You must imagine what it must have been for Griselda Lobo Silva, who was born and raised in a farm in La Paz (Colombia), to have seen these young people walk through her land when she was a young girl. Her mother had fallen ill, and Griselda was the one who had to leave school to take her care of her seventeen brothers and sisters. The farm was modest and their lives were hard. But here came this band of rebels, armed and disciplined, with a leader who was a woman. Griselda watched them with fascination. They treated her brothers and sisters with care and did not steal from the farm despite being armed. Her fascination with these men and women only grew. At the age of sixteen, when other siblings could take up her work at home, Griselda joined these fighters who were part of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). She took on the name of Sandra Ramírez and spent the next thirty-five years in combat to make her country a more equitable place, a better place.

In 2018, Sandra—the farm girl now an ex-combatant—took her place as one of the ten nominated Senators and members of Congress as part of the 2016 peace agreement. In the Senate, Sandra fought for the very things that she had spent her life fighting for in the forests. The agreement now comes to an end, and so Sandra —now a member of Comunes, a left-wing political party that emerged out of the guerrilla movement—is fighting to win back her seat to the Colombian Senate. We spoke to Sandra as she campaigned in the election that will take place on Sunday, March 8.

When the peace agreement was being negotiated in Havana (Cuba) from 2012, Sandra was sent by the FARC as one of their representatives. Out of the peace deal in 2016, Sandra said, “we brought the voice of reconciliation and truth.” Out of the agreement and with her seat in the legislature that came with that agreement, Sandra says that she managed “to be more active across the country, getting to know the problems that various communities face on a daily basis and to try and find solutions, together with the state institutions, to these immense problems, especially with relation to land.” However, Sandra points out sadly, since the agreement, over five hundred of her comrades who had signed the peace agreement have been murdered and other comrades have been evicted from territories due to the lack of security for them and their families. The media, which has been hostile to her campaign, has continued to stigmatize the ex-combatants who “in good faith” signed the peace agreement.

Once the former combatants entered the Congress, they found themselves surrounded by the right-wing. This configuration of the Congress, Sandra told us, put forward “no legislation in the interests of Colombian society.” Nevertheless, Sandra and her comrades “managed to make progress,” for example by fighting to get the peasantry recognized as subjects with constitutional rights. The fight for the peasantry, she told us, was about the need for agrarian courts in rural Colombia to solve the problem of land. The point of this fight was to resolve the problems of ownership and access to water. “Land was brutally taken from the peasants, and today has other owners and that has to be resolved in an agrarian court.” The Left in the legislature made very slow progress, although on other issues—such as on labor rights and pension reform—the advances came faster. There was progress on education and on health, but very little on infrastructure. Roads, she said, “are the blood vessels that connect to the arteries,” but since “we don’t have blood vessels, there is a great deficit that exists in the country.”