Hostage Nation (21 page)

Shortly after the presidential election in 1994, the first signs began to appear that the Cali cartel had financed the campaign of Ernesto Samper, the Liberal party candidate, who had won the election. After seven months, with the administration under a constant barrage of accusations, on Monday, July 31, 1995, the minister of defense and the minister of the interior held a tumultuous press conference. Botero inscribed his name on the long list of reporters who wanted to ask questions. An inside source had tipped him off; Samper's campaign treasurer, Santiago Medina (who had been indicted and arrested the week before), admitted to prosecutors that the Cali cartel had donated millions
of dollars to Samper's campaign. But Medina's recorded testimony had been stolen over the weekend. In the press conference, the minister of defense quoted portions of Medina's testimony, and accused him of lying. Botero took the microphone. He knew that no one outside of the prosecutor's office should have seen Medina's testimony. “I asked the minister of defense, ‘How is it possible that you are revealing the content of statements that are secret?'” Ingrid Betancourt remembers the question igniting a firestorm. It was “an unprecedented television moment,” Betancourt wrote in her memoir,
Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia
. “Naturally, they can't admit that they've stolen the investigative file over the weekend.” The minister of the interior hesitated and then mumbled that an anonymous source had brought the file to the Interior Ministry. Those close to Samper ducked or ran for cover. The minister of the interior was forced to resign two days later. A handful of others, led by first-time congresswoman Betancourt, doggedly began to pursue Samper's impeachment.

By the time Betancourt took the lead to bring down Samper, the thirty-four-year-old had already gained attention for her nontraditional campaign style. In her congressional race, Betancourt handed out condoms in the streets of Bogotá, promising to “protect” Colombian politics against corruption. She was attractive and determined. As a congresswoman, she dressed in short skirts, wore large costume jewelry, and played expertly to the media. On the campaign trail, she dressed down and traveled through rural Colombia in traditional colorful “Chiva” buses. But it was the impeachment trial against Samper that launched her definitively into fame and gave her national notoriety.

In the many months that Botero reported on the downfall of Samper, he became well acquainted with Betancourt, whom he would later spend more than six years trying to find in captivity. At the time, Botero, by now a well-known television anchor, was working for an evening newscast called
24 Horas
, on assignment to cover the impeachment trial. “Around six p.m. every day, we would set up a small television set, with the cameras, lights. Ingrid would arrive each day at that time because she knew that the media would all be there, and that she would be on every channel's evening news.” Botero interviewed her on
many occasions. “At times I found her charming and genuine. She was very clever. Other times she seemed like a typical duplicitous Colombian politician.”

Botero felt that Betancourt took advantage of the widespread antipathy and mistrust that many Colombians felt for their political leaders by publicly and continually calling for transparency in the government. Traditional politicians, who saw her as a threat, called her a rich little girl—more French than Colombian—and an upstart in politics. In stand-up interviews in the congressional hallway, Betancourt told Botero and other reporters that she was convinced Samper was guilty, and she forcefully called for his resignation. When only close allies of Samper were appointed to a committee to decide whether to convict him, Betancourt went on a hunger strike. The media covered her hunger strike every day. Then an ambulance took her to the hospital, and television cameras followed her like a celebrity. The Colombian public, fed up with the broken political system, fell in love with Betancourt, and she quickly became a rising star—a symbol of opposition to the entrenched Colombian government and to its long-standing acceptance of corruption.

On June 11, 1996, Betancourt appeared in front of the Colombian Congress to detail the evidence of Samper's links to the drug cartel and to convince her fellow representatives and the millions of Colombians watching her on television of Samper's guilt. Her testimony was brilliant. It lasted more than an hour, was well documented, and was rated by pundits as the best of the more than one hundred speeches heard during the trial. In the end, Samper was acquitted. Betancourt was crushed by Samper's acquittal, but all of her work had paid off politically. Afterward, she was considered one of most promising figures in Colombian politics.

For his coverage of the trial, Botero achieved a sort of celebrity, something not missed by those in the media business. “Job offers rained on me, and my editors pretty much let me do any story that I wanted,” he says. What he wanted was to cover his country's civil war. As a teenager in the early seventies, Botero had followed news stories about the guerrillas. At the time, the FARC was still a small army that occasionally
achieved high visibility by attacking the military in remote mountain areas. They also took towns, killed police, robbed banks, and gathered the campesinos together and gave revolutionary speeches. “The guerrillas were admired by young leftist university students, including me,” says Botero. When Botero finished college and started working in the media, he heard stories of former friends who had joined the guerrillas. “I'd inquire about an old friend, and the response was, ‘He went to the mountains.' One particular friend from Botero's days with the Juventud Comunista was Guillermo León Sáenz, a chainsmoking radical, a womanizing and gregarious revolutionary leader who was greatly admired by all of the younger students and who had studied anthropology at the National University in Bogotá. Together with three other Juventud Comunista comrades, Botero and Sáenz marched in the streets of Bogotá, stopping traffic and yelling revolutionary slogans. They played all-night poker games, drank in excess, and expounded political ideology. In the early 1980s, Sáenz—who was eight years Botero's senior—became FARC soldier Alfonso Cano. Over the years, the highly educated Cano spent a great deal of time with Manuel Marulanda, and the upbeat conversationalist and dedicated revolutionary deeply ingratiated himself with the commander in chief.

Aside from a brief fantasy he'd had as a high school student, Botero had never considered joining the guerrillas. “After graduating from the university, I was already a father. I'd left my political life with the Juventud Comunista and gone into journalism, which I liked a lot.” Even though many of Botero's friends had been killed or had joined guerrilla movements, his country's civil war had always seemed very far away—until the early 1990s, when he began to hear stories from deep within the jungle and from the most remote mountain regions. “The tales were very intriguing, very journalistic. They were stories that always navigated between fiction and reality in the vein of magic realism.”

Getting an interview with the guerrillas would be somewhat difficult because the FARC had become a very reclusive organization. By 1997, Marulanda and other leaders of the Secretariat were still in the process of rebuilding after the massacres of the Unión Patriótica. They almost never spoke publicly and rarely gave interviews to the media. But because of their twenty-year history, Botero wasn't surprised when
Cano—whose intense dedication to the movement had earned him a place in the Secretariat—agreed to an interview. Cano was known to be the FARC's great ideologue, but it was still a shock to Botero when he came face-to-face with his former friend in May 1997: Cano had become a deeply reflective revolutionary and seemed to belong to a period three decades earlier.

In the videotaped interview, Cano expounded on the FARC's struggle against state-sponsored terrorism. He said that the FARC was growing in numbers of troops, just like other revolutionary groups around the world. He cited conflicts in Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, and the Congo, and insisted that the phenomenon of armed insurgencies was global. Cano chastised what he called a “farce” of democracy in Colombia. “If anything was proven in the last four years [during the scandal-ridden Samper administration], it is that the elections in this country are not democratic. They are corrupt; they are full of tricks, of deceptions, of a deep disregard for what the people express, how the country should be, who should govern, et cetera.” He also told Botero that only if the FARC came to power would the violence in Colombia come to an end.

For mainstream Colombians, who wanted to believe that the guerrillas no longer had the idea of taking over the country, the Cano interview was an unwelcome wake-up call. The interview was aired in its entirety, and Botero took a lot of heat from the government for giving Cano such a forum. At the end of the 1990s, Botero took the job of director of news-magazine programs for one of Colombia's largest networks, Caracol. He covered many stories and proposed dozens of others to the network producers, but no news story enticed him more than one that had simply disappeared from the public consciousness—that of the nearly five hundred kidnapped soldiers who had been captured in 1997 and 1998 when the FARC overtook several military bases.

“Pastrana had recently given the FARC the DMZ, and I went to El Caguán because I wanted to do a large report about the military people whom the FARC held in captivity.” Botero traveled without his camera because he was working on preproduction for his story—securing locations and getting authorization for interviews and access. He arrived in Los Pozos (a three-hour trip from San Vicente del Caguán), where the
dialogues between the government and the FARC were being held. The camp was only eighteen miles away, but the jungle roads were ridiculously difficult to travel, especially during the rainy season. “I was talking with various leaders and commanders of the FARC about my idea to do this report, and a car passed by with a man who caught my attention because of the way he acted, the elegance of his uniform. So one of the guerrilla commanders who was there said, ‘Look, comrade Simón, this is the journalist Jorge Enrique Botero.'” Trinidad's car stopped, and he got out. “He said, ‘It's a pleasure to meet you. I have heard a lot about you.' And of course, everyone in Colombia knew the story of the banker turned guerrilla, so I said, ‘No. The pleasure is mine because I have heard a lot about you.'” Trinidad, who was with his companion, Lucero, invited Botero to spend the night at their camp.

“I was happy that I'd brought a bottle of Old Parr whiskey,” says Botero, who was thrilled to get such great access to the senior guerrilla. The camp, which belonged to Secretariat member and senior negotiator Raúl Reyes, was two hours away by car. Several other members of the FARC negotiation team were also there. “We were talking and drinking whiskey almost until two a.m. I had many questions because I had heard many things about Trinidad, about how he was a banker, about his past as a member of the social elite of Valledupar, that he had studied in Bogotá, all of that. We talked a lot about Bogotá in the seventies, when he was a young student. We knew the same places, and many of the people he mentioned were also friends of mine. It was a very interesting night because he was the first guerrilla whom I met who had a social upbringing similar to mine.” The two men discussed cinema, literature, women, and soccer. Botero found Trinidad eloquent, with a keen sense of humor, but also very determined politically. “When we talked about politics, he adopted an uncompromising attitude. He referred to ‘the oligarchy' with contempt and hatred and defended the most radical positions within the FARC. The whole night he kept insisting that the FARC would never have to turn over their weapons, that they would never put them down. But at the same time, he seemed to be, from the human point of view, a happy man—not a guy who was sad with life or unhappily resigned to the fact that he was a guerrilla. He also seemed like a man completely in love. Lucero was
always at his side. He always held her hand. She was always enjoying his jokes. It was as if they were almost one single person.”

The following day, Trinidad drove Botero back to Los Pozos, where he would meet the guerrilla commander Mono Jojoy to ask for authorization to report on the military hostages.

Several weeks later, Botero received word that Mono Jojoy would allow him access with his cameras. He would travel by car on remote muddy roads and by river and by foot for sixteen days into the jungle until he reached the hostage camp. What he encountered when he arrived was something he couldn't have imagined. “I had never seen so much sadness in one place. Men, soldiers trained in rigid military discipline, cried like children in front of my eyes. They sobbed, begged that I would help them get out of there.” The prison was deep within the jungle, where the guerrillas had constructed camps surrounded by barbed wire. “Some were walking like zombies, ignoring reality; others clung fanatically to prayer, raised their arms to heaven, and asked for clemency, compassion, freedom.” From what Botero could see, the hostages were not subjected to torture and were in decent physical condition. “But their spirits had collapsed. Their souls were empty.” Botero thought the camp looked similar to images he'd seen of Jews held in Nazi concentration camps. “When I saw what it was like, I thought, This war is incredibly cruel. I also thought that no one in the world had any idea what these men were suffering, and that maybe if they did, something could change.” Although Botero had no idea if anything he could do would actually help, he says, “I promised that I would not rest for one minute until they were free.”

With more than ten hours of recorded videotape, Botero returned to Bogotá and locked himself inside a Caracol office for over fifty hours to edit his story. When he finished, his bosses gave a copy of the final program to the government's peace commissioner, who had requested to see it after the station had run commercials for the upcoming show that included shocking images of the hostages. The following day, the channel received a letter from the National Television Commission demanding the story not be broadcast because it could “seriously hurt the feelings of large segments of television viewers, such as children,” and that “this sort of broadcast could turn out to be counterproductive”
in regard to the peace talks. Caracol agreed to scrap the program. A furious Botero went public, admonishing the government's and Caracol's censorship. He was fired the next day. But clips of his disturbing images had already reached the masses in the promotional spots.