Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  The hostages slept in cabins that surrounded a small open area. The compound was enclosed by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. One hostage each day was in charge of food service to the others and of organizing the camp and cleaning the bathroom. The guerrillas took two-hour shifts guarding the hostages while another guerrilla circled the camp, keeping an eye on the other guards. The guerrillas were forbidden to speak to the hostages except on occasions when the hostages requested permission for certain necessities.

  Living in a camp was extremely difficult, but still preferable to being marched through the jungle. After months in one camp, without any explanation, “they would give us a limited time to arrange our things to set off on a march of two months. They would say, ‘Prepare your equipment because we’re going. We recommend the least heavy equipment possible because the march is going to be long,’” says González de Perdomo. If it was during a period when the Colombian hostages were chained, each hostage was made to carry his own chains (which weighed between ten and fifteen pounds) around his waist or neck. While many of the Colombian hostages, especially Betancourt, often rebelled against the captors and made escape attempts, the Americans did not, and they remained unchained. Stansell and Gonsalves “never rebelled, or protested like Ingrid and me,” wrote Pérez. Howes was the exception, and Pérez remembers that on one occasion Howes screamed furiously at the guerrillas during a brutal march that lasted forty days.

  “The circumstances were always so arduous that they brought out the worst side of everyone,” wrote Pérez. Betancourt received the most ire, especially from the military hostages. “She was the best in swimming, in physical exercise, the one who the media emphasized, the one who spoke various languages.” Pérez would come to the conclusion that being with so many others in such bad circumstances was actually more difficult than the two years he had spent as a lone captive in the mountains. The stress in the camps became even greater when the Colombian military was near. Constant flyovers by Colombian army planes and helicopters made both the hostages and the guerrillas edgy.

  For some of the hostages, the only break in the monotonous, torturous routine was the Saturday-night radio broadcast Las Voces del Secuestro. “Everything revolved around this program,” wrote Pérez. “Not for everyone, because many were not sent any messages. I’m referring to the military and the National Police officers. Some military, some police and the three Americans, for example, received very few messages.” For the three Americans, the messages they did receive came mainly from Gonsalves’s mother, Jo Rosano, and Stansell’s Colombian girlfriend, Patricia Medina (Stansell heard only one message from his fiancée, Malia Phillips). “When they listened to the first messages from their families, they became extremely emotional,” says González de Perdomo. “They cried in happiness because it had been a long time since they had heard anything from them.” It was through a radio message from Medina that Stansell learned about the arrival of his twin sons. “So then he began to feel an immense love for Patricia, because of the messages that she sent him, because of the way she took care of his sons,” wrote Pérez.

  What the Americans did not hear on the radio during the long years of their captivity—even on Voice of America (the U.S. government-funded international radio broadcast) news programs—was anything about their kidnapping. “They felt very abandoned by the US government,” wrote Pérez. “They did not understand this vacuum of five years—five long years where there had not been a clear attitude on the part of the government of their country to look for a solution to their problem. President Bush was in Cartagena [in November 2004] but did not make any announcement about them. When Condoleezza Rice visited Medellín [in January 2008] she didn’t mention the issue, either. So they felt like pariahs in their country.” Even the U.S. ambassador in Colombia, William Wood (who held the post from August 2003 to March 2007), seemed completely uninterested in the captives. “During his tenure as ambassador, Wood only seemed to talk about drugs and counterdrugs, saying nothing about us hostages,” wrote Howes.

  To figure out what she could do to help, Marc Gonsalves’s mother, Jo Rosano, an Italian-American who had no previous knowledge of Colombian politics, became a quick study of the Colombian conflict. Rosano also refused to believe that keeping quiet about the men would do anything to help their situation, and she accused the Colombian and U.S. governments of doing nothing to free her son and the other hostages. She met with the Portuguese government to seek help, because Gonsalves’s father is Portuguese. She traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with senators and congresspeople, several of whom promised to help but could ultimately do little. She flew to Bogotá to march with the families of other hostages. She searched the Internet for news many times each day, kept in contact with dozens of journalists, and, most important to her, she prayed. Always accompanying her was her very frail second husband, Mike Rosano. The two had severe health problems and very little income, but according to Rosano, her strength came from the Holy Father. Even her intense faith could not dampen her seething anger toward Gonsalves’s wife, Shane, who, she believed, was carelessly spending her son’s money and doing nothing to help free him. Shane no longer took calls from Northrop Grumman or the government agents who called to give her updates on the situation. She refused to leave radio messages for her husband, even though Northrop Grumman made sure that all the families had the ability to record messages for broadcast on Colombian radio programs. According to Luis Eladio Pérez, while Gonsalves received many radio messages from his mother, he was worried “because his wife had not sent any messages to him, and he thought she had abandoned him.”

  Stansell’s American fiancée, Malia Phillips, later moved out of the house she had shared with Stansell and left his children in the care of his parents and the children’s mother. Northrop Grumman kept Phillips’s cell phone active, on the outside chance that Stansell or one of the kidnappers would call. In Bogotá, Patricia Medina continued to send messages to Stansell via Las Voces del Secuestro. “I would tell him what happened that day, and then I put the kids on. I would tell them, ‘We’re going to speak to Papa.’ One day, I regretted it, because I told one of the boys, ‘We’re going to leave a message for Papa.’ He grabbed the phone and said, ‘Hello? Hello?’ waiting for someone to say something. Then I said, ‘No, sweetie, Papa is not going to speak to you, but he can hear you.’ I saw the frustration on his face because he wanted to hear his father on the other end of the line.” Medina would also read to Stansell news articles that mentioned his two children in the United States because she was worried that Lauren and Kyle weren’t able to leave messages very often. Medina created a photo album as a way to keep the twins’ father in their consciousness. She would routinely show them the few photos she had gathered of her and Stansell together, those that Stansell had given her of himself hunting, and photos of the twins as babies and as they grew. “This is your papa. He is very smart and handsome and strong. He loves to hunt deer and bears,” she would tell them. “I could not tell the boys a lot about Keith, because in ten months, I hadn’t shared many things with him.”

  Several miles from the apartment of Medina and her family, in the foothills of central Bogotá, Juan Carlos Lecompte continued to live in the luxury apartment he had shared with his wife, Ingrid Betancourt. The two-story penthouse, with its tremendous view of Bogotá and the sunsets over the altiplano, had belonged to Betancourt before the couple married. During the years of his wife’s captivity, Lecompte changed nothing in the apartment because he wanted everything to be exactly the way Betancourt had left it when she returned. The only thing that continued to pile up through the years were shrinelike items to Betancourt—paintings of her from well-wishers and fans, and books that had been written about her in her absence. The maid still came several times a week to mop the floors and dust pictures of the couple at their wedding in Tahiti or kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower. But as the years passed, things had changed. The deep red furniture and matching drapes had faded in the high-alti
tude sun. The terra-cotta tiles in the living room were cracking and coming loose. There was no longer the clicking sound of Betancourt’s yellow Labrador’s nails across the tile floors; the much-loved dog had passed away. The small Colombian flag that had flown proudly from the balcony planter during the presidential election of 2002 was reduced to tattered threads of faded yellow, blue, and red.

  Lecompte continued to do everything he could to help get Betancourt and Rojas liberated—haranguing President Uribe for his abandonment of the hostages and pleading with the media not to forget her. And when the Congress voted to disband Betancourt’s political party, the Oxygen Green party, retroactively, he took a trash can full of horse manure from a friend’s finca and dumped it on the steps of the Congress building. Lecompte wrote about the act in his book, Buscando a Ingrid (Looking for Ingrid). “‘For corruption!’ we shouted as we launched shit against the enormous stone columns. ‘For cowardice!’ And we dumped more shit. ‘For restricting democracy!’” The stunt landed him in a freezing jail until after midnight, but Lecompte was happy that he had made his point and brought more attention to Betancourt’s situation. Lecompte’s antics infuriated Betancourt’s mother and sister, who were of the mind that more diplomatic means should be used. When he could think of nothing else to do, Lecompte chartered a plane and dropped thousands of flyers with up-to-date photos of Betancourt’s children over the jungle, hoping that one would reach her and give her comfort.

  Lecompte’s desperate maneuvers made Jorge Enrique Botero feel very sorry for him. Despite the many times he had interviewed the families of hostages, he was never able to escape an overwhelming sense of sadness for them. Botero never quit his push to get to Betancourt, Rojas, and the three Americans, and on another trip to the jungle in June 2005 to try to secure permission to interview one or all of the hostages, he would come across a story that, for him, embodied all that was wrong with his country and yet, at the same time, represented a rebirth of possibility.

  For several years, it had been rumored that Betancourt had become pregnant in captivity. But Botero learned that it was actually Clara Rojas, Betancourt’s former friend and campaign manager, who had become a mother in April 2004. Botero wrote about the startling story he’d heard from his guerrilla sources in a book titled Últimas Noticias de la Guerra (Latest News from the War), which was published in early 2006. Botero chose to make the book partly fictitious because the details he had were few. What Botero didn’t know, and his report didn’t speculate or fictionalize, was what had happened to the baby. And at the time the book was released, Clara Rojas, who was still being held along with the other political prisoners, also had no idea what had happened to her son, Emmanuel.

  Rojas’s pregnancy had briefly reunited her with Ingrid Betancourt, and Betancourt may have been the only hostage who viewed Rojas’s pregnancy as a happy occasion. Most were angry. “We were concerned about the circumstances that would surround the arrival of this child, the difficulties that were going to exist for the child and for Clara, because we knew that the limitations were great,” says González de Perdomo. Luis Eladio Pérez was deeply affected because he had lost his son to illness when the baby was just eighteen months old. “I was not happy at all because it seemed like an enormously irresponsible act, in such circumstances, in captivity, in the jungle, in these conditions, to bring a baby into the world to suffer,” he wrote. The guerrillas removed Rojas from the main group prior to the April 16, 2004, birth, but they took the baby to meet the other hostages shortly after. Luis Eladio Pérez recalls, “In that moment we noticed the fracture [of Emmanuel’s arm], we spoiled him, we changed him, he peed on us. We doted on him. He became a factor of happiness, but also of sadness because the baby had a fixed gaze, always toward the horizon. We made signs and movements to see if he would react, but nothing.” At first, some of the hostages speculated that Emmanuel was blind, but they found out that the guerrillas were giving the baby pain medicine because of the broken arm he incurred during delivery. González de Perdomo remembers how all of the hostages, even the Americans, adored the child. “Keith carried him and put him in his hammock,” she says, “and I sang to him. We were very concerned about the baby’s health condition, about his arm.” According to Pérez, keeping the baby in the jungle became a risk and a danger for everyone, including the guerrillas, because it was impossible to keep him quiet. The guerrillas’ solution was to remove the baby from Rojas for all but forty-five minutes a day. Keith Stansell remembers seeing Rojas standing at the fence of their compound, shrieking in agony in the direction where a group of female guerrillas was taking care of Emmanuel. And at night, “We [her fellow hostages] would hear the haunting sound of Clara singing lullabies as loud as she could to her absent child,” Stansell wrote. When the baby was eight months old, the guerrillas told the hostages they were taking Emmanuel from the camp in order to get him medical care. Pérez remembers that the guerrillas marched the baby off—he was carried in a pouch on the back of one of the captors—chubby, babbling, and laughing, delighted with his jungle world.

  Últimas Noticias de la Guerra was a best seller in Colombia. The story shocked the nation, and Botero was delighted with his most successful book to date, and glad that the country’s consciousness had finally returned to the kidnapped victims. But not everyone was happy. Manuel Marulanda and the FARC Secretariat were angry that Botero had divulged a matter that they’d wanted to keep private. In one chapter of the book, he revealed that a top FARC commander had been killed by his lover. The woman had returned from prison after five years and found that her partner, the commander, had strayed. Botero thought it was an absurd thing for them to be angry about. “They didn’t want anyone to know how he died. It was an embarrassment to them that one of their own was killed for love instead of war, and to them it was a sign of weakness.” The reaction was not something Botero was expecting, but he had learned that accurately predicting the behavior of the guerrillas was impossible. What worried him most about angering the top commanders was his continuing coverage of the hostage situation. “I knew I would have to try to make them forget how angry they were with me in order to get back into the jungle,” he says.

  Once again, Botero found himself in the crosshairs of the Colombian government and the mainstream media, which accused him of using the touching story of the hostage child to sway the government into talks with the “terrorists.” “In media interviews of top military leaders, many generals said, ‘Botero is the press secretary for Mono Jojoy.’ In the editorial meetings of newspapers and radio and television stations, my name often came up. ‘Watch, when Botero goes missing—surely he will arrive with new news about the FARC.’ At the beginning, it made me laugh. I thought, This is pure envy of my colleagues who couldn’t get the scoop.” When Botero later interviewed Secretariat member Raúl Reyes for another book, Botero says, “Reyes told me, ‘I hope that your new book won’t be like the one about Clara Rojas. That book is complete filth.’ I thought, If the FARC aren’t satisfied with my work and neither is the government, it is because I am doing things well. It would be terrible if either of them applauded me.”

  By fall 2004, the full weight of the Colombian military seemed to be bearing down on FARC territories in southern Colombia. For Uribe, money from the United States continued to be a great windfall in the war against the FARC. President Andrés Pastrana (who remained uncredited for any of the army’s success against the FARC after his term) had left Uribe with a more powerful and capable army than the country had ever seen. And with continuing American support during Uribe’s first two years, thousands more Colombian troops were on the ground, and the army’s airpower had significantly increased. Bombing raids killed guerrillas by the dozens and pushed the FARC front lines farther and farther into the jungle. Uribe was hailed as a hero and his approval rating in Colombia shot upward of 80 percent. In Colombia, the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia package was part of what was known as Plan Patriota. To an American audience that was footing the bill, U
ribe, rather than highlight his military success to fight the “terrorists,” promoted the success of Plan Colombia in its eradication efforts. “In one year of my administration, we have destroyed 70 percent of illegal drugs,” Uribe told PBS during a 2003 visit to the United States to secure continued funding from Congress and the administration. “Our determination is to overcome this problem. We no longer want drugs in Colombia, but we need American help with budget, with technology and with the attitude of the American citizens. Whenever one American citizen consumes coca, cocaine or poppy [heroin], this consumption helps the traffickers, helps the terrorists.” However, the same year, John Walters, the head of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, admitted that the $3.3 billion Plan Colombia—in its fourth year—was having no significant effect in stopping the trafficking of drugs out of Colombia. Although the number of hectares of coca cultivated had significantly dropped from 420,000 in 2001 to 280,000 in 2003, Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, argued that the numbers were statistically misleading because they ignored the fact that the area of coca under cultivation in Peru and Bolivia had risen sharply. Carpenter also argued that coca growers had become more efficient and could produce the same amount of cocaine from a smaller number of plants. Walters did add that he expected to see progress in the following year or shortly thereafter.

  A decidedly unfortunate consequence of the billions of American dollars supporting the war against the FARC was that it was putting the three American hostages in grave danger. “If President Uribe’s objective with his Plan Patriota was to flush out the FARC and get them on the run in order to wipe them out, then his efforts nearly did the same to us,” wrote Howes. With the intense military pressure on all sides, the guerrillas broke up the permanent hostage camp, and on September 28, 2004, the politicians, the military hostages, and the Americans were told to pack up and move out. “The brutality of the 40 days we marched after we abandoned Camp Caribe rivaled anything we’d been through before,” wrote Howes. Provisions had been at an all-time low for the hostages in their last months in the camp. They were all terribly weak as they pushed through the dense foliage and mud, carrying on their backs as many of their belongings as they could. “At one point,” Howes recalled, “I stumbled, fell, and lay there in the mud thinking that it would be easy to just stay where I was, but I didn’t. I picked myself up and kept putting one foot in front of the other. From knee-high mud through neck-deep water and up and down hills that were high enough to tire out dogs—into shivering nights when our bodies were so depleted of calories that we could not stay warm. We stretched the limits of what we thought we could endure.”