Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  McLaughlin also felt that the men’s status as contractors, rather than as active-duty U.S. military personnel, was part of the reason the military refused to act immediately after the crash. “If you had military guys flying the mission, they would have the full weight of DOD behind them, ensuring that all the things needed for air safety would be in place before they take on such a mission,” he said. In a 2008 interview in Germany, Keen, who had been promoted to major general, would argue that this was not the case. “It would be the same response,” he said. “We would have the same capability to respond. If it was a downed aircraft, no one would be asking, ‘Is this a contractor, DOD, military?’ It would be ‘Let’s do what we can to locate and recover them.’”

  In the days following the crash, the immediate response of the U.S. government was to bury the story as quickly as possible. A former FBI hostage negotiator working on the case felt that there were several factors behind the government’s desire to keep the kidnapping under wraps. “First and foremost was the government’s belief that media coverage would only enhance Tom, Marc, and Keith’s status, and thereby make them more valuable hostages for the FARC to leverage,” he said. “But in this case, the FARC were clearly aware of their value from day one, regardless of what was or was not in the media. I also believe they kept the story under wraps to avoid bringing unwanted political or public attention to the classified program the guys were working on, and to avoid unwanted scrutiny and criticism of the government’s activities in Colombia.” Adam Isacson, director of the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., agreed with this assessment. “Obviously it’s embarrassing to the U.S., because [the kidnapping] causes people to ask questions about the policy in Colombia and the role of contractors in general,” he said. The men’s role as contractors, rather than as active military personnel, also helped push the story from the headlines. Myles Frechette, the former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, had put it bluntly to the St. Petersburg Times in 2000: “It’s very handy to have an outfit not part of the U.S. armed forces, obviously … if somebody gets killed or whatever, you can say it’s not a member of the armed forces. Nobody wants to see American military men killed.”

  3

  The Elegant Guerrilla

  On December 31, 2004, nearly two years after the guerrillas marched Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves off into mountains, a stocky middle-aged man, bald and bespectacled, sat handcuffed and shackled aboard a U.S. government Gulfstream jet, bound for the United States. He wore the clothing of a prisoner from the Cómbita maximum-security prison outside of Bogotá. He was flanked by six agents of the North American government: five FBI agents and one DEA agent. Before boarding the jet, fifty-four-year-old FARC commander Simón Trinidad, the highest-ranking FARC member ever to be captured, raised his fist in defiance and repeatedly yelled out to reporters, “¡Viva las FARC! ¡Viva Manuel Marulanda! ¡Viva Simón Bolívar!”

  The 150 years of violence that prompted Simón Trinidad to join the FARC can be traced back to Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan revolutionary who helped liberate South America from the Spanish. In 1821 Bolívar created Gran Colombia, an area encompassing present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. “The Liberator” named himself president and appointed one of his military generals, Francisco de Paula Santander, as vice president. The two men soon became bitter political rivals. Their followers split into two factions, which, by the late 1840s, became the Partido Liberal, whose adherents included those in the oligarchy who were aligned with Santander, and the Partido Conservador, whose members included the oligarchs who sided with Bolívar. While the parties took the names Liberal and Conservative, the titles did not correlate at all to the ideological meaning of the words liberal and conservative in the North American political vernacular. The Conservative party wanted a more centralized government, something that had never been achieved in Colombia due to a weak military, the country’s treacherous geography, and a lack of cohesion among the country’s departments (states). The Liberal party was more inclined toward decentralization. And although clergy members aligned with the Conservative party because of its platform to give more power to the Church, there were no great ideological, economic, or policy differences between the two parties. Within each party, there were those who leaned politically to the Left, those who were centrists, and those who were politically on the Right.

  FARC founder Manuel Marulanda in the early years of the guerrilla organization. Marulanda earned the nickname “Tirofijo” (“Sureshot”) for his excellent aim with a rifle. Photo: Cuadernos de Campaña.

  Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one party would hold power for several four-year terms before losing the presidential election to the other party. The elected party would reap all the perks of incumbency, while members of the opposition party would be stripped of most ruling-class benefits. Periods of lasting violence were commonplace between Liberals and Conservatives from the parties’ beginnings, with thousands killed in eleven major clashes before the dawn of the twentieth century. A civil war began in 1899, when Liberals declared war against the Conservative government after accusing the Conservative party of maintaining power through fraudulent elections. The Thousand Days’ War claimed an estimated 250,000 lives, but it ultimately failed to overthrow the Conservatives. The Conservative party remained in power until 1930, when the Liberal party was able to convince a Colombian electorate, suffering from an economic depression, to elect Liberal candidate Alfonso López. The Liberals remained in power until the 1946 election of moderate Conservative Mariano Ospina.

  During Ospina’s term, conflict between the Liberals and Conservatives continued, resulting in increasing partisan hostility. Then in 1948, the assassination of Liberal party presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán brought about a tremendous surge in violence, which would cause 300,000 deaths throughout the 1950s, earning the decade the name La Violencia. Killings became more and more sinister and grotesque. Bodies—mostly those of Liberals—turned up all over the country, mutilated, burned, and decapitated. Peasants who considered themselves members of the Liberal party (mainly because they followed the party of their patrones) were targeted by death squads sponsored by the Conservatives. Liberal peasants and members of an emerging Communist movement counterattacked, forming gangs and self-defense units. All the while, the Liberal elite in Bogotá, mostly unaffected by the violence, turned a blind eye to the bloodshed.

  It was one of those rural Liberals, a young salesman in his late teens named Pedro Marín, who went into hiding in the hills of the Cordillera Central and emerged to become one of the most successful guerrilla leaders in history. Of that period, Marín later wrote, “The police and armed Conservatives would destroy the villages, kill inhabitants, burn their houses, take people prisoner and disappear them, steal livestock and rape the women. The goal of the Conservative groups was to inflict terror on the population and take advantage of the goods the peasants had.” Rather than wait idly for his impending murder at the hands of Conservatives, Marín took the nom de guerre Manuel Marulanda (after a murdered union leader) and gathered the necessary tools to launch a guerrilla war. “The Liberals wanted to fight back,” he wrote. In addition, Marín brought together Communist party members, who were also targets of the Conservatives. “Men and women formed groups that had little stability, but as the residents in the pueblos began to hear about these groups, more people joined. Like many newly founded groups, they lacked experience and adequate organization. But they made their way to the spine of the Cordillera Central, and for those who had been essentially condemned to death by Conservatives, this became a place of salvation.”

  Marulanda had very little formal education, but he quickly became a skilled leader and an excellent guerrilla tactician—his proficiency as a marksman earned him the nickname “Tirofijo,” or “Sureshot.” In 1953, after a military coup ousted the Conservative president Laureano Gómez, Gen. Gustavo Rojas offered amnesty to Liberals who had taken up arms. After many who turned t
hemselves in were murdered, Marulanda and the majority of his guerrilla troops vowed never to return to civilian life and to continue their fight against the entrenched and corrupt political establishment. La Violencia came to a close at the end of 1957, when the Liberals and Conservatives joined together in a power-sharing relationship they called the National Front.

  Unlike his charismatic contemporaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Marulanda gave no rousing speeches. He lived an almost hermetic lifestyle and remained mostly an enigma to the general Colombian population and to many in his ranks. Physically, he was unassuming—short, stocky, and unsmiling—and in his later years, he had a profound slouch and sagging features, which gave the appearance of a grumpy grandfather rather than the commanding leader of a vast guerrilla army. While he demanded his troops be in full military uniform, Marulanda was most often photographed wearing the clothes of a campesino—long-sleeved plaid shirts with white undershirts and loose blue work pants tucked into high rubber boots, a machete and a pistol tucked into a belt around his waist.

  Marulanda’s prowess in battle was legendary throughout Colombia and embellished to the point that he was said to have taken down entire battalions single-handedly. Over the years, his army grew into the thousands, becoming well disciplined and organized. The guerrillas adopted a Marxist ideology and considered themselves Communists, but remained unconnected to Cuba or the Soviet Union. The FARC commander presided over and was considered one of the members of the Secretariat, a five-member body that was responsible for all military and political decisions, but he also had to answer to a fairly cumbersome Central High Command of approximately twenty-five members. The Secretariat also controlled the guerrilla army’s finances, coordination with other guerrilla groups, and military strategies. Except for Marulanda, members of the Secretariat were all of equal rank, and although some guerrilla leaders questioned the decision, Marulanda never appointed a second in command or a successor. In the field, FARC troops were divided into sixty fronts, each with a senior commander and a second in command. In 1993, the then seven Secretariat members were decentralized and placed in seven blocs spanning the entire country. The move was made for security reasons after a 1990 attack on Marulanda’s headquarters, as well as to give the Secretariat a greater command over regional operations. In essence, by the mid-1990s, FARC troops were spread throughout almost all of rural Colombia. Smaller cells of guerrillas masqueraded as civilians in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali—the major population centers situated among three Andean cordilleras that trisect the country from north to south. The land in the majority of FARC-controlled regions lacked any significant network of roads and thus was ideal for guerrilla warfare. It was extremely difficult for Colombian soldiers to fight the insurgents by conducting standard military operations. Also inhibiting the Colombian forces was the fact that for many decades, members of the poor rural civilian population, the campesinos, felt abandoned by the government and were mostly uncooperative when dealing with soldiers searching for guerrillas.

  Although the guerrilla foot soldiers lived simply, in the mid-1990s, the FARC, after struggling for thirty years to fund its troops, grew to be the richest guerrilla army in the world by becoming a major player in the country’s most lucrative black-market export. By 1998, estimations of the FARC’s annual income from the taxing and trafficking of cocaine and heroin varied widely, but it was most often reported to be in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. To the guerrillas, money from the drug business was considered completely legitimate because the bounty was shared among a multitude of players, who crossed every level of Colombian society from street thug to oligarch. Drug money permeated every government agency, every branch of the military, every elected political level, including—at least in the case of Ernesto Samper in 1994—the president of Colombia. “Legitimate” banks or financial institutions were infiltrated, as well as many rural businesses and dozens of self-defense and paramilitary groups. Even the Catholic Church was not immune; in the 1980s, donations and newly constructed churches came compliments of Medellín drug boss Pablo Escobar. In essence, the term narco could be a prefix to groups or individuals from every category of Colombian citizenry. The remainder of the guerrillas’ vast income in the late 1990s came from the kidnapping and extortion of over a thousand Colombian citizens a year. Ransoms paid ranged from several hundred to several million dollars.

  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 i
n 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.”