Another recent deserter resorted to particularly dramatic measures in order to return to the family she had left behind when she joined Farc. Sitting in her mother's sparse sitting room in a Bogota housing estate, she looks every inch the typical city girl: manicured nails, carefully groomed hair, white trousers. Amalia now has a respectable job in a travel agency and keeps her guerrilla past a secret from her neighbours. When she went to the camps, her two-year-old daughter was sent to live in Bogota with her grandmother but, after two-and-a-half years, Amalia could no longer bear the separation. 'I was given the task of looking after an airstrip, and I saw my opportunity,' she says. She got on to the plane with her gun and told the pilot he was being hijacked. 'He went very pale and did what I said.' On the journey to freedom she read her horoscope in the newspaper El Tiempo. 'It said I was about to start a new cycle in my life. I remember thinking how true it was.'I bet no one realised that day that El Tiempo's astrologer was writing about an escaping female guerrilla. This is what El Tiempo says about me today:
VIRGO
24 de agosto a 23 de septiembre
Tu talento recibe mayor expansión y es posible que puedas encauzar con mejor precisión tus proyectos. La inteligencia y calma, que empleas al hacer tus negocios; se convierten ahora en la llave secreta del éxito.
Or is it actually addressed to another Farc member about to employ her intelligence and calm to organise a successful kidnapping. Who knows?
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