Hostage Nation

by Victoria Bruce

  Although the proofs of life had resulted in a major debacle for the guerrillas, Manuel Marulanda and the FARC Secretariat assumed that the American prosecutors would take the proofs into account in Trinidad’s sentencing. But neither Kohl nor anyone else in the U.S. government was impressed by the FARC’s olive branch. Gary Noesner tried to convince the DOJ otherwise, in the hope that it would encourage some kind of deal to send Trinidad back to Colombia, or at least reduce Trinidad’s sentence, something that could be helpful for the hostage situation. But Kohl and others didn’t count the proofs as having fulfilled the FARC’s end of the bargain, because they’d been confiscated, not released. With the sentencing scheduled to take place two days later, it was rumored that Kohl would seek the maximum sixty-year sentence for the fifty-seven-year-old guerrilla.

  In the meantime, Álvaro Uribe, sick of Chávez’s posturing and cozying up to FARC leaders in dozens of media ops and furious that Chávez had spoken behind his back to Gen. Mario Montoya, the head of the Colombian army, demanded that the Venezuelan president stay out of the hostage negotiation business for good. An enraged Chávez took the opportunity to cut all ties to Uribe and announced that relations with Colombia were in the “deep freezer.” But Chávez was now more determined than ever to be the one to deliver the hostages to freedom. Just before Christmas in 2007, Chávez announced that the FARC would release three hostages to him. The names of those to be released shocked Colombians and observers around the world. While the French government had spent millions of dollars and endless hours lobbying for the release of Ingrid Betancourt, instead it would be her former friend and colleague Clara Rojas who would go free. Along with Rojas, the FARC promised to release Rojas’s three-year-old son, Emmanuel, and former Colombian congresswoman Consuelo González de Perdomo, who’d been held for over six years.

  There was much speculation about why the Secretariat chose the two women and the child. The story of Rojas giving birth in captivity had shocked the nation, creating intense public pressure for the FARC to release Emmanuel. Consuelo González de Perdomo was one of the few women held by the FARC, and her daughters had worked hard to win her freedom, which impressed the guerrillas. The Secretariat believed that after the unilateral releases the public would recognize the guerrillas’ generosity and surely support the idea of a humanitarian exchange for the rest of the captives. Moreover, for the FARC it was a good way to get closer to Chávez, whom they had always admired and considered an ally.

  A delighted Chávez dubbed the mission “Operation Emmanuel,” after the child, and invited more than one hundred journalists and observers from eight countries to meet in the Colombian city of Villavicencio on December 28, 2007, where they would wait for instructions from the FARC. The first day passed uneventfully while rescue crews in Venezuelan helicopters bearing Red Cross emblems stood by to receive coordinates where they would collect the hostages.

  President Chávez had promised Rojas’s and González de Perdomo’s families that the women would be home to ring in the new year. But days passed and all Chávez was left with were excuses from the FARC. On January 2, 2008, the FARC finally released a message, claiming that they couldn’t orchestrate the releases because President Uribe had called for intense military activity in the area where the hostages were being held. Hollywood director Oliver Stone, who was a fan of Hugo Chávez and had gone to Venezuela to film the documentary South of the Border, told The Observer, “It’s Colombia’s fault. Colombia did not want it to happen, and I think there were other outside forces, like Bush.… Every Colombian that I spoke to was scared of the military in some way or another; they’re the most dangerous people, not the FARC.” That same day, Uribe appeared in Villavicencio and made an astonishing announcement at a press conference: The reason the FARC was not releasing the hostages was because they did not have Emmanuel in their possession. “The FARC terrorist group doesn’t have any excuse. They’ve fooled Colombia and now they want to fool the international community,” Uribe told the massive congregation of journalists, who were skeptical of his intentions. The child had been found living in foster care in Bogotá, Uribe said, and was now safely in the custody of the state. Many believed it was a ridiculous ploy by Uribe to remove Chávez from the negotiations and to make the FARC look bad in their time of obvious humanitarianism. But it was true. And to prove it, Rojas’s brother had given a DNA sample to compare with the boy’s. The FARC looked ridiculous and so did Hugo Chávez, who was furious with the bumbling guerrillas. Chávez quickly called his people out of Villavicencio, and behind the scenes, he demanded that the FARC hand over Rojas and González de Perdomo to him immediately.

  Eight days later, on January 10, 2008, Rojas and González de Perdomo were released to a Red Cross and Venezuelan commission. In video footage, Rojas and González de Perdomo appeared healthy and enormously relieved as they spoke by satellite phone to Hugo Chávez. “Mr. President, oh Mr. President, a million thanks for all of your humanitarian efforts,” said González de Perdomo. “Please, Mr. President, don’t let your guard down, Mr. President. Those who are still there told us to give you that message. We have to continue working. A thousand thanks, Mr. President. Yes, sir. Thank you. And you are helping us, Mr. President, to return to life.” An equally jubilant Rojas took the satellite phone: “Mr. President, I am thankful from the bottom of my heart for these people that you have sent us. A million thanks. Yes, we are being reborn.”

  It was several days before Rojas would be reunited with her son and learn the details of his difficult journey. The story quickly emerged that Emmanuel had been taken from Rojas when he was eight months old, under the guise that he would receive treatment for a tropical disease and his broken arm. Instead, Emmanuel had been taken to a nearby village and handed over to a poor campesino family who could barely afford to feed him. Sometime later, a sickly baby with no known history arrived in the foster care system, a ward of the Colombian state. He was undernourished and his broken arm remained untreated.

  How Rojas had managed to become pregnant in captivity was a matter of great speculation, and some wondered whether she had been raped by one of her captors. According to Rojas, that was not the case. Nor would she confirm Botero’s speculation that she’d had a consensual relationship with one of the guerrillas. Luis Eladio Pérez wrote in his book that Rojas had secured permission to have sexual relations and was supplied with condoms to prevent pregnancy. Some speculated that she had planned to get pregnant, in the hope that the guerrillas would free her. Rojas told members of the media, who were understandably fascinated with her story, that she had no idea if the father of her son was still alive. Some of the hostages believed he was not. Martín Sombra, the commander in charge of Rojas during her pregnancy, was captured by Colombian forces in February 2008. From jail, Sombra told Ingrid Betancourt’s husband that the guerrilla soldier suspected of being the father of Emmanuel had been executed for his part in the conception. Other guerrillas would tell Jorge Enrique Botero that Emmanuel’s father hadn’t been killed, but was sentenced to hard labor and stripped of his weapon for more than a year.

  18

  Tucker on the Mountain

  On the northern part of the border between Colombia and Venezuela, the land juts out into an enormous peninsula of temperate desert called La Guajira. Giant dunes reach down to the Caribbean Sea on the Colombian side and into the Gulf of Venezuela on the neighboring coast. Heading south along this same political boundary, a huge mountain range rises. The northernmost extension of the Andes, it is called the Serranía de Perijá, and it was in this region that Simón Trinidad began his career as a guerrilla. On one side of the wild virgin mountains is the Venezuelan state of Zulia. On the other side is the region that the family of Simón Trinidad was from—the department of César.

  “It’s impossible, really impossible, unless you’re an expert or you have a GPS, to know whether you are in Venezuelan territory or Colombian territory,” says Botero, for whom the mountains had become a more and more common des
tination. His target each time was the camp of FARC Secretariat member and Caribbean Bloc commander Iván Márquez. Traveling to see Márquez was difficult, but less so than the trip to see Raúl Reyes near the Ecuadorian border or the weeks-long trek to the hostage camps in the jungle. After several days of travel, Botero would meet a guerrilla who would guide him up the rustic footpaths, or trochas, through the mountains along the border. The trip to the camp was an arduous two-day journey by foot and on mules. The reason that Márquez’s camp had become so important to the journalist was that it had become a sort of “international relations” headquarters for the FARC. And while Raúl Reyes was still the main Secretariat member dealing with hostage negotiations, Márquez and several other high-level commanders had also become players.

  Each trip into FARC territory fascinated Botero. He never ceased to be amazed by the way the guerrillas acted and defined themselves—what he saw as a throwback to a Marxist guerrilla movement in a world where Marxism no longer existed. But no trip into FARC territory had ever been as unusual as the one Botero made on January 20, 2008. As he hiked up the muddy mountainside, he could hardly comprehend how he found himself with such strange traveling companions. In front of him on the trocha was the enormous American public defender Robert Tucker, and behind Tucker was an American woman Tucker had brought along to act as his translator.

  Robert Tucker, Simón Trinidad’s public defender in four federal trials held between 2006 and 2008, and Lara Quint, assistant federal public defender, who helped translate exchanges between Trinidad and Tucker during the trials. Photo: Jorge Enrique Botero.

  “When Mr. Tucker first called me and asked if I could get him an audience with a FARC commander, I was very impressed by his interest, his capacity to take a risk and to do something that was obviously going to be dangerous. I was also sort of stunned because what he was asking seemed to be very much against the U.S. policy not to negotiate with the FARC.” Tucker asked Botero to make sure that he could meet with a commander who could make the decision to release Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes in exchange for an offer that Tucker would bring with him. “I told him that this was very difficult because it would have to be a collective decision of the Secretariat, and all of the Secretariat members would never be in the same place at one time.” It was early January 2008, and Trinidad’s sentencing date of January 28 (which had been postponed from November 2007) was swiftly approaching. Botero wasn’t optimistic about making the meeting happen, since the FARC usually took months to agree to anything so out of the ordinary. So he was shocked when only ten days later, he received an e-mail response to his inquiry from Raúl Reyes, who said that the FARC would be very interested in talking with Trinidad’s lawyer. Reyes and all of the Secretariat members had been closely following Tucker’s work through Colombian news reports and the trial chronicles of attorney Paul Wolf. “They all felt that Tucker did a great job for Trinidad, even though the guerrilla commander was convicted in the end,” says Botero. “Several commanders told me that they respected Tucker very much. They said, ‘Here is a man that is not earning money from this defense; he’s a public defender. We have to applaud him because he did not leave his client hanging. He did a very professional job.’” Botero was informed that he and Tucker would be received by Iván Márquez. Tucker agreed and coordinated with Botero about making the trip. Although Botero was dying to know what offer Tucker was going to make, as a journalist, he did not want to be in the business of negotiations, and so he didn’t ask.

  The journey into the mountains began in the early morning, and Botero was immediately impressed by his gringo companions. “Tucker was really calm. He was never nervous. He was always looking around with a lot of curiosity. He was joking like a person who is not thinking that he is in danger.” Tucker’s translator was calm as well, but the Americans did have one concern. “They kept asking about weapons—if the guerrillas were going to be armed. I told him that yes, the guerrillas would be armed, very armed.” At dusk, Botero, Tucker, and the translator arrived at a small house belonging to a campesino family in the Serranía de Perijá and were told to wait for the arrival of the guerrilla commanders. Hours later, fifty-two-year-old Secretariat member Iván Márquez, a thickly built man with dark curly hair and a neatly trimmed beard, arrived with his entourage. All of the guerrillas were dressed in combat fatigues and were carrying semiautomatic rifles. The group consisted of Márquez; his companion, Lucia; and a senior guerrilla named Rodrigo Granda, along with half a dozen young soldiers, both men and women.

  Botero had met Granda thirty years before, when the two were both university students participating in political marches. Tucker also knew who Granda was because of the guerrilla’s interesting history. Granda had been captured in Caracas in January 2004 by Colombian police commandos (reportedly without the authorization of the Venezuelan government) and secretly transported to Colombia in the trunk of a car. His capture was a coup for Uribe because Granda was the FARC’s acting “foreign minister.” Granda was held for over three years in a Colombian prison, and his liberation came in a most unusual way. In May 2007, with enormous pressure mounting on newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy to do something to help free Ingrid Betancourt, Sarkozy persuaded Álvaro Uribe to release Granda from prison. Sarkozy’s argument was that the FARC would be thrilled to get their high-level commander out of jail and therefore would be so thankful to the Colombian government that they would respond with a similar gesture and release Betancourt. Uribe initially resisted Sarkozy’s appeal, because with so many Colombians in captivity, he did not want to give the impression that Betancourt’s freedom was more important to the government than the freedom of any of the other hostages. However, Uribe finally gave in to Sarkozy, and upon Granda’s release, the guerrilla commander was made to swear he would not return to the FARC. Sarkozy then publicly asked the guerrillas to make a “similar gesture,” and thousands of French people waited for the FARC to respond with the release of their beloved Betancourt. Nothing happened. The FARC completely ignored the request to reciprocate. Colombians were not surprised. Within weeks of his release, Granda was once again in the mountains with Iván Márquez, his AK-47, and his revolutionary rhetoric. “I will never demobilize or call for an end to armed struggle until our objectives are met,” he said in an interview with a French newspaper in May 2007. For Sarkozy, it was a painful embarrassment. For Uribe, it was a successfully calculated move: those in France and the international community who said he was not doing enough through diplomacy to free the hostages were temporarily silenced.

  However frightening the assemblage of armed guerrillas looked, the reception they gave Tucker at the campesino house was quite warm. Márquez, Granda, and a group of guerrillas who were part of Márquez’s personal guard sat down at a table near the kitchen to greet one another. “It was bizarre because I introduced them as if I were introducing business associates: ‘Mr. Tucker, this is Iván Márquez; Mr. Márquez, this is Trinidad’s lawyer,’” says Botero. At the same time, the presence of the attractive gringa translator had dampened any climate of hostility. “All the guerrillas stared at her because she was so pretty, so nice, and always smiling. She awoke many sighs among the guerrillas,” says Botero. Márquez began the meeting by thanking Tucker for the effort and the professionalism with which he had handled the case. Then to Tucker’s astonishment, Granda and Márquez cited various things that had impressed them about Tucker’s defense of Trinidad during the trial. “While we were talking, the guerrillas began preparing dinner on a woodstove, and just before we were served, Tucker told the FARC commanders that he wanted to discuss an offer. He said, ‘If you release the three Americans, the prosecutor could request a shorter sentence for Simón.’” Granda and Márquez looked at each other in disbelief. Botero was speechless. He had expected something more substantial in Tucker’s offer. It was the same offer that Ken Kohl had made publicly, a proposal that the guerrillas had categorically rejected. Botero knew that Márquez was expecting Tucker to o
ffer Trinidad’s and Sonia’s freedom for the liberation of the three Americans. “Márquez told Tucker that his proposal would be ‘taken to the Secretariat,’ but he was also firmly discouraging,” says Botero. “They took the offer a little bit like it was a joke. They said, ‘How long of a sentence are you talking about? Forty years? So Simón only has to live to be one hundred years old, not one hundred and twenty years old, to get out of prison? Well, that’s fine. Thanks a lot, Mr. Tucker, but this is not sufficient.’ Tucker was a little taken aback, like he hoped for something more, like he hoped for more flexibility, more pragmatism. But he didn’t think it had been a waste of time. He said, ‘Well, I’ve done as much as possible to try to help my client.’” After the frustrating exchange, the mood lightened and the meeting went the way of revolutionary music and conversation. There were Cuban cigars and rum. Before noon the following day, Tucker, the translator, and Botero headed down the mountain.

  In an August 2008 interview, Ken Kohl said that he had never made a specific offer for Tucker to deliver to the FARC, but he added, “Certainly, we wouldn’t be against whatever [Trinidad’s] attorney wanted to do to try to get those guys out. And if they were successful, we certainly would recognize that in sentencing Trinidad.” But days before the hearing, Tucker was empty-handed; he had nothing to offer the prosecutor when Trinidad’s sentencing day arrived.