Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  It was the middle of July, one of the rainiest months in the Amazon. At night, Botero and his guides suffered under heavy downpours. Each morning, the jungle was bathed by fog, which only lifted at midday, when humidity took hold of everything. The guerrillas told Botero that they preferred the apocalyptic rains to the dry months, when water was scarce and the enemy was freer to move about. But the season brought many difficulties as well, they said. Moving through the jungle was more difficult, clothing never dried, illnesses increased, and food got wet and rotted. The hours standing guard in the rain seemed eternal, and a collective melancholy took root in the rustic housings that the guerrillas continued constructing and dismantling throughout their nomadic travels.

  Botero appreciated that his guides helped carry his gear, but he cursed them when they dropped his pack and broke his provision of J&B scotch. As they continued past village after village, each more isolated and impoverished than the last, Botero felt like a visitor to a war that interested no one. Many Colombians, especially those from the cities, seemed accustomed and resigned to listen, read, and watch the news of the deaths, explosions, and pain and suffering of thousands of families in the remote areas where the battles occurred. Even as four million internally displaced people arrived in Bogotá and other big cities to escape the endless violence in desperately poor settlements, life seemed to proceed normally. News of the war was mixed with that of corruption scandals and soccer goals and beauty queens, and somehow became a part of everyday life. Many times, Botero felt that people watched the news of the dead, wounded, and displaced as if it were one more soap opera of the many that aired on Colombian television. It was a world that Botero found difficult to explain when talking with colleagues or with politicians from other countries. The only reason he could think of as to why there was so much indifference toward his country’s suffering was that perhaps people in other countries had become bored hearing the same news from Colombia: murders, bombs, kidnappings, drug traffickers, guerrillas, paramilitaries.

  In the afternoon of the fifteenth day of his trip, Botero sat on the edge of a makeshift bed of planks, checking his equipment and writing in his notebook, when a young guerrilla named Nancy suddenly appeared. At first, Botero did not hear the great news that she brought because her fresh scent and wide, flirtatious smile overwhelmed him. “You have been given permission to interview the gringos,” she told him.

  It had been five months since the three Americans had been kidnapped, and during their captivity, they had not spoken to anyone other than their captors. While many of the other political hostages were kept together in a large prison camp, the extremely valuable nature of the Americans caused the guerrillas to keep them far away from all other captives. They had no access to radio broadcasts or newspapers, and they were desperate to find out what was going on in the outside world, especially what was being done on their behalf. At New Camp, where the three men slept in separate quarters, they were still forbidden to speak to one another, but despite the unbearable loneliness, the men had found ways to cope. Thomas Howes used pages from his notebook to make a full deck of cards, but because he was still not allowed to speak to anyone, the only game he played was solitaire. Marc Gonsalves drew a picture of his house, the layout of each room, in a small notebook that the guerrillas had given him. Every morning, he would open his journal to page 13 and say “good morning” to his family.

  Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves still had no idea what their future held, but there seemed to be very little urgency for the guerrillas to do anything with them. Howes, whose Spanish was better than that of the others, asked a guard what they were being held for and what the possibility was for their release. He didn’t quite understand the soldier’s answer, but he gleaned that the three of them were being offered as an exchange for FARC prisoners in Colombian jails. To the three men, it actually seemed promising. Stansell was a former marine and considered himself an intensely patriotic American. He was sure that the United States was doing everything it could to ensure their release. One day in mid-July, the captors came to the men and gave them soap, razors, toothpaste, and toothbrushes and told them they would be moving out. They traveled on motorized aluminum canoes down shallow rivers full of debris. But being out of the jungle was a welcome relief. “With blue sky above us, and even bluer skies on the horizon, the boat trip felt a little bit like a vacation,” wrote Stansell. Because they were traveling by day—which was unusual, since mostly they had been moved during the night—the men were hopeful that the FARC had made a deal with the Colombian government and they were going to be released. On July 23, the guerrillas told the Americans that the following day they would be interviewed by an international journalist—that the world would be able to see just how decent the FARC were. Then they asked the men for their clothing sizes in order to “look good for your visitors.” All three received haircuts and were given the chance to bathe in clean water for the first time. The three began to speculate wildly on who might be coming. Stansell thought that maybe it would be Christiane Amanpour, the venerable CNN reporter, who, he knew, was famous for getting into difficult spots and covering conflict zones. Stansell also thought that the interview was for proof of life, probably demanded by someone in Washington, D.C., who was working on their release. As they mulled over the possibilities, the men began to wonder whom else they might meet besides the journalist. Would they see the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson? Someone from the State Department or from Northrop Grumman? Possibly a Colombian minister of justice or minister of the interior? Their minds raced as the guerrillas brought them to a small camp with a wooden structure, where they were told they would spend the night.

  Nearby in the jungle, Botero slept restlessly. His body ached from the many days on the trail, and he was nervous about the interview and his poor English. He was told he would have a translator, a guerrilla who spoke English, but he never fully trusted anyone to translate his interviews. When the clock struck 4:00 a.m., a guerrilla shone a flashlight into his face and told him to get up. With two guerrillas in front and two guerrillas behind him, Botero was guided through the dark. “When the sun rose, we arrived at a kind of oasis, where the vegetation was not as thick and an abundant spring formed a pool surrounded by delicate white sand,” Botero recalls. After breakfast, around 10:00 a.m., Mono Jojoy arrived in the camp. Botero, Mono Jojoy, and several other guerrillas climbed a small hill. On the hill’s summit was a little cabin with two rooms and a small porch. With each footstep, Botero felt the growing tension as he moved toward the structure. Botero was filming as he stepped onto the porch, ready to record the first moment he would meet the Americans.

  Gonsalves, Howes, and Stansell seemed surprised and nervous when they were introduced to Mono Jojoy, whom they had met only once before, in the initial weeks of their captivity. Mono Jojoy then introduced them to a thin Colombian journalist wearing a backward baseball cap that read WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA, and he told the hostages that they would be able to record messages to their families. The hostages were immediately deflated. Botero was obviously a Colombian, not the international journalist they had been promised. He had no production crew with him, no obvious credentials, only two small cameras and a backpack. They were even more stunned by Botero’s first words, which he directed to Gonsalves. “Marc,” Botero said in a sentence he had memorized in English, “I have a message from your mother.”

  “I wasn’t sure what to expect from the proof of life, but when Botero uttered those words, I realized just how hard this was going to be,” recalls Gonsalves. “After telling me that he had a message from my mother, Botero immediately turned his back on me and stepped to the other side of the table. I was stunned by what he had said, and I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t given me the message. The last thing I expected out of the POL [proof of life] was to hear from anyone in my family.”

  Botero filmed as Mono Jojoy sat at a long table across from the hostages and began to speak. A European-looking female guerril
la, who spoke perfect English with an accent that the hostages couldn’t place, translated for the commander. Mono Jojoy accused the three of being spies for the U.S. government and of violating the sovereign airspace of the FARC. He informed the men that they were being held as prisoners of war until there was a prisoner exchange, what he called a “humanitarian exchange.” When Stansell was given a chance to speak, he asked Mono Jojoy, “If Colombian president Uribe refuses to negotiate, if he doesn’t go along with the idea of a prisoner exchange, then we could be here for five or ten years?” Mono Jojoy seemed certain that an exchange would take place eventually. “One day these negotiations will be here, but we don’t know when.” After they met with Mono Jojoy, the men walked out to the porch and were joined by the translator. Gonsalves took the opportunity to ask a question that they all were desperate to know the answer to: “Do you think we’re going to live through this?” The young woman replied that it would depend on what the Colombian government did. At that moment, she told them, the army was training troops to rescue the political hostages. “Rescue comes,” she said icily, “we kill everybody.”

  When the interview with Botero began, the Americans were instantly suspicious. “We didn’t know Botero at all, but the fact that he was allowed into the FARC camp and his chummy demeanor didn’t sit well with us,” wrote Stansell. “We knew in some ways we were being used by him,” wrote Gonsalves, “but we also wanted to let our families know that we were okay—even if he wasn’t from the States or from CNN.” Botero had not been given any restrictions on what he could ask the Americans, and he had more than a dozen questions that he wanted all three of them to have a chance to answer. For two hours, he filmed as the men were questioned about what they were doing in Colombia, what they thought of the country, and what their opinion was of the war on drugs. With the camera lens fogging up in the humidity, Botero turned it off while the guerrillas turned on a fan, which he hoped would help fix the problem. During the break, Botero gave the men the newspapers he’d brought with him and two printed Internet pages of articles about the murder of Tommy Janis and Sgt. Luis Alcides Cruz and the crash that had killed Ralph Ponticelli, Butch Oliver, and Tommy Schmidt. The news was too much for Howes to bear. “Botero must have planned all these revelations in order to elicit some emotion from us, and he succeeded,” wrote Gonsalves. “Tom was so upset about Ralph’s death that he grabbed the copy of the day’s Miami Herald they had intended to use in the [proof of life] to shield his face from the camera.” (Gonsalves erroneously assumed that the newspaper Botero had brought for them to read was a tool the captors would use to prove the date of the video.) Gonsalves, who was also in tears, was incensed that Botero had turned the camera on again.

  The men were also stunned when they read that their SOUTHCOM Reconnaissance Systems contract had been transferred by Northrop Grumman to a company called CIAO, and they were very worried that Northrop Grumman had abandoned them and their families. They also had to deal with the fact that the guerrillas thought they all worked for the CIA. “None of us had ever heard of [CIAO], but we were incredulous that someone who was contracted to do intelligence operations would call themselves CIAO,” wrote Gonsalves. When Botero asked the men to comment on an article he’d brought with him about the war on drugs, Gonsalves spoke somberly to the camera: “There is a toll here,” he said. “We’re victims of the toll of the drug war in Colombia. There’s other ways I think that are safer that we can tighten up our border control, educate U.S. citizens because there’s a demand for this cocaine product, and if we can kill the demand, then we won’t have a problem anymore.”

  Gonsalves wrote that when Botero played the message from his mother, “I was determined not to become a part of Botero’s propaganda scheme. Despite how I was feeling about hearing a voice from home, I told myself I wasn’t going to cry when I watched the message. I hated that this journalist was manipulating us, but I tried to remember something Keith had said to us earlier, before we’d even gone on camera. We knew that our families might see this video, and we did our best to put a positive spin on everything. At every opportunity, we told them that we were well; we were healthy; we were being treated humanely. None of it was true. But it was what we needed to tell our families.” Howes was also suspicious of Botero’s motives, but he desperately hoped the proofs of life would make it to his family. “Botero had told us that two journalists in Los Angeles were working to track down our families so that they could be provided with our messages,” Howes wrote, “but that wasn’t the most precise answer to our questions about how the video would be used. Maybe they wanted to do the proof of life just to calm us all down, to make us think that our release was near. We all knew that happy prisoners were easier to control.”

  It took eleven days for Botero to get out of the jungle and back to Bogotá with his videotapes. He was completely unaware of the disdain that the Americans had for him and felt relieved that they had appeared to be in good physical condition. In addition to Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes, he’d interviewed many of the other political prisoners in a camp that was several days’ travel from where the Americans were being held. He knew that the families of those hostages would be ecstatic to see that their loved ones were alive. Whenever Botero had gone to the jungle and emerged with videos of hostages, he always made sure that families got to see the messages first, before they were ever released to the media. This way, they would have time to deal peacefully with the pain and absorb the weight of their loved ones’ messages. Sometimes Botero would watch the videos with them. Sometimes he preferred to give the tapes to the families to avoid having to watch the suffering. The families always wanted to know more: “How are they really doing? What else did they say? Are they sick or well? What are they eating? How are they being treated?” For the families of the Colombian hostages, Botero’s videos were often their only ray of hope after years of silence.

  After making sure the families of Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were given the opportunity to see the messages that the men had recorded, Botero agreed to give the video to the U.S. government. Facilitating the handover was Gary Noesner, who invited his former colleague FBI agent Chris Voss, a State Department counterterrorism official working on the case, and Northrop Grumman’s vice president, Lloyd Carpenter, who was deeply concerned for the men’s welfare, to view the proofs of life. While the agents on the case were glad to have the information and to see that the men were alive, there was little action they could take, given the Bush administration’s refusal to engage the guerrillas in any way beyond backing what Uribe decided to do.

  While Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes would be terrified for the rest of their captivity of being executed during a rescue attempt and bristle whenever they heard the sound of helicopters, they had learned one positive piece of news in the days before the proofs of life. “The news leaked out to us that Colin Powell, the God-bless-him-four-star-general secretary of state of the United States of America, had just been in Colombia on our behalf. We were completely jacked up to hear that,” wrote Stansell. It was a hope that the Americans would continue to hold on to throughout their captivity. However, Powell had not been in Colombia since the men’s capture. A month earlier, he’d traveled to Santiago, Chile, to garner support for the U.S. government’s policy against Cuba for its “appalling repression of human rights and civil liberties.” About Colombia, Powell praised “Uribe’s efforts in Colombia to bring peace and security to that troubled country which is under assault from narco-traffickers and terrorists.” But about Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes, the United States secretary of state was silent.

  14

  Capture and Extradition

  For a few days in October 2003, after Botero’s footage of the three American hostages appeared in the United States on CBS’s 60 Minutes II, the case was prominent news. At the time, Patricia Medina was working full-time to support her and Stansell’s four-month-old twins and living with her mother, sister, and brother, who helped care for the babies. North
rop Grumman and Stansell’s family in the United States did not recognize the twins as Stansell’s, and therefore, Medina received no financial support. To try to get some kind of help, Medina went to the U.S. Embassy, where agents informed her that she couldn’t file any type of paperwork on the boys until she could prove paternity—and to prove paternity, she would need the father’s DNA. (Years later, when she learned that the embassy had a sample of Stansell’s DNA from his older children, Medina was told that it could not be released to her because she was not Stansell’s next of kin.) As difficult as things had been for Medina, she still hung on to the hope that Stansell would be released, and that he would want to have a relationship with her sons. So when Medina heard that there was proof that Stansell was alive, she felt immensely relieved. But her relief was short-lived. Stansell’s message to the world would be like a knife to her heart:

  I one hundred percent miss my family. I have … I’m kind of a hard-ass, I apologize. But in my life the two things that really hit me in my heart are my children and my fiancée. And when I feel like sometimes not going on, I think in my mind of my 11-year-old son—and I’m sorry, Kyle, for missing your birthday—and my 14-year-old daughter, Lauren, and my fiancée, Malia. What would they want me to do? And I think most what they would want me to do is to come home. My mother died when I was 14, and she left myself and my brother and my father. And if I die now, the exact same thing is happening to my children, and that’s a very hard weight for me to carry. So what I miss most is my immediate family, and my father and my brother, I love them.