Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  FARC commander Simón Trinidad and a United Nations envoy, American James LeMoyne, meet in San Vicente del Caguán during the negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC on January 11, 2002. Photo: AP Images/Scott Dalton.

  “For me, it was very hard physically,” says Lucero, who had to carry heavy equipment on her back. The black rubber boots, the pantaneras, were terribly heavy and blisteringly hot on the long hikes up the sierra. “I was fifteen years old, almost sixteen, and I was weak, thin. I fell while I walked, and I was very afraid of the dark. So it hit me very hard.” She missed her mother, her sisters, her brother, and her friends. She missed the food she was accustomed to, seeing movies, and dancing to popular music. She missed the freedom of being a civilian. But to the teenager whose family had always considered her spoiled, it was all worth it. “You leave everything. You change everything for a new life. It’s like a rebirth, but into a life of much more sacrifice. The advantage is that you know that the sacrifice will all be worth it after the triumph of the revolution.” And with that thought, Lucero was content.

  After taking basic military courses and studying FARC ideology for the first year, Lucero was allowed to be with Trinidad, and she soon became pregnant. She didn’t know how to tell Trinidad. When she did, he was livid. “He told me, ‘I spend my life telling young men and women that they better not get pregnant. Tell me: With what face am I going to tell them that I’m going to be a father?’” Lucero gave birth to a healthy daughter but was able to keep the infant with her for only four months. Then Lucero was given an ultimatum. Stay with your child or continue to be a guerrillera and send the child away. “There are your feelings as a mother,” Lucero said of the difficult decision in a 2005 interview, “but also your feelings as a revolutionary. What weighs more? I made the choice to return to the guerrillas, with pain, with my heart in my throat, but with the conviction, the desire to continue fighting.” Lucero took the baby to live with her mother, who was overjoyed to care for her granddaughter. Lucero was heartbroken as she said good-bye to the child, but she felt convinced that returning to the mountains and to Trinidad was the right thing to do. The two continued to live together in the camp, Trinidad as the second in command of the Forty-first Front, and Lucero, like many other young women who were romantic partners with older commanders, as “Trinidad’s woman.” But Lucero took her role in the guerrilla army and in its defense of poor Colombians very seriously. “You see the soldier’s treatment of the civilians; the soldier sees the enemy in the civilian population. We treat the civilian population with love, with love and affection—because if they are not our relatives, they are our companions. It is for them that we are giving our lives, our youth, our joys. For them we made the decision to come here.”

  The bond between Trinidad and Lucero continued to grow with their intense belief in the cause. And in early 1999, when Trinidad received orders from the Secretariat to travel to the south of the country and take part in the first dialogues between the FARC and the Colombian government in fifteen years, there was no question that Lucero would go, as well. Trinidad was one of only nine commanders chosen for the honor by the commander in chief, Marulanda. He was extremely proud of the appointment.

  The negotiations had come about because by 1998, the guerrillas had brought the Colombian government nearly to its knees. In 1996, the FARC had launched a new phase of the war with multifront attacks on military objectives, using 60mm and 81mm mortars and improvised cylinder bombs. In August of that year, the FARC attacked and destroyed a military base in Putumayo, leaving fifty-four Colombian soldiers dead, seventeen wounded, and sixty captured. On December 20, 1997, the FARC attacked an army communications base, kidnapping eighteen soldiers. In March 1998, the FARC wiped out an elite army unit in southern Caquetá after local sympathizers provided the guerrillas with intelligence on the battalion’s movements. Within two days, 107 of the battalion’s 154 soldiers were dead. On August 3, 1998, the FARC attacked an antinarcotics base, kidnapping twenty-four members of the National Police. All told, in the departments of Caquetá, Putumayo, and Nariño, guerrillas overtook Colombian troops and captured approximately five hundred soldiers and members of the National Police.

  Emboldened by the success of his army, Marulanda set his sights on taking over the large cities and then the entire country—a long-range plan, for which he concluded he would need at least forty thousand guerrillas. But in 1998, with less than twenty thousand troops spread out across Colombia, Marulanda knew he was far from powerful enough to take Bogotá or any other big city. Instead, his strategy was to scare the populace into thinking that it might be possible for the FARC to capture the major cities. To do so, the guerrillas embarked on a campaign of bombing civilian and military targets around Bogotá, destroying electrical towers to cut off power, and impeding transportation routes into the city.

  With the country paralyzed by the constant guerrilla violence, and the growing perception that the FARC could take over at any time, presidential candidate Andrés Pastrana campaigned in early 1998 with the promise of setting a stage for peace negotiations with the FARC. Pastrana won the election in June and took office in August. An enormous coup for the guerrillas came very soon after Pastrana’s inauguration. In October, the new president traveled to the mountains to meet the FARC Secretariat members, who convinced Pastrana, as a precondition to the peace dialogues, to cede temporarily a vast demilitarized zone of more than sixteen thousand square miles of high plains and Amazonian jungle. The demilitarized zone, or DMZ, which became official on November 7, 1998, was like a FARC state within the country of Colombia, and the press was soon referring to it as “Farclandia” or simply as “El Caguán,” because much of the DMZ rested in the Caguán River Basin. Residents in the area, which was composed of five municipalities within the departments of Meta and Caquetá, were now legally under the rule of the FARC.

  The official talks began in January 1999 with lots of fanfare but with seemingly little momentum to come to a cease-fire. Three months later, while the dialogues were still in their infancy, Trinidad and Lucero arrived from the mountains of Perijá after a grueling six-hundred-mile journey. Marulanda gave Trinidad the assignment of managing journalists who would be covering the talks and giving a sort of media training to the local people in San Vicente del Caguán, an impoverished municipality that had become the ad hoc capital of the DMZ. Marulanda wanted a positive spin from the town’s residents, who were likely to be asked their opinion about treatment under the guerrillas, who had been the unofficial government for years. Trinidad was also asked to handle economic topics that the FARC would discuss in the dialogues. The refined commander had yet to prove his worth to Marulanda, who had always been suspicious about the few in his ranks who weren’t from el campo, but, rather, from the educated elite. But Marulanda could not have predicted how great an asset Trinidad would be.

  Since there were no hostilities allowed between government and FARC troops in the zone, delegates arrived from a dozen countries, including Canada, France, Switzerland, and Spain, to participate in the talks. Trinidad, wearing a uniform of camouflage fatigues with a bright green scarf around his neck, sporting stylish aviator sunglasses, and carrying a semiautomatic rifle, received many of those visitors and moved easily among delegates sent by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ambassadors from many countries, and even with the then president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Grasso, who had come to discuss investment opportunities for the guerrillas.

  In June 1999, the Washington, D.C.–based Center for International Policy sent a delegation from the U.S. Congress, led by Massachusetts Democrat William Delahunt. Trinidad attended the talks with the Americans and the FARC lead negotiator and commander of the Southern Bloc, Raúl Reyes. The topics discussed included illegal drugs, kidnapping, and the recent assassination of three Americans who had been working with Colombian indigenous tribes. But the talks failed to produce any concrete proposals to deal with the ongoing violence. In one of the most
surreal photo ops of the talks, America Online founder Jim Kinsey arrived for a meeting with Marulanda, hugged the guerrilla, and swapped his baseball cap for Marulanda’s rumpled cachucha. After the meeting, Kinsey said that he felt that Marulanda was “very much interested in achieving peace. He understands, I think, that foreign investment is critical to the prosperity of this country, and I think is willing to negotiate and to discuss possible solutions that will move this country into the 21st century.”

  The meetings were a tremendous slap in the face for Pastrana and a great embarrassment to many Colombians, who felt that the outside world was legitimizing the violent insurgents while ignoring the elected Colombian government. The great pomp that surrounded the dialogues created an enormous economic boon for San Vicente del Caguán; journalists and diplomats came with plentiful dollars. Hotels, restaurants, and local prostitutes were the first beneficiaries of the “peace” dialogues. For the FARC, it was an oasis. After years of living separately, confined by the wild Colombian geography and hounded by the Colombian army, the Secretariat members were all together. The sanctuary allowed them to refine their plans and chart new strategies. Nearly ten thousand guerrillas moved about freely in the DMZ. The guerrillas felt empowered, invincible—the revolutionary esprit de corps was at its greatest point in the history of the rebel army.

  As weeks turned into months, Pastrana continued to push for discussions on disarmament. FARC negotiators danced around the topic, preferring instead to talk about economic and social issues and land reform. In due time, they said, they would speak about peace—when those other topics were solved. Day and night, Colombian news broadcasts reported on the dialogues. Over time, as it became apparent that the FARC was not interested in a cease-fire, Pastrana’s team began to look more and more impotent. While the government returned again and again to negotiate, the FARC continued to commit terrorist attacks outside the DMZ. Canisters packed with gunpowder and shrapnel were tossed into areas with civilian populations. Planes were hijacked, roads blocked off. Police and soldiers who surrendered in gun battles were taken prisoner or executed. The guerrillas remained unrepentant, even when civilians appeared to be targets or were caught in the cross fire. In a Human Rights Watch interview, Simón Trinidad referred to international humanitarian law as a “bourgeois concept.” In July 1999, four thousand fighters emerged from El Caguán to attack bases and towns in five regions. In December 2000, FARC guerrillas ambushed and killed Diego Turbay, the head of the Congressional Peace Commission. Five others were also murdered, including Turbay’s mother.

  Amid the escalating violence, the government continued to cede the DMZ to the guerrillas, and dialogues carried on without progress toward a peace accord. It had become painfully obvious to most that the FARC had no intention of ending the war. Many would say the Colombian government was also uninterested in achieving peace. While the FARC attacked military targets, paramilitary units linked to the legitimate military committed horrible atrocities as well. In January 1999, paramilitaries killed 136 civilians in four days. The victims were accused of supporting the FARC, then shot in the head. In the town of El Tigre in central Colombia, four truckloads of militia forces began breaking down residents’ doors. Twenty-six bodies were found, some beheaded. Twenty-five more disappeared. Witnesses later reported that the paramilitaries arrived in trucks belonging to the army’s Twenty-fourth Brigade. Such events had been going on for decades; the Colombian Peace Commission reported that from 1988 to 1997, of the more than twenty thousand murders committed by illegal armed groups, paramilitaries and drug cartels were responsible for more than 80 percent of the killings, while guerrilla groups accounted for 20 percent.

  Even as Pastrana waxed poetic about peace, he cozied up to Bill Clinton and $1.3 billion in military aid to fight the FARC in order to win the war on drugs. Critics claimed that the money allocated to Plan Colombia was being spent to fight a Colombian civil war tantamount to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, denied the charges in 2001: “Plan Colombia is a plan for peace, and the United States supports President Pastrana’s peace efforts,” he wrote. “From the beginning, we have stated that there is no military solution to Colombia’s problems. Colombia’s ills go well beyond drug production and trafficking. That is why Plan Colombia is aimed at bolstering democracy, improving the economy, and respecting human rights while at the same time attacking narcotics. As a democratic neighbor in need, Colombia deserves our help. And we are providing it through a comprehensive, balanced assistance package in support of Plan Colombia.” The balance, however, was heavily skewed on the side of military spending. In 2000, 78 percent ($765 million) and in 2001, 97 percent ($242 million) of Plan Colombia aid went to bolster Colombia’s military forces, with the remainder earmarked for “economic and social assistance programs.”

  The money did not go to waste. With burgeoning war coffers, Pastrana formed a command team of generals and completely restructured and invigorated his flailing army. Terms for recruits were extended and conscripts were turned into professional soldiers. Troops were retrained and battalions modernized into swiftly deployable war-fighting outfits. The Colombian army purchased Black Hawks and Russian transport helicopters and modernized their aircraft, riverine, and combat equipment. According to a Stratfor intelligence report, with the new money and innovation, “the military was able, in but a few years, to field a revitalized force able to be employed in a manner more appropriate in the new phase the conflict had entered, that of mobile warfare.” But perhaps the most important factor that would later be brought to bear against the FARC was the streamlining and bolstering of the army’s intelligence operations (which were put under the direct command of a brigadier general) and its psychological operations division (which was responsible for inundating the guerrillas with messages and propaganda to encourage them to defect). The bulk of Pastrana’s new and improved military came compliments of American taxpayers, with the Clinton and then Bush administrations arguing Plan Colombia’s essential role in stopping cocaine from making its way to the United States. And although many illegal armed groups were involved in the drug trade at a level perhaps equal to the guerrillas, Plan Colombia funds were not used to aggressively fight drug production and smuggling by paramilitaries or to help prevent atrocities by the AUC or the military-paramilitary alliances. In 2000, Carlos Castaño, the head of the largest paramilitary coalition, admitted that the AUC received 70 percent of its financing from drug trafficking. And a leaked Colombian government report in 2003 put the paramilitary groups’ share in the entire Colombian drug trade at 40 percent.

  Publicly, the FARC blamed the failure of the negotiations on the government, claiming Pastrana wanted peace for free—without reforms and without social, economic, and political changes for the country. However, internally, Secretariat members congratulated themselves on the charade of the dialogues, which covered up a twofold plan to move the FARC toward its ultimate goal: overtaking the country. The first step was an unprecedented weapons buildup—the result of a creative arms deal for tens of thousands of Russian weapons. The guns came from Siberia and were brokered by both the Russian mafia and the Russian military. Aboard Russian cargo planes, the arms passed through the Canary Islands, Jordan, and finally into Colombia by way of Peru’s remote jungle. Thousands of automatic rifles were smuggled by land; a reported twenty to thirty thousand more floated into El Caguán by parachute from Russian planes. In April 2000, MSNBC.com broke the story and reported that the FARC paid for the guns with huge shipments (about forty thousand kilograms) of cocaine—ferried back to Russia in the same planes that had delivered the weapons. (While it first appeared that Vladimiro Montesinos, head of Peru’s intelligence service, had broken the smuggling ring, the spy chief was later implicated in the dealings.)

  With the FARC flush with weapons, what Marulanda needed was more troops. So behind the smoke screen of the peace negotiations, the FARC Secretariat bega
n a tremendous and wholesale recruitment effort that spanned the entire country, with the idea of doubling the FARC ranks to forty thousand troops. With the greatly inflated ranks, Marulanda believed he could actually overthrow the Colombian government. The new recruitment strategy was an extraordinary paradigmatic shift, one that would prove to be a catastrophic failure. In its thirty-five-year history, the FARC had always had standards for recruits: New troops came from families with Communist sympathies, or they came from areas where the FARC had been the only presence for decades. But in the frenzy to recruit enough bodies to match the number of arms, standards slackened. The majority of new recruits came from the massive glut of humanity that had arrived in the jungle to eek out a living in a lawless land—the raspachines, the coca pickers. The FARC also recruited destitute city dwellers. With no former background or tie to the guerrillas in any way, the new recruits lacked significant passion or commitment to revolutionary ideology.