Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  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.

  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 moun
tains; 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.

  4

  Friends and Neighbors

  Cold 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 se
emed 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: