Hostage Nation (13 page)

After giving Wilson's remains a decent burial, Sonia continued her work on the banks of the Caguán River. Never having had many close friends, she was very lonely. But many of Wilson's friends came to her, offering help. “Everyone loved him,” she says. “And they knew how much he loved me, so I was inheriting what people felt for Wilson.” As she traveled up and down the river, her mind would constantly go back to Wilson's last words to her as he lay dying: “You have to continue on, and take care of yourself, dear. And you must tell our son who his father was. So that he, too, will be strong—a warrior like his parents.”

Her dedication to the movement and her great competence as a radio operator in the course of dozens of battles did not go unnoticed. The high commanders put her in charge of Peñas Coloradas. Sonia's duties, like other midlevel commanders, included finding teachers for the school and nurses for the health clinic. She mandated that all of the prostitutes carry a card stating that they did not have any sexually transmitted diseases. She controlled the quantity of gasoline that could be sold to boat owners, and anyone wanting to travel on the river had to ask her for authorization. Sonia was well liked and respected by the people. “She was our ‘government,' because we never knew anyone from Bogotá,” said one resident of Peñas Coloradas. Outsiders who arrived in the area had to register with her or with her subordinate guerrillas. She ran a tight ship, which was especially difficult during the weekends, when after a weeklong enforced sobriety, nearly everyone got drunk. She was also the town banker, the person who gave loans to the campesinos, a loving Santa Claus who bought all of the children Christmas presents, and a mediator who helped settle family squabbles and doled out punishment for bad behavior. The village had to be well run, because it was a large source of income for the FARC, and Sonia's most important responsibility was to keep track of all of the buying and selling of coca base in the region.

By 2003, Sonia's success and that of all the players in the massively diversified drug trade had caused the cocaine business to explode.
Street values in the United States reached a new low, with a gram of cocaine averaging one hundred dollars—an 89 percent drop in price since 1975. Sonia felt confident in her abilities and optimistic about her future in the guerrilla army. What she had no idea of at the time was that others besides her commanders had recognized her dedication. With the use of bugged satellite phones, Colombian military intelligence officers had infiltrated communications along the Caguán River and were closely following the goings-on of Sonia and her comrades. And what she could never have imagined then was that just one year later, her high profile in the FARC and involvement in the coca trade would link her fate to that of Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Thomas Howes—the three American hostages whose goal had been to shut the pervasive business down.

T
wo years after Simón Trinidad joined the FARC, friends close to him say that he received word that his wife, who was living in Mexico with their children, had moved on with another man. The betrayal was the impetus for his decision to remain in the guerrilla army. The following year, in December 1990, during a meeting between the FARC and ELN commanders in the region, Trinidad met with a group of high school students who were part of the Juventud Comunista. When fifteen-year-old Lucero saw the forty-year-old guerrilla commander, her reaction was immediate. “I don't know if it was love at first sight, but, yes, there was attraction,” she recalls. “I was an ordinary citizen, and I looked at the guerrillas and it was like seeing pure Che Guevaras.” Lucero idolized the renowned Argentinean revolutionary from images and propaganda that she'd seen all of her life. Guevara was the perfect hero, someone who could have saved the world. “I felt more than a physical attraction toward the guerrillas. It was an admiration for them, for what they represented.” Trinidad stood out from the others because of his elegant manner. But more than that, Lucero says, “was how I admired his beliefs that he defended in every word. In each one of us, he left a seed planted. The way he expressed himself, the way he reached each of us was very strong.”

For Trinidad, the young Lucero was impossible to forget, as well. The two began to see each other occasionally, when Trinidad could get away from his duties, or when Lucero could concoct a lie that her widowed mother would believe to explain a three-day absence. “One day, he took my hand, and we became boyfriend and girlfriend,” she says. There was a six-hour distance between Trinidad's camp and Lucero's farm, so the two spent most of their time apart. Over the next year, the guerrilla commander sent romantic letters. “When I was far away, a little card would arrive with a seed—whatever little seed—because, he said, ‘You place a seed anywhere, and the seed is sown. Since I have thrown my love in your field, love will bloom there, because I have planted it there.'”

After a year, Lucero told Trinidad that she wanted to join the FARC. He was hesitant. “Simón feared that I only wanted to join the guerrillas because I was in love with him. He thought that after the first week, I would be begging them to let me return to my house.” But Lucero was adamant. Her life had been spent on a small farm in Becerril, in the department of César, near the Venezuelan border. Lucero called it a “feudalistic society,” where rich landowners controlled the political system and hired paramilitaries to kill poor farmers they accused of rebellion. Several of Lucero's childhood friends were killed in the violence, which made her greatly admire the guerrillas who fought back against the repressive oligarchy. On her third trip to visit Trinidad at his encampment, Lucero was adamant. “I said, ‘Simón, I'm going to stay here.'” When Trinidad told her that she couldn't, “I told him, ‘Then I'm going to the ELN.'” Whether or not Trinidad took her threat seriously, he conceded that she could join the FARC and stay with him in the camp. When Lucero failed to return home, her mother and brother set out to find her, and when they did, they pleaded that she leave with them. When they realized Lucero would not listen, they sought out Trinidad. “She is a spoiled girl,” her mother told him. “She won't be able to handle this.” But neither the young woman nor the guerrilla commander, both of whom had fallen completely in love, could be swayed. Lucero stayed.

FARC commander Simón Trinidad and a United Nations envoy, American James LeMoyne, meet in San Vicente del Caguán during the negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC on January 11, 2002. Photo: AP Images/Scott Dalton
.

“For me, it was very hard physically,” says Lucero, who had to carry heavy equipment on her back. The black rubber boots, the
pantaneras
, were terribly heavy and blisteringly hot on the long hikes up the sierra. “I was fifteen years old, almost sixteen, and I was weak, thin. I fell while I walked, and I was very afraid of the dark. So it hit me very hard.” She missed her mother, her sisters, her brother, and her friends. She missed the food she was accustomed to, seeing movies, and dancing to popular music. She missed the freedom of being a civilian. But to the teenager whose family had always considered her spoiled, it was all worth it. “You leave everything. You change everything for a new life. It's like a rebirth, but into a life of much more sacrifice. The advantage is that you know that the sacrifice will all be worth it after the triumph of the revolution.” And with that thought, Lucero was content.

After taking basic military courses and studying FARC ideology for the first year, Lucero was allowed to be with Trinidad, and she soon became pregnant. She didn't know how to tell Trinidad. When she did,
he was livid. “He told me, ‘I spend my life telling young men and women that they better not get pregnant. Tell me: With what face am I going to tell them that I'm going to be a father?'” Lucero gave birth to a healthy daughter but was able to keep the infant with her for only four months. Then Lucero was given an ultimatum. Stay with your child or continue to be a
guerrillera
and send the child away. “There are your feelings as a mother,” Lucero said of the difficult decision in a 2005 interview, “but also your feelings as a revolutionary. What weighs more? I made the choice to return to the guerrillas, with pain, with my heart in my throat, but with the conviction, the desire to continue fighting.” Lucero took the baby to live with her mother, who was overjoyed to care for her granddaughter. Lucero was heartbroken as she said good-bye to the child, but she felt convinced that returning to the mountains and to Trinidad was the right thing to do. The two continued to live together in the camp, Trinidad as the second in command of the Forty-first Front, and Lucero, like many other young women who were romantic partners with older commanders, as “Trinidad's woman.” But Lucero took her role in the guerrilla army and in its defense of poor Colombians very seriously. “You see the soldier's treatment of the civilians; the soldier sees the enemy in the civilian population. We treat the civilian population with love, with love and affection—because if they are not our relatives, they are our companions. It is for them that we are giving our lives, our youth, our joys. For them we made the decision to come here.”

The bond between Trinidad and Lucero continued to grow with their intense belief in the cause. And in early 1999, when Trinidad received orders from the Secretariat to travel to the south of the country and take part in the first dialogues between the FARC and the Colombian government in fifteen years, there was no question that Lucero would go, as well. Trinidad was one of only nine commanders chosen for the honor by the commander in chief, Marulanda. He was extremely proud of the appointment.

The negotiations had come about because by 1998, the guerrillas had brought the Colombian government nearly to its knees. In 1996, the FARC had launched a new phase of the war with multifront attacks on military objectives, using 60mm and 81mm mortars and improvised
cylinder bombs. In August of that year, the FARC attacked and destroyed a military base in Putumayo, leaving fifty-four Colombian soldiers dead, seventeen wounded, and sixty captured. On December 20, 1997, the FARC attacked an army communications base, kidnapping eighteen soldiers. In March 1998, the FARC wiped out an elite army unit in southern Caquetá after local sympathizers provided the guerrillas with intelligence on the battalion's movements. Within two days, 107 of the battalion's 154 soldiers were dead. On August 3, 1998, the FARC attacked an antinarcotics base, kidnapping twenty-four members of the National Police. All told, in the departments of Caquetá, Putumayo, and Nariño, guerrillas overtook Colombian troops and captured approximately five hundred soldiers and members of the National Police.

Emboldened by the success of his army, Marulanda set his sights on taking over the large cities and then the entire country—a long-range plan, for which he concluded he would need at least forty thousand guerrillas. But in 1998, with less than twenty thousand troops spread out across Colombia, Marulanda knew he was far from powerful enough to take Bogotá or any other big city. Instead, his strategy was to scare the populace into thinking that it
might
be possible for the FARC to capture the major cities. To do so, the guerrillas embarked on a campaign of bombing civilian and military targets around Bogotá, destroying electrical towers to cut off power, and impeding transportation routes into the city.

With the country paralyzed by the constant guerrilla violence, and the growing perception that the FARC could take over at any time, presidential candidate Andrés Pastrana campaigned in early 1998 with the promise of setting a stage for peace negotiations with the FARC. Pastrana won the election in June and took office in August. An enormous coup for the guerrillas came very soon after Pastrana's inauguration. In October, the new president traveled to the mountains to meet the FARC Secretariat members, who convinced Pastrana, as a precondition to the peace dialogues, to cede temporarily a vast demilitarized zone of more than sixteen thousand square miles of high plains and Amazonian jungle. The demilitarized zone, or DMZ, which became official on November 7, 1998, was like a FARC state within the country
of Colombia, and the press was soon referring to it as “Farclandia” or simply as “El Caguán,” because much of the DMZ rested in the Caguán River Basin. Residents in the area, which was composed of five municipalities within the departments of Meta and Caquetá, were now legally under the rule of the FARC.

The official talks began in January 1999 with lots of fanfare but with seemingly little momentum to come to a cease-fire. Three months later, while the dialogues were still in their infancy, Trinidad and Lucero arrived from the mountains of Perijá after a grueling six-hundred-mile journey. Marulanda gave Trinidad the assignment of managing journalists who would be covering the talks and giving a sort of media training to the local people in San Vicente del Caguán, an impoverished municipality that had become the ad hoc capital of the DMZ. Marulanda wanted a positive spin from the town's residents, who were likely to be asked their opinion about treatment under the guerrillas, who had been the unofficial government for years. Trinidad was also asked to handle economic topics that the FARC would discuss in the dialogues. The refined commander had yet to prove his worth to Marulanda, who had always been suspicious about the few in his ranks who weren't from
el campo
, but, rather, from the educated elite. But Marulanda could not have predicted how great an asset Trinidad would be.