Studies in Conflict & Terrorism

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Eating, Shitting and Shooting: A Scatological and

Culinary Approximation to the Daily Lives of
Rebels

José Antonio Gutiérrez D

To cite this article: José Antonio Gutiérrez D (2021): Eating, Shitting and Shooting: A Scatological
and Culinary Approximation to the Daily Lives of Rebels, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, DOI:
10.1080/1057610X.2021.1886432

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2021.1886432

Published online: 16 Feb 2021.

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STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM
https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2021.1886432

Eating, Shitting and Shooting: A Scatological and Culinary

Approximation to the Daily Lives of Rebels
Jos

e Antonio Guti
errez Da,b
a
Universidad Santo Tom
as, Medell
ın, Colombia; bInstitute for International Conflict Resolution and
Reconstruction, Dublin City University (DCU), Dublin, Republic of Ireland

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Everything that comes in, eventually goes out. One way or another. Received 24 October 2021
This paper will look into eating and defecating practices among reb- Accepted 14 December 2021
els in Colombia, in particular, the FARC-EP. I will argue that these
practices, despite being daily occurrences, have been overlooked in
conflict studies. I will argue that eating practices in particular rein-
forced emotional bonds within the organization and fostered micro-
solidarity. At the same time, eating and defecating practices reflected
and reinforced, at once, organizational practices and ideological
commitments of the rebels – particularly gender equality and collect-
ivism. This paper, by focusing on cherished everyday activities which
are deeply human, both biological and social, is a call to re-human-
ise this field of study.

Rebels only shoot and fight exceptionally. Months or weeks can pass without a single
bullet being fired. Sometimes, shots are never fired. Yet, eating and defecating are daily
happenings, absolutely unavoidable activities. Let us start with eating. As Marx
remarked, “men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But
life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various
other things”.1 Paraphrasing Marx’s dictum, we may as well say that in order to rebel,
insurgents need first, before anything else, to procure food so as to eat. This is, of
course, a biological function, but one which determines the capacity of an army – rebel
or otherwise – to organize, expand, and prevail. Abraham Guill
en, a Spanish Civil War
miliciano and theoretician of guerrilla warfare, notes:
A soldier or a civilian, need a frugal diet more than duty or ideology, for if starved, even
the most heroic of people demoralise and depoliticise. ( … ) An empty stomach policy does
not win a war even if weapons are ammunitions are aplenty.2
However, there is more than biological imperatives to eating. Eating, is shaped by
social norms and cultural patterns which determine how, what and when we take sus-
tenance. Our social order sits with us at the table even when we eat by ourselves; much
has been written by anthropologists such as L
evi-Strauss on the link between how we
relate to food and how we relate to the world around us.3 Food is also invested with

CONTACT Jos
e Antonio Guti
errez D. jose-antonio.danton@ucdconnect.ie 2 Ard
an na Curkish, Bailieborough, Co.

Cavan, Republic of Ireland.
ß 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

values, taboos, and beliefs which shape religious practise, create identities, denote class,
power or status, and demarcate gender spaces.4 Food also serves to define national iden-
tities and embodies the values of the nation-State.5
Even if we recognize that there are economic or ecological determinants to our eating
habits,6 these reflect deeply the globalized culture and general organization of the soci-
ety in which we live. Imperialism, for instance, has unequivocally shaped our eating
habits.7 Take Brown Sauce, a staple of British dining: a blend of foodstuffs taken from
across the Empire (tamarind, dates, maize, tomatoes, molasses and all imaginable spices)
it represents the ultimate imperial/colonial product. As a matter of fact, without the
Empire this unlikely mix would probably never have seen the light of day. In Victorian
England the incorporation of “exotic” elements into British cuisine reinforced class ele-
ments and at the same time displayed the might of Empire.8 As luxuries such as tea or
sugar became staples of lower class diets,9 the changing food culture in England rein-
forced their sense of Empire across classes:
Foods ranging from coffee to curry also became the empire’s most ubiquitous symbols, and
their advertisement, retail, preparation and consumption reflected and contributed to
British discussions and perceptions of the empire. ( … ) The English, and later British,
penchant for sweet, hot beverages helped to fuel the empire’s expansion into Asia,
transformed the ecosystems of large swathes of the Americas and doomed millions of
Africans and their descendants to slavery.10
The politics of food have taken sinister turns at times: imperialism has led to food
deprivation, unrest and famines of unprecedented scale across the colonies, including
the cases of India,11 the French African colonies,12 and the Great Famine, or Gorta
M
or, of Ireland.13 The Nazis imposed draconian food measures on the ghettos,14 while
their extractions led to serious food deprivation in France.15 The U.S. has used food as
a “weapon of war” during the occupation of Germany16 and their sanctions against Iraq
in the 1990s brought hunger and death.17 Food has been used in counter-insurgency:
blockades and controls have been imposed to punish entire populations for their links
to rebels.18 Some insurgencies, too, have used attacks on agricultural infrastructure and
livelihoods as a means to attack an enemy society.19 Inasmuch as war has often imposed
hunger, it has popularized some foods, as canned food after the Napoleonic wars or
crackers after the U.S. Civil War.20
Food can also be a source of resistance: for example, the nineteenth century boycott
on sugar by the abolitionists or today’s ethical consumers of Palestinian products.21
Women, who had a prominent role in “feeding” the Great War effort in Germany, were
empowered in the process.22 In revolutionary China, food was “proletarianised” as part
of the struggle against the old regime.23 Certain dietary lifestyles have been associated
with particular political sub-cultures – anarchists, for instance, have a long history of
promoting and practising vegetarianism.24 Leading anarchist Elis
ee Reclus, an open
advocate of vegetarianism, made arguments, particularly on ethical consumption, which
were ahead of his time.25 In a 1901 article advocating vegetarianism and a humane
treatment of animals, he declared that the “diet of individuals corresponds closely to
their manners”.26 Today, many advocates of animal rights militant groups advocate
vegetarian diets.27 However, veganism is also claimed by Neo-Nazis – there is some
basis for their claim as Hitler himself was a vegetarian.28
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 3

This brief discussion shows how people invest food with “inside meanings”, attribut-
ing significance to food, but also “outside meanings”, since power controls the produc-
tion and distribution of food.29 Sugar during slavery and Coca-Cola during the Cold
War, for example, have symbolized and epitomized power relations.30
And what can be said about the end product of all this eating? As food goes in, it
has to come out. This is also at once a biological but a deeply cultural activity: while in
the privacy of the toilet, the whole world is watching us – how we sit, how we clean
ourselves, it is all learned from an early age. Learning to control the bowels is a land-
mark in personal development. Their children first going to the “loo” is a cherished
memory in any parents’ life, one that is as – or even more – important than learning to
read and write, or tying your own shoe laces.
This landmark in development is marked and constrained by culture. Indigenous
groups in the Amazon demarcate their difference from nature through the control of
their bowels – monkeys defecate anywhere, not them.31 The emergence of the first sani-
tation systems in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia some five thousand years ago was
a landmark of civilization; particularly with the growth of urban centers, the efficient
disposal of human waste became a pressing task spurred by cyclic epidemics and
plagues.32 I remember visiting the ruined city of Ephesus in Turkey and marveling at
the spectacle of its Hellenistic architecture, particularly the magnificent Library of
Celsus. But what really caught my attention were the public toilets: the latrines were all
arranged in a horse-shoe shape facing one another. Defecating was a semipublic affair,
restricted to a given space in which people socialized – they talked politics, philosophy,
sports, sex, of all sorts of small-talk while they were sitting there doing their thing. This
is very different to our culture, which regards, by and large, the toilet as a strictly pri-
vate – and gender segregated-33 space, to the point that it is often referred to as the
“privy”, or other euphemisms to avoid even mentioning it.34
But even if the toilet is considered, by and large, a private space in modern Western
culture, it is also still a space for interaction, notably through graffiti.35 In some con-
texts, such as Indonesia, communal toilets emerged as a response to small dwelling
spaces;36 in parts of Eastern Africa, communal or shared toilets are a response to poor
infrastructure in urban vulnerable settlements in Kampala37 or as I observed in Kibera
and Kawangare in Nairobi. Although associated often with comfort (and nicknamed for
instance, the “throne”), it is a space which can be dangerous and threatening for vulner-
able women and girls in certain contexts.38 Other threats are also represented in poor
sanitation: there is much talk of pushing for a “toilet revolution” in rural China.39
Habits in the toilet also reflect status, class, power, notions of gender and diverging cul-
turally constructed notions of hygiene.40
Both eating and emptying the bowels are paramount in our daily lives. It is therefore
hard to understand why such daily, routine and, therefore, fundamental activities have
received so little, if any, attention in conflict studies. Probably these aspects of rebel
activity are largely neglected because they do not make good headlines or they are not
regarded as security issues. But I contend that a powerful reason which renders these
activities invisible is the predominance of the “mysterious rational agent” in recent con-
flict studies.41 The rational agent is a timeless calculator, who has no attachments and
no feelings, who is only thinking about how to maximize his/her benefits at all times.
4 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

Naturally, the rational agent does not love, does not eat, and (surprise) does not go to
the loo.
There are only few mentions about food, mostly in passing, in testimonies and narra-
tives on the Colombian guerrillas, which will be the focus of this paper.42 The only
book which deals systematically with the issue of food within the guerrilla movement,
was written from the perspective of people kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, People’s Army (FARC-EP) between the 1990s and the 2000s as the
rebels were trying to push for a prisoner exchange with the Colombian government, not
from the perspective of the rebels themselves.43 Unsurprisingly, defecation within guer-
rilla movements has not received any systematic investigation so far.
This paper aims at filling that gap, bringing insights from the everyday turn in social
sciences into conflict studies, in order to demonstrate how these everyday activities
structure routines in guerrilla ranks, foster micro-solidarity and help forge identity,
while at the same time, they reflect ideological and political commitments. For this pur-
pose, I will explore eating and defecating habits in the FARC-EP ranks – one of the lon-
gest insurgencies in the world and the biggest guerrilla movement in Colombia, which
engaged in a peace process with the Colombian government from 2012 to 2016, leading
to their demobilization in 2017. Although I will resort to some of the testimonies and
works already mentioned, the main focus will be the perspective of the guerrillas them-
selves. First, I will discuss the methods of the research, before proceeding to explore
various aspects of eating and defecating within guerrilla ranks. Then I will discuss the
relevance of these findings to a broader effort to re-humanise the field of conflict
research and to identify the importance of neglected everyday activities in the consolida-
tion of an insurgency. The conclusions will highlight the main findings of the research.

Methods
This paper is based, primarily, on years of fieldwork experience in four continents
(South America, Europe, Asia and Africa). Years of ethnographic work in Colombia’s
rebel-controlled areas have been particularly illuminating. Participant observation, in
this context, meant cutting down sugar-cane and helping to prepare panela in Tolima,
picking coffee beans in the central cordillera, slaughtering animals, cooking with what-
ever we had at hand, eating all sorts of creatures (the white worm Mojojoy, tapir,
iguana, armadillo, spotted paca, ants, snake, capybara, turtle, peccary), participating in
meetings where food was central, drinking water by squeezing mud in a sock, and, of
course, emptying my bowels in toilets, latrines, holes in the ground and sometimes just
in the wild.
This paper was inspired by one research participant who once said to me that, unlike
other “doctors” (the terms reserved in Colombia for any professional) who came and
talk about their reality and about conflict from afar, I had “slept, eaten and shat with
us”. This conversation inspired me to take these issues seriously. During fieldwork,
when working with other researchers, each one of those activities proved to be highly
problematic: researchers were constipated or suffered from dreadful diarrhoeas, they did
not find food appealing or were unsure of the cooking procedures, or they found it dif-
ficult to sleep in hammocks or sharing bed with others. Given the prominence of these
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 5

activities in my conversations with other researchers on the field, I found it always

strange that these “issues” rarely found their way into academic papers. Those papers
only gave a sanitized version of their narrative, in which the enormous discomfort of
being out of their comfort zone was rarely – if ever – discussed.
Apart from participant observation and a self-reflexive approach, I am also basing
this paper in four in-depth interviews to former FARC-EP guerrillas: two women and
two men, who operated in diverse environments and occupied different places in the
hierarchy. These interviews were conducted recently, to contrast some of the observa-
tions and interviews I completed during a previous research project (2014–2018), to fill
the gaps and to discuss some aspects of my notes. As mentioned earlier, I also consulted
the few testimonies and narratives that delve into the topic in a bit more detail.

Inputs: “Nobody Can Cook Lentils Like the Guerrillas Do”

Counter-insurgency theory and practice, with its blockades and control imposed
over food,44 was enacted in Colombia. During the persecution of the FARC-EP
leader Alfonso Cano (who was eventually murdered in November 2011), the whole
rural region of Chaparral, Tolima was subjected to these practices. According to the
wife of an agrarian leader who was later assassinated, H
ector Orozco, whole com-
munities suffered, though some families were targeted selectively with even tougher
measures. In the military checkpoints, her husband was frequently interrogated:
“‘why do you feed the guerrillas?’ They started to ration our food supplies, and we
were starving”.45
These harsh measures on the population aim at demoralizing and turning them
against the rebels, thus isolating the latter from their base of support. However, similar
measures have been shown, on occasion, to reinforce popular support for rebels and to
increase animosity against the incumbent.46 However, the impact of these activities goes
well beyond demoralizing the base of rebel support or starving the militants.
Eating is a fundamental aspects of the rebels’ daily lives: they normally had about five
meals a day, and those meals functioned as the clock which structured everyday life for
the guerrillas. The rebels came together at meal times, worked together to prepare food
and to craft the logistics for the preparation and preservation of food; developed tastes
and culinary identities, and ate to re-charge their batteries to have the energy to march,
do political agitation, fight, etc. But if food structured the everyday of guerrilla life, they
also marked special occasions with food. As such, these practices also de-structure the
normality of life in the rebel ranks, which has a far deeper demoralizing effect than
mere starvation – they upset micro-solidarities and cohesion.

Meals as Routine
Life in the guerrillas was structured around the meal times. The rancha, as the guerrilla
camp kitchen was called, on the one hand, provided a routine which is so necessary to
build a sense of normality in the most abnormal circumstances. On the other hand, it
also created a sense of cohesion, of solidarity between its members who found in meals
6 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

a space to come together and socialize. It is not a coincidence that for some of the
FARC-EP members, many of whom had been away from their families and unable to
see them for years, sometimes decades, and from a very young age, this sense of routine
provided the resemblance of a family:
It was like in any normal family, we woke up in the morning, at around 6am with the
coffee [tinto] and the crackers. Then at 9am we had the breakfast, which was like a lunch
or a dinner, that is, savoury food ( … ) Whatever there was for lunch, that was the
breakfast. At noon we ate lunch, and then at 3pm we had a snack [refrigerio], a coffee and
crackers, or agua de panela [a beverage prepared with unrefined whole sugar cane] with
crackers ( … ) and then at 6,30pm we had dinner before preparing our tent [caleta]47 to go
to sleep and then wait for your turn to do the guard.48
Of course, normal family life has very little in common with guerrilla life, yet, the ref-
erence to the resemblance highlights the important symbolic meaning of the meals for
the group’s cohesion. As discussed in the everyday literature, identities are created not
so much by grand statements and exceptional occasions, but through every day, recur-
rent and even banal practices.49 Despite some minor differences of the times, members
of different FARC-EP fronts, operating in different parts of the country, gave consistent
testimonies about the ways meals organized everyday routine:
We had three meals a day, plus two snacks, in the morning and in the afternoon. At
5,30am the cook [ranchero] had the coffee ready with the bread. If times were hard, coffee
was served on its own. Then at 8am we had the breakfast, at noon it was lunch, and at
5pm it was dinner. Within meals, we had a snack, which could be coffee and popcorn
[crispetas], fruit salad, or some treat [mecato], a biscuit, cancharina [ed. a fried dough],
coffee and crackers.50
Some meals were more eagerly anticipated than others, as recollected by a guerrilla
woman: “I longed for the coffee in the morning with the crackers ( … ) they were soda
crackers, Salt
ın [ed. the brand] and the coffee is something you yearn for”.51 Not every-
one, however, was equally enamored of the guerrilla meals. According to Alan Jara, a
politician kidnapped by the FARC-EP, the meals were tedious and reflected the restric-
tions of life in those difficult circumstances. He claims, however, that they were given
the same food as the guerrillas:
They gave us whatever they had. We were not mistreated, insulted or humiliated. They
simply gave us what they had. Most of the time, it was a rich diet -rich in starch. Rice and
peas. Beans and rice. Peas and rice. In the afternoon it was different: we had rice and
pasta, or rice and lentils. You knew the season depending if you were served rice
or pasta.52
His remark on the seasons was no exaggeration. According to a former fighter, “food
always depended of the season and availability. Pasta with rice, cuchuco” – a barley,
wheat and/or corn-based soup, with beans, peas, vegetables, pork and potatoes. “For
months we ate cuchuco for breakfast, lunch and dinner”.53
In defence of the lentils, a female guerrilla explained that “some comrades say that
they don’t want to know about lentils now, because we ate too much of them”, but that
they “were smoked, I don’t know how they seasoned them ( … ) but the guerrilla lentils
are the best thing in the world. It has a secret … they are magic to me”.54 Tanja
Nijmeijer,55 a Dutch-born guerrilla, explained that
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 7

I had to remind myself that food was not the reason why I joined the guerrillas. I thought
it was monotonous, we had rice every day, I was fed up with rice, and the beans did upset
my stomach so bad … My belly could not cope with them, I had diarrhoea all the time …
I was often given metronidazole. ( … ) I’ve never been much of a fan of Colombian food,
but I did not join to eat good.56
The FARC-EP is an organization recognized by its collectivist spirit in which mem-
bers did not receive a salary and were not allowed to have possessions of their own
others than which they could carry on their bag-pack.57 But they had the opportunity
to barter these small possessions between them, and this expanded the range of interac-
tions they had within this collectivist and quite hierarchical organization:
If the shopping was just done ( … ) smokers received cigarettes, and those who didn’t
smoke, received treats. The shopping was done over the weekend in the villages. They
bought lollypops [bombones], bananas, biscuits, chocolate bars, and this turned into a lot of
internal barter, because those who smoked just a little, changed their cigarettes for sweets,
and so on and so forth.58
It is important to note that while everybody ate the same food, commanders and
rank-and-file, commanders’ meals were prepared separately by dedicated cooks:
There was a general rancha59 and one for commanders, like in any other army. In the
FARC, this difference was caused because of various enemy plans to infiltrate us in order
to poison the commanders. The general ranchero was changed every 24 hours, but the
special rancheros for the commanders did the same job for many months. But the food for
the commanders’ rancha was the same as the other, and it was regulated by the same
budget considerations as any other rancha. The quality and the quantity of the food was
the same, so it did not create a class difference.60
Corroborating the strict egalitarianism in food rations, Tanja Nijmeijer, recalling the
first time she had lunch with a leading commander of her Bloc, Jorge Brice~ no, she got
all happy because she thought she was going to “eat yummy” and that the portions
were going to be more generous than usual. To her surprise, the food was not what she
expected and the portions were even smaller: “I thought that he ate very well, and no,
he has a special diet because he is sick. He ate vegetable soups, and I remember I was
very disappointed”.61

Orthodox and Unorthodox Delicacies

Food in the guerrilla camps reflected the peasant stock of the members of the organiza-
tion. As explained by demobilized combatant, guerrilla breakfast, lunch and dinner con-
sisted of “the typical Colombian corrientazo”, which is not a particular meal but a way
to arrange the meal instead. The corrientazo consists typically of a soup for starters,
often cooked with hen feet, or offal, potatoes, beans, rice, lentils and/or vegetables.
Then comes the seco, or dry meal, which typically consists in a piece of meat with rice,
manioc, plantain, and/or potatoes – often more than one staple is the norm – and len-
tils or beans on the side. Together with the seco, a miniscule portion of salad is served,
and the drink which typically goes with the meal is agua de panela, a beverage prepared
with unrefined whole sugar cane, which is a regular staple in Colombian meals. If
lemon is added to the beverage, then is called limonada. This is the typical Colombian
8 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

meal you will be served in most rural locations, with few variations depending to the
region: in the Caribbean coast the rice may be cooked with coconut, in the Pacific the
predominant food will be fish, typically with coconut sauce, and fruit instead of salad,
and in the South Eastern regions in the Amazon, the main staple was fari~na – a toasted
manioc coarse powder.62
But the conditions of warfare and regional variation determined what people ate.
According to the same man,
Sometimes we ate too much rice, too much lentils, sometimes too much beef. If they
slaughtered a cow, we ate ( … ) until we finished it, and we had to smoke and set aside the
portions for the following days. We ate a lot of trout, because that is what they ate in our
region [Cauca].63
The preservation techniques also influenced the preparation of certain foods:
I never slaughtered or skinned a cow, I like animals very much and couldn’t do that. But
when they had it quartered, then I separated the pieces, we made a fire and a sort of
scaffolding with sticks, and then you hang there the meat. There it gets smoked and then it
lasts longer ( … ) because we didn’t carry fridges with us. We smoked it and salted it, the
whole animal, and that way the beef was preserved. ( … ) we spent the whole night
smoking the cow.64
She goes on to describe lentils, cancharina and smoked meat as true guerrilla
“delicacies” that she misses the most. A kidnapped person described how fish was
smoked full, without removing any parts of it, and that way it lasted for many days;
they called this pescado moquiado.65 Another regular meal was the sancocho, which is a
type of soup found all over Colombia, cooked with manioc, plantain, potatoes and/or
yam which give it a thick consistency. It can be prepared with beef, chicken or fish, but
in the jungles of Colombia there were other options available to which guerrillas had to
resort often in times of need: “we had to eat snake … yuck! It is not very pleasant, they
put it in the soup just like any other meat and you saw it like dancing in the soup ( … )
we were reluctant”.66 Nijmeijer said that,
With Plan Patriota [ed. a massive US-funded counter-insurgent offensive in the mid-
2000s], things got tough. We had to eat monkey, which was delicious but had too many
worms. We went hunting for them. ( … ) Hunting was only allowed in times of scarcity. At
any other time, it was banned ( … ) Some animals could not be hunted regardless of the
difficulties, such as the tapir, which is horrible anyway … it has a black meat, I ate it only
once in a soup … for three months we ate nothing but roasted monkey with toasted
cancharina, because there was no oil. We also ate armadillo [gurre] and paca [lapas],
crocodile [cachiris], mostly those animals, when there was no food.67
Nijmeijer, who fought in the Eastern regions, went through the most difficult and
hard battles with the army. In Western regions of Colombia things were not so difficult:
“I was very lucky ( … ) I even grew fatter! A comrade told me he had to eat monkey
head, and that it was like eating a child. Fortunately, I never had to eat that”.68
However, this same fighter had her own deal of unorthodox delicacies while backing a
land squat by some displaced supporters in the city of Medell
ın;
We had to eat vulture [gallinazo]. That animal is really ugly and shocking, but it is just
like eating a chicken.69 ( … ) we had to eat opossum [chucha] ( … ) the opossum is
delicious, yummy, but at first you are quite shocked. However, if you are hungry, you will
eat anything.70
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 9

These narratives are backed by the testimonies of kidnapped people. Alan Jara men-
tions that hunting was an exceptional activity, but that he ate “big tigers,71 ( … ) even
monkey. I ate ray, armadillo, deer, fish”.72 Other kidnapped people mentioned eating
crocodile [babilla or cachiri], paca, peccary [sa
ıno or cajuche], piranha [Caribe o pu~
no].
Both the paca and the peccary are mentioned to have been prepared in the style of a
lechona, a typical dish from the Tolima region in which a full pig is stuffed with its
meat, yellow peas and rice and put to a clay oven for eight or twelve hours, until the
meat is tender and the skin crunchy. One of them compares the roasted paca to a gour-
met dish, up to the standards of international cuisine, while another person compared
the crocodile meat to lobster – thus marking the class difference through the different
life experiences of these kidnapped elites from those of their captors.73
The guerrillas also had distinctive foods of their own. Among these, the most famous
was the cancharina, which we have mentioned a few times. This was such a staple of
the guerrillas that according to a Colombian sociologist, if you want to know where the
FARC-EP are, “all you need to know is if people eat cancharina”.74 It is a simple fried
dough, but its preparation requires great skill:
The cancharina is made with [wheat] flour and panela melted in hot but not boiling water.
As it melts, you dip the dough until it gets the right consistency you want before frying
them. That’s the difficult part, and if it is too soft, then it is not much of a problem, but
when it is too hard, then that’s the problem ( … ), it was like eating chewing gum. But if
they were made just right, then it was something special … I ate them with beans or
lentils ( … ), it was the best thing ever. ( … ) I try to make cancharinas at home but they
are not the same.75
Other distinctive foods included the guerrilla rice [arroz guerrillero], which is called
as such and prepared by civilians in the region of Southern and Western Colombia:
“when there was little rice left, to make it last longer, we fried noodles, and then pre-
pared the rice with the fried noodles and then we put some meat in, tuna, pasta, any-
thing we could find”.76 There were also the tungos, which I tried in Tolima, and like
the cancharina, it was mostly consumed at breakfast time or during the snacks: it con-
sisted of wheat flour dough, wrapped up in leaves or plastic film, and boiled. And some
of the distinctive beverages included the so-called FARC-EP Coca-Cola [Coca-Cola fari-
ana], which was sweet cold coffee, and Donkey’s dust [polvo de burro], which “was a
hot chocolate with wheat flour … it was like a colada,77 ( … ) and it was called polvo de
burro because it gave you lots of energy”.78

De-gendering the Rancho

The FARC-EP was an organization were men and women had the same rights accord-
ing to its statutes and according to them discriminatory behavior was punishable.
Although there were still gender inequalities – particularly on the question of holding
commanding positions, which were by and large dominated by men, as well as a lack of
recognition of the distinct experiences of both men and women – the FARC-EP were
much more egalitarian than mainstream Colombian society and women within the
guerrilla ranks achieved both an incredible amount of sexual freedom and of gender
equality, particularly by Colombian standards.79 This was reflected in the organization
10 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

of basic chores – for instance, a guerrillera found washing the clothes of her partner
was considered a serious issue. But this was also reflected in the rancho.
Both men and women had to cook. “The officer in charge, the person organising the
services, organised the roster for everybody to cook”, remembers a former combatant.
While he acknowledged some differences between genders on commanding positions,
he recognized that “in the rancho there was no difference. To be honest, when it came
to cooking it was the same for everybody, same as with the guard and other duties”.80
The few urban guerrillas, and the even fewer international fighters had to learn to cook
as anybody else and learn the tricks of cooking in the jungle with precarious but skillful
technologies:
I had to learn to peel plantain, manioc, to cook rice, to soften the beans … guerrillas have
many tricks to do this, because there are no pressure cookers [pitadoras], so they covered
any pot with plastic film and then they made a small hole, and the beans were soft as if
they had been cooked in a pitadora. You learn about how to make hot chocolate nicer,
how to wash and make the pots shine without soap, I had to learn to dry the rice … I
didn’t even know you had to dry the rice! And cooking for so many people, 130, 150
people … you have to plan the cooking [rancha], how to prepare the food. All of this is
like a science. And I had to learn all of that with so much sweat and tears, and now this is
all useless after demobilisation!81
This gender (and class) equality in daily tasks was not always the case though. When
FARC-EP guerrillas first organized back in the 1960s, it was a mixture of agrarian
movement and self-defense groups, strongly influenced by popular liberalism and the
Communist Party. Women marched alongside the guerrillas, but their roles reflected
the gendered division of labor in Colombian rural society. Save for a few exceptions
who were combatants or had political roles, such as Judith Grisales and Miryam
Narv
aez, most women in the 1960s guerrilla movement participated as wives, mothers
or daughters of the male combatants. Because of the defensive nature of the original
movement, the guerrillas marched as whole communities.82 In the words of Rosa
Helena, the sister of the founder of the FARC-EP, Manuel Marulanda,
I didn’t participate in the armed struggle however. I was in their [ie., the guerrillas]
company, but I was only helping with those tasks which are expected from women, such
as washing, ironing and patching up the clothes of the guerrillas, looking after the kitchen,
and other domestic chores.83
A veteran woman in the movement explains that “women started to join in significant
numbers in the 1980s ( … ). At first, there was moderate change, and as they saw that the
women were the same in the guerrilla, they started to join”.84 As women joined the ranks,
“those tasks which are expected from women” had to be reconsidered. Guti
errez and
Carranza85 point to the fact that the FARC-EP had the internal regulations, the organiza-
tional capacity and the ideological framework to make sure that women entered in a
more or less equal footings. In the words of a peasant combatant from Tolima,
As a woman in FARC, I can say I never faced discrimination and that we had equality on
every aspect of our lives. Men in the FARC do the washing, they cook, they carry stuff, we
all do the same because we can all do the same ( … ) as female fighters we always had a
voice and authority. As a revolutionary fighter, as a guerrilla, you learn to appreciate
yourself, to value yourself as a woman, we learn that we can do the same things as men
and that you can overcome difficulties ( … ) by ourselves.86
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 11

It is difficult to overstate the importance that these rural women attached to the
abandonment of the traditional labor divisions. In the eyes of most of these guerrilla
women, the equal sharing of tasks, such as cooking together with men, was a life-chang-
ing experience which challenged deep-seated gendered roles in their societies.87 This
was obviously part of a broader redefinition of gender roles within the rebels’ ranks. As
mentioned by another researcher, the FARC-EP
allows females a relative autonomy and a control over their lives – including sexual
freedom – unimaginable in the patriarchal rural societies from which the vast majority are
recruited. Indeed, for many young females, the FARC offers a sanctuary from physical and
verbal, occasionally sexual, abuse, empowers them through arms, assigns defined roles and
tasks that allows them a measure of control over their lives. The contrast between the
relative freedom and control over their choices in the FARC and the subordinate position
held by women in Colombian society makes reintegration into civilian life especially
difficult for former guerrilleras.88
The biggest challenge facing former guerrilla couples after demobilization in 2017,
was to reintegrate into a society that has very different values, and which regards the
kitchen as the exclusive domain of women. Many former combatants said that they had
been subject to pervasive pressure from their families to conform to traditional patri-
archal roles – i.e. that women are in charge of domestic chores and that men are
devoted the role model of breadwinner-, and that this pressure was the cause of much
distress and tension in couples.89

You Can’t March on an Empty Stomach … Unless You Have to!

As we have already seen, the hardship of war at times imposed incredible hardships on
the guerrillas. The difficult conditions of life – to be constantly on the move in remote
and inaccessible landscapes, weighed down by heavy backpacks, and having to be ready
at any time to engage in combat – meant that food scarcity had to be avoided. Fatigued
troops are easy prey for the army:
In the guerrillas, you had to eat a lot. There were a few occasions in which we went
hungry, because things were difficult ( … ). But most of the time, the movement had places
where they kept the ‘economy’, as we called the food [remesa]. Grains, canned foods,
vegetables. Each guerrilla had to carry one or two kilos of food in their bags. Panela, salt,
sugar, pasta, rice. The idea was that, in case of difficulties, we didn’t go hungry, and the
squad had enough food to keep going until we found more food.90
This is precisely one of the reasons why food blockades and controls were imple-
mented through the decades of war: they not only affected guerrillas physically and psy-
chologically, but also upset their daily routine. Their impact was felt differentially in
different regions of Colombia. Without a doubt, guerrillas in the Eastern region of the
country were worst affected:
With the military blockades, we were left without coffee, so sometimes we had hot water
with sugar, sometimes coffee without sugar, coffee on its own. Those blockades were really
tough … I honestly do not know how much the population was affected with them, but
they controlled how much food passed … they allowed only 10 pounds of rice and claimed
that the rest would be for the guerrillas ( … ) But one way or another, some food reached
us … if we didn’t have rice, we had lentils, but there was always something we didn’t have.
12 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

We had no sugar, no oil, and for weeks we could only eat pasta and beans, which in those
circumstances seemed delicious ( … ) I remember from 2007 onwards the blockades
around La Macarena were almost permanent. Sometimes we could get a cow, but we spent
months without eating beef.91
While most guerrilla units and fronts, faced scarcity at some point, because of the
conditions of warfare, these dramatic circumstances, in which food was systematically
blockaded for years,92 were not felt elsewhere. A guerrilla from the region of Antioquia
said that “as a matter of fact, I grew fatter in the guerrillas”.93 Likewise, the testimonies
from Cauca, as well as those of parts of Putumayo and parts of Tolima, claim that
long-term shortage of food was not an occurrence in the regions where they operated.
In parts of Tolima and Putumayo, however, the stories were similar to those of the
Eastern regions, although not so prolonged. According to a high-ranking commander of
the Eastern Bloc, expenditure on food had to follow the budget authorized by the
national leadership; this, plus “the public order [i.e. conflict] situation and the location
of the camp, depending on whether it had or not easy access to food products, deter-
mined what was on the menu”.94
Proving that they could still manage to get food in the middle of the 2000s counter-
insurgent offensive95 became a matter of pride for some FARC-EP commanders. In
2008, boasting about the food controls and blockades, president Alvaro
Uribe, not
known for his high regard for human rights or international humanitarian law, claimed
that he would force the guerrillas to eat roots. As a result, according to a guerrilla hos-
tage, that day the commander in charge of them brought all of them half a roasted
chicken to eat, saying “so you can digest the roots!”.96 But this hardship was also used
to emphasize the difference between the guerrillas, fighting from conviction, and the
army or the right-wing paramilitaries, who fought for money – calling the latter
“mercenaries” a commander of the 60th Front, in Argelia, Cauca, while delivering a
speech to hundreds of locals before demobilization, which I attended, claimed that
because of their “conviction, we can spend months in the jungle, eating only monkey
and roots, if needs be”.97 Tellingly, the class distance between former president Uribe
and the bulk of the Colombian population was evidenced bluntly in the “roots” speech:
since pre-Columbian times the diet of ordinary and poor Colombians has been based
on a wide range of roots, including potatoes, arracacha and manioc.98
When on long marches, obviously, the availability of food changed dramatically.
People only had the opportunity to eat properly at night; during the breaks, people ate
crackers and drank a not-so-healthy but full-of-sugar powder juice mix, very popular in
Colombia, called Fruti~ no. It was nicknamed the gut-stainer [manchatripas] to joke
about its high content of artificial colorants. However, on marching occasions, this diet
was efficient – not only it left little traces of the pass of the guerrillas, but it also gave
them enough energy to keep going in those abrupt and difficult terrains.

Special Occasions
Among guerrillas, some days were genuinely special. Those days, the routine was bro-
ken and guerrillas participated in what was often called integration [integraci
on], that is,
activities to relax, commemorate and form stronger bonds within the unit. Some of
these days were birthdays, mother’s day, the anniversary of the FARC-EP (27 May), the
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 13

anniversary of the Colombian Communist Party (17 July),99 and the December festiv-
ities – Christmas, which in Latin America is celebrated on the night of 24 December,
and New Year. Food and drinks were prepared “for the occasion, together with political
and cultural events”.100
Those days, special foods were cooked: “smoked beef was the thing, a barbecue. And
we drank coffee and agua de panela with lemon”, for the organization’s anniversary.101
Ad-hoc celebrations had a similar menu: “following times of scarcity, they brought a
beef, they cooked cancharina and we ate lots of smoked beef. That was typically the
menu for special occasions”.102 But other days, such as birthdays, could be celebrated
with a hen sancocho, which is one of the favorite dinners for special occasions among
the Colombian peasantry. These foods, and the preparations, depended on the local
idiosyncrasy and the food available in the region.
For instance, in Tolima, I participated on a political meeting between the FARC-EP
and local agrarian and community leaders in Las Hermosas, before demobilization (29
May 2016). The meeting lasted all day, from 9 am until it was interrupted by military
operations at around 4 pm – which, by the way, endangered some 200 attendants. We
had traveled from 4 am to get to the remote area where it was held. It was organized to
inform people about the state of the peace negotiations and discuss the concerns of the
community leaders in relation to it. At lunch time, the meeting was interrupted by a
young guerrilla woman, with a flower clung to her plait, and an M-16 rifle scarcely con-
cealed under a poncho [ruana]. She whispered to the ear of the commander, and he
immediately addressed the people:
We are really sorry, some of you have not even had breakfast … we have prepared a
lechona with a lot of love ( … ), I prepared it myself, I am quite good at that. The roast is
ready, but the manioc went past, it went straight to San Jos
e.
At that point everyone in the meeting exploded in laughter. After a spontaneous
short break, the guerrillas, both male and female, started to serve small cardboard paper
plates with the lechona plus a plastic cup of national brands of soft drinks (Postob
on
and Colombiana). The meeting continued as people were served and ate in their places.
After everyone had finished the lechona, the guerrillas brought a cake and greeted the
mothers at the meeting, for that week had been Mother’s Day. Because the cake – which
was bought at a baker’s – was too small to give everybody a slice, they prioritized moth-
ers. Once all mothers had been served, the rest was given to the women at the meeting.
This is an interesting example of an ad-hoc celebration (a gathering with the community
after over a year from the last meeting), and a mainstream celebration (Mother’s day),
in which the main dish (lechona) responded to the local idiosyncrasy of the region in
which the meeting took place: Tolima.
The December festivities were celebrated in the same way as in the rest of Colombia:
dancing to music popular for the season (cumbias and paseos of singers such as
Gaiteros de San Jacinto, Lisandro Meza and the Venezuelan Pastor L
opez) and eating
traditional food reserved for the occasion. This includes desserts such as natilla – a cin-
namon and milk custard-, bu~ nuelos – round cheese fritters, the dough based on corn
flour and egg- and drinking masato – a sweet drink prepared with fermented rice.
Vodka, brandy, wine, whiskey, chicha (fermented maize), aguardiente (distilled drink
based on sugar cane and anise), are drinks mentioned in the testimonies of FARC-EP
14 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

hostages on the end of the year celebrations.103 Castilla104 reflects on the significance of
those drinks among hostages, and the way they made them homesick. Without a doubt,
these festivities made guerrillas homesick too, but they also reinforced the sense of the
FARC-EP as a “true family”. According to Par
ıs, even when celebrating Christmas and
new year, they still had to keep an eye on security.
We organised a dance and we allow consumption of alcohol, like chicha, beer, aguardiente,
whiskey. The drinks were served in a regulated and organised fashion, and we also created
discipline commissions for the occasion so as to avoid people getting into trouble with
each other. People participating in the party could not carry weapons; they were left under
the supervision of guards who did not take part in the celebration. But sometimes, in order
to avoid excluding people from the party, we created two dancing shifts.105
Par
ıs corroborates the testimonies of hostages (who also took part in the festivities)
claiming that rebel celebrations in December were consistent with the customs of
Colombian people in general. He mentions, apart from the natilla and the bu~ nuelos for
Christmas, barbecued beef Eastern plain style [a la llanera], which is beef cooked in a
stick scaffolding, as described before, which gives it a smoked flavor; lechona from
Tolima; and on occasions, tamales were also prepared. Tamales are food found with
slight variations in many Latin America countries. In Colombia, according to region,
there are also differences, but it is commonly a maize-based dough, containing carrot,
egg, pieces of chicken and pork, wrapped in plantain leaves and then cooked. It is one
of the most popular dishes in Colombia, and often the preparation of tamales is a big
occasion in its own right. Although the food on a day-to-day basis was determined by
locality or region, at the December parties, the meals resembled what is eaten in most
Colombian households, in which a “national” cuisine emerges as regional dishes are
combined together for the occasion.

Outputs: Everything That Goes in Has to Come out!

A good meal always has to be evacuated at some point. But the ways in which our bow-
els are emptied speaks volume about our context, race, gender, circumstances, class, cul-
ture, religious identity, etc. The conditions of toilets in the countryside of Colombia are,
at best, precarious, and this is, according to many researchers I’ve talked to and worked
with, something most will find difficult to get used to when doing research in the coun-
tryside. In many areas people simply defecate out in the wild. The FARC-EP placed
much importance in the construction of latrines [pozos s
epticos] and often collective
works were dedicated to building sewage systems or latrines in the countryside; in
Putumayo, everybody said that the FARC-EP gave the order that no house could lack a
latrine. The scatological technologies of the FARC-EP in their own camps reflected that
peasant stock, but also reinforced gender egalitarianism and a certain sense of collectiv-
ism, while reflecting security concerns – the need of not being detected.

We All Go to the Chonto, Whether Women or Men

In the FARC-EP camps there were rarely toilets. Normally, the infrastructure was far
more simple: “We called it a chonto. It’s just a hole in the ground ( … ) a metre or a
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 15

metre and a half in depth, and as you use it, you cover it with a bit of earth. When it
was full, you had to dig another one”.106 The chontos were a convenient and easy solu-
tion for a group that, particularly since the escalation of the conflict in the 2000s had to
sustain high levels of mobility,
During my time, ( … ) we had to move in groups of not more than a squad, that is, 12
people, only exceptionally you could move as a guerrilla of 24 people … when I joined, we
could not be in the same spot for more than two days ( … ) we formed a camp and
when we left, we had to take everything apart. ( … ) The chonto was the first thing to be
built, and the commander gave you the order, go and dig a hole, then do another hole
for the rubbish, and organise the rancha, and finally, go and organise the sleeping
quarter [caleta].107
This simple but effective solution was replicated all over the country, according to
the testimonies of combatants from and with experience in different regions “In
Caquet
a, it was the same hole in the ground with the mound by the side as in
Antioquia, and you had to carry toilet paper with you”.108 The fact that the chonto was
the first thing to be organized when starting a new camp was no coincidence, because
you didn’t really shit when you were on the march! Maybe, before you started the march,
while still in the camp, you made a chonteada [i.e., use of the chonto] here or there, but
not when marching … I remember that taking all of your equipment down was a lot of
hassle, so you got used to it, and waited until the night, whenever you settled, and then
you went to chontear.109
Therefore, as people had been marching a full day without going to the chonto, it is
only natural that this was the first thing to get organized. There doesn’t seem to have
been particular military strategy considerations in the organization of the chonto; but
there were naturally sanitary considerations when deciding where it should be,
the chonto had to be at a certain distance from the sleeping area [caletas] because of the
smell and that sort of thing. ( … ) It was built at a certain distance from the place where
the caletas were, and opposite to the rancha. ( … ) On the one side it was the rancha; on
the other, the chontos, because of sanitation concerns.110
According to a female combatant, privacy was also a consideration: “It was always a
bit removed from the camp, you reached it by a trail, ( … ) it could not be exposed, you
needed to have some privacy”.111 However, women and men shared the same facilities,
sometimes quite literally,
Once a guerrilla woman arrived there, she was pushing, she was by my side and this was
all very natural, she said, ‘how are you, bro?’ and she started doing her thing. When the
commander [ed. sat beside him to use another chonto], it was easier to accept because the
two of us were men, but when the woman took down her pants, that was very strange at
first … but then you become used to it. It is a stupid sense of shame, because we all
shit … but at first it was very strange.112
The FARC-EP insistence on gender equality was taken quite literally in this case:
both men and women go to the chonto, and both can share the space safely. Something
similar happened at bath time – everybody bathed in the local river together, regardless
of sex. Even before Plan Colombia113 and the conflict escalation in the 2000s, when
there were “veritable batallions” moving in big number around the countryside, particu-
larly on the Eastern Plains and the Southern jungles, and when the guerrillas built stable
16 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

camps, with “bunkbeds, toilets, kitchens, where they stayed for months, years even”,114
the toilets, typically latrines as those used in rural Colombia, were not gender differenti-
ated. This continued to be the case, even after Plan Colombia, in areas where the
FARC-EP could keep a more or less stable presence, such as the Naya, in the Pacific
region. One of our interviewees when there to give a course and was impressed with
the facilities: “that was no camp. It was a big house and there we had latrines”.115
According to the Eastern Bloc commander Andr
es Par
ıs in these “more stable camps
which had more people ( … ) we are talking about camps with 100 or even 300
guerrillas”, there were restricted and segregated latrine areas, “one area was for the
direction” of the movement because of the same security considerations. This, however,
was different when they were on the march and on smaller camps “up to a guerrilla,
that is, 24 people”, where everything was done in common according to this collectivist
spirit, and therefore, everybody used the same chonto.
During the demobilization process, as combatants gathered in concentration point
around the country, the FARC-EP had to build the villages where they were going to
live for the process. Toilets remained a shared facility used by both men and women
without distinction. However, another difference emerged that did not make everyone
in the ranks happy: commanders got their own toilets in their own homes. The rest had
to share houses and toilets. This was a deviation from the previous norm, where only in
big camps and strictly for security purposes, commanders used distinct facilities. Many
interpreted it as a sign that commanders would get a better deal out of the peace pro-
cess than the ordinary fighter, as an emerging form of class difference within the ranks
in stark contrast with the former insistence on egalitarianism, despite the hierarchical
nature of the organization.116

Where’s the Toilet? The Challenge for the Urbanites

The FARC-EP were by and large a peasant organization, historically led by peasants.
The presence of urbanites was almost anecdotal, although toward the end of their mili-
tary campaign the urban element became crucial in leadership positions.117 For these
urbanite elements, used to the comforts of toilets, the adaptation to the chonto or to
latrines was far from easy:
if you were urban and if you were new, what the hell, you had to get used to it. It surely
isn’t the same as to go to a toilet and sit there on a loo: in the chonto you are exposed. If
it rains, your bum cheeks get wet, and the winds blow straight there, but you get used to
it. After you did it, you threw two handfuls of earth ( … ) and the wee hole started to fill
up, and then you had to get the next one ready.118
But the problem was not just exposure to the elements or the discomfort in relation
to the WC in towns. It was also the social exposure which was difficult – as mentioned
by the same man who told of his shock when he first used a chonto side by side with
a woman:
You asked for permission to go to the chonto, and typically, if there was somebody in the
chonto, the officer told you to wait. But the commanders didn’t have to ask for permission,
and that was so strange, because I had never been with my bum exposed, shitting, next to
another person … I don’t know, this caught me by surprise.119
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 17

According to Tanja Nijmeijer, who not only came from an urban but also European
background, mentions that this exposure was even more difficult to cope with because
of the gender integration within the FARC-EP ranks, particularly when people did not
ask first for permission to use the chonto,
At first, the chonto was something uncomfortable. You waited for the previous person to
finish their business, but then you were sitting there, and two or three men would come in
and started doing their thing naturally, talking between them, and then you start losing
this shame. I didn’t care too much about bathing [ed., men and women together], but
chontear was different, because this is something you do all alone, that’s how you are used
to do it. ( … ) But then you get used to it.
Self-consciousness was very much present at the start for these urbanite guerrillas,
although, particularly for the vast majority of guerrillas of peasant stock the chonto or
the latrines was not an issue because this is what they have known all of their lives to
the point that the issue was never raised in conversations with them – likewise, in the
countryside, the perception of privacy is very different and most of the times latrines
are very much exposed.
According to a female guerrilla, this self-consciousness was really difficult to over-
come when during the 1999–2002 failed peace negotiations between the FARC-EP and
the government,
I was in Cagu
an, in the same camp with Sim
on [Trinidad], Carlos Antonio [Lozada], con
Andr
es [Par
ıs] [ie., all top-commanders], and Sim
on came to me one day, and said, ‘hey
lass, is it true that since you arrived you haven’t gone to the chonto?’ I could not reply
anything back! ‘Come here, don’t be embarrassed, go to my chonto and I’ll keep an eye so
nobody comes’. And after some days, then I went to that exclusive chonto.
Eventually, everyone had to get used to it, because there was no other way around it.
After all, one way or another, we all have to go to the chonto. But in this process of get-
ting used to it, the distance between the urbanites and the rural combatants and con-
stituency got shorter and the gender egalitarian practices got reinforced.

Conclusion: Eating, Shitting and (Sometimes) Shooting

Eating is not merely a biological need – one need which needed to be satisfactorily cov-
ered in order to have troops able to march and fight in the most demanding conditions.
Eating is equally a social need and function. The same could be said about defecation.
It is important to note that eating and defecating are intimately linked, they are the
opposite ends of the same process. Likewise, in guerrilla camps, they were at the oppos-
ite ends of the same camp site. The chonto and the kitchen were at the extremes of the
same space, structuring it.
While fighting was exceptional, eating and defecating were daily occurrences. The
meals within the guerrilla ranks structured a routine, while at the same time it served to
create a space that brought guerrillas together, fostering micro-solidarity within the
ranks, a key component of cohesion in any armed force, a key component of social
action and of human sociability.120 The emotional bonds created in this process trans-
late into nostalgia; nostalgia of the coffee in the morning, the act of doing rancho, the
18 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

fact that cancharinas are not the same when done at home. Through both the routine
and the special occasions the sense of being a family was fostered.
At the same time, the ways in which people cooked together reflected and reinforced
key ideological commitments within the FARC-EP: mainly, gender equality and the col-
lectivist spirit within the organization. Everybody, regardless of sex, had to cook.
Everybody, regardless of sex, used the same space to defecate. And often, they mixed
while defecating. Everybody, whether rank-and-file or commander ate the same –
although commanders were largely exempt from cooking, they still cooked on special
occasions. If for security reasons, and in particular circumstances, the leadership defe-
cated in specific areas and had their own cooks, still the fact that they shared the same
infrastructure and food reinforced that sense of equality within a very hierarchical
organization. The nature of the meals and of the infrastructure constructed to biologic-
ally evacuate the meals reflected the peasant stock of the organization and forced the
integration of the few urbanites who joined the rebel ranks. At the time of demobiliza-
tion, although everybody still ate together, the fact that many commanders built their
own separate toilets within their houses, was resented by combatants who saw it as a
sign of the cracks in the old egalitarian ideology.
This paper demonstrates how two deeply human activities – maybe much overlooked
precisely because of their human nature- reflect important aspects of an insurgency’s
organization, class composition, relation to its constituency, and ideology. Certainly,
rebel movements in other latitudes with different ideological commitments, cultural
background and organizational architecture, structure the routine around these two
banal but fundamental activities in radically different ways with radically different
results. But by exploring these particular ways in which the everyday life of rebels is
organized, not only we gain insights on social, economic and ideological issues linked
to rebellion – we also re-humanise the field and the subjects we study.

Notes
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books,
1998), 47.
2. Abraham Guill
en, El error militar de las izquierdas (Barcelona: Hacer, 1980), 199.
3. Claude L
evi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964); Du miel aux cendres (Paris: Plon,
1967); L’Origine des manieres des tables (Paris: Plon, 1968).
4. Carolyn Rouse and Janet Hoskins, “Purity, Soul Food, and Sunni Islam: Explorations at
the Intersection of Consumption and Resistance”, Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2004):
226–249; Charles Feldman, “Roman Taste”, Food, Culture & Society 8, no. 1 (2005): 7–30;
Danielle De Vooght (ed.), Royal Taste. Food, Power and Status at the European courts after
1789 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Pierre Bordieu, “Distinction: a Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste”, in Food and Culture: a Reader, eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van
Esterik (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013): 31–39; Caroline Bynum, “Fast, Feast and Flesh: the
Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women”, in Food and Culture, eds. Counihan
and Van Esterik, 245–264; Mary Douglas, “The Abominations of Leviticus”, in Food and
Culture, eds. Counihan and Van Esterik, 48–58.
5. Annette Cozzi, “Composed Consumption. Picturing Nascent National Identity in Food
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Iraq. The Impact of War and Sanctions on the Civilian Population”, Food, Culture &
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18. David Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency Redux”, Survival 48, no. 4 (2006): 111–130; C
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Fabre, “Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War”, Ethics 120, no. 1 (2009): 36–63; Karl
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Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 383–414; Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths
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“Blood, Sweat and Tears in a Bottle of Palestinian Extra-Virgin Olive Oil”, Food, Culture
& Society 14, no. 2 (2011): 275–292.
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Great War”, in Food, Culture and Identity, eds. Benbow and Perry, 17–43.
20 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

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Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
24. Kim Salmons, “Anarchic Appetites: Vegetarianism and The Secret Agent”, The Conradian
37, no. 2 (2012): 35–49.
25. Federico Ferretti, Anarchy and Geography. Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2019).
26. John Clark and Camille Martin, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity. Selected Writings of Elis
ee
Reclus (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 269.
27. Jean-Marc Fl€ ukiger, “An Appraisal of the Radical Animal Liberation Movement in
Switzerland: 2003 to March 2007”, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31, no. 2 (2008):
145–157; John Sorenson, “Constructing Terrorists: Propaganda about Animal Rights”,
Critical Studies on Terrorism 2, no. 2 (2009): 237–256; Michael Loadenthal,
“Deconstructing ‘Eco-terrorism’: Rhetoric, Framing and Statecraft as Seen through the
Insight Approach”, Critical Studies on Terrorism 6, no. 1 (2013): 92–117.
28. Bernhard Forchtner and Ana Tominc, “Kalashnikov and Cooking-spoon: Neo-Nazism,
Veganism and a Lifestyle Cooking Show on YouTube”, Food, Culture & Society 20, no. 3
(2017): 415–441.
29. Sidney Mintz, “Food and its Relationship to Concepts of Power”, in Food and Agrarian
Orders in the World-Economy, ed. Philip McMichael (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1995), 3–13.
30. Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into
Eating, Power, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Ellen Messer and Marc Cohen,
“Conflict, Food Insecurity and Globalization”, Food, Culture & Society 10, no. 2
(2007): 297–315.
31. Claude L
evi-Strauss, La potiere jalouse (Paris: Plon, 1985).
32. Julie Horan, The Porcelain God. A Social History of the Toilet (Secaucus: Citadel
Press, 1997).
33. Olga Gershenshon and Barbara Penner, “Introduction: The Private Life of Public
Conveniences”, in Ladies and Gents. Public Toilets and Gender, eds. Olga Gershenson and
Barbara Penner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 1–32.
34. Naomi Stead, “Avoidance: On Some Euphemisms for the ‘Smallest Room’”, in Ladies and
Gents, eds. Gershenson and Penner, 126–133.
35. Sam Whiting and Veronika Koller, “Dialogues in Solitude: The Discursive Structures and
Social Functions of Male Toilet Graffiti”, Centre for the Study of Language in Social Life,
Lancaster University, Working Paper No. 126 (2007).
36. Yandi Yatmo and Paramita Atmodiwirjo, “Communal Toilet as a Collective Spatial System
in High Density Urban Kampong”, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 36
(2012): 677–687.
37. Innocent Tumwebaze and Hans-Joachim Mosler, “Shared Toilet Users’ Collective Cleaning
and Determinant Factors in Kampala Slums, Uganda”, BMC Public Health, 14 (2014):
1260, doi:10.1186/1471-2458-14-1260.
38. Claudia Mitchell, “Geographies of Danger: School Toilets in Sub-Saharan Africa”, in Ladies
and Gents, eds. Gershenson and Penner, 62–74; Kathleen O’Reilly, “From Toilet Insecurity
to Toilet Security: Creating Safe Sanitation for Women and Girls”, Wiley Interdisciplinary
Reviews: Water, 3 (2016): 19–24.
39. Shikun Cheng, Zifu Li, Sayed Uddin, Heinz-Peter Mang, Xiaoqin Zhou, Jian Zhang, Lei
Zheng, and Lingling Zhang, “Toilet Revolution in China”, Journal of Environmental
Management 216 (2018): 347–356.
40. Horan, The Porcelain God; Beverly Skeggs, “The Toilet Paper: Femininity, Class and Mis-
recognition”, Women’s Studies International Forum 24, nos. 3-4 (2001): 295–307.
41. Duncan Foley, “The Strange History of the Economic Agent”, New School Economic
Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 82–94; Jos
e A. Guti
errez, “What Do Rebels Do When They Rule?”,
Journal of Political Power 11, no. 1 (2018): 125–133.
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 21

42.

Alfredo Molano, Trochas y fusiles (Bogot
a: El Ancora, 2007); John Pinchao, Mi fuga hacia
la libertad (Bogot
a: Planeta, 2008); Clara Rojas, Cautiva (Bogot
a: Norma, 2009); Alan Jara,
El mundo al rev
es (Bogot
a: Norma, 2010).
43. Felipe Castilla, Sancocho de mico (Bogot
a: Universidad de la Sabana, 2018).
44. Kilcullen, “Counterinsurgency redux”; Hack, “The Malayan emergency”; Porch,
Counterinsurgency.
45. Interview, La Marina (Chaparral, Tolima), 16 November 2012.
46. Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas & Revolution in Latin America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
47. Caleta also means “stash” or “cache”.
48. F-1F (15/05/20).
49. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995); Michel De Certeau, Luce Giard,
and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Living and Cooking (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
50. F-2M (18/05/20). According to the Eastern Bloc commander Andr
es Par
ıs (14/07/20), the
main meal times were breakfast at 6 am, lunch at 11,30 am and dinner at 5 pm. There was
consistency despite small variations.
51. F-1F (15/05/20)
52. Semana, “En la selva el tiempo cuenta doble: Alan Jara”, Semana, February 4 (2009).
53. Tanja Nijmeijer (25/05/20)
54. F-1F (15/05/20).
55. All former guerrillas mentioned by their names have demobilised and have consented to
be referred to by their names in the paper.
56. Tanja Nijmeijer (25/05/20).
57. Francisco Guti
errez, Criminal Rebels? A Discussion of War and Criminality from the
Colombian Experience (London: London School of Economics, 2003); Francisco Guti
errez,
“The FARC’s Militaristic Blueprint”, Small Wars & Insurgencies 29, no. 4 (2018): 629–653.
58. F-2M (18/05/20).
59. The kitchen was called, indistinctively and according to personal preference, as a
masculine or feminine noun: rancho o rancha. It meant exactly the same.
60. Andr
es Par
ıs (14/07/20).
61. R
ıo Negro, “La holandesa de las Farc promete seguir ‘en lucha’”, R
ıo Negro, November
11 (2010).
62. In the Andean region, this diet has come to be known as “ACPM [vehicles’ fuel] diet”,
because it is cheap and keep you going –the acronym stands for Arroz [rice], Carne
[meat], Papa [potatoe] and Maduro [plantain]. See Juana Camacho, Embodied tastes: Food
and agrobiodiversity in the Colombian Andes, PhD diss., University of Georgia (2011).
63. F-2M (18/05/20).
64. F-1F (15/05/20).
65. Pinchao, Mi fuga hacia la libertad.
66. Ibid.
67. Tanja Nijmeijer (25/05/20).
68. F-1F (15/05/20).
69. I have tried vulture, and in my humble opinion, it tastes more of turkey.
70. F-1F (15/05/20).
71. In Colombia, tiger is a name often given to the jaguar or to the ocelots. The puma is often
referred to as a lion.
72. Semana, “En la selva el tiempo cuenta doble”.
73. Rojas, Cautiva; Jara, El mundo al rev
es.
74. Alfredo Molano, “La ruta de la cancharina”, El Espectador, 22 June (2014).
75. F-1F (15/05/20).
76. F-2M (18/05/20).
77. Colada is a hot, thick sweet beverage made of milk and corn-starch.
22 J. A. GUTIÉRREZ D

78. The name is a double entendre – it means, literally, donkey’s dust but the latter word also
is slang for sex, so it could be translated too as donkey’s “quickie”.
79. Natalia Herrera and Douglas Porch, “‘Like going to a fiesta’ – the role of female fighters in
Colombia’s FARC-EP”, Small Wars & Insurgencies 19, no.4 (2008), 609-634; Terry Gibbs,
“Voices from the Colombian left: women and the struggle for social transformation”,
Labour, Capital & Society 43, no.2 (2010), 58-84; Francisco Guti
errez and Francy Carranza,
“Organizing women for combat: the experience of the FARC in the Colombian war”,
Journal of Agrarian Change 17 (2017): 770–778.
80. F-2M (18/05/20).
81. Tanja Nijmeijer (25/05/20).
82. Eduardo Pizarro, Las FARC (1949-1966) de la autodefensa a la combinaci
on de todas las
formas de lucha (Bogot
a: IEPRI/Tercer Mundo, 1991).
83. Carlos Arango, FARC, veinte a~ nos (Bogot
a: Aurora, 1984), 192.
84. Ester, 6th Front (13/03/16).
85. “Organizing women for combat”.
86. Vanessa Reynoso, 21st Front (26/06/17).
87. Obviously, for the few elite women in the FARC-EP, this was not life-changing as they
had not been expected to have the same restrictive roles of working-class or peasant
women. Gendered experiences within ranks cannot be understood abstracting class from
the equation.
88. Herrera and Porch, “‘Like going to a fiesta’”, 611.
89. These difficulties will be the subject of a future paper we are working together with my
colleague Emma Murphy.
90. F-2M (18/05/20).
91. Tanja Nijmeijer (25/05/20).
92. Naturally, these blockades had a terrible impact over local populations and created much
resentment, although this is outside the scope of this paper.
93. F-1F (15/05/20).
94. Andr
es Par
ıs (14/07/20).
95. During the government of Alvaro
Uribe (2002–2010) there was a sustained escalation in
counter-insurgency operations and increasing US involvement in the Colombian conflict.
96. Jara, El mundo al rev
es, 238.
97. Speech delivered in Sina
ı, Argelia (Cauca) (11/05/16)
98. This sharp observation on class and root vegetables was made by Felipe Castilla during
one of our conversations.
99. Although since the early 1990s the FARC-EP formed their own clandestine party (called
the Colombian Clandestine Communist Party, or PC3), for most of the guerrillas’ history,
since its foundation in 1964, the FARC-EP had organic links to the Colombian
Communist Party (PCC). Many guerrillas came from the party, and although their
leadership was different, the influence of the PCC over the FARC-EP was obvious until
the late 1980s. Even after their split, the FARC-EP kept claiming allegiance to the
communist tradition. See Guillermo Ferro and Graciela Uribe, El orden de la guerra
(Bogot
a: CEJA, 2002).
100. Andr
es Par
ıs (14/07/20).
101. F-1F (15/05/20).
102. Tanja Nijmeijer (25/05/20).
103. Pinchao, Mi fuga hacia la libertad; Rojas, Cautiva; Jara, El mundo al rev
es.
104. Sancocho de mico.
105. Andr
es Par
ıs (14/07/20).
106. F-1F (15/05/20).
107. F-2M (18/05/20).
108. F-1F (15/05/20).
109. Tanja Nijmeijer (25/05/20).
110. F-2M (18/05/20).
 STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM 23

111. F-1F (15/05/20).

112. F-2M (18/05/20).
113. Plan Colombia was a massive US-funded military aid plan allegedly directed to counter-
narcotics purposes, though in reality, its real aim were left-wing guerrillas, mostly in
Southern Colombia. It lasted from 2000 until 2015, and its main result was a massive
escalation of the conflict resulting in millions forcefully displaced and tens of thousands
dead. See Diana Rojas, El Plan Colombia: la intervenci
on de Estados Unidos en Colombia.
1998-2012 (Bogot
a: IEPRI, 2015); Winifred Tate, Drugs, thugs and diplomats (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2015); John Lindsay-Poland, Plan Colombia. U.S. ally atrocities
and community activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid.
116. This nascent resentment was voiced by many combatants during the months (May–July) I
spent in 2017 in the concentration points [Zonas Veredales de Transici
on y Normalizaci
on
in Spanish – Village zones for transition and normalisation] of La Carmelita, Putumayo
and El Oso, Tolima. This was more consistently voiced in Putumayo than Tolima.
117. Jos
e A. Guti
errez, “Insurgent Institutions: Refractory Communities, Armed Insurgency
and Institution-Building in the Colombian Conflict” (PhD diss., University College
Dublin, 2019).
118. F-1F (15/05/20).
119. F-2M (18/05/20).
120. Sinisa Malesevi
c, The Rise of organised brutality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017).

Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Felipe Castilla for the many interesting discussions we had on this topic and
his valuable observations on a preliminary draft; to Hern
an Castro for the anthropological and
scatological discussions which inspired this paper; to Ruth Kinna for feedback and inspiring con-
versations; to those guerrillas who told me their intimate stories in the camps; and to the rural
communities where I conducted my research, which fed me and put up with me, hard as it is,
for months.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This research was partly funded by the Irish Research Council & the Conflict Resolution Unit of
the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Ireland through the Andrew Grene
Postgraduate Scholarship in Conflict Resolution, under grant GOIPG/2015/2479.

ORCID
Jos
e Antonio Guti
errez D http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2335-2677