“Many people don’t say they were part of the FARC because they are afraid of losing their jobs, their lives”

Natali González Arce was born in 1983 in Cali. A clinical and social neuropsychologist and a feminist, she was Under-Secretary for Human Rights and Peacebuilding at Cali City Council between 2020 and 2022. Natali is an activist with the Observatory for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding (COBSEPAZ), founder of PSICOPAZ, an organisation focused on mental health and conflict, and part of the regional leadership in Cali of Comunes, the political party that succeeded the FARC. Before that, from her youth, she was a clandestine agent of the political and social apparatus of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC-EP), the historic guerrilla group that signed a peace agreement with the Colombian Government in 2016.

The only daughter of an upholsterer father and a mother devoted to ancestral wisdom and mysticism, Natali grew up in Cali, a city in south-western Colombia which she describes as “a meeting point for the mixing of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities”. In a lower-middle-class environment, she developed a deep political awareness and, at the age of 15, in a context marked by the conflict, she began her involvement with social organisations and social justice. A year later, she was already vice-president of a community board in a Cali neighbourhood.

“On one occasion, I had breakfast with [former president] Uribe Vélez. They brought us community leaders together. At the time I didn’t know whether I was right-wing or left-wing, but at that breakfast I could see how that political class organised itself, how it blamed security problems on the young people I worked with and who, over time, would be murdered,” she recalls of a period that left its mark on her conscience with the murder of the comedian Jaime Garzón in 1999.

It was at that moment that Natali understood which side she would be on in the conflict in Colombia. She chose the radical left as a way of defending life and joined the communist youth, later becoming part of the FARC’s clandestine Bolivarian movement and a member of the PC3, or Clandestine Colombian Communist Party. Her activities were persecuted by the authorities, so she had to lead a double life. “While I was living my clandestine life, I studied for my degree in Psychology and specialised in neuropsychology and in psychosocial support in contexts of war or insecurity,” she explains.

As she was not a guerrilla fighter, the peace process achieved in 2016 does not cover her case. However, the signing brought a crucial change in her life: she was able to leave clandestinity behind and put an end to her parallel lives. Now her public identity is clear, concise and transparent. Hers is a personality that breaks down the stigmas still attached to former members of the guerrilla and shows that, despite the difficulties, it is indeed possible to integrate into the system one wants to transform. That said, she warns, it is not easy, especially if you are a woman.

“Nothing we are talking about can be understood outside of privilege. I didn’t experience gender-based violence, but women’s participation in politics has to be seen in terms of privilege,” Natali insists, and recalls: “Participation has historically been monopolised by the interests of patriarchy, which says that if we have a certain leadership or rank, it is because we are the commanders’ girlfriends. But that is not the case: those of us women who joined the organisations were neither blinded nor deceived; we did it out of conviction. In Cali, many of us women were part of organisations of the Bolivarian movement in which we were not merely included, but were the ones leading.”

Colombia, when peace is marked by violence

In 2016, the then president Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC) signed a peace agreement that ended the armed conflict that had begun in 1964 and has left around 120,000 victims. This peace, full of imperfections, dissidence and reprisals, turns ten years old in 2026. And although the FARC has dissolved and most of its members have begun a process of reintegration into society, violence continues to shape people’s lives in Colombia. In regions such as Cauca and Guaviare, the situation has even worsened, now marked by armed groups fighting over the vacuum left by the FARC.

These armed groups are mainly made up of FARC dissident forces, paramilitaries linked to the State, members of the National Liberation Army guerrilla group and criminal groups allied with drug trafficking. Depending on the region of Colombia, one faction has a greater or lesser presence, although in every case they want to seize the territory in order to control illicit activities such as the cultivation of and trafficking in cocaine or the extraction of mineral resources such as gold. In many parts of the country, since the State does not exist, they are the ones who act as the real authority, sometimes creating a swarm of fragile alliances that can quickly escalate into extreme violence. And those who suffer most from this violence are the inhabitants of these territories and human rights defenders.

Thus, according to data from the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ), in 2025 alone “187 people who exercised some form of social leadership or human rights defence work in Colombia were murdered. This figure represents an increase of 14 murders compared with 2024 and matches the levels of violence reached in 2022, a year marked by the presidential elections.” Although it does not reach the levels of the worst years of the post-conflict period, from 2018 to 2020, under the presidency of Iván Duque, skirmishes still persist, mainly affecting the population living in rural areas, where the authority of the State is so diluted that it practically does not exist. A reflection of this lack of protection is that not even political representatives are free; this February Aida Quilcué, a senator and defender from Cauca, was kidnapped for a few hours. That is why people flee. In 2025 alone, INDEPAZ put the number of people displaced by the conflict at more than 100,000. In the midst of the 2026 electoral process, few people believe that the new Colombian president will change this dynamic, entrenched for decades in Colombia.