Hostage Nation (16 page)

The soldiers forced Lamprea, Mesa, and Keler to move farther away from Betancourt and Rojas. “They wouldn't let us see Ingrid because they said that we would get upset. At that moment, I felt really scared because I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know if they were going to kill me there, or going to kill Ingrid, or going to kill Clara,” Lamprea says. A guerrilla named Uni radioed his commander to report the capture of Betancourt and her colleague Clara Rojas. “Betancourt at first thought the uniformed guerrillas who stopped her vehicle were soldiers,” Uni later told the Associated Press. He described the moment when she learned they were going to detain her: “Her face changed color. Only then did Rojas and Betancourt realize the extent of the trouble they were in,” he said. Lamprea watched Betancourt standing defiantly as the guerrillas ordered her into their vehicle. Even as they became angry, she remained calm. One of the guerrillas became livid. “Lady, lady, get in! Get in now!” he yelled at her. Finally, with no other option, Betancourt climbed into the vehicle, and it drove away. Rojas stood for a moment, her face drawn. Then she was ordered into the other truck. “She said good-bye to us,” Lamprea recalls. “She blew us a kiss. We stayed there, waiting to see what they were going to do with us. It was a terrifying moment.”

Twenty minutes later, Lamprea, Mesa, and Keler were forced into the backseat of their truck with one of the guerrilla soldiers. The young guerrilla who'd stepped on a land mine was still lying in the truck bed, moaning and yelling for water. Five more guerrillas piled in back with him. The commander, who continued talking on a handheld radio, got into the driver's seat, and two more guerrillas squeezed into the front. Lamprea was trying to ignore the injured guerrilla's constant screams from the back of the truck, when his attention was diverted by a conversation between the two FARC soldiers in the front seat. “They said Ingrid was a politician just like all the others. That it was a good thing that they had captured her. That the country was going to know that they had a presidential candidate.” Lamprea couldn't stand it. He had completely dedicated the last three years of his life to helping Betancourt in her political fight. “I said, ‘If you guys think this, you're completely wrong, because this is not the person that you have just captured. This is a person who has been radical, who has been against
corruption, who is in favor of land reform, who is truly for the poor in this country.'” Finally, the driver slammed on the breaks. “He turned around and yelled at me. He said, ‘Don't tell me this shit. All politicians are the same.'” Twenty-four hours later, Lamprea, Keler, and Mesa were released on a deserted road. They walked throughout the night and finally came upon a group of Colombian soldiers who helped them get back to Bogotá. Lamprea prayed that Ingrid would be coming right behind them, and he was consumed by guilt that he was free while Betancourt and Rojas were still captive.

In Bogotá, Betancourt's husband was initially numbed by the news. The advertising executive, who had no experience in politics, was about to embark on an odyssey that he felt totally unprepared for. Believing that it would be the most important thing to her, Lecompte vowed to continue her presidential campaign. In the weeks that followed, Lecompte became a surrogate candidate for his hostage wife. He made a striking picture, both heartbroken and defiant, attending campaign events with a life-size poster of Betancourt held in his arms. He pleaded with the media not to forget her and begged Colombians to cast their votes for her—as a symbolic gesture for her freedom and the freedom of Rojas and all of the hostages. But the apathy of a hardened country was apparent. A local journalist echoed a common Colombian attitude in an interview several weeks after her capture. “She took her own risks,” said
El Tiempo
sports editor Mauricio Bayona, “and she's paying for that now.”

On May 26, 2002, Álvaro Uribe, a hard-liner who vowed to quash the FARC by any means necessary, won the presidential election. (Uribe, a former member of the Liberal party, had won the election as an independent candidate.) During the campaign, the FARC tried to assassinate Uribe by detonating a bomb in a bus near his motorcade. Uribe was unhurt, due to his armored vehicle, but three others were killed and thirteen injured. People across the country—especially those in areas with a large population—were invigorated by Uribe's tough talk, and he won in a landslide, becoming the only Colombian president ever to get more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary election. On inauguration day, FARC guerrillas in Bogotá, attempting an attack on the presidential palace, missed their target and shelled an area
to the south, killing nineteen homeless people and injuring sixty. Because Uribe's father had been killed by FARC guerrillas in a 1983 kidnapping attempt, those who opposed his candidacy were afraid that the hard-liner's term would be a violent four-year vendetta. Uribe was also known to have openly supported self-defense forces in Antioquia when he served as the department's governor from 1995 to 1997. (Medellín, home to Pablo Escobar's cartel and the site of terrible drug-related violence in the early 1990s, is the capital of Antioquia.) Between 1994 and 1997, Private Security and Vigilance Cooperatives, or CONVIVIR, its Spanish acronym, had been legal under a national program created by the Defense Ministry to use private citizens to combat guerrilla activity. But after reports of human rights abuses, the Colombian Constitutional Court stripped CONVIVIR of its ability to use military-grade weapons or to collect intelligence. While the official CONVIVIR units disappeared, many former members united with other vigilante gangs. The most prominent, the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, or ACCU (which later combined with other groups to form the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC), was led by Carlos Castaño, whose father had also been killed by FARC guerrillas. The groups (which all were referred to under the umbrella term
paramilitaries)
built up troops and amassed weapons and cash from kidnapping, extortion, and narco-trafficking and were implicated in brutal acts against civilians, guerrillas, union leaders, and left-leaning politicians. What failed to disappear with the CONVIVIR were the accusations that Uribe maintained strong ties to the paramilitaries and their leaders.

On the day the votes were tallied and Uribe supporters took their celebration to the streets by the thousands, Betancourt and Rojas remained together in the jungle, with no news of the outside world. They did not know that Lecompte had named Rojas as Betancourt's vice presidential pick, and that Betancourt's small but dedicated group of supporters and family members had been able to convince more than fifty thousand Colombians to cast their votes for the missing candidates—barely saving Betancourt's fledgling political party.

T
hree days after the February 13, 2003, kidnapping of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes, Colombian military rescue teams had completely lost the guerrillas' trail and had no intelligence on which to base a rescue attempt. “What [the Colombian army] tried to do was to develop a wall of human flesh around an area so that no one could get through it. But if you look at the landscape, it's mountainous, and it's jungle terrain. And it's possible to be fifteen feet from someone and not see them and not hear them. So it's very, very difficult,” says Brig. Gen. Remo Butler, retired commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command South. The guerrillas knew they had barely managed to evade the army, and they continued to force the injured men to march for twenty-one days—first through the foothills of the Eastern Cordillera and then deep into the jungle. At times, Stansell was carried on a mule. An intestinal ailment and an injury to his ribs that he sustained in the crash made it impossible for him to walk. Other times, the three would be loaded into trucks and driven along makeshift jungle roads. On the last day of their grueling march, the group landed in a small clearing with a sixteen-by-twenty-foot structure. The sight of the rustic bungalow with three solid wood sides and a chain-link fence on the fourth side was incredibly discouraging. “As we walked up to the structure,”
Stansell wrote, “I knew immediately that this marked the end of our days as kidnapped contract workers and began our life as prisoners.”

Their more than three weeks in captivity had been marked by many political conversations between the hostages and their captors. The guerrillas accused the Americans of imperialism, of butting into an internal conflict in ways that hurt poor campesinos, of being CIA agents, and of spying on their organization. Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes vehemently denied the charges. In their opinion, their captors came to those conclusions because the guerrillas were brainwashed, ignorant, and incapable of independent thought. What the hostages themselves believed was that without the billions of American dollars behind Plan Colombia, the drug traffickers and other criminals would continue to destabilize Colombia and the surrounding region. What the three men also believed, although there was no empirical data to support it, was that the work they were doing was impeding the flow of drugs from Colombia to the United States. And because they were working for the greatest country in the world, all three men were positive that the United States would take all military measures to free them. “By holding us, they [the FARC] were opening a Pandora's box,” Howes told one of the high commanders they were introduced to on their march. “Instead of simply working indirectly against the FARC by interfering with their narco-trafficking, the U.S. could strike directly against them because they were holding Americans hostage.”

Jo Rosano, mother of kidnapped American Marc Gonsalves, with her husband, Mike, and journalist Jorge Enrique Botero at an August 2004 demonstration in Bogotá with the families of Colombian hostages. The demonstrators were calling for the government to negotiate for an exchange of prisoners and not attempt a military rescue. Photo: Claudia Rubio
.

But the U.S. government did not make any direct military moves to recover the hostages, nor were there any plans to do so. In fact, within days of the hostages' arrival in what they would call “Monkey Camp” (because of the monkeys, which would fling feces and urinate on the humans below), Secretary of State Colin Powell publicly admitted in a March 13 press conference that the State Department had no clue where the hostages were and no idea which FARC front was holding them. Powell did not offer any commitment on the part of the United States to engage in a mission to rescue the men or to negotiate for their release. However, he did take the opportunity to reassert the United States' goals in Colombia. “It's sad that [the kidnapping] happened,” he said. “But it's a risk that we must run to defeat these narco-traffickers and help President Uribe. I am impressed by his total commitment to ridding Colombia of narco-terrorists and narco-traffickers and all the others who are trying to destroy Colombian democracy.”

The families of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were also under the mistaken impression that U.S. forces would attempt to rescue their loved ones. A week after the crash, President Bush had given the okay to send an additional 150 U.S. troops to Colombia to help with rescue efforts, but the rules of engagement still prevented Colonel Keen from taking charge of any rescue attempt, and U.S. troops played only limited advisory roles. “There was a lot of effort from the Colombians,”
says Keen. “They were doing the best they could do to try to locate the hostages.” Keen said they were aided by U.S. military intelligence. However, the only other California Microwave Systems airplane was grounded while the cause of the first crash was under investigation. The United States did have satellite imagery, but it was mostly useless for reconnaissance because of the thick forest canopy. “We were using intelligence assets. But again, you can't take a pig's ear and make a silk purse out of it,” says General Butler. Colombian troops were sent to interrogate local villagers and came up empty. “You must remember that many of the people in this part of Colombia were sympathizers or very friendly to the FARC. So we were not going to get an awful lot of information. Intelligence was very hard to come by.”

El Caguán became hot with firefights between guerrillas and the military troops looking for the Americans. Complaints were filed by campesinos, who accused Colombian soldiers of harassing them to gain information. The allegations fueled resentment within the military ranks. “Colombians in the armed forces believe the rescue of our guys [the Americans] is not their problem,” said one Colombian-American contractor who worked with Howes, Gonsalves, and Stansell. “They say, ‘We have many of our guys [Colombians] there to die for these Americans, and where are the Americans while we are risking our lives?'”

The fact that there were hundreds, possibly thousands, of Colombian troops trying to rescue the Americans terrified Ingrid Betancourt's husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte. Lecompte knew it was possible that Betancourt was being held somewhere near the Americans, and he knew that an attempted military rescue would likely be a death sentence. If they weren't killed by cross fire, they would be executed by direct order from Marulanda, who demanded that hostages be killed at the first sign of a rescue attempt. Lecompte feared it would be an excruciating end to the nightmare that he and Betancourt's family had been living since her kidnapping a year earlier.