Love in the midst of war: six women who survived the armed conflict in Colombia tell their stories

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The journalist Vanessa de la Torre launched her first book 'Love stories in war fields', in September 2019.

(CNN Spanish) - Alejandra and Ramiro are the protagonists of a love story in the middle of the war.

She was part of one of the most deadly terrorist machines of the Farc during the war years: she was one of the most important explosives of that guerrilla, in charge of making serial bombs and antipersonnel mines to attack her enemies. The FARC group of explosivists, to which Alejandra belonged, even camouflaged explosives in corpses and toys to attack the Colombian Army.

Ramiro, meanwhile, was a seasoned guerrilla with superior military training. It was a "soft step", as trained men are called to annihilate the soldiers of the Colombian Army "becoming unpredictable." They were extermination machines.

The two entered the war from children. And in the war they fell in love. They lived a love that was forbidden on account of the rules of conflict, as absurd as war itself.

In the middle of a bombing in 2011, when they were part of an elite group to take care of the then top leader of the Farc, Alfonso Cano, in one of the hardest bombings that lived during his years in the war, they decided to escape.

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This story is recorded in “Stories of love in war fields” (Grijalbo, 2019) by the Colombian journalist Vanessa de la Torre, who for several years investigated and dedicated herself to narrating through love the bloody Colombian war that left more than 220,000 dead in more than five decades of war.

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In secret loves you never know when tomorrow is. You don't even know if there is a tomorrow. #HistoriesDeAmorEnCamposDeGuerra ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

A post shared by Vanessa De La Torre (@vanesssadelatorre) on Sep 23, 2019 at 7:30 pm PDT

The stories are starring women who fell in love and left behind their past violence, by the force of love.

“I wanted to tell the story of the war in Colombia, but the story is already written,” says De La Torre. "But we Colombians have not necessarily read it."

Then a book was proposed with which he could tell his two young daughters and the generations that did not have to live in their own flesh the violence of the country, the history of Colombia through these chronicles of love.

“I wanted to tell something very horrible but in a way that catches,” she says.

And he achieve it. He toured the lives of six women, submerged in violence, whom love freed.

“It's very strong what a woman in love does,” she says about the stories of her protagonists. "I was touched by the momentum, determination and strength behind a woman's love."

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In his book, De la Torre, he goes through several periods and situations of conflict. It not only tells the war through members of the Farc, but also the victims of the violence of the 80s and 90s in Colombia, from the beginning of the 2000s and in general from the war that Colombia is trying to overcome after the signing of a peace agreement in 2016.

She says she wrote this book now, after the signing of the peace accords, "because during the war journalists are talking about war," but once the rifles are silenced, when the war is decanted, it is possible to "be more creative and talk ”.

And although Colombia has lived in war for so many decades, the country "is so wonderful that it allows us to love, even in the midst of bullets, but it's that cruel," she says.

Therefore, as the Colombian writer Jorge Franco says in the prologue of the book, the love that intersects in the life of the characters has endowed them with "a humanity that seemed to have been devoured by violence." That's what the book is about.

In addition to the story of Alejandra and Ramiro, there is a story about the love story of Miryam Rodríguez and Carlos Pizarro, the guerrilla commander of the M-19, who was killed in April 1990. The couple met, fled together, met they hid, and suffered persecutions, torture and operations in the midst of the violent Colombia of the 80s and 90s.

There is also the story of Fabiola and Librado, a woman who for almost three decades cried to her husband - escort of one of the magistrates who died in the taking of the Palace of Justice in 1985 - in the grave of her victimizers.

In the same way is the story of Arelys Henao, a popular music singer victim of violence, who broke free from forced recruitment at the edge of singing, and the fairytale story of Josephine and Anderson: she a woman who grew up in the Swedish royalty, and he, a capoeira dancer from one of the violent communes of Medellín.

"Love is an aphrodisiac because it makes it survive in the midst of war," says De La Torre. "Aphrodisiac is to survive," he reiterates.

This book and these chronicles of love in the midst of war, are evidence that love is savior, and, as Franco says in the prologue, “we only have love left” and only those who believe in it “have been saved from horror "

Peace in Colombia