Hostage Nation (7 page)

What Ochoa did not hear or know, but could only painfully imagine, was what his wife of fifteen years, Carmen Alicia Medina, was going through to try to free him. After the kidnapping, the guerrillas contacted Medina and told her that she would have to hike alone into the Perijá mountains for a meeting with a midlevel commander named Octavio. Medina, who endured chronic pain from an injured leg, made several excruciating trips. “I had to go up a mountain, many hours, sometimes just to be listened to, just to be given an opportunity, asking God to give me strength. Not only to overcome the situation but also because I am deathly afraid of snakes. I was asking God to just please not let me find a snake.” Each time, she begged for information, but the guerrillas had nothing for her—no proof of life and no demand for money. Medina felt that the guerrillas were interested in her only because she continued to deliver the items that they requested, such as cell phones with prepaid cards, batteries, and medicine. But she had no choice other than to make the trip each time they requested her to do so. “The several occasions that I went up, they would ask me for something.
Sometimes they would leave a list down below. I even sent medicine for Elías for his high blood pressure, because he suffers from high blood pressure, and that worried me.”

After several meetings, Octavio told Medina that he had participated in the kidnapping of her husband, that the two Ochoa brothers were being held in a hostage camp, and that they were alive and doing all right. “And that was when he told me that Professor Ricardo [Palmera] was also in that front. That made me very happy. He was my teacher—my professor for four semesters—teaching me Colombian economics and economic history. We had friends in common at the university, and I also knew him as the head of the bank. I knew his family, all his siblings, brothers and sisters, and I knew his wife, Margarita.” Medina felt very strongly that her many connections to Trinidad would help. “I always felt that he was my way out—that he was the person from whom I was going to obtain Elías's release.” Medina asked Octavio to facilitate a conversation with Trinidad.

Months later, Medina heard a rumor that her husband and his brother had been killed. After several more fruitless trips, she found herself at the meeting with Octavio in the pouring rain. “I was determined, and he realized that I wasn't going to budge,” says Medina. When the rain lightened up a bit, Octavio came out of the tent and walked toward Medina. “That's when he told me he was going to help me; that he was going to ask for authorization from Commander Simón to get the proof of life.” Octavio went back to the tent and began to speak over the radio. He used some code words, and at first Medina didn't understand, but she moved closer to the tent, where she could hear. Medina heard Octavio call Trinidad by name. “He [Octavio] said that I was insisting on the proof of life, and that I was getting very annoying.” And then she heard the voice of her former professor come through over the radio: “Yeah, tell her that we'll give it to her in two weeks.”

Two weeks later, Medina again went to see Octavio and received the proof of life (the exact contents of the proof of life were never reported). “On the same day that I got the proof of life, we were also told that we needed to pay a million dollars. I held my head, and I started crying. I was saying, ‘We don't have that money.' And I asked
Octavio, ‘Why are you talking about
dollars?
You don't like Americans.' And he said, ‘Well, it's a million dollars.' After they said it was going to be a million dollars, I anguished because it was unreachable, unobtainable.” For some time, Medina heard nothing more.

“Finally, one day, Octavio called me on the cell phone, and even though I had insisted to talk to Simón Trinidad, I understood that that wasn't going to be possible, because they were asking me for money—lots of money. They said the agreement was reached; they said it would be one hundred million pesos [seventy thousand dollars]. And I said to him, ‘We don't have that money,' and he said, ‘If you don't have the money, send two coffins, because we're going to kill him.' It must have been God that gave me the strength. I said to him, ‘Kill him, eat him, and rot with him, because I don't have that money.'”

Again, Medina agonized during a long, deafening silence from the guerrillas, at which time the tragedy touched everyone in her family, even the youngest members. Her six-year-old son was having nightmares, and Medina appealed to País Libre (a Colombian foundation that offers help to the families of kidnapped victims) to give the boy psychological counseling. Medina was tormented by the fact she had baited Octavio to kill her husband, but felt she hadn't had any other choice. “I think that was the way to make them understand that we didn't have that kind of money. Besides, Simón Trinidad knew it.” She continued to communicate with Octavio and was finally given another demand—twice as high as the last. “They were asking for two hundred million pesos [$140,000] to free them.” With no option, Medina did everything she could think of to secure the amount. “My mother-in-law sold her house. I quit my job in order to get the severance pay. We got a mortgage on our house. We took loans from friends to gather the money. And I went to pay that amount in cash. And they told me on that day that the two would be freed.”

In the camp where Elías and Eliécer Ochoa were being held, the two men heard an order given over the radio to “bring in the hostages.” Medina had received word that her husband and his brother would be released and was told to go to a location where the guerrillas would deliver the two men. Along with several family members, Medina traveled to an area in the mountains. “We went there early in the morning.
That night, they released Eliécer. When I saw that it was only Eliécer who was freed, it was very hard for me. I tried not to make him feel bad when I did not see Elías. Eliécer was crying, telling me that he didn't want to leave him, but they forced him to leave and leave Elías.”

Medina was enraged. “I wanted to go out looking for Octavio to confront him with the fact that he had lied to me, because he said that they would turn both of them over, and they did not. The next day, I went back to the area where we had been meeting, looking for Octavio, but he wasn't there. He didn't want to face me.” Instead, Medina spoke to the guerrilla in charge. “I complained to him that after I had been asked to provide so many provisions such as food, meat, rice, et cetera—all things that they had asked me for, that Eliécer had told me that all they had been fed was rice and spaghetti and
cacharina
[a cracker made of flour and water].” Medina implored the guerrilla: “How could that be? How could they do that?” And then she asked the question that was most important to her: What were they to do about freeing Elías? “He told me that if I wanted Elías, I'd have to pay an additional one hundred million pesos.” Perhaps Simón Trinidad had changed his mind about the additional ransom for Ochoa, or maybe it was another high commander, because five days after Eliécer's release and seven months after the two had been kidnapped, Elías Ochoa was set free.

Whether the kidnapping of the Ochoas or other members of the Valledupar elite bothered Trinidad's conscience was impossible to determine. But he would later write about the painful consequences that his decision to enter the FARC had for his family. “The disloyalty to my dad hurt a lot,” Trinidad wrote. “He proposed my departure into exile thinking about the well-being of the whole family. So I wrote him a letter explaining why I made the decision to join the FARC. I didn't imagine that my decision was going to affect them so much. His house was raided several times by the military, and he received multiple death threats.”

Trinidad's abandonment of his social position to join the FARC turned the Palmeras into pariahs in Valledupar—the same city that a few years earlier had bestowed his father with the title of “Legal Conscience of the Department of César” and had considered this family one of the most prominent and respected in the region. According to the
eldest son, Jaime, many of the attacks that his father and mother had to put up with were instigated by their old friends from Valledupar society. “It came to the point where the old man was prevented from entering the Valledupar Club,” he says.

In 1996, Trinidad's sister, Leonor Palmera, was kidnapped for seven months by AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño in a show of force and retaliation against the FARC and against Trinidad. After gaining her freedom, for her own security and for the security of her family, Leonor left Colombia for Paraguay with her two children and her parents, doña Alix and don Ovidio. By then, don Ovidio was succumbing to the effects of Alzheimer's disease. He died in 2003, as Trinidad says, “far from the land of his birth and from his homeland.”

W
hen Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves, and Thomas Howes were captured by FARC guerrillas, they were working as military contractors for a small company called California Microwave Systems (CMS), a subsidiary of contractor giant Northrop Grumman. The work that CMS was doing was part of an eight-million-dollar contract to gather information on drug production and trafficking. There were a handful of employees tasked for the job—pilots, systems analysts who operated the surveillance equipment, and mechanics who maintained the company's two Cessnas. The company rented a small office and hangar space from an American army veteran who had created a successful business catering to the many North American contractors working under Plan Colombia—the half-billion-dollar-a-year Colombian component of the U.S.-funded war on drugs.

While Plan Colombia was certainly the most expensive program in the history of U.S. relations with Colombia, a deep interest in this strategic nation runs back nearly a century. In 1903, the Colombian government refused to sign a treaty that would hand over “all rights, power and authority” of the Panama Canal to the United States in perpetuity (Panama had been a state within Colombia since the Bolivarian revolution, with varying levels of cooperation with the central government in Bogotá). With control of the canal in doubt, the United States seized the opportunity to back Panamanian separatists to fight against Colombian troops heading toward Panama City. Panama gained independence in a military junta (partially financed by the French company building the canal) on November 6, 1903. Panama's ambassador to the United States quickly signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, granting the United States the right to build and indefinitely control the canal. The United States and Colombia repaired relations with a reconciliatory treaty in 1921, and for the rest of the century, the United States would sit squarely on the side of the Colombian government in South American political disputes, especially when it came to matters of the burgeoning communism that had made its way to the western hemisphere.

Colombian antinarcotics police patrol a coca field while an American contractor spray plane fumigates coca crops near Tumaco, Nariño, southwest of Bogotá. September 12, 2000. Photo: APImages/Scott Dalton
.

In April 1948, the ninth Pan-American Conference (an annual meeting of U.S. and Latin American leaders) was being presided over by the U.S. secretary of state, George C. Marshall, in Bogotá. The
conference—attended by representatives from more than a dozen countries—had two goals: to put a stop to a perceived Soviet-inspired Communist movement throughout Latin America and to form the Organization of American States (OAS), which would widen the U.S. government's economic and political influence in South America. On the third day of the conference, popular presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was shot and killed in central Bogotá. Members of Gaitán's Liberal party took to the streets, rioting and looting shops for weapons. The assassin was killed by a mob, his body dragged to the steps of the presidential palace. Army tanks advanced on the palace, and students took over a radio station, demanding the incumbent president, Mariano Ospina, resign and flee. Possibly to fuel the case of the strongly anti-Communist coalition at the conference and remove suspicion from Ospina's ruling Conservative party, Ospina immediately accused Gaitán's shooter of being a Communist. Kremlin-inspired revolutionaries were said to be responsible for orchestrating the violence. But in reality, there was no proven Communist link to the assassination or to the unrest. A 1960s declassified CIA document analyzing the violent uprising—referred to as “El Bogotazo”—reported, “The government preferred to blame the riots on communist agitation and foreign intrigue, rather than to address itself to the underlying causes of popular discontent.” About the assassin, the document stated, “The murderer was apparently one of those fanatics or psychopaths we say may never be excluded from calculations on the safety of dignitaries. His motives cannot be known for certain, for he was battered to death on the spot by frenzied bystanders. Inevitably, charges were raised of the complicity of the Conservative Party, of the Communists, and of the U.S. But no strong evidence of a political plot has ever been produced.”