Alfredo Usuga put up with 18 years of hunger, insomnia and fear before deserting Colombia’s Marxist FARC rebels this year.
Known by his war alias as Marlon, he is one of hundreds of rebels who abandoned the country’s two leftist insurgent groups in recent years, an exodus that may have encouraged rebel leaders to seek a negotiated peace with the government.
Some 1,140 combatants from the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and the smaller National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, demobilised in 2012, the government says, three times the number killed in combat.
Peace talks - which turned one-year old on Tuesday - are a huge risk for President Juan Manuel Santos and his legacy but could end 50 years of conflict that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, mostly civilian.
“Every noise from an airplane makes you run,” said Usuga, a heavy-set 31-year-old with short cropped hair.
“You feel surrounded. It’s scary, very scary. That’s why I left the rebels,” he said in an interview with Reuters, organised by the government at a secret location.
Deserting is a big risk. Those suspected of planning an escape are often killed by their comrades.
Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon believes desertions will climb as combatants cease to see a future in insurgency, eroding rebel ranks and potentially hastening the end of the conflict.
“Demobilisation is growing this year,” said Pinzon during a recent interview. “It’s a humanitarian attitude. It saves lives. They can repent.”
The FARC says desertion talk is part of the government’s psychological warfare. Rebel leaders deny the ranks have dwindled and say desertion is part of every war.
“In every armed conflict, especially one as long as Colombia’s there are always things like this,” rebel negotiator Andres Paris said in Havana. “But there are also recruits who compensate for this phenomenon. “What is being presented is a staged film, made to portray a non-existent collapse in the armed struggle.”
Usuga’s tale is familiar within the FARC. Recruited by force from an impoverished rural area when he was 12 years old, he spent two-thirds of his life fighting the government in the jungle.
By the time he fled, Usuga controlled operations along the porous Panama border, an area the government says is used to smuggle cocaine to finance the FARC’s operations.
Encouraging rebels like Usuga to demobilise is part of a government strategy to demoralise the guerrillas, even as it maintains military pressure on the FARC.
A reinsertion programme offers job training, a monthly stipend and amnesty for minor crimes like firearms possession.