Hostage Nation (26 page)

Jorge Enrique Botero reporting on the Colombian military and National Police hostages being held by the FARC in 1999. The documentary he made for the news station Canal Caracol was eventually censored at the request of the Colombian government. It was the first time the FARC allowed a journalist into the hostage camps. Photo: Jorge Enrique Botero
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The debacle happened in July 2003. Betancourt's mother received a message from President Uribe: A FARC informant had reported that Betancourt was very ill, and that the guerrillas would release her near the border with Brazil. Betancourt's sister, Astrid, got the message to longtime friend Villepin, who had been one of Betancourt's professors when she was attending college in France. And with intense pressure from Betancourt's mother and sister, Villepin dispatched French commandos
and medical staff in a Hercules C-130 hospital plane to an airport in the Brazilian city of Manaus, near the border with Colombia. After landing, the French team hired a Brazilian pilot and small plane to take them to a landing strip near the given coordinates. The pilot had no idea what the French were up to in the well-known drug-trafficking area. Frightened for his safety, he contacted Brazilian police, exposing the mission and causing an international incident.

All the while, Betancourt's husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, along with a rural priest who had been told by the FARC informant to act as an intermediary, waited for Betancourt in the pueblo of San Antonio de Isa, Brazil. During the night, Lecompte slept in a stifling windowless room at a run-down pension. During the day, he and the priest sat on a large floating pier on the Putumayo River, watching boats pass by and waiting for Betancourt to be delivered. “The priest kept saying that I had to have faith,” Lecompte told a reporter, but he was beyond praying. After more than a week of waiting, he saw a newscast about the unannounced French military aircraft in Brazil. After seeing Brazilian air force planes fly overhead and drop soldiers into the surrounding jungle near the pueblo, an anguished Lecompte knew the FARC would not be coming with his wife and that waiting any longer would be in vain. Flying back to Bogotá, Lecompte looked down at the endless green and felt intense dread, wondering if he'd ever see his wife alive. In truth, Betancourt was not ill at that time, and the release was never intended. It had all been a terrible lie. Secretariat member Raúl Reyes blamed Álvaro Uribe for the fiasco. According to Reyes, the FARC never planned on unilaterally releasing Ingrid, and certainly not to the French. Reyes also denied that Betancourt was sick at that time. “It was a vulgar delusion that Uribe created to give the French the impression that the FARC do not keep their word,” he said.

While Lecompte (and for a week before him Betancourt's sister, Astrid) had been waiting for Betancourt in Brazil, she and Clara Rojas were together in their jungle prison hundreds of miles away. Several months after their capture in 2002, the two women had planned to escape together. Finally one morning before daylight, they were able to sneak past the twenty or thirty guerrillas who guarded them. The jungle terrain made it nearly impossible to navigate with any speed, and
they made it only a short way before they were captured. Afterward, the guerrillas took no chances. “That was when her [Betancourt's] feet were chained together,” said Uni, a former guerrilla who was one of the captors. The women remained chained day and night for fifteen days. Afterward, they were chained only at night. But to intimidate them further, Rojas said, the guerrillas threw snakes, tarantulas, and, once, a dead jaguar into their tent as they slept.

For a year and a half, Rojas and Betancourt had been completely isolated from all other hostages. And what made the isolation much worse was that during that period, the former friends and colleagues grew to despise each other. The rift was later reported to have been the result of a failed escape attempt. Other hostages would say that Rojas turned cold when Betancourt learned that her father, Gabriel Betancourt, had died, and the lack of solace in the intensely painful situation became an intractable wedge between the two. On August 22, 2003, the estranged pair would be introduced to a third political hostage, Luis Eladio Pérez, a former congressman from the department of Nariño, who had been kidnapped and held alone for more than two years. Pérez was beyond relieved to have the company of the women, but he could tell immediately that the tension between them was going to make things very uncomfortable.

After six weeks of living together in captivity, Pérez, Rojas, and Betancourt were moved to another, larger camp with two separate areas—one for the military hostages and one for the civilians, who were all politicians being held as part of the FARC's demand for a prisoner exchange. Betancourt, Rojas, and Pérez joined four other politicians. Fifteen days later, on October 20, 2003, the hostages were completely shocked when a group of seven guerrillas marched the three Americans to their camp. “We approached the political prisoners' camp with real anticipation,” wrote Gonsalves. “It didn't take long for that feeling to be replaced by dread. In front of us stood a large compound completely surrounded by chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. For the first time, we were in a compound that reminded us of the photos we'd seen of actual POW camps.”

“We were already adapting ourselves to the situation [of being in the larger group] when the foreigners arrived … Tom Howes, Keith
Stansell, Marc Gonsalves,” Pérez wrote in his autobiography,
7 Años Secuestrado por las FARC
(Seven Years Held Hostage by the FARC). Pérez and other civilian hostages felt that they received far worse treatment than the military hostages, possibly because the guerrillas and the soldiers came from similar backgrounds. But it seemed that the guerrillas had treated the Americans most harshly of all. Although they arrived unchained, “they were very thin,
very
thin, and their clothes were in tatters,” says Consuelo González de Perdomo, a congresswoman in her fifties whose husband had died and who had become a grandmother during her captivity. “We brought them some mattresses, and to them it seemed incredible to have mattresses in captivity. They had slept on boards covered with black plastic. They did not have bedding, and they were very surprised to be able to have a sheet.” To Gonsalves, seeing this group of prisoners was shocking, and he immediately asked how long they'd been held. “Some of us four years, some five, some six,” one of them told Gonsalves. “I felt my stomach curdle. The group was in a bad way,” he wrote.

The additional bodies made the small quarters even more cramped, causing friction and initial resentment toward the Americans. “At the beginning they were a little bit arrogant,” Pérez wrote. “They felt more important than the rest of us.” Pérez also thought that the way in which their young captors reacted to the tall, light-skinned gringos was incredible: “The guerrillas have always spoken against imperialism, against the United States, and against the gringos. But when they saw [the Americans], it was an adoration and complete submission. The classic submission of a Colombian before ‘the American.' This surprised me very much.”

One of the political hostages in the camp was clearly not happy that the Americans had arrived. Stansell recognized the woman as Ingrid Betancourt. He'd been in Colombia at the time of her kidnapping, and the CMS crew had even been given orders to fly over the area to look for her—something that he'd thought was strange: American contractors looking for a captured Colombian. While Betancourt argued with the guards and demanded they find somewhere else for the gringos, “we lingered there like unwelcome relatives who'd dropped in for a surprise
visit,” wrote Gonsalves. “I was trying to be open-minded and give them the benefit of the doubt.”

However rough the initial meeting had been, there was one thing the camp provided that made it the best place they'd been since their capture: radios. For Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes, who had lived without almost any news of the outside world for the entire eight months of their captivity, it was a great relief. Betancourt's demeanor changed as she and others told the Americans about the radio station that families of kidnapped victims could use to send messages. “Your mother has been all over the airwaves,” she told Gonsalves. “We hear her messages all the time. Clearly she loves you very much.” The men were told that their families were okay and that Northrop Grumman was taking care of them. “Hearing those words brought tremendous relief for all of us,” wrote Gonsalves, “We had talked about and worried about whether the company was taking care of our families since we'd first crashed.”

Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were eager to tell the other hostages what they had been through. “We began to hear the stories of the gringos, how they had been isolated one from each other, how they had been prohibited to talk among themselves,” says González de Perdomo. Howes was the only one who could communicate in Spanish. Stansell spoke very little, and Gonsalves none at all. In the weeks and months that followed, Stansell and Gonsalves became willing students of the congresswoman and of Orlando Beltrán, a congressman from Huila captured in 2001. “Marc had a lot of interest in learning the basics of Spanish,” says González de Perdomo. “We asked a favor of the military hostages, if they would be able to loan us a Bible that they had in English, and Marc dedicated himself to try to read the Bible, to translate it.” González de Perdomo wrote a page of essential Spanish conjugated verbs for Gonsalves—
ser, haber, tener, estar, comer, dormir—
which he studied judiciously. Stansell gave English classes to Beltrán and González de Perdomo. “But it was for a very short time because we were disorderly—the teacher and the students. I taught Keith and Marc to play
banca rusa
[a card game] and we played a lot, two hours, three in a row, with Marc winning time after time,” she says.

The hostages slept in cabins that surrounded a small open area. The compound was enclosed by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. One hostage each day was in charge of food service to the others and of organizing the camp and cleaning the bathroom. The guerrillas took two-hour shifts guarding the hostages while another guerrilla circled the camp, keeping an eye on the other guards. The guerrillas were forbidden to speak to the hostages except on occasions when the hostages requested permission for certain necessities.

Living in a camp was extremely difficult, but still preferable to being marched through the jungle. After months in one camp, without any explanation, “they would give us a limited time to arrange our things to set off on a march of two months. They would say, ‘Prepare your equipment because we're going. We recommend the least heavy equipment possible because the march is going to be long,'” says González de Perdomo. If it was during a period when the Colombian hostages were chained, each hostage was made to carry his own chains (which weighed between ten and fifteen pounds) around his waist or neck. While many of the Colombian hostages, especially Betancourt, often rebelled against the captors and made escape attempts, the Americans did not, and they remained unchained. Stansell and Gonsalves “never rebelled, or protested like Ingrid and me,” wrote Pérez. Howes was the exception, and Pérez remembers that on one occasion Howes screamed furiously at the guerrillas during a brutal march that lasted forty days.

“The circumstances were always so arduous that they brought out the worst side of everyone,” wrote Pérez. Betancourt received the most ire, especially from the military hostages. “She was the best in swimming, in physical exercise, the one who the media emphasized, the one who spoke various languages.” Pérez would come to the conclusion that being with so many others in such bad circumstances was actually more difficult than the two years he had spent as a lone captive in the mountains. The stress in the camps became even greater when the Colombian military was near. Constant flyovers by Colombian army planes and helicopters made both the hostages and the guerrillas edgy.

For some of the hostages, the only break in the monotonous, torturous routine was the Saturday-night radio broadcast
Las Voces del
Secuestro
. “Everything revolved around this program,” wrote Pérez. “Not for everyone, because many were not sent any messages. I'm referring to the military and the National Police officers. Some military, some police and the three Americans, for example, received very few messages.” For the three Americans, the messages they did receive came mainly from Gonsalves's mother, Jo Rosano, and Stansell's Colombian girlfriend, Patricia Medina (Stansell heard only one message from his fiancée, Malia Phillips). “When they listened to the first messages from their families, they became extremely emotional,” says González de Perdomo. “They cried in happiness because it had been a long time since they had heard anything from them.” It was through a radio message from Medina that Stansell learned about the arrival of his twin sons. “So then he began to feel an immense love for Patricia, because of the messages that she sent him, because of the way she took care of his sons,” wrote Pérez.