Hostage Nation (6 page)

After arriving in the camp, Palmera personally met with Marulanda and Secretariat members Alfonso Cano, a former leader of the Juventud Comunista (Communist Youth movement), and Jacobo Arenas, who had been at Marulanda's side since the FARC's formative years. “I told them that I was not willing to leave, to flee, to go into exile, and I wanted to join the FARC. Jacobo Arenas said the idea was not to have people leaving the city to go to the mountains; that was crazy. He told
me, ‘Stay here for a couple of days. Get to know this life. It's very difficult. Get to know some of the members. And while you're here, give us some classes on Colombian economics.'” The didactic professor eagerly accepted the position. The economic struggle of poor Colombians was proof that the armed conflict had a legitimate cause, and Palmera's lessons, taught mostly to uneducated guerrilla recruits, consisted of the basics: The wealth and the land of Colombia is in the hands of few. Capitalism is bad. Socialism and communism are good. We are here in the mountains because the corrupt oligarchy won't let us into the political arena. If they let us, then we can change the economic situation of the country and wealth can be shared among the majority.

Days after Palmera's arrival, seven members of the Juventud Comunista in Medellín were assassinated at the headquarters of the Unión Patriótica. Apparently, the news was enough to change the mind of Jacobo Arenas with regard to Palmera. “He told me, ‘If you want to continue alive and in the struggle, come to the FARC,'” Palmera says. Although he accepted the invitation, Palmera still believed that it would not be long before he was reunited with Margarita and his two children. “The FARC, at that time, were in the peace process with President Betancur. And the FARC, despite all the assassinations, the threats and [having] some of its members in exile, still believed in the peace process, and I believed in it, too.” At thirty-seven, Palmera took the nom de guerre Simón Trinidad, a name he felt gave respect to his idol, Simón Bolívar, and joined the revolutionary army. (The practice of taking a nom de guerre was both to protect a recruit's family and to signify the radical life change of becoming a guerrilla fighter.) He was assigned to the Nineteenth Front on the northern coast of the country for basic training. Jacobo Arenas and Alfonso Cano told him that although he would be assigned a teaching position, he would have to comply with all the duties and obligations of any guerrilla member. He was given the job of training young uneducated guerrillas in politics and ideology. Later, he was put in charge of a FARC radio station that broadcast from the mountains, and finally he was made the second in command of over one hundred guerrillas in the FARC's Forty-first Front in northern Colombia. His territory covered a vast area of the Serranía de Perijá,
the northernmost part of the Eastern Cordillera, which extends along the border between Colombia and Venezuela.

Some guerrillas would say that Trinidad was forced to appear very militant to gain respect within the organization. “He had a certain complex because of his bourgeois origin, and that always forced him to take more radical positions,” said one high-ranking guerrilla who knew him well. “He seemed to scream, ‘Believe me, I am a revolutionary!'” And although Trinidad would spend many hard years in the jungle and mountains, he never lost the distinguished air of a college professor. His mother, though heartbroken when her son joined the guerrillas, sent him camouflage fatigues made by the same tailor who had sewn his aristocratic banker's suits. It would not only be his manner of dress, elocution, and education that would separate Trinidad from the vast majority of his comrades. Nearly all FARC guerrillas felt an intense level of detachment from the victims of the oligarchy and aristocracy whom they kidnapped or murdered. For Trinidad, those he once called friends were now terrorized by the organization to which he so fervently belonged. It was a circumstance of his dual life that he would never fully escape.

C
old and exhausted, Carmen Alicia Medina hiked alone in the rain along a
trocha
, a hidden guerrilla pathway in the Serranía de Perijá mountains, seventy miles from her home in Valledupar. She'd been to this place several times before, each time to meet a FARC guerrilla named Octavio. Sometimes she carried a heavy pack with boots, cell phones, medicine, batteries—anything they had demanded of her in exchange for a meeting. Each time she came hoping for “proof of life” and desperately seeking some kind of monetary demand from the guerrillas who had kidnapped her husband several months before, on March 22, 1998. As she made her way, Medina became anguished at the thought that she might have to turn back once again without evidence that her husband was still alive. When she arrived at her meeting place, “it was raining really hard,” Medina recalled in a 2006 court testimony. “Octavio asked me to come close to the tent so that I wouldn't get wet. I said, ‘No. I'm not moving from this stone until you promise me that you're going to tell me how Elías is. You have three options: You can kidnap me with Elías, you can give me the proof, or you can shoot me. But I'm not going to move.'”

Medina's gall was born of exhaustion and frustration. Her will and morale had been tested tremendously over the past several months in a
game of cat and mouse that had been played since the day a group of seven FARC guerrillas took her husband, Elías Ochoa, and his brother, Eliécer, at gunpoint from their ranch in El Paso, a hundred miles south of Valledupar, near the Ariguaní River. Medina arrived at the ranch to find that one of the family's bodyguards had been shot, and she half carried, half dragged him back to the house to get help. Elías Ochoa, who had spent two years as the mayor of Valledupar, was taken with his brother to a FARC hideout in the mountains. Because the protocol for FARC kidnappings was very well known, Ochoa knew right away that he would be ransomed to his family. He hoped this would happen soon, of course, but the FARC's strategy in the business of kidnapping had always been one of extreme patience. With seldom any pressure from the military or police, hiding a hostage in Colombia was a relatively inexpensive and easy undertaking. Whenever there was a perceived threat, the guerrillas, competent at navigating difficult jungle and mountain terrain, would simply march their hostages to another remote area. Taking their time to contact the victim's family was a strategy that the guerrillas felt helped immensely when it came time to negotiate a price for the hostage's freedom: The emotional turmoil brought about by the disappearance of a loved one was then exacerbated by the long silence that followed, sometimes for several months, sometimes for more than a year. Families suffered immeasurably, waiting moment by moment for any communication from the kidnappers. When it finally came, by way of a note, a visit, or a phone call, the family members were often so emotionally weakened that they were willing to agree immediately to the kidnappers' demands.

Simón Trinidad and his partner, Lucero, speak with local campesinos in 2000 in San Vicente del Caguán (inside the demilitarized zone) about the FARC's plans. Photo: Salud Hernández-Mora
.

For the victim, the interrogation about one's fiscal capacity began almost immediately after capture: “We know that you stole five hundred million pesos of government money when you were mayor. How many cattle do you own? We saw that you sold a farm for three hundred million pesos. How much is your emerald mine worth?” Such research about an individual's life was something that the guerrillas undertook in order to estimate the value of their commodity and to plan a negotiation strategy. Commonly, the kidnappers would have some prior knowledge of their victim's financial affairs, as well as a general idea of what they could get for each hostage. For Ochoa and his brother, fifteen days passed, and they still had no idea what the guerrillas would ask for their release, so Ochoa decided to push the issue with commander Octavio. The commander had been part of the group who kidnapped him, and Ochoa had watched as Octavio shot their bodyguard with an R-15 rifle. Ochoa recalled the events surrounding his kidnapping in a 2006 court testimony. “I asked Commander Octavio whom we needed to speak to about the kidnapping, about accelerating the process. He was emphatic in telling me that the person who had to make the decision about the negotiations and the demands was Commander Simón Trinidad.”

Ochoa was relieved and optimistic. “Everyone in Valledupar knew that Ricardo [Palmera] had become a FARC member, and that he was using the name of Simón Trinidad.” Ochoa asked Octavio if Trinidad was still with the Forty-first Front of the FARC, which Ochoa knew was the group of guerrillas controlling the region where he was being
held. Octavio replied that, yes, he was. To Ochoa, it seemed like a terrific stroke of luck. “I was very happy to get the information that it was Simón Trinidad who had to make the decision, because we had been friends and known each other well when he was my colleague at the university and he was general manager of Banco del Comercio. At that time, my waterworks company had accounts with that bank.” The two men taught in the same department and saw each other quite frequently. “We would meet either at the administrative offices of the bank or at the company, and we would talk on the phone frequently. We did not have a social relationship, because he belonged to a socioeconomic stratum that was much higher than mine.”

Many would say that it was his social status and former banking career that gave Trinidad inside information into which members of the Valledupar elite were the biggest fish for FARC kidnappers. Colombia's daily newspaper,
El Tiempo
, reported:

Trinidad was reported to have stolen thirty million pesos ($125,000) from the Banco del Comercio before he left, along with financial records. The newspaper
El Espectador
quoted the governor of the department of César, Hernando Molina, in a 2003 article: “Extortion and kidnapping appeared like a plague in Valledupar, naturally orchestrated by Palmera.” Molina told
The New York Times
, “Because he knew us, he could say how much each of us had. It was a bill come due, but we never understood why, because we had never done anything to him.” The charges that Trinidad used stolen bank records to kidnap his former friends and colleagues were vehemently denied by Jaime Palmera, Trinidad's eldest brother: “One didn't have to be a manager of a bank to know who had money in Valledupar at the end of the
eighties and beginning of the nineties.” Jaime was harshly critical of the FARC's policy of kidnapping, and he had been devastated by his brother's decision to enter the ranks of the guerrilla group.

Although public opinion mostly considered a friendship with Trinidad to be a liability, Ochoa still believed that his relationship with his former colleague would help free him. “I asked to speak with him, because I thought that would facilitate the negotiations greatly,” he says. Ochoa asked one of the FARC captors, a man named Dumar, to speak with Trinidad, and Ochoa was close enough to hear the radio transmission. Ochoa believed he heard Trinidad say that his case would soon be resolved. Still, Trinidad did not agree to speak with Ochoa.

Weeks into his kidnapping, a new commander appeared in the camp. “He told me that he came on behalf of Simón Trinidad to speak with me.” This was when Ochoa would find out what the FARC would demand for his freedom. Ochoa remembers that “the expression used was ‘You have to make a contribution to the war.' And the contribution that they mentioned was one million
dollars.”
Ochoa was stunned. “[I told him] that even if I sold all my assets and my family's assets, I could not raise that amount. And that would include my children's, my wife's, and all my relatives'. I offered ten million pesos [seven thousand dollars].” Ochoa's insulting offer infuriated the commander, who admonished him for his lack of respect to the FARC and gave him a lesson in the business of extortion and kidnapping. He told Ochoa that the FARC would, under no circumstances, release anyone for less than fifty million pesos. In fact, if the FARC needed fifty million pesos, it would just go to a rural area where the big landowners lived and demand it from any one of them. If they didn't pay, it would simply take away two or three hundred head of cattle. A few days later, the landowner would seek out the FARC, willing to pay the money so that the cattle would be returned.

Eight days after Ochoa learned of the demand, he and his brother were moved out of their original camp. They began a march that lasted over forty-seven nights. Each day, they walked for six to ten hours—much of it in the rain. Their captors were mostly between thirteen and seventeen years old, and all were armed with semiautomatic rifles.
Ochoa continued to believe that his relationship with Trinidad would help free him, and not a day went by that he didn't asked to speak with his former friend. When the group of captors and hostages finally arrived in a camp, Ochoa and his brother were allowed to listen to the radio, but it was taken away immediately when the broadcast contained news about their kidnapping. “I complained about why it had been taken away from me, and the answer that I was given was that it was an instruction given by Simón Trinidad,” Ochoa says. But there was always a radio somewhere in the camp tuned to a news station, and Ochoa stealthily moved as close as possible to hear any news. “Commander Dumar would lower the volume so that I could not hear it. But he would allow me to hear other national and regional news broadcasts on the radio.” Ochoa also listened intently to the radio communications among the guerrillas, hoping to glean some insight into his future. The guerrillas spoke in code to one another over the radio, but it was soon apparent which words referred to what. One code word he heard over and over: “Whenever they referred to us, they would say the ‘calves' or the ‘merchandise.'”