Hostage Nation (5 page)

In 2003, when Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves were captured, the FARC was estimated to number between fifteen and twenty thousand troops. The rank and file came mostly from poor rural villages, where schools were ill-equipped or simply didn't exist. FARC soldiers, mostly in their teens and early twenties, both male and female, strolled freely through villages where for decades there had been no Colombian government presence. Impoverished children were in awe of the guerrillas, with their clean uniforms, military caps, and glistening rifles. Given the extreme poverty, the idea of joining the guerrillas held great allure. Most believed life in the FARC would be better than at home. Food was much better and always plentiful; teenage guerrilla soldiers were taught to read and write. FARC soldiers received no monetary compensation, but often, deep familial bonds formed between commanders and the young guerrillas.

The FARC's official minimum age for recruits is fifteen, but some are as young as thirteen, and journalists have reported seeing guerrillas as young as ten. Secretariat member Iván Ríos defended the recruitment of children in the book
El Orden de la Guerra
, arguing that with the horrors of Colombia and the realities of an endless civil war, the FARC is more of a salvation for children than a death sentence. Paramilitaries come into villages and massacre entire families they feel are aligned with the FARC. The constant battles among paramilitaries, the Colombian military, and the guerrillas have displaced more than four million people. And with the government unable to provide for the massive population of internal refugees, thousands of children are left with few options; they join the guerrillas or find their way to the major cities to beg, become child prostitutes, or spend days in dumps looking for food and desperately sniffing rags soaked with gasoline to stave off hunger. “The children love the guerrillas because here there is love, warmth for them,” says Ríos. “We will not lie and say that there are no children in the organization. There are children in the organization, but they are particular cases and practically obligatory cases.”

Upon entrée into the FARC, the youngest soldiers are made to prepare food, plant crops, tidy the encampments, and pass messages among commanders. They clean the large rifles but are given small pistols because the weight of the Russian-built AK-47s is too much for their small frames. For four hours a day, they are taught FARC ideology: The Colombian government is corrupt; the American government is imperialistic; FARC is the people's army; the FARC and the poor are persecuted by the state. With the FARC's form of limited Marxism having changed little in forty years, there is hardly more rhetoric to absorb. At sundown, they collapse onto plank beds. Above them, a black plastic tarp shields them from the ceaseless rain, and netting dissuades ravenous mosquitoes.

While nearly all FARC guerrillas—including those in commanding positions—entered the ranks from lives of destitute poverty, a handful of guerrillas came into the FARC from middle-or upper-class families, having university educations and deep ties to the oligarchy. And it was one of those few who in 2004 would become permanently entangled in the hostage drama of Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves.

Simón Trinidad was born in Bogotá in 1950 as Ricardo Palmera, the pampered child of an upper-class family from Valledupar, a city of 350,000 in northeastern Colombia. Palmera was the seventh child of eleven sired by his father with five women. “It was a comfortable life financewise,” Palmera says. “This allowed me to have a happy and pleasant childhood, go to school, to travel the country.” There was a long tradition of political involvement in both his parents' families. His great-grandfather Federico Palmera was killed while fighting on the Liberal side during one of the many civil wars in the nineteenth century. His two grandfathers were active members of the Liberal party during the conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. His maternal grandfather, a successful textile businessman, Rodrigo Pineda, was the mayor of the large city of Bucaramanga in the 1930s.

In his early life, Palmera had little interest in politics or the elite formal education his family's social status afforded him. “Ricardo Palmera wasn't the most sensible of my schoolmates,” says Luis Gabriel Jaramillo, “nor the most studious.” Jaramillo remembers being in awe of Palmera's exceptional social skills, especially his prowess with the girls, when they attended the Swiss-Colombian School in Bogotá. “Already at our young age—ten, twelve, fourteen years—he presented himself as a successful man of the world. I admired him, and I was delighted with this miraculous sociability, with his grace of a distinguished Valentino.” The schoolboys were all descendants of European immigrants, and most conducted themselves with inherited modesty and timidity. Palmera was the exception, Jaramillo says, “but he assumed his role without any presumption, which embodied him with the spirit of a brotherly leader.”

Palmera was very close to his mother, Alix, who separated from his father in 1954. After the divorce, Ovidio Palmera would send Alix money each month from the proceeds of his two-hundred-acre farm, Los Mangos, on the outskirts of Valledupar. Although she was now a single mother, Alix never lacked an upper-class lifestyle. She employed a driver for her 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, lived with her three children in a comfortable apartment in the north of Bogotá, and passed her days playing canasta. Palmera finished high school with terrible grades, but
his social stature enabled him to attend and graduate from the private and left-leaning Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá in 1975. After graduating, Palmera worked for an agrarian bank in Bogotá, the Caja de Crédito Agraria, Industrial y Minero, where he provided small loans to rural areas. By mid-1976, he returned to his father's home department of César with his new wife, Margarita. There, he helped manage the vast farms that belonged to his father, Valledupar's most prominent lawyer and a former senator from the Liberal party. According to Palmera's brother Jaime, it was during that period that Palmera and his father, who was a great admirer of Fidel Castro, became close political allies. “I believe that [the political positions of his father] not only influenced but were definitive,” says Jaime. “Dad and Ricardo spent hours and hours talking about politics. I am sure that those chats marked my brother forever.”

By the late 1970s, Palmera's wife, Margarita, opened a business in Valledupar, selling imported Italian jewelry. Palmera continued his career in banking and also took a teaching job at a state university. Even in the highest social circles, Palmera was considered a fancy man. He danced in the local clubs, rode horses for enjoyment, and loved the arts and theater. “He was so charming and intelligent,” Lilián Castro, a Valledupar native and former friend of Palmera, told
The New York Times
. “Ricardo Palmera was every bit the gentleman.” Friends would call him jovial, well mannered, and driven. But when it came to matters of social justice, there was a seriousness to Palmera's drive.

In 1979, Palmera and several of his university colleagues were captured at their homes and taken by the military to the Popa Battalion in Valledupar. That night, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken in a cattle truck to a military headquarters in Barranquilla. “For five days, I was denied food. The first three days, I was denied anything to drink. I was also prevented from sleeping, and I was made to undergo questioning that was very fierce and that happened day or night. I was charged with supporting a guerrilla movement in Colombia.” His interrogators accused Palmera of being a member of the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the National Liberation Army, Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group), but at the time, Palmera had never met a member of any guerrilla group. He finally convinced the army of his
innocence. After he had been forced to sign documents stating that he had been treated well and had not been tortured, the army released him. “When I returned to Valledupar, I learned that a few days after my capture they had also detained the doctor José David López, the lawyer René Costa, and the labor and syndicate director Víctor Mieles. Years later, the three were assassinated by the army.”

Palmera's experience with the army fortified his rebellious spirit. By 1982, the Liberal party bifurcated, and the offshoot movement that Palmera joined, dubbed “New Liberalism,” stood on the dangerous platform of antidrugs and anticorruption. “Basically, the program was to solve the problems of political corruption in the traditional parties, to fight against drugs, and to promote democracy,” Palmera recalls. “Already in 1982, the drug problem had permeated throughout the entire Colombian society. The Atlantic region, the north region of the country, where I was living, had already suffered the negative consequences of drug trafficking very severely.” Palmera became part of a civic movement that supported teachers and students from the university as candidates for the city council of Valledupar. Along with other left-leaning professionals, Palmera began to attend meetings to try to find ways to help the multitude of destitute Colombians who, they believed, were oppressed by the entrenched oligarchy. “It was all pure ideology for Ricardo,” Edgardo Pupo, a close friend of Palmera told
The New York Times
in 2004. “He was convinced that the system here didn't work and that only a communist system would.” Another friend and political colleague, Imelda Daza, remembers that Palmera became more and more fanatical in his views. “He was always criticizing us when he discovered us at parties, drinking rum and dancing. ‘By drinking we are not going to change this country,' he'd say.” Palmera was a known admirer of Joseph Stalin, and because of his increasingly severe nature, his contemporaries nicknamed him “the German.”

In 1984, the FARC agreed to a cease-fire after successful negotiations with the government. For the first time since its formation, Manuel Marulanda's guerrilla army was gaining mainstream political acceptance. Out of the negotiations came a new political party, the Unión Patriótica. “It was not only the party of former guerrillas; it had a very wide political agenda,” says Palmera, who immediately became a
member. “Many people joined it—the Liberals, Conservatives, priests, democrats, patriots, people from many walks of life who were not necessarily Communist, socialist, or leftist.” The new movement quickly became a political phenomenon; in 1986, its members were elected to seats in both houses of Congress and captured dozens of state and municipal executive and legislative offices. But the fragile peace that had come with the cease-fire and the FARC's induction into mainstream politics would not last long. The startling success of the Unión Patriótica was a threat to the Liberal and the Conservative parties, which had divided power for nearly two centuries, and the situation rapidly translated into violence. Unión Patriótica senators and mayors were assassinated, one after another. Party members were threatened with death and told to leave their cities or towns. Those who remained were brutally killed. Paid assassins committed the crimes. The military and the police looked the other way, and sometimes even acted as accomplices. According to a 2002 United Kingdom Home Office report, between 1985 and 1987, approximately 450 members of the Unión Patriótica were murdered. More recent reports estimate that between 3,500 and 4,000 Unión Patriótica members have been murdered since 1985. While the death squads acted anonymously, later investigations would prove that the social, economic, and political elites of both the Liberal and Conservative parties were behind the massacres.

Palmera, being an active member of the Unión Patriótica and a left-leaning university professor, also became a target. Death threats came frequently. “They were simple phone calls, or small notes that said ‘Son of a bitch, you leave or you die,'” he recalls. Many of Palmera's colleagues left the region, and some abandoned the country. A month after the assassination of a close friend, Palmera's and Margarita's names appeared on a list of those next in line to be killed, and Palmera's father suggested the family move to Mexico or Paris for a few years. Margarita left immediately to find what they both hoped would be a temporary home in Mexico. Palmera stayed behind, getting his eight-year-old daughter and his eleven-year-old son ready for the move. He also needed to deal with his business affairs. “I stayed because there was property to be sold. We had to sell the jewelry store and other
things. I also had to hand in all the university responsibilities and also the management of the Banco del Comercio, where I had been working the last five years.” After the murder of another close friend, Palmera began to question his decision to leave. “I began to wonder whether it would be an act of cowardice to leave running, to hide myself outside of the country,” says Palmera. “I loved Margarita. We had an excellent marriage, and of course my children were most precious and valuable to me. However, to go into exile was to flee, leaving behind a trail of cadavers of people who were friends, valued companions who sacrificed everything, even their lives.”

The attacks against the Unión Patriótica came to a climax in October 1987 with the assassination of Jaime Pardo Leal, the party's presidential candidate. Some days prior to the killing, Palmera had traveled to Bogotá to speak with Leal. But instead, he ended up attending Leal's funeral. While a disillusioned and furious Manuel Marulanda recalled all Unión Patriótica FARC members back to the mountains, a grieving Palmera reached out to a FARC commander he had met during the political campaigning of Unión Patriótica candidates. “I wrote him a letter. I said I would not run away like a dog from my country—that I would stay. He replied. He told me to think about my decision, to think it over. And he recommended I go speak to the members of the FARC Secretariat, Jacobo Arenas and Manuel Marulanda, who had been the promoters of the Unión Patriótica movement.” At the end of November, Palmera went deep into the hills in the department of Meta, in central Colombia, where the FARC Secretariat had their general headquarters. At the time, the Secretariat was made up of five top commanders, who were working on strategies to reorganize the guerrillas after the calamity of their entry into mainstream politics with the Unión Patriótica.