Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  For Medina, the proof-of-life video that blasted across Colombian and U.S. television was the painful explanation of why Stansell had never wanted a commitment with her—he had a fiancée in the United States. The fact that he didn’t even mention her or their two boys in the video was unbearable as well. “Hearing him speak in this video, I felt like it was another Keith. It was not the same man that I lived with for more than ten months,” she says. Still, Medina could not give up hope that things would be different when Stansell returned. And even though Stansell said in the footage that he did not have access to a radio, she began to send messages through a radio program set up specifically to broadcast to hostages, Las Voces del Secuestro (The Voices of Kidnapping), giving Stansell updates on her life and the life of their twins, never mentioning her heartbreak over his other life.

  Ecuadorian policemen guard FARC commander Simón Trinidad the day after his January 2, 2004, capture in Quito, Ecuador. Photo: Jorge Vinueza/AFP/Getty Images.

  In addition to Stansell’s message to his family in the United States, he also made an impassioned plea to the U.S. government, which aired in the 60 Minutes II segment:

  I love the U.S. I think it’s the greatest country in the world, and I’m a proud American. And if I die here, I die here. I believe that we have the force to come kill everybody that’s holding us, but in that rescue attempt, we’re going to die also. I know some people don’t like me to say that, that’s probably not what they want to hear. But please kids, anybody here, listen to your … to the words out of my mouth. A rescue attempt for us is very serious. This isn’t a movie, and I do not believe we will live. I pray for a diplomatic solution.

  The Bush administration responded to the media coverage of the hostages by offering a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to the rescue and the safe return of the men. There was no mention of the possibility of negotiating for their freedom. In Colombia, a contractor who tried dialing the number to see if it was a legitimate offer says that there was no answer. The following week, a State Department spokesman announced that the “campaign” for the reward was still being developed. The mood of those working out of the American embassy in Colombia was somber. According to a Colombian-American contractor who worked closely with the embassy as well as with many of the U.S. contractors, “If you ask any pilot, any contractor, even anyone in the military, ‘Do you think the U.S. would do anything different to rescue you?’ the answer is no. Before this crash, they totally thought that the U.S. would come get them. Now, no one does.”

  With the war in Iraq filling the airwaves, the plight of the American hostages quickly disappeared from the news and no further word came from the Bush administration on the situation. So in December 2003, Manuel Marulanda met with some of his commanders, desperate for a way to jump-start the faltering hostage negotiations. Initially, the FARC Secretariat had been sure that the American government wouldn’t let their “spies” rot in the Colombian jungle. Their thought was that President Álvaro Uribe followed President Bush like a dog. The United States would want its men out, and Bush would command Uribe to make an exchange of prisoners. Not only did this strategy fall flat, but the only solution the U.S. government and Uribe continued to pursue was a military rescue by Colombian troops. This was a constant threat and a potentially deadly maneuver for both sides. The miracle gift of the “gringos who fell from the sky” was not the ultimate catalyst for the exchange that Marulanda had hoped for.

  With the case totally stymied, Gary Noesner kept trying to get a meeting with Jorge Enrique Botero, who was still the only civilian who had seen the hostages in captivity. “We keep trying to open a humanitarian link,” Noesner said in January 2004, “but nothing is working. Plus, the FARC leadership is all in hiding now based on the recent successful military operations against them.” But for Botero, the story had also grown completely cold. The guerrillas seemed uninterested in letting him anywhere near the hostages, and all of the sources who had connected him to the FARC had disappeared.

  As time wore on, there was still almost no media coverage. The occasional comments from lawmakers in Washington got little press and did almost nothing to move the case along. In early 2004, Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat overseeing appropriations for U.S. activities in Colombia, commented, “It is very disheartening that we appear to be no closer to seeing the release of these American captives captured more than a year ago.… Also troubling is that no one has been held accountable, nor have adequate changes been made in a poorly conceived program with lax oversight. Using contractors as ‘private soldiers’ in combat zones, without the backup we would provide our armed forces, is fraught with dangers.” Five months later, in June 2004, Noesner would encapsulate the continuing lack of progress:

  There is absolutely nothing happening on the case. There has been no confirmed proof of life since Botero’s videotape came out—zip. It’s been very frustrating for the families but they seem to be holding on. The ongoing military campaign has the FARC on the run and showing little interest in talking about our three guys. As far as we know, they are alive and well, but nothing positive has been received despite our continual efforts to obtain verification of same. Talks of the humanitarian exchange ebb and flow, but nothing is certain as to whether or not that has any realistic chance of moving forward. Both sides, the Government and FARC, remain far apart on the issue. Northrop Grumman’s Crisis Management Team continues to meet weekly with [Control Risks] involvement. They continue to support the families both financially and morally, but aren’t able to give them what they want most, the safe release of their loved ones. The U.S. Government’s attention is completely Iraq focused at the moment and Colombia has fallen off their radar screen. I see no attempts to explore other options by the government.

  On the FARC side, there was great frustration as well. To try to push for movement toward negotiations, at the end of 2003, Secretariat member Raúl Reyes called upon Simón Trinidad—who during the years in the DMZ had earned himself a trusted place in the top FARC ranks—and ordered him to neighboring Ecuador. Trinidad was told to contact officials from the United Nations and European countries whom he’d met during the dialogues between the Colombian government and the FARC. His specific task was to contact James LeMoyne, a former El Salvador bureau chief for The New York Times who had been a United Nations special advisor to the 2001 talks. Trinidad was also instructed to make contact with Fabrice Delloye, the French ex-husband of Ingrid Betancourt. Delloye had been very active in trying to persuade the French government to help secure Betancourt’s release and was now working for the French government in Ecuador.

  For Trinidad, the chance to be actively involved in some high-level negotiations once again was likely a welcome relief from the nearly two years he’d spent in the Amazon since the end of the demilitarized zone (some would say that Reyes hated Trinidad for upstaging him during the dialogues and had sent him to Ecuador to get him out of the picture). Jorge Enrique Botero had last seen Trinidad in February 2002, the day the peace dialogues collapsed and Pastrana called the military into El Caguán. “That morning, I was in a town called La Tunia and Trinidad passed through, driving a truck crowded with guerrillas. At his side, as always, was Lucero. I asked Trinidad what the future would hold. What was in store for him and for the FARC?” He told Botero, “This area has historically been ours and will continue to be ours, with or without a DMZ.” The guerrillas’ plan, explained Trinidad, was to retreat deep into the jungle, where the FARC had managed to create another world with roads, camps, trenches, supply routes, escape routes, hospitals, radio stations, training camps, and political training schools.

  “After that, the jungle swallowed Trinidad,” says Botero. “When I traveled in 2003 to interview the three gringos, I passed through several camps. In all of them, I asked about Simón, but nobody knew anything, or perhaps they were unwilling to say anything.” Later, Botero would learn that Trinidad had been assigned to teach basic politics to new recruits. �
��My opinion is that it was a particularly desperate time for Trinidad, that the commander experienced something like fading celebrity. There was no longer a demilitarized zone. There were no cameras. He no longer appeared in the newspapers. He could no longer meet his old friends. In addition, he had become trapped in the jungle at the south of the country, unable to return to his Atlantic coast region and his post as second in command of the Forty-first Front. So teaching basic politics to dozens of young people who entered the FARC would not have been very attractive to him.”

  In late December, Trinidad and Lucero traveled to Ecuador and began to work on getting fake passports, in the hope that they could travel to a third country, possibly France, where Trinidad could represent the FARC in hostage negotiations. The couple was put up in the house of a family that worked for the FARC. To the guerrilla commander, the house seemed unsafe from the beginning. “Simón told me, ‘If we come out of here alive, it will be a miracle,’” says Lucero. Shortly after they arrived, the couple’s eleven-year-old daughter, Alix Farela, joined them from her grandmother’s house. Trinidad and Lucero spent Christmas with their daughter, enjoying Quito. Perhaps it was the season, or being in a peaceful country, or the joy of being together as a family that made the two seasoned guerrilla fighters drop their guard. They had no idea that nearly every minute they were being watched. A Colombian secret police command had been dispatched to Quito, having been alerted to the presence of an important FARC commander in the Ecuadorian capital.

  According to Lucero, on the evening of December 29, she and her daughter left the house to buy some bread for the following day. At the last minute, Trinidad decided to accompany them. The three were walking casually, when dozens of heavily armed men ambushed the family. They threw Trinidad up against a wall, handcuffed him, and pushed him into a waiting car. Lucero and the child were forced into another vehicle. Minutes later, they were in an Ecuadorian military garrison, Trinidad in one cell and his wife and child in an adjoining one. “It was a hellish night,” says Lucero. “They interrogated us the whole time. Sometimes, someone friendly came and told me that if I collaborated with them, they could help us. Then ten minutes later, very aggressive men came. They threatened us and said that they could kill us and no one would ever know, that they were going to torture us so that we would talk.” Lucero’s daughter began to scream and howl uncontrollably. “I went near her to calm her, but she spoke into my ear to calm me down. She said that she did all of this so that they wouldn’t hurt her father.” (A Colombian police commander would later offer a conflicting story of Trinidad’s capture to Reuters, saying that Trinidad was captured alone while visiting a health clinic. Lucero adamantly denies the report.)

  In Trinidad’s holding cell, the guerrilla commander told his interrogators that he and his family were in possession of false identity documents, and he immediately asked that they charge him with the crime of having counterfeit papers. Trinidad knew that the sentence for the offense was very light and that he would be released on bond. He also asked the Ecuadorian authorities for political asylum, but the Colombian government was calling for his immediate extradition. In the morning, police guards took Trinidad from his cell and allowed him to briefly say good-bye to his family. The three hugged, and he repeated to Lucero various times that she would have to continue in the fight that they both so believed in. “You already know what you have to do,” he told her.

  Trinidad was flown to Bogotá, while Lucero and their daughter were set free. “I was released because they wanted to present the image that they had captured a dangerous terrorist, and he couldn’t be seen on television with his wife and child,” Lucero says. The Colombian television stations interrupted their regular broadcasts to fill the screen with special news updates: The image of Trinidad handcuffed, guarded up to his ears by dozens of armed police, went around the world. In the Casa de Nariño, the presidential palace in Bogotá, Álvaro Uribe’s first substantial victory in his war against the FARC was celebrated exuberantly. Trinidad was the highest-ranking guerrilla ever captured.

  As he was transported from the helicopter and taken by car to Cómbita prison outside of Bogotá, Simón Trinidad cheered to the television cameras for Simón Bolívar and for FARC commander in chief Manuel Marulanda. After he was placed in solitary confinement, his only friendly visitors were his lawyer and, once, his mother. (After her visit, his mother received death threats from sources she believed to be close to the government, so she decided to leave the country.) Trinidad did have other “visitors”: a pale parade of U.S. government agents passed through his cell. Some of the gringos acted friendly; some were threatening. All of them asked him to collaborate, to give them information about the FARC, and to tell them where the American hostages were being held. If Trinidad knew, he did not tell them. (Eight months earlier, on April 27, 2003, the FARC had released a communiqué, in which it named Trinidad as a FARC representative to negotiate for the Americans and other political prisoners. The memo put Trinidad high on the radar of U.S. intelligence.)

  Shortly after his capture, the call to extradite Trinidad to the United States came as a joint effort by the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department. Whether his extradition would hurt the situation of the American hostages “was toiled over on an interagency basis, a lot,” said a State Department counterterrorism official who was involved in the case. “The bottom line was: Will we further endanger the hostages beyond the danger they’re in now by bringing Trinidad up here and trying him? There was some spirited conversation, but it was decided that, based on the FARC’s previous activities, we could [extradite Trinidad] without endangering the hostages. Anyway, the likelihood of them ever letting these guys out, we knew, was between zero and zero point one percent.” The official said that he and his counterterrorism colleagues believed that the FARC were already angry with the United States for helping fund the Colombian army, which was bombing the guerrilla camps. “It’s probably not much of a stretch to say that indicting one guy [Simón Trinidad] who’s been out of circulation for a while is not going to further tick them off.”

  On December 31, 2004, Trinidad’s nightmare of being exiled from his country became a reality. From the window of a U.S. government Gulfstream jet, as the clock struck midnight and the new year began, the guerrilla commander gazed out at the lights of Bogotá. Alejandro Barbeito was one of the FBI agents on board the plane. He had been on the hostage case since the beginning, when he collected Tommy Janis’s body from the crash site. On the airplane, Trinidad talked openly with Barbeito about his life in the FARC and his reasons for traveling to Ecuador. He also told Barbeito that he did not believe in the policy of kidnapping because it was difficult and costly to the guerrillas. He also tried to give Barbeito advice on dealing with the hostage situation. “He said, ‘Why doesn’t the U.S. government establish official contact with the FARC?’” says Barbeito. “And I explained to him that, no, I was not allowed to do that because the FARC is a designated terrorist organization. And then that’s when he suggested that we do things—and he said, ‘por debajo de la mesa’—‘under the table,’ which means, unofficially.” Barbeito asked Trinidad if he could be of any assistance in that regard. “I was hoping that he would cooperate with us, given his status in the FARC and his being named as the FARC negotiator involving our three hostages.”

  One month after Trinidad’s celebrated arrest, in February 2004, another FARC member would become an actor in the international hostage drama. While traveling to a meeting with other FARC commanders, Sonia (the commander who controlled the river outpost Peñas Coloradas) and two fellow guerrillas, Juancho and Pantera, decided to spend the night at her brother’s farm. There wasn’t even the slightest indication of Colombian military in the zone, so they decided that no one needed to stand guard. Sonia went to bed in her underwear, left her weapon tossed on the floor, and fell into a deep sleep. Her comrades slept in various areas of the house. About three in the morning, a terrible roar reverberated through the
house. Sonia knew immediately that it was a helicopter. She peeked through a crack in the curtain at enormous rotors practically grazing the house. Soldiers descended from a rope ladder like spiders. Sonia dressed in an instant and grabbed her weapon, her radio, and a book full of details of her business dealings in Peñas Coloradas. In complete darkness, the three guerrillas moved like shadows, trying to find an escape route. If they were able to head for the mountains, Sonia knew, they could escape. But their only exit was blocked by a chicken coop, so the three hid in the bathroom and made a pact to escape or die. Sonia quickly shoved her book into a space in the ceiling. As the soldiers entered the house, Sonia whispered that they should fire shots as they exited and search for a way to escape. When the commandos were less than three feet away, Juancho jumped out, with his pistol ready to fire, but before he could, he was hit by a direct shot to his face and fell dead. The tip of Sonia’s rifle reflected a bit of light and a soldier pushed his hand into the bathroom and grabbed the AK-47 by the barrel.

  “He told me to let go of it,” Sonia says. “They threw me down on the floor and a soldier put his foot on my neck.” When she saw them stepping on her comrade Pantera, who had been taken down and handcuffed, she protested. “I told them, ‘You already have him under control. Take your foot off his neck.’” Sonia prayed that the soldiers tearing the house apart would not find the book she’d hidden in the bathroom ceiling, which would implicate her and many other FARC members. After searching the house for two hours, the commandos loaded Sonia, Pantera, and Juancho’s corpse into the helicopter. Then they grabbed Sonia’s brother and sister-in-law, the farm’s cook and her two-month-old baby, and a sick woman who had been staying in the house and forced them into the helicopter as well. They also confiscated several kilos of cocaine paste and 27 million pesos (approximately ten thousand dollars) that belonged to Sonia’s brother, a midlevel drug runner. The group arrived at the military base in Larandia blindfolded and handcuffed and then were taken to a large office where, she says, “some agents harassed us with obscene gestures with their fingers. They called me by my name, and they were celebrating the success of their operation, which included the infiltration of satellite telephones into our ranks.”