Sonia was then transferred to the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá for further questioning, specifically about the three kidnapped Americans: Where were they being held? Who had them? Who kidnapped them? But Sonia had had nothing to do with the kidnapping and could tell them nothing. The U.S. agents also drilled her about the guerrilla organization and asked her for the names of the FARC Secretariat. “They told me that I should collaborate, should talk. They offered to bring my child and family to the United States in exchange for providing information. Otherwise, I would be extradited, locked in a dark room, and I would have to spend many years without seeing my family. They tried to pressure me by saying that the Secretariat was going to have me killed because I knew so much.” Sonia was transferred to a women’s prison in Bogotá. The guards at the Buen Pastor jail had rarely seen a prisoner like her; she acted almost like a rabid animal when they approached her cell. After a brief trial, a judge sentenced Sonia to fifty-six months in prison. The conviction was for “rebellion.” What was much worse than the relatively light sentence was that Sonia awaited extradition to the United States on charges of narco-trafficking. “The biggest narco-traffickers are strolling around the streets, sitting in the Congress of the Colombian Republic and in high positions of power,” Sonia told a reporter after hearing of her pending extradition. “My only crime is to have rebelled against the violent, anti-democratic, and inhumane State.”
After several months in solitary confinement, she was abruptly taken from her cell. “When they woke me up, it was barely dawn. They told me to pack some clothes and they put me into a military vehicle. The guard who took me said, ‘This is for your security, mamita.’” When they forced her onto an airplane, Sonia had no idea where they were taking her. But on the trip, she looked out the window and saw a large expanse of deep blue water, which she assumed was the ocean. The plane landed after an hour, and Sonia recognized she was at the Juanchaco military base on Colombia’s Pacific coast. She’d seen the area on television in 1994 when the then president, César Gaviria, had invited U.S. forces to build a school for antinarcotics training on the military base without seeking the approval of the Colombian Congress. The move had caused a public outcry, and the court ruled that allowing American troops to enter Colombia without congressional approval was unconstitutional. An angry Gaviria told the media, “I am surprised that Colombians demand more international cooperation in the fight against drugs and then criticize such operations.” At the same time, American and Colombian officials admitted only that the work on the base was an “army exercise,” and denied that the operation involved antinarcotics activities.
From Juanchaco, Sonia was forced into a helicopter and delivered to what she believes was a U.S. Navy frigate. “On the frigate, I spent more than twenty horrible days, vomiting everything I ate, with an eternal dizziness.” But there was something that gave the untraveled guerrilla a sizable amount of pride as well. Two years later, from her jail cell in Washington, D.C., she would brag to Jorge Enrique Botero, “I had the good fortune to see the ocean. What do you think of that, journalist?”
At Control Risks, just a few miles from the D.C. Jail, Gary Noesner was incensed by the charade that had brought Trinidad to the United States, and he felt that his former colleagues at the FBI were totally mishandling the case. “The strategic incompetence of extraditing Trinidad in the middle of what was going on with the Americans ran smack in the face of all these government people who stand in front of the families and say, ‘The freedom of your guys is the most important thing in the world to us.’ That was pure crap, and their actions certainly didn’t support their words.” Noesner believed that Trinidad’s extradition would be a nail in the coffin for the three Americans. Months before, he’d helped Northrop Grumman craft a letter to the Department of Justice, begging that they not make such a grave mistake. Noesner believed that the FARC would demand Trinidad’s return in exchange for the Americans, and he was sure that the U.S. government would never let that happen. Two months after Trinidad landed on U.S. soil, Sonia was also in the D.C. Jail, and Noesner’s prediction had come true. The FARC demanded that, as a condition to release the “exchangeables” (which included Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes), all incarcerated FARC members must be freed, including Sonia and Trinidad. It was all becoming an inconceivable mess.
FBI negotiator Chris Voss would disagree with his former mentor about extraditing Trinidad. “That was one of the things that I actually thought was a smart move. Your adversary has to respect you. The FARC is not going to deal with anyone who they think is weak,” he says. After nearly two years had passed, Voss was not afraid that the FARC would kill the Americans, because they considered them to be so valuable. However, he was still gravely concerned for their safety. “We completely changed our threat assessment to include all peril that they faced. And the real threat to these guys was from disease and dying in the jungle. And absent the change in the [U.S.] government’s approach, the risk that these guys would end up dying in the jungle was very high.”
While the former FBI colleagues did not see eye-to-eye on the subject of Trinidad, Voss completely agreed with Noesner’s take on the FARC as “an organization that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Days prior to Trinidad’s scheduled departure for the United States, Álvaro Uribe had offered to cancel his extradition if the three Americans were released, but the FARC did nothing. “Imagine the world’s response if the FARC’s response to the extradition and prosecution of Trinidad and Sonia was to hold a very public humanitarian, spontaneous, unconditional release of one of the American hostages,” Voss says. “How much pressure would there have been? It would have embarrassed the U.S. government and the Colombian government. Nobody would have known what to do with that.” However, it would be another two years after Trinidad’s extradition before the guerrillas would consider the idea of releasing one of the hostages in the hope of just the reaction that Voss was predicting.
15
The Jungle
By mid-2004, a year had passed since Botero’s interview with the three Americans, and the fact that they were still stuck in the jungle along with forty-seven other political prisoners continued to haunt him. Many times he awoke terrified and sweating, recalling the beige shawl that captive congresswoman Consuelo González de Perdomo had given him to take to her daughters; the desperate letters from Gloria Polanco, a woman who had been kidnapped with her two teenage sons and then separated from them while in captivity; the perpetual smile of Alan Jara, the former governor of Meta, who taught Russian and English to his companions in captivity. “The images of Marc, Keith, and Tom appeared to me at all hours of the day, becoming a kind of torture. Almost no one was interested in the case of the hostages. My stories were broadcast on television and radio and published in newspapers or magazines. But the following day, other news buried them and everything returned as it was before: into oblivion.”
The only interest in the hostage situation came from Canada and several European countries, including France, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands, where private citizens formed Ingrid Betancourt support committees and various lawmakers made public calls for the FARC to release the hostages. Support came most strongly from the French government and President Jacques Chirac, who, because of a groundswell of public pressure to free Betancourt, pushed Uribe’s government to make an exchange happen. Chirac even offered to allow FARC guerrillas released from prison to emigrate to France. Uribe denied Chirac’s requests, and diplomatic ties between France and Colombia were severely strained when French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin tried to coordinate the release of Betancourt without the authorization of the Colombian government.
Jorge Enrique Botero reporting on the Colombian military and National Police hostages being held by the FARC in 1999. The documentary he made for the news station Canal Caracol was eventually censored at the request of the Colombian government. It was the first time the FARC allowed a journalist into the hostage camps. Photo: Jorge Enrique Bo
tero.
The debacle happened in July 2003. Betancourt’s mother received a message from President Uribe: A FARC informant had reported that Betancourt was very ill, and that the guerrillas would release her near the border with Brazil. Betancourt’s sister, Astrid, got the message to longtime friend Villepin, who had been one of Betancourt’s professors when she was attending college in France. And with intense pressure from Betancourt’s mother and sister, Villepin dispatched French commandos and medical staff in a Hercules C-130 hospital plane to an airport in the Brazilian city of Manaus, near the border with Colombia. After landing, the French team hired a Brazilian pilot and small plane to take them to a landing strip near the given coordinates. The pilot had no idea what the French were up to in the well-known drug-trafficking area. Frightened for his safety, he contacted Brazilian police, exposing the mission and causing an international incident.
All the while, Betancourt’s husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, along with a rural priest who had been told by the FARC informant to act as an intermediary, waited for Betancourt in the pueblo of San Antonio de Isa, Brazil. During the night, Lecompte slept in a stifling windowless room at a run-down pension. During the day, he and the priest sat on a large floating pier on the Putumayo River, watching boats pass by and waiting for Betancourt to be delivered. “The priest kept saying that I had to have faith,” Lecompte told a reporter, but he was beyond praying. After more than a week of waiting, he saw a newscast about the unannounced French military aircraft in Brazil. After seeing Brazilian air force planes fly overhead and drop soldiers into the surrounding jungle near the pueblo, an anguished Lecompte knew the FARC would not be coming with his wife and that waiting any longer would be in vain. Flying back to Bogotá, Lecompte looked down at the endless green and felt intense dread, wondering if he’d ever see his wife alive. In truth, Betancourt was not ill at that time, and the release was never intended. It had all been a terrible lie. Secretariat member Raúl Reyes blamed Álvaro Uribe for the fiasco. According to Reyes, the FARC never planned on unilaterally releasing Ingrid, and certainly not to the French. Reyes also denied that Betancourt was sick at that time. “It was a vulgar delusion that Uribe created to give the French the impression that the FARC do not keep their word,” he said.
While Lecompte (and for a week before him Betancourt’s sister, Astrid) had been waiting for Betancourt in Brazil, she and Clara Rojas were together in their jungle prison hundreds of miles away. Several months after their capture in 2002, the two women had planned to escape together. Finally one morning before daylight, they were able to sneak past the twenty or thirty guerrillas who guarded them. The jungle terrain made it nearly impossible to navigate with any speed, and they made it only a short way before they were captured. Afterward, the guerrillas took no chances. “That was when her [Betancourt’s] feet were chained together,” said Uni, a former guerrilla who was one of the captors. The women remained chained day and night for fifteen days. Afterward, they were chained only at night. But to intimidate them further, Rojas said, the guerrillas threw snakes, tarantulas, and, once, a dead jaguar into their tent as they slept.
For a year and a half, Rojas and Betancourt had been completely isolated from all other hostages. And what made the isolation much worse was that during that period, the former friends and colleagues grew to despise each other. The rift was later reported to have been the result of a failed escape attempt. Other hostages would say that Rojas turned cold when Betancourt learned that her father, Gabriel Betancourt, had died, and the lack of solace in the intensely painful situation became an intractable wedge between the two. On August 22, 2003, the estranged pair would be introduced to a third political hostage, Luis Eladio Pérez, a former congressman from the department of Nariño, who had been kidnapped and held alone for more than two years. Pérez was beyond relieved to have the company of the women, but he could tell immediately that the tension between them was going to make things very uncomfortable.
After six weeks of living together in captivity, Pérez, Rojas, and Betancourt were moved to another, larger camp with two separate areas—one for the military hostages and one for the civilians, who were all politicians being held as part of the FARC’s demand for a prisoner exchange. Betancourt, Rojas, and Pérez joined four other politicians. Fifteen days later, on October 20, 2003, the hostages were completely shocked when a group of seven guerrillas marched the three Americans to their camp. “We approached the political prisoners’ camp with real anticipation,” wrote Gonsalves. “It didn’t take long for that feeling to be replaced by dread. In front of us stood a large compound completely surrounded by chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. For the first time, we were in a compound that reminded us of the photos we’d seen of actual POW camps.”
“We were already adapting ourselves to the situation [of being in the larger group] when the foreigners arrived … Tom Howes, Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves,” Pérez wrote in his autobiography, 7 Años Secuestrado por las FARC (Seven Years Held Hostage by the FARC). Pérez and other civilian hostages felt that they received far worse treatment than the military hostages, possibly because the guerrillas and the soldiers came from similar backgrounds. But it seemed that the guerrillas had treated the Americans most harshly of all. Although they arrived unchained, “they were very thin, very thin, and their clothes were in tatters,” says Consuelo González de Perdomo, a congresswoman in her fifties whose husband had died and who had become a grandmother during her captivity. “We brought them some mattresses, and to them it seemed incredible to have mattresses in captivity. They had slept on boards covered with black plastic. They did not have bedding, and they were very surprised to be able to have a sheet.” To Gonsalves, seeing this group of prisoners was shocking, and he immediately asked how long they’d been held. “Some of us four years, some five, some six,” one of them told Gonsalves. “I felt my stomach curdle. The group was in a bad way,” he wrote.
The additional bodies made the small quarters even more cramped, causing friction and initial resentment toward the Americans. “At the beginning they were a little bit arrogant,” Pérez wrote. “They felt more important than the rest of us.” Pérez also thought that the way in which their young captors reacted to the tall, light-skinned gringos was incredible: “The guerrillas have always spoken against imperialism, against the United States, and against the gringos. But when they saw [the Americans], it was an adoration and complete submission. The classic submission of a Colombian before ‘the American.’ This surprised me very much.”
One of the political hostages in the camp was clearly not happy that the Americans had arrived. Stansell recognized the woman as Ingrid Betancourt. He’d been in Colombia at the time of her kidnapping, and the CMS crew had even been given orders to fly over the area to look for her—something that he’d thought was strange: American contractors looking for a captured Colombian. While Betancourt argued with the guards and demanded they find somewhere else for the gringos, “we lingered there like unwelcome relatives who’d dropped in for a surprise visit,” wrote Gonsalves. “I was trying to be open-minded and give them the benefit of the doubt.”
However rough the initial meeting had been, there was one thing the camp provided that made it the best place they’d been since their capture: radios. For Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes, who had lived without almost any news of the outside world for the entire eight months of their captivity, it was a great relief. Betancourt’s demeanor changed as she and others told the Americans about the radio station that families of kidnapped victims could use to send messages. “Your mother has been all over the airwaves,” she told Gonsalves. “We hear her messages all the time. Clearly she loves you very much.” The men were told that their families were okay and that Northrop Grumman was taking care of them. “Hearing those words brought tremendous relief for all of us,” wrote Gonsalves, “We had talked about and worried about whether the company was taking care of our families since we’d first crashed.”
Stansell, Gonsalves, an
d Howes were eager to tell the other hostages what they had been through. “We began to hear the stories of the gringos, how they had been isolated one from each other, how they had been prohibited to talk among themselves,” says González de Perdomo. Howes was the only one who could communicate in Spanish. Stansell spoke very little, and Gonsalves none at all. In the weeks and months that followed, Stansell and Gonsalves became willing students of the congresswoman and of Orlando Beltrán, a congressman from Huila captured in 2001. “Marc had a lot of interest in learning the basics of Spanish,” says González de Perdomo. “We asked a favor of the military hostages, if they would be able to loan us a Bible that they had in English, and Marc dedicated himself to try to read the Bible, to translate it.” González de Perdomo wrote a page of essential Spanish conjugated verbs for Gonsalves—ser, haber, tener, estar, comer, dormir—which he studied judiciously. Stansell gave English classes to Beltrán and González de Perdomo. “But it was for a very short time because we were disorderly—the teacher and the students. I taught Keith and Marc to play banca rusa [a card game] and we played a lot, two hours, three in a row, with Marc winning time after time,” she says.
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