Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  A few days after Trinidad went to the FARC in 1987, the most wealthy men of Valledupar carried a blank check in their pockets. It was christened “the Simón check.” It was a sort of insurance policy to prevent oneself from becoming a guest at the “Sierra Nevada Hilton” or “Serranía de Perijá Hilton,” tragicomic names with which the people of [the department of] César baptized the FARC camps.

  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.’”

  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 Trin
idad, 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.”

  5

  Contractor

  When 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 presid
ent, 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.”

  By 1960, after continuing to come up empty for more than a decade in its pursuit of the Red threat, the U.S. government believed it had found proof of a real Communist rebellion in Colombia—a ragged group of fighters in the central Colombian mountains, led by peasant revolutionary Pedro Marín. To help Colombia fight the rebels (whose ideology at the time was more nationalist and anticapitalist than Communist), President Alberto Lleras signed a military-aid agreement with the United States. The Colombian military received twenty-five fighter jets and sixteen light bombers and lessons from U.S. pilots in how to napalm insurgent settlements. In 1964, the Colombian army, trained and funded by the United States, went to wipe out Marín and his cohorts with a bombing raid on their camp. When troops arrived on the ground, the rebels were nowhere to be found. The raid had forced Marín and forty of his men to become mobile guerrilla warriors, disappearing into the impenetrable Colombian countryside. It was the beginning of a new kind of war, one that the Colombian government—for more than four decades—would be powerless to end.