Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  When the long march finally came to an end, the three Americans were separated from the other hostages and taken via boat and then by truck to the Macarena Mountains, a mile-high range east of the Eastern Cordillera. Over the next two years, the FARC would continue to move the men throughout the mountains and jungle of central Colombia, what Gonsalves would refer to as their “wandering phase.” During that period, they never gave up hope that there were American troops looking for them—possibly overhead, possibly on the ground—and they continued to wonder what was happening on their behalf in the United States. By spring 2005, with almost no U.S. media coverage about the hostages, several other Americans working on Plan Colombia made the news when they were arrested for drug trafficking and illegal arms trading. On March 28, five American soldiers flew a U.S. military plane from the Apiay air base southeast of Bogotá to El Paso, Texas. Their payload included more than fifteen kilos of cocaine, with a street value of approximately $300,000. A month later, Colombian police arrested two members of the U.S. Army Special Forces—one a colonel, the other a sergeant. The two Green Berets had been stationed at the National Army Training Center in western Colombia and had the job of training Colombian soldiers how to shoot weapons. The Americans were accused of being part of a smuggling ring and of intending to sell 32,000 rounds of stolen U.S.-supplied ammunition to paramilitaries. Because American soldiers (and also American contractors working under Plan Colombia) cannot be tried in Colombia, under the provisions of a treaty that grants them diplomatic immunity, the two were immediately taken to the United States to face a court-martial. The move infuriated many Colombian lawmakers, who called on the United States to extradite the men to face justice in Colombia “It’s completely unjust that we are sending Colombians abroad to stand trial, and we can’t request anyone be sent here,” said Senator Jairo Clopatofsky, a member of the Colombian Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

  For most of their captivity, Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes would see little of the drug business that they had been employed to eradicate. But at one point in 2006, the guerrillas took them to a location where the FARC had stored five metric tons of cocaine base. “When Keith told us about the amount of coke on the premises, we all thought about the job we’d been doing before our captivity and how we had contributed to the situation the FARC was currently in,” wrote Howes. “They had the drugs at our location, but they couldn’t move them anywhere because of the strong military presence and heavy activity. We were glad to know that the combined efforts of the Colombians and the Americans in Plan Patriota were having some effect.”

  While the hostages were not mistaken about the fact that the guerrillas were losing territory partly due to increased military aid from the United States, the belief that the FARC’s downfall was correlative to a diminishing drug production, cultivation, or exportation was completely false. In 2007, the CIA World Fact Book reported that Colombia remained the world’s leading coca cultivator, with a 40 percent increase from 2003 to 2006. The report also named Colombia as the world’s largest producer of coca derivatives and stated that it was the supplier of cocaine to most of the U.S. market and the great majority of other international drug markets. The bleak analysis did not deter the State Department from continuing to tout Plan Colombia’s success. “Exponential growth in Colombia’s cocaine production has been stopped,” wrote John Negroponte, deputy secretary of state, in a Miami Herald op-ed piece. “In 2006 alone, combined eradication and interdiction efforts kept approximately 550 U.S. tons of cocaine off U.S. streets.” (This number was not substantiated, nor did Negroponte cite data from which it had been derived.) Negroponte also argued that Plan Colombia had helped stabilize Colombia, and that the policies “also benefit everyone in [the United States] where cocaine has ruined thousands of American lives.” The State Department’s 2007 budget request called Plan Colombia “highly successful by all measures” and asked for $465 million in continuing support.

  The fact that the FARC’s decline had no visible effect on the drug business was a result of the multitudes of others involved in the illicit trade. And as had long been the pattern in Colombia (and had been seen after the demise of the cartels), the decline of one illegal group allowed for the bolstering of another. In 2005, Uribe had placated the U.S. Congress and other detractors with a widespread and highly publicized demobilization campaign (under legislation called the Justice and Peace Law), whereby paramilitary fighters were offered amnesty, jobs, and cash to disarm. The program was given a boost by the U.S. government after Congress approved twenty million dollars in its FY 2006 Appropriations Act to fund demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants. By 2006, Uribe claimed that thirty thousand had demobilized and that Colombia was free of paramilitaries. (Because the reported figures were far greater than the estimated number of active paramilitary soldiers, many suggested that common criminals were taking the deal as well, and that the government was turning a blind eye in order to pump up the numbers.) It was also apparent that thousands of those who had taken the “demobilization” deal were back to work under their former commanders and had resumed trafficking drugs. According to Semana magazine, as many as nine thousand paramilitaries never disarmed at all. In some cases, the FARC and paramilitary groups even worked together in the drug business. One of the largest groups that coalesced in 2006, the Águilas Negras (Black Eagles) had four thousand members and was responsible for murdering and threatening peasants, unionists, human rights activists, and journalists; it also controlled illegal crops and produced and trafficked cocaine and heroin. While Uribe, with Plan Patriota in his pocket, continued to bear down on the FARC, the hydra-headed illegal drug industry continued to thrive.

  The majority of urban Colombians backed Uribe’s war against the FARC. It was also helpful to Uribe that opinions of the FARC were changing in the countryside. Many campesinos had long supported or sympathized with the guerrillas, but the children and grandchildren of those who had settled in the Amazon Basin to escape La Violencia found themselves at ground zero of the civil war. As the FARC gave up territory, abandoning the villages they had ruled for two decades, it was startlingly evident why they had lost the hearts and minds of the campesinos. Dusty streets had never been paved. No public sewers or electricity existed in most of the villages. There were no new schools. Poverty was as extreme as it had ever been. The FARC had used the villages like ATMs, coming to collect coca base and taxing the constituents, with little thought to improving their lives.

  With increasing military operations against them, the guerrillas were abandoning many towns along the Caguán River. Photojournalist Carlos Villalón, who had traveled and reported extensively in the region since the early 2000s, found the pueblo of Santa Fe nearly deserted in 2007. “There were still guerrillas in the surrounding jungle, but they didn’t have the presence they had in the town five or seven years before,” says Villalón. “There was coca, but the business there was decimated. Since the FARC was unable to maintain a daily presence, they didn’t [operate as a government] anymore.” In the river outpost of Peñas Coloradas (where Sonia had once ruled over the thriving river business), every civilian had been run out by the Colombian military. In the village of Cartagena del Chairá, the FARC left the campesinos with nothing, including the thing that they had most needed from the guerrillas—protection against the paramilitaries. In many cases, the military’s success was fleeting. Because the army has no long-term strategy for settling the villages after a takeover, in some areas, things eventually reverted to “normal.” “When the army enters the town, the FARC leaves for the jungle,” says Jorge Enrique Botero. “There’s no money to start social programs, and the businesses die. But logistically, it’s impossible to keep the military occupying the village. So in many cases, after three or four months, they leave, and everything goes back to the guerrillas.” However, by late 2009, CNN en Español journalist Luis Vélez traveled to the village of La Macarena, in the department of Meta, where the military had run the FARC out t
wo years earlier. Vélez found that the campesinos (who were prevented from growing coca by the military controlling the region) were suffering more under the army than they had been under the guerrillas. “These people used to grow coca; they used to sell it,” says Vélez. “The FARC used to [run] the government. They had banks. They had organizations. They had laws, everything. Now the people have sixty-five percent unemployment.” The military, Vélez says, “transformed a successful illegal economy into an unsuccessful legal economy.”

  With Uribe’s popularity at an all-time high, and with the business of ending his country’s “terrorist threat” unfinished, Uribe pushed Congress to amend the constitution to allow him to run for a second term in 2006—something unprecedented in Colombian history. The voices of his detractors, who claimed that Uribe’s ties to paramilitaries made him unfit to remain president, were barely audible above the cheers of his supporters. (Claims surfaced that many lawmakers in Congress who were allies of Uribe were linked to paramilitaries, as well.) Also getting very little attention or acknowledgment from Uribe were the family members of the hundreds of captive Colombians, who constantly begged Uribe to negotiate with the FARC for the release of their loved ones—and not to attempt a military rescue. In May 2006, Uribe easily won the election with 62 percent of the vote. Juan Carlos Lecompte, who had spent the previous four years believing that only with a new administration would there be hope for negotiations to free his wife, Ingrid Betancourt, and the other hostages, was devastated.

  16

  Trial

  The Mid-Atlantic region of the United States is known for violent summer thunderstorms in which rain comes in pounding sheets, sometimes for hours on end. The force of the water can make it almost impossible to walk even a short distance without getting completely soaked. Thousands of government employees in the nation’s capital wait for a break in the deluge just to leave their concrete office buildings for home. It was during the summer storms of 2005 and 2006 that Ken Kohl felt the true weight of his job. “I live in the D.C. area, and whenever we’d have the prolonged rains and it would be pouring outside, I’d be in my backyard and just be thinking of those guys in the jungle and how it can go on, year after year after year. It’s absolutely insane.”

  Kohl was a nineteen-year veteran prosecutor with the Department of Justice when he was handed the Simón Trinidad case in 2005. He’d worked on homicide cases until 2001, when he transferred to the National Security Division—the part of the DOJ that deals with terrorism cases against Americans perpetrated outside of the United States. And although numerous accused terrorists around the world have been indicted by the DOJ, “a lot of cases never see the light of day because the criminal is never apprehended overseas, or we don’t accomplish extradition,” Kohl says. For FARC guerrillas, there had been many indictments, but none had ever come to trial in the United States, so there was little background knowledge in the prosecutor’s office about how to handle the unique case of Simón Trinidad. “I have to admit,” Kohl says, “I didn’t know too much about Colombia before I was added to the case.” Kohl read everything he could on the subject. He traveled to Colombia and interviewed people at the U.S. Embassy. He spoke to reinsertados, former FARC members who had abandoned the guerrilla organization for amnesty and the promise of being assimilated into society. Learning the facts surrounding the kidnapping of Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves was important to Kohl, but he felt it was also crucial to understand the political complexities of the guerrillas and the Colombian government. “So much of the prosecution of Simón Trinidad most certainly had a political undercurrent to it, because Simón Trinidad wanted to use the trial as a platform for espousing FARC ideology. So you try to keep as much of that stuff out, but you’ve got to understand it first,” he says.

  U.S. federal prosecutor Ken Kohl, who tried Simón Trinidad in 2006 and 2007. The trials resulted in a conviction for conspiracy to commit hostage taking and a sixty-year sentence. Photo: Ken Kohl.

  While Trinidad remained in solitary confinement in the D.C. Jail, Kohl spent countless hours investigating the Colombian conflict. The barbarity of it amazed him. “I’ve talked to many FARC deserters who were directly involved with hostage takings, who participated in chaining people. I really don’t know how any human being does that. You join the FARC for a lot of different reasons. But once you’re into that situation, how do you, each day, attach those chains, knowing that they’ve got children, wives, mothers, fathers at home? It’s just so inhumane.”

  Kohl could understand the reason that poor young Colombians joined the FARC, and he even had some compassion for their plight. But for Trinidad, Kohl felt only disgust. “I think it’s even more unforgivable for a guy like Simón Trinidad, who had the education, all of the benefits in life. He left all of that and very deliberately embraced what the FARC was doing.” And although Kohl knew that Trinidad had never met the hostages and had not taken part in the kidnapping, he says that “Trinidad’s job was to make sure that none of the Americans were released until the FARC got what they wanted. I don’t think it’s really an option for the U.S. to just say, ‘Oh well, let’s not prosecute him because we hope that the FARC will just, out of the goodness of its heart, let the hostages go.’ Under the law he’s a gangster. So there was no hesitation on my part to prosecute him as a senior member of this organization.”

  There were five counts in the indictment: three counts of hostage taking (one for each American hostage), one count of conspiracy to commit hostage taking, and one count of providing material support to a terrorist organization. In a completely separate indictment, Trinidad was charged with narco-trafficking. The drug trial would be separate and was set to follow the trial for hostage taking. In a brief written two weeks before the trial in October 2006, Paul Wolf, a human rights lawyer in Washington, D.C., accused the government of pushing the limits of U.S. conspiracy law by accusing Trinidad—as a known member of a designated “terrorist” organization—of being responsible for crimes committed by other members of the organization. “Since Trinidad is not alleged to have had any involvement in the actual events, it would appear difficult to convict him as a principal in the crime,” Wolf wrote.

  In the weeks that followed, Wolf would attend much of the trial and produce a series of articles and daily synopses. The e-mail blasts became heavily relied upon by journalists covering the complicated case. The reports also found their way onto the FARC’s official Web site in Spanish translation. Wolf, who had initially invited anyone to use and post his comments on their sites, made clear that he did not know how the postings got to the FARC site and that in no way did he support the FARC organization. Learning the details of the trial and how the American system of justice worked was extremely important to the top commanders because each one of them—forty-eight of the FARC’s top leaders—was under indictment by the United States Department of Justice. While the FARC was on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations, its members listed on the indictment were not accused of terrorist acts but of narco-trafficking. Each of the guerrilla commanders listed in the indictment knew that, if captured, any one of them could be sitting in that same cramped American jail cell, waiting for a trial that they believed would play out just like the trial of Simón Trinidad.

  As Trinidad went to trial in 2006, it was becoming obvious that America’s drug war in Colombia would not be separated from the war on terror. The U.S. State Department’s congressional budget justification of $600 million for FY 2007 stated, “Colombia’s position as the supplier of over 90 percent of the cocaine and almost 50 percent of the heroin entering the United States makes the aggressive disruption of the illicit drug trade a top USG priority. Colombia is home to three Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). These groups finance a large part of their operations with proceeds from the drug trade and are a threat to the security of the hemisphere.” After paying little attention to western hemispheric security issues in the early 2000s while fighting its war on terror in the East against radical
Islam, the Bush administration began to recognize a threat closer to home in menacing Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Chávez seemed to be champing at the bit to start a conflict with the United States and neighboring Colombia. Chávez was also believed to be aiding and abetting massive arms shipments to the guerrillas across his porous border with Colombia. Some accused him of being involved in actually arming the FARC. The governments of Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina had also turned decidedly lukewarm to the United States, and therefore it became ever more important to keep Colombia as a staunch ally. “With U.S. support, Colombia is transforming into a secure, democratic, and economically prosperous country capable of undertaking a greater role in the problematic Andean region,” the FY 2007 budget report said.

  In addition to the legal complexities of the case against Trinidad, Kohl had another concern: “I didn’t want something we did in the prosecution of Simón Trinidad to end up either harming Marc, Keith, or Tom or prolonging their captivity,” says Kohl. His justification for moving forward anyway was hard for some trial watchers to digest. “As prosecutors on the case, we felt that the best thing for Marc, Keith, and Tom would be to make their hostage taking as costly as possible for the FARC, so that the FARC would recognize that kidnapping Americans is counterproductive. Not only did they get nothing in exchange for Marc, Keith, and Tom, it brought attention to their brutal and barbaric behavior.” Kohl said he was also hopeful that the strategy would help pressure the FARC to release the men, but he did not elaborate on why that would be so.