Hostage Nation (30 page)

The tall, balding public defender was the stark opposite of Crabb. During his opening arguments, Robert Tucker spoke so softly that three times the interpreters said they couldn't hear him and asked him to speak up or speak more directly into his lapel microphone. In a long and confusing speech to the jury, a laid-back Tucker waxed on about Colombia's civil war, the history of the FARC, and the assassinations of Unión Patriótica members in the 1980s. The jury appeared lost. Tucker said that it was not part of his agenda to prove that Trinidad was not a member of the FARC, nor to argue that the FARC was not a brutal organization. What he would establish, Tucker said, was that the FARC was an army fighting a war against another brutal army—that of the established Colombian government. The American hostages were prisoners of that war. Trinidad was only a soldier in that army who was ordered by his commander to go to Ecuador and reestablish communication with United Nations representative James LeMoyne. All Trinidad did, Tucker told the jury, was follow orders. “I suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that you'll find at the end that he had nothing to do with this. Nothing. And if you think about what the government [prosecution] said, what did they really tell you this man had to do about the three Americans? They didn't tell you anything. He had nothing to do with it.”

In the trial's opening days, there were testimonies from James Hollaway, the program manager of California Microwave Systems, and Derek Harvey, an administrative coordinator for the SOUTHCOM Reconnaissance System program at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, who described the type of work that Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes had performed. The Colombian colonel Gustavo Enrique Avendaño and the Colombian National Police officer Juan Carlos Sánchez discussed the crash and the attempted rescue by Colombian forces, and expounded on the horrors of the FARC's grip on Colombia. On the
trial's fourth day, Jorge Enrique Botero took the witness stand. It was clear that Botero felt friendly toward the guerrilla commander, whom he'd spent many hours interviewing in Colombia's DMZ and during the large hostage exchange in 2001. He winked and smiled at Trinidad as he settled into the witness chair. When Kohl asked Botero if he could identify Trinidad in the courtroom, Botero pointed at Trinidad. “He's seated next to the defense attorney. He is wearing an elegant tie and a dark suit.” Over the course of his testimony, Botero became irritated when he felt that Kohl was trying to paint him as a guerrilla sympathizer, maybe even a FARC member. And Kohl seemed unnerved by Botero, who refused to condemn the FARC or Trinidad. Botero testified that the only time he had met Trinidad was during the very public and political negotiation period when the FARC had the DMZ, and that Trinidad was never in any of the hostage camps that he had visited.

After Botero's testimony, Kohl was free to present the proof-of-life video of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes to the jury. Although Kohl had tried to rally support for prosecuting Trinidad from the families of the hostages, none of them attended the trial except Jo Rosano. While distrustful of the government's motives, Rosano once again used the opportunity to try to bring attention to her son's kidnapping. Rosano sat in the front row of the courtroom gallery, flanked by her husband, Mike, and a young FBI agent who had been given the job of keeping tabs on the outspoken Rosano. The video had been strategically edited by the prosecutor's office, and the very first clip was of Marc Gonsalves speaking directly to the camera and sending a message to his mother and family:

The jurors could hear Rosano choke back tears as her son's face appeared on the wide-screen monitor. The U.S. attorney general's office had paid for her travel to Washington, D.C., and FBI agent Chris Voss had spent an hour going over a written script she was to recite when speaking to the media, which amounted to how glad she was that they were trying a Colombian terrorist for her son's kidnapping and how important the work was for the war on drugs. True to character, Rosano didn't follow the script. “The script I was supposed to read said, ‘I am just a simple-minded woman.… I went onto the FARC's Web site, and it says they oppose drug trafficking, so why are they holding my son, who was helping them?' I thought they must be joking. I said, ‘I'm not going to say that.' Instead, I said, ‘What are they doing trying him here? Why isn't he being tried in Colombia?'” For these comments and many others condemning the Uribe and Bush administrations' handling of the crisis, Rosano had unknowingly earned the respect of Marulanda and the top FARC commanders, who, the following year, would begin to consider releasing some of the hostages.

The following week, other witnesses who would take the stand were clearly less friendly to the defendant than Botero had been. Trinidad's former university colleague Elías Ochoa and his wife, Carmen Alicia Medina, had come to Washington, D.C., to testify about Trinidad's involvement in Elías's and his brother's kidnapping in 1998. Human rights attorney Paul Wolf was critical of Kohl's tactic of using the Ochoa kidnapping to help convict Trinidad for the kidnapping of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes. After Medina's dramatic testimony about her husband's kidnapping, Wolf wrote in his daily e-mail analysis:

While Kohl's goal was to keep FARC politics out of the courtroom, the fact that Trinidad testified in his own defense made this completely impossible. Trinidad proved to be a skilled and evasive debater. Kohl was visibly frustrated as he examined Trinidad in a lengthy back-and-forth, in which Trinidad said that he agreed with stopping drug traffic but disagreed with U.S. methods, which were destroying humans, animals, rivers, and crops. When Kohl continued to press the guerrilla to admit that Americans flying drug-reconnaissance planes were targets of the FARC, Trinidad evaded the question and responded, “The thing is that the war against drugs is a façade. And behind it is a war against guerrilla organizations among which the FARC is one in the country.”

During closing arguments, Botero sat in the gallery and watched Kohl give a powerful summary of the prosecution's case. The prosecutor detailed the copious and horrific acts of terrorism by the FARC and tied Trinidad into it all through guilt by association. Then, to Botero's horror, Kohl stated that the proof-of-life video of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes had been made by the FARC to further their hostage-taking conspiracy. “If this were true,” wrote attorney Paul Wolf, “Botero would have been more involved in the kidnapping than the defendant himself.… Botero clearly had his own reasons for making the video—it was made into a CBS documentary—but the waters are treacherous. The prosecutors accuse their own witness of a serious crime, on the record.” Botero was stunned by Kohl's accusation. “The first thing I thought was that Kohl wanted revenge because I was not helpful to him during my testimony.” If Kohl's comments about the video were reported in the Colombian media, Botero was sure he would arrive home to death threats. Botero implored his Colombian journalist friends covering the trial not to report the dangerous allegations about him.

When Kohl was through, Tucker delivered a rambling and disjointed closing argument. Wolf wrote of the summation:

Many court observers seconded Wolf's comments and believed that the jury would hurriedly return a guilty verdict. Especially confident that Trinidad would be found guilty was the prosecution team. So Ken Kohl was in red-faced disbelief on November 21, 2006, when the jury foreman returned a third note to the judge, claiming that the jury could not reach a unanimous decision on whether Simón Trinidad was guilty of conspiring to kidnap the three Americans. The result was a mistrial. “Obviously, we were disappointed,” says Kohl. “The vast majority of the jurors felt that he was guilty. It was ten to two for conviction.” The trial had cost millions, and Kohl immediately announced a retrial. “We were concerned, because we knew that we'd have to bring all these witnesses back. Retrials are never fun for a prosecutor, but it's part of how the process works. You have to proceed.”

Three months later, down the hallway in the same the federal courthouse, it was much easier to convict Anayibe Rojas Valderrama, aka Sonia, for narcotics trafficking. The prosecution presented the pale guerrilla as the finance officer for the FARC's Fourteenth Front in the area of El Caguán. Witnesses testified about Sonia's deep involvement in the cocaine trade. After five weeks of testimony from twenty prosecution
witnesses and four days of deliberations, Sonia was found guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and of manufacturing or distributing cocaine, knowing or intending that it would be imported into the United States. Her public defender, Carmen Hernández, never called a single witness in her defense.

At her sentencing hearing, Sonia took the opportunity to speak publicly for the first time. She looked directly at the judge and said, “I am innocent,” and denied being a drug trafficker or a terrorist. Then she asked to be removed from solitary confinement in the jail. “How could I be a danger to society?” she asked the court. “I'm not an addict. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not mentally ill. What danger could I represent?” Between sobs, she implored Judge James Robertson not to send her to a maximum-security prison. “I want to study, to take advantage of the years of my sentence to learn the language and to have a career. Your Honor, today I would be insane if it wasn't for God and my willpower.” Then she said that she did not want to be part of any prisoner exchange for hostages held by the FARC, and that she hoped all the hostages would soon be freed. Robertson sentenced her to sixteen and a half years in prison. Sonia's attorney vowed she would appeal.

Jorge Enrique Botero, still in Washington after Trinidad's mistrial, went to the D.C. Jail to visit Sonia. He was very curious to meet her, but he also knew that if he could speak privately with her, the FARC Secretariat would want to meet with him to learn about Sonia's experience in the United States. He would then use the meeting as an opportunity to ask for an interview with the hostages. For all his travels in conflict zones, Botero couldn't remember being more nervous than he was entering the D.C. Jail. As he filled out paperwork to visit inmate DCDC number 304314, Anayibe Rojas Valderrama, Botero couldn't believe how stringent all of the rules at the jail were. “The guards would not let me take anything in with me, so I didn't even have a pen. They also confiscated the magazines and a copy of my book that I was going to give her.” Sonia appeared behind a wall of thick soundproof glass, handcuffed and wearing an orange jumpsuit. At first, the guerrilla didn't know what to make of the visitor, but she picked up the telephone handset to hear Botero. “She didn't immediately know who I was,” says Botero, whose ego was slightly bruised. “When I told her
that I was the one who wrote the book about Clara Rojas and the baby, then she said she had heard of me. Then she did not stop talking.” It was the first time in two years of captivity that Sonia, who spoke no English, had been able to speak to anyone other than her attorney and, once, a visiting nun. “When she spoke to me, with her words and accent of a nearly illiterate
campesina
, I thought, How was it possible for the federal prosecutors to make a jury believe that this woman is a great narco-trafficker? Is condemning someone like Sonia the way the gringos aspire to win the war against drugs?”

Sonia told Botero that she had no idea of what was happening in the world or in Colombia. Then she surprised Botero with her candor. “Sonia gave me a message for the heads of the FARC. She said she was very angry with them. She felt abandoned. She dedicated her life to the revolution, and she had received neither a letter, nor a call, nor any money in the entire two years of her imprisonment.” She also told Botero that during the two years she'd been in the same jail in Washington, D.C., as Simón Trinidad, she'd seen the commander only twice. Although the thirty-nine-year-old mother had been a guerrilla for nearly two decades, she'd never encountered Trinidad in person until they'd passed each other in a hallway of the American jail. Sonia was not impressed. “On television he looked so big and strong, but he's a real shrimp. The first time he saw me, he yelled across the hall,
‘¡Viva las FARC! ¡Viva el Libertador Simón Bolívar!'”
Sonia told Botero she thought Trinidad was nuts. After the hour-long visit came to an end, an enormous guard came to take Sonia back to her cell. “She cried a little, and she told me to try to locate her son. She said, ‘Tell him that I love him, and that he is always in my thoughts.'” Botero promised to look for Sonia's son as soon as he returned to Colombia.