Finally, it looked as though Córdoba had been able to pry open the negotiations, and the guerrillas had agreed to turn over four hostages to her and delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross. On February 1, 2009, Botero joined the group and boarded a Brazilian military helicopter adorned with giant Red Cross emblems. They landed in an initial meeting place in Caquetá, where they would rendezvous with the guerrillas to organize the handover. The area had been guaranteed by the Colombian government to be free from military activity. Córdoba and a Swiss Red Cross worker were speaking to the guerrillas when the terrifying sound of military jets rattled the cloudy skies. “It was one plane first, then two planes, three planes above us,” Botero recalls. “Circling—each time getting closer. Everybody was terrified. The first thing I thought was, Uribe doesn’t want this hostage release to happen. Then I thought, They’re going to bomb us, but at least I’m going to be able to film this before I die.” Botero quickly called in a report to Venezuelan television station Telesur, because he knew that the two major Colombian news stations wouldn’t air a report showing the government impeding the handover. Soon after, the guerrillas picked up Colombian military radio transmissions. Botero filmed the guerrillas as they listened to the intercepted message. “Photograph them at the coordinates,” the military commander said. “Then do a ground search in that area.” The FARC soldiers told Córdoba that they were going to cancel the hostage release. The Red Cross delegate tried to reach the Colombian peace commissioner, Luis Carlos Restrepo, by satellite phone to get him to call off the military, but Restrepo’s phone went to voice mail. At the time, Restrepo was holding a press conference at the Villavicencio airport, where journalists had gathered to wait for the hostages’ return. The reporters had gotten wind of Botero’s live report about the aggressive flyovers, and they demanded answers from Restrepo, who denied any military action was going on in the area. Finally, Córdoba and the Red Cross delegate were able to communicate with Minister of Defense Santos, who called off the military. The planes left the area. Santos later referred to the incident as a simple misunderstanding. In the end, one soldier and three members of the National Police were released to Córdoba.
In a press conference the following day, Uribe was irate that Botero had exposed the flyovers on Venezuelan television. “What’s his name? The journalist Jorge Enrique Botero? He was not acting as an observer, but instead he was a publicist of terrorism, and that cannot be accepted. One thing is the freedom of the press, and another thing is to use the press pass to become a publicist for terrorism.” Botero apologized for not following protocol. He’d been invited to be part of the release as an observer for a nongovernmental organization called Colombians for Peace. “But everyone knew I was traveling as a journalist, as well. I’d arrived in Florencia with all my camera gear, and I’d secured permission to film.” Botero was smugly confident that had he not reported on the flyovers, the military would have continued their operations and the hostages would not have been released. Still, he felt Uribe’s condemnation like a noose around his neck. For several days, Botero locked himself in his apartment and waited for the storm to calm down. “I believe that Uribe was very irresponsible with his accusations, and I told my children, ‘If something happens to me, it will be Uribe’s fault.’ Some lawyer friends suggested I bring a lawsuit against Uribe in court for slander, but I preferred to keep things quiet and lie low.”
While the fate of the remaining Colombian hostages had become internationally uninteresting after the release of Betancourt and the three Americans, Piedad Córdoba continued to negotiate with the FARC for the release of the remaining prisoners. For his part, Botero couldn’t help but continue to follow her. There was one hostage in particular whom Botero was determined to see freed—the first hostage he’d ever interviewed in captivity in 2000, a National Police colonel named Luis Mendieta, who had been kidnapped when the FARC attacked his battalion in 1998. “What impressed me so much about him was his serenity and his capacity to keep his men united,” Botero says. “It was before the 2001 prisoner exchange, and Mendieta had fifty or sixty of his men who had been kidnapped along with him. He was like a father to them.” Botero was also taken with the colonel because he was cultured and sophisticated, but in a very gentle way—something Botero found very unusual for a police colonel. But the thing that made Botero feel most connected to Mendieta was the colonel’s family, whom Botero had become very close to while filming the documentary ¿Cómo Voy a Olvidarte? (How Can I Forget You?) about their situation. “They had so much love—the two children, Jenny and José Luis, and the colonel’s wife, María Teresa.” Botero says that after making his documentary and watching the heartbreaking footage over and over while editing the film, “I had many sleepless nights. For months, I awoke in the middle of the night remembering the images of that family submerged in suffering. I heard the cries of María Teresa when she read the love letters she wrote to the colonel; I saw his children cry [while] remembering their father.” Twice more, Botero would receive permission to interview Mendieta in the jungle. The last time would be in 2003, just prior to his interview with Gonsalves, Stansell, and Howes. “The colonel was destroyed. He’d lost his will to live, his ability to fight. He clung to God with a desperation that he’d never had before,” says Botero. At that last meeting, Mendieta gave Botero a letter to give to his family and a religious medallion that he’d been wearing on a silver chain. Botero gave his headphones to Mendieta so he could use them to listen to his radio. Four and a half years would go by before Botero received news of Mendieta. Among a stack of letters brought out by Clara Rojas and Consuelo González de Perdomo in January 2008 was a tragic letter from Mendieta to his wife. The colonel, who had been promoted to brigadier general in absentia, wrote that he was often chained by the neck to other hostages, had chronic chest pains, and was so ill at one point that “I had to drag myself through the mud to relieve myself with only my arms because I couldn’t stand up.” Mendieta’s daughter read excerpts of her father’s letter on Caracol Radio in January 2008. The letter from Mendieta and the continuing brutality of the FARC caused a public outcry so great that less than a month later, more than two million people—the largest demonstration ever witnessed in Colombia—came together in Bogotá and other Colombian cities. The call to march against the FARC went viral on the social networking site Facebook, and thousands more joined in cities around the world on February 4, 2008, with a simple and straightforward cry: “No more FARC!”
As Botero returned to the jungle in early 2009 to continue reporting on the war and the hostages, he found that Marulanda’s ultimate goal for his revolution was still moving forward under the leadership of Alfonso Cano. “From what I have heard personally and from the documents they’ve produced, the FARC have not renounced the plan to take over the country; they have postponed it—pushed it back,” Botero says. “The reality is that Uribe came in and started a huge plan to annihilate them. So they’ve had to dedicate all of their efforts to defending themselves. But from what I’ve seen, they are resisting. They are continuing to recruit people.” By mid-2009, Botero witnessed an obvious growth in the ranks. “I also saw a push to obtain heavy weaponry, including missiles, weapons to take down planes, high-power armaments and long-range weapons.”
On February 3, 2009, Alan Jara, the former governor of Meta (who had been chained to Colonel Mendieta during his captivity), was released to Piedad Córdoba after seven and a half years in captivity. The Colombian government forbade Botero to accompany Córdoba on the mission this time, and instead he waited for Jara to arrive in Villavicencio. “I had tears in my eyes as I watched him come from the helicopter into the arms of his wife and son,” says Botero, who had interviewed Jara in captivity and met Jara’s family several times. In a press conference two days later, Jara would express his anger toward both sides of the conflict that had kept him captive for 2,760 days. “I think that the President’s attitude hasn’t helped the exchange and the liberation happen at al
l. It would seem that President Uribe benefits from the situation of war that the country is living through, and it seems like the FARC likes to have him in power. In one direction or the other, [Uribe and the FARC] aim the same way.” Three days after Jara’s release, the FARC freed the last politician they held, former assemblyman Sigifredo López, who had been a captive for six years and ten months. López had been held with eleven other lawmakers from the Valle de Cauca assembly. All of his colleagues had been murdered a year and a half earlier when their captors mistakenly thought the Colombian army was attempting a rescue. At the time, López had been chained to a tree as punishment and was missed in the massacre.
With twenty-two military and National Police hostages still on the list of exchangeables, Córdoba and Botero made another trip to Washington, D.C., to try to gain support for hostage negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government. There was little interest on the part of U.S. lawmakers or the international media. “When the rich people were still hostage, it was an important item, but now that the politicians are free, it is not important anymore,” Marleny Orjuela, director of Asfamipaz (an association of relatives of military hostages), told Colombia Reports. “The interest of countries like France, Switzerland and Sweden has dropped 80 percent since Ingrid Betancourt was released. We haven’t heard from the Betancourt Committees ever since—nor from her.” Orjuela said that she had asked for a meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, and had been waiting for months but had received no response. Although there was little market for stories about the hostages, there was one specific reason Botero continued his trips to the mountains and the jungle to meet with FARC commanders. “It’s because of the colonel,” he says. “When Mendieta is free—and I’m afraid he may be the last one to be freed—when this happens, I will turn the page. Only then will I be able to close this chapter of my life.”
* Interagency
** SOUTHCOM Reconnaissance System
Epilogue
During the 1,967 days that Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves, and Keith Stansell remained in captivity, nearly three billion dollars were invested by the U.S. government to fight the war on drugs in Colombia. Four months after their rescue, in November 2008, a glossy State Department brochure titled Colombia: An Opportunity for Lasting Success (published to pump up the idea of a trade agreement with Colombia) stated, “While estimates differ, coca cultivation has declined since 2002.” The statement could only be interpreted as a twisted analysis of the State Department’s own data, since the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report for 2007 (compiled by the State Department) actually reports an increase in cultivation every year since 2003. The United Nations found similar trends. In a 2008 survey, coca cultivation in South America was found to be at its highest level since 2001 due to a 27 percent rise in Colombia’s crop. The executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, called the increase “a surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian Government is trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of cultivation.” The National Drug Intelligence Center, a division of the DOJ, reported that the price for cocaine in the first quarter of 2008 was up by about 22 percent from 2005 and purity was down. Both factors pointed to a decline in the availability of cocaine on U.S. streets. The promising trend was attributed to several exceptionally large cocaine seizures, counterdrug efforts by the Mexican government, increasing intercartel violence in Mexico, and expanding cocaine markets in Europe and South America. No credit could be attributed to any U.S.-Colombia efforts.
Although the empirical data show an absolute failure of Plan Colombia to curb coca cultivation and production, the State Department’s 2007 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, released in March 2008, indicated that the unsuccessful policy would remain essentially the same for 2009 and 2010: capturing and extraditing Colombian nationals, dismantling terrorist organizations and illegal armed groups that run the drug trade in Colombia, and continuing the chemical eradication efforts. The price tag for the 2009–2010 program would be $1 billion.
In February 2009, South American leaders from seventeen countries met in Rio de Janeiro to evaluate western hemisphere drug policies. The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy presented its conclusions in an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal. “Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of consumption have not yielded the expected results,” the article said. “We are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.” The commission was cochaired by former heads of state Fernando Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia (who helped bring down Pablo Escobar), and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, all of whom were once leaders in the crusade to crack down on the drug trade by using military, law enforcement, and fumigation techniques. The commission also blamed the war on drugs for a litany of dire and costly consequences: “The expansion of organized crime, a surge of violence related to drug trafficking and pandemic corruption among law enforcement personnel from the street level on up.”
“Every measure of the coca and cocaine reduction effort indicates failure,” says Adam Isacson. “Whether it’s the amount of coca being detected, whether it is the tonnage of cocaine being shipped, the percentage that we think we’ve interdicted, the price of the stuff on the streets here in the U.S., or the size of the addict population. Everything indicates no impact.” Alfredo Rangel, a top Colombian security expert and a supporter of Álvaro Uribe, told Newsweek in January 2009, “We’re capturing more cocaine and heroin than ever before. The bad news is that all that has done nothing.” A former U.S. Army veteran and self-described ultra-right-winger who worked closely with Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes was one of the first to capitalize on the massive influx of U.S. dollars that came with Plan Colombia. “If the drug war goes away, I might be unemployed,” he said in a June 2008 interview. “But I think that legalization is the way. It’s a lie that the drug war has changed anything. The laws in the U.S. have not changed. The DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] spends a lot of money. The solution is to legalize and tax drugs in the States and in Mexico. Pablo Escobar is like a Boy Scout compared to the Mexicans.”
By 2008, it had become apparent that the illegal drug trade, manifested in a form more brutal and deadly than ever before, had landed on the very doorstep of the United States. Long-problematic drug violence in Mexico dramatically escalated in 2006 when Mexican president Felipe Calderón declared war on seven major cartels by deploying 45,000 soldiers and 5,000 police officers across the nation. In the Wild West city of Uruapan in central Mexico, traffickers tossed five human heads onto a dance floor. In Tijuana, on the border with California, decapitated bodies of soldiers and police turned up in minimarts, and gunmen blanketed neighborhoods with gunfire. Mutilated bodies appeared with written signs taunting rival cartels. In 2009, the ghoulishness reached Hollywood horror film proportions when Santiago Meza López, known as “El Pozolero” (“the Stewmaker”), admitted he’d dissolved three hundred bodies in barrels of lye for Tijuana’s Arellano Félix cartel. After his arrest, hundreds lined up with photos of missing loved ones, begging police to ask López if he recognized the faces. Between January 2008 and July 2009, over seven thousand were killed as traffickers fought over territory and smuggling routes and battled often-corrupt military and police forces. Nearly one-third of the killings took place in Ciudad Juárez, on the border with El Paso, Texas. In almost all cases, there were no arrests, no prosecutions.
The violence has not been contained behind the U.S.-Mexico border. In August 2008, in an apartment near Birmingham, Alabama, five men were tortured by electric shock before having their throats slit over a $400,000 debt to a Mexican cartel. Phoenix, Arizona, has become the kidnapping capital of the United States, with nearly four hundred known abductions in 2008 by those tied to the Mexican drug business. And in February 2009, U.S. authorities arrested forty-eight people in C
alifornia, Minnesota, and Maryland as part of a twenty-one-month investigation targeting Baja California’s Sinaloa cartel. In Starr County, Texas, in March 2009, the town sheriff was arrested for taking payoffs from the Gulf cartel as it moved drugs across the border. The U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center believes that Mexican cartels maintain distribution networks or supply drugs in at least 230 U.S. cities. In 2009, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said the Obama administration was considering swarming the border with agents and hadn’t counted out the possibility of engaging the military. And while drugs and their problematic counterparts have flowed north, American weapons have poured south. Responding to a report that 90 percent of all arms in Mexico come from the United States, Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said, “It’s simply unacceptable that the United States not only consumes the majority of the drugs flowing from Mexico but also arms the very cartels that contribute to the daily violence that is devastating Mexico.”
To tackle the menacing problems emerging from its southern neighbor, in June 2008, the United States began a new chapter of the war on drugs with a costly antinarcotics program called the Mérida Initiative. As with Plan Colombia, much of the $1.6 billion plan for Mexico and Central America will never leave the United States. Instead, the money will go to private U.S. contractor corporations for surveillance software, computers, ion scanners, gamma-ray scanners, satellite communication networks, and other goods and services. A large portion of the first-year budget is for aircraft and includes $104 million to Texatron, Inc., for eight Bell helicopters to transport troops and support counternarcotics missions, $106 million to the Connecticut-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation for three Black Hawks, and $10 million for the purchase of three single-engine Cessna Caravans, training, maintenance, and parts “for surveillance of drug trafficking areas and for a wide range of surveillance missions.”
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