Twenty minutes later, Lamprea, Mesa, and Keler were forced into the backseat of their truck with one of the guerrilla soldiers. The young guerrilla who’d stepped on a land mine was still lying in the truck bed, moaning and yelling for water. Five more guerrillas piled in back with him. The commander, who continued talking on a handheld radio, got into the driver’s seat, and two more guerrillas squeezed into the front. Lamprea was trying to ignore the injured guerrilla’s constant screams from the back of the truck, when his attention was diverted by a conversation between the two FARC soldiers in the front seat. “They said Ingrid was a politician just like all the others. That it was a good thing that they had captured her. That the country was going to know that they had a presidential candidate.” Lamprea couldn’t stand it. He had completely dedicated the last three years of his life to helping Betancourt in her political fight. “I said, ‘If you guys think this, you’re completely wrong, because this is not the person that you have just captured. This is a person who has been radical, who has been against corruption, who is in favor of land reform, who is truly for the poor in this country.’” Finally, the driver slammed on the breaks. “He turned around and yelled at me. He said, ‘Don’t tell me this shit. All politicians are the same.’” Twenty-four hours later, Lamprea, Keler, and Mesa were released on a deserted road. They walked throughout the night and finally came upon a group of Colombian soldiers who helped them get back to Bogotá. Lamprea prayed that Ingrid would be coming right behind them, and he was consumed by guilt that he was free while Betancourt and Rojas were still captive.
In Bogotá, Betancourt’s husband was initially numbed by the news. The advertising executive, who had no experience in politics, was about to embark on an odyssey that he felt totally unprepared for. Believing that it would be the most important thing to her, Lecompte vowed to continue her presidential campaign. In the weeks that followed, Lecompte became a surrogate candidate for his hostage wife. He made a striking picture, both heartbroken and defiant, attending campaign events with a life-size poster of Betancourt held in his arms. He pleaded with the media not to forget her and begged Colombians to cast their votes for her—as a symbolic gesture for her freedom and the freedom of Rojas and all of the hostages. But the apathy of a hardened country was apparent. A local journalist echoed a common Colombian attitude in an interview several weeks after her capture. “She took her own risks,” said El Tiempo sports editor Mauricio Bayona, “and she’s paying for that now.”
On May 26, 2002, Álvaro Uribe, a hard-liner who vowed to quash the FARC by any means necessary, won the presidential election. (Uribe, a former member of the Liberal party, had won the election as an independent candidate.) During the campaign, the FARC tried to assassinate Uribe by detonating a bomb in a bus near his motorcade. Uribe was unhurt, due to his armored vehicle, but three others were killed and thirteen injured. People across the country—especially those in areas with a large population—were invigorated by Uribe’s tough talk, and he won in a landslide, becoming the only Colombian president ever to get more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary election. On inauguration day, FARC guerrillas in Bogotá, attempting an attack on the presidential palace, missed their target and shelled an area to the south, killing nineteen homeless people and injuring sixty. Because Uribe’s father had been killed by FARC guerrillas in a 1983 kidnapping attempt, those who opposed his candidacy were afraid that the hard-liner’s term would be a violent four-year vendetta. Uribe was also known to have openly supported self-defense forces in Antioquia when he served as the department’s governor from 1995 to 1997. (Medellín, home to Pablo Escobar’s cartel and the site of terrible drug-related violence in the early 1990s, is the capital of Antioquia.) Between 1994 and 1997, Private Security and Vigilance Cooperatives, or CONVIVIR, its Spanish acronym, had been legal under a national program created by the Defense Ministry to use private citizens to combat guerrilla activity. But after reports of human rights abuses, the Colombian Constitutional Court stripped CONVIVIR of its ability to use military-grade weapons or to collect intelligence. While the official CONVIVIR units disappeared, many former members united with other vigilante gangs. The most prominent, the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, or ACCU (which later combined with other groups to form the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC), was led by Carlos Castaño, whose father had also been killed by FARC guerrillas. The groups (which all were referred to under the umbrella term paramilitaries) built up troops and amassed weapons and cash from kidnapping, extortion, and narco-trafficking and were implicated in brutal acts against civilians, guerrillas, union leaders, and left-leaning politicians. What failed to disappear with the CONVIVIR were the accusations that Uribe maintained strong ties to the paramilitaries and their leaders.
On the day the votes were tallied and Uribe supporters took their celebration to the streets by the thousands, Betancourt and Rojas remained together in the jungle, with no news of the outside world. They did not know that Lecompte had named Rojas as Betancourt’s vice presidential pick, and that Betancourt’s small but dedicated group of supporters and family members had been able to convince more than fifty thousand Colombians to cast their votes for the missing candidates—barely saving Betancourt’s fledgling political party.
10
Fallout
Three days after the February 13, 2003, kidnapping of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes, Colombian military rescue teams had completely lost the guerrillas’ trail and had no intelligence on which to base a rescue attempt. “What [the Colombian army] tried to do was to develop a wall of human flesh around an area so that no one could get through it. But if you look at the landscape, it’s mountainous, and it’s jungle terrain. And it’s possible to be fifteen feet from someone and not see them and not hear them. So it’s very, very difficult,” says Brig. Gen. Remo Butler, retired commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command South. The guerrillas knew they had barely managed to evade the army, and they continued to force the injured men to march for twenty-one days—first through the foothills of the Eastern Cordillera and then deep into the jungle. At times, Stansell was carried on a mule. An intestinal ailment and an injury to his ribs that he sustained in the crash made it impossible for him to walk. Other times, the three would be loaded into trucks and driven along makeshift jungle roads. On the last day of their grueling march, the group landed in a small clearing with a sixteen-by-twenty-foot structure. The sight of the rustic bungalow with three solid wood sides and a chain-link fence on the fourth side was incredibly discouraging. “As we walked up to the structure,” Stansell wrote, “I knew immediately that this marked the end of our days as kidnapped contract workers and began our life as prisoners.”
Their more than three weeks in captivity had been marked by many political conversations between the hostages and their captors. The guerrillas accused the Americans of imperialism, of butting into an internal conflict in ways that hurt poor campesinos, of being CIA agents, and of spying on their organization. Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes vehemently denied the charges. In their opinion, their captors came to those conclusions because the guerrillas were brainwashed, ignorant, and incapable of independent thought. What the hostages themselves believed was that without the billions of American dollars behind Plan Colombia, the drug traffickers and other criminals would continue to destabilize Colombia and the surrounding region. What the three men also believed, although there was no empirical data to support it, was that the work they were doing was impeding the flow of drugs from Colombia to the United States. And because they were working for the greatest country in the world, all three men were positive that the United States would take all military measures to free them. “By holding us, they [the FARC] were opening a Pandora’s box,” Howes told one of the high commanders they were introduced to on their march. “Instead of simply working indirectly against the FARC by interfering with their narco-trafficking, the U.S. could strike directly against them because they were holding Americans hostage.”
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Jo Rosano, mother of kidnapped American Marc Gonsalves, with her husband, Mike, and journalist Jorge Enrique Botero at an August 2004 demonstration in Bogotá with the families of Colombian hostages. The demonstrators were calling for the government to negotiate for an exchange of prisoners and not attempt a military rescue. Photo: Claudia Rubio.
But the U.S. government did not make any direct military moves to recover the hostages, nor were there any plans to do so. In fact, within days of the hostages’ arrival in what they would call “Monkey Camp” (because of the monkeys, which would fling feces and urinate on the humans below), Secretary of State Colin Powell publicly admitted in a March 13 press conference that the State Department had no clue where the hostages were and no idea which FARC front was holding them. Powell did not offer any commitment on the part of the United States to engage in a mission to rescue the men or to negotiate for their release. However, he did take the opportunity to reassert the United States’ goals in Colombia. “It’s sad that [the kidnapping] happened,” he said. “But it’s a risk that we must run to defeat these narco-traffickers and help President Uribe. I am impressed by his total commitment to ridding Colombia of narco-terrorists and narco-traffickers and all the others who are trying to destroy Colombian democracy.”
The families of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were also under the mistaken impression that U.S. forces would attempt to rescue their loved ones. A week after the crash, President Bush had given the okay to send an additional 150 U.S. troops to Colombia to help with rescue efforts, but the rules of engagement still prevented Colonel Keen from taking charge of any rescue attempt, and U.S. troops played only limited advisory roles. “There was a lot of effort from the Colombians,” says Keen. “They were doing the best they could do to try to locate the hostages.” Keen said they were aided by U.S. military intelligence. However, the only other California Microwave Systems airplane was grounded while the cause of the first crash was under investigation. The United States did have satellite imagery, but it was mostly useless for reconnaissance because of the thick forest canopy. “We were using intelligence assets. But again, you can’t take a pig’s ear and make a silk purse out of it,” says General Butler. Colombian troops were sent to interrogate local villagers and came up empty. “You must remember that many of the people in this part of Colombia were sympathizers or very friendly to the FARC. So we were not going to get an awful lot of information. Intelligence was very hard to come by.”
El Caguán became hot with firefights between guerrillas and the military troops looking for the Americans. Complaints were filed by campesinos, who accused Colombian soldiers of harassing them to gain information. The allegations fueled resentment within the military ranks. “Colombians in the armed forces believe the rescue of our guys [the Americans] is not their problem,” said one Colombian-American contractor who worked with Howes, Gonsalves, and Stansell. “They say, ‘We have many of our guys [Colombians] there to die for these Americans, and where are the Americans while we are risking our lives?’”
The fact that there were hundreds, possibly thousands, of Colombian troops trying to rescue the Americans terrified Ingrid Betancourt’s husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte. Lecompte knew it was possible that Betancourt was being held somewhere near the Americans, and he knew that an attempted military rescue would likely be a death sentence. If they weren’t killed by cross fire, they would be executed by direct order from Marulanda, who demanded that hostages be killed at the first sign of a rescue attempt. Lecompte feared it would be an excruciating end to the nightmare that he and Betancourt’s family had been living since her kidnapping a year earlier.
Initial reactions of shock and disbelief turned to anger for the families of Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves as the days wore on and very little information came from the U.S. government or from Northrop Grumman. Two weeks after the crash, the State Department wrote identical letters to the wives of Gonsalves and Howes and to Stansell’s fiancée, Malia Phillips. The letter to Shane Gonsalves read:
Dear Ms. Gonsalves:
On behalf of the U.S. Government, I would like to say how extremely sorry I am that your husband, Mark [sic] Gonsalves, was taken hostage in Colombia on February 13, 2003. I know this is a very stressful time for you and your family and I want you to know that our thoughts are with you. I promise we will do all we can to help you through this terrible time.…
The letter stated that the U.S. State Department would be the primary contact for the families until the men’s release, but at the end of the first page, the letter gave little room for hope:
The United States views hostage taking as an act of terrorism. The official policy of the United States Government is to make no concessions to terrorists holding Americans hostage. The U.S. Government will not pay ransom, exchange prisoners, or change its policies. Let me assure you that the United States Government will continue to press the Government of Colombia to do all it can to effect the immediate release of your husband.
With each passing day, Shane Gonsalves became more and more aggravated and felt more and more alone. She found photos on her husband’s laptop that made her suspicious of his fidelity. It seemed wrong to be angry with him while he was in such a terrible situation, but somehow, the anger almost helped her deal with the nightmare of everything that was going on. Northrop Grumman promised to send Gonsalves’s paycheck to Shane, which was a great relief. With his six-figure salary, at least money would not be an issue. Gonsalves had been on the job in Colombia for only four months, and although he’d been told that the work was dangerous, the money had been too good to pass up. He’d enlisted in the air force right after high school and had struggled for years on military pay while supporting his wife, their eight-year-old daughter, Destiney, and Shane’s two sons. His new salary had afforded him a small boat, a new motorcycle, and a large-screen television, but Gonsalves hated being away from his home in the Florida Keys. And according to Shane, the long separations had put a strain on their marriage.
In the stunning new Florida home where Thomas Howes had spent only twelve days before returning to Colombia to work, Peruvian-born Mariana Howes couldn’t bear to tell her two boys that their father had been kidnapped; instead, she told them that he was on an extended work trip. The painful charade would continue for two torturous years. And in a small single-story house in southern Georgia, Keith Stansell’s fiancée, Malia Phillips, first heard the news of the crash and was sure that Stansell was dead. Piecing together what little she’d been told, she tried to explain to Stansell’s fourteen-year-old daughter and his ten-year-old son from his first marriage (whom she had been taking care of while Stansell was working out of the country) what was happening.
Just days after the crash, Phillips would be confounded by an article in USA Today about a woman named Patricia Medina, who claimed to be Stansell’s girlfriend and to be pregnant with his twins. It was something that the Stansell family and Phillips did not want to believe was true. But it was true. Medina had been Stansell’s constant companion in Colombia for the past ten months. The thirty-year-old flight attendant had fallen in love with him on an Avianca flight. She was working that day, and Stansell was a business-class passenger. On their second date, Medina went back to Stansell’s apartment and, she says, “I never left until he was kidnapped.” Although she wasn’t sure of her future with the American, because Stansell had repeatedly told her that he did not want a commitment, Medina lived happily with Stansell in one of the most elegant condominiums in northern Bogotá. She knew that Stansell had been married previously and that after the divorce he had custody of his two children, which, he told her, was a huge responsibility. And even though Stansell revealed some details of his life to Medina—such as how he loved to hunt in Wyoming—she always felt that he did not like to talk about himself, and even less about his work. “He told me that he worked for Plan Colombia, but he never mentioned the name of the company where he worked. He only told me that he worked on the war against drugs,” she s
ays. When Stansell had meetings with his colleagues in the living room of the apartment, he made Medina stay in another room. Occasionally, she overheard the men talk about the inadequacy of the airplanes they used for work.
In November 2002, soon after Medina found out that she was pregnant with twins, she tried to muster the courage to tell Stansell. At the time, Medina remembers, Stansell was under a lot of stress because the CMS bosses were visiting Bogotá from the States. One night, as the two went to bed, she broke the news to him. “He turned out the light, and I said, ‘I have to tell you something. I’m pregnant, and they’re twins.’ He was quiet for what seemed like an eternity. Then he turned on the light and began to pace across the room without saying anything. He said, What were we going to do? How was he going to tell his children? That he could not change their whole lives. That he had always taught them to be responsible. Later, he told me that it didn’t matter, that my children would be taken care of but that he was not going to marry me. It was horrible. But in a certain way it also gave me peace, because he told me that the children would never lack for anything, not to worry about them, that he was a responsible person and that that was not going to change now.”
But when Stansell returned from the United States in January 2003, Medina noted a marked change in his attitude toward her. He lavished her with loving attention, frequently asking how the twins were doing. Given his seeming change of heart, Medina was looking forward to the birth and having Stansell by her side. But Stansell may not have planned on being with Medina for the twins’ birth. In early February, he flew back to Bogotá from Miami. Sitting next to him on the plane was a Colombian medical doctor who had treated the American contractors in Colombia. “Keith told me that he was about to quit working and leave Colombia,” the doctor recalls. “That he wanted to be with his family in the States. That this would be his last trip.” A week after the crash, Medina, four months pregnant, packed her things and left the apartment that she had shared with Stansell. Ralph Ponticelli, Stansell’s best friend, who also worked for CMS, organized a barbecue and took up a collection from the other CMS employees to try to help Medina with the costs of her delivery. Ponticelli had been so wonderful to Medina during her pregnancy that she had hoped he would be like an uncle to the twins.
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