Out of Captivity: Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

by Gary Brozek

  “I know. I know. I can’t believe, it either,” he said. I didn’t have words to respond to him.

  Immediately any thoughts we had of being flown to a prisoner exchange evaporated. Looking at that plane, with small-caliber bullet holes riddling one side (clearly not what had brought it to the ground), we couldn’t help but think of our own crash and of whoever had been aboard this plane. An overnight bag flapped in the twenty-knot wind. Empty sardine cans lay strewn around the wreckage. The FARC had found still sealed jars of Nescafé instant coffee and were stuffing them in their backpacks. I walked around the seared metal. The smell of decaying flesh was suddenly in my nostrils. I looked inside the cabin. It was empty.

  On this exposed ridge at what I guessed had to be well above five thousand feet, the air was frigid. I tried to take it all in. The wreckage. Keith lying on the ground tucked into a fetal position for warmth. Marc, visibly shaken, pale and drawn and lost in his own thoughts of what might have happened to this pilot and crew and what might be happening to us. I hated feeling lucky at that moment, but I did. We were still alive thanks to the skill of Tommy Janis, and now, like the pilot of the wreck before us, he was nowhere to be seen.

  I saw a pair of black penny loafers sitting on this wind-scraped hunk of rock. They had to have belonged to someone on board that doomed craft. The pennies were gone. I thought about just how cheap life was to these guerrillas and just how valuable it was to all of us. I’d been driven by the pursuit of the almighty dollar most of my life, but I was just starting to learn that there were a few things more valuable than coin.

  THREE

  ¿Quién Sabe?

  February 25, 2003—March 9, 2003

  MARC

  In some ways, sitting at that windswept crash site was a good thing. The climb to the airplane had taxed our bodies and spirits to their limits. The FARC had made it sound as if this plane was somehow going to help us get free. Now, confronted by the reality, we all felt as though we’d been punched in the gut and had our breath knocked out of us. Whether they were being malicious or just incredibly dense didn’t matter. We were learning a valuable lesson the hard way: It was dangerous for us to trust their words.

  If there was one positive that we could take from this enormous disappointment, it was that Keith was finally going to get more medical help. Having eaten nothing for the last week and a half except a few crackers, he was at the point when he knew that he could no longer continue. He told Johnny that he was not going any farther, and thank God that Johnny was either sympathetic, worried, or both, because he took Keith seriously. We were in a vulnerable location, where we could be easily spotted from the air, but despite that, they set up a tent for the three of us. We were all shivering so violently that they built a fire, but we were too exhausted to even crawl out of the tent to sit by it.

  The only reason we woke up the next morning was that Johnny returned with an IV fluid drip for Keith. I was a little worried about this jungle medic jabbing Keith with a needle, but he seemed to know what he was doing, although it strangely took him another couple of days to stitch up Tom’s head wound. After an hour or so of Keith’s IV treatment, the bag was empty and we were on the move again with Keith still dangling between two guerrillas in the hammock.

  By Tom’s count, we had been on this march for eleven days since the plane went down. We still had no idea of where we were going or whether there was a point to this march other than getting us as far away from the Colombian Army as possible. Even if we hadn’t been surviving on only a few hours of sleep, those days would have blurred one into another. Our exhaustion was so all-consuming that anytime we stopped marching, even if it was for just a few minutes, we immediately fell asleep. We were all experiencing a kind of vertigo; every image seemed to dance in front of us with dizzying intensity, as if we were viewing everything through troubled water.

  Though the FARC continued to provide Keith with IV feedings, beyond that they didn’t seem to care much about our mental or physical state. They pushed us relentlessly during the next two weeks, and as they did, our hopes rose and fell. Their answers to our questions about where we were going or when we would be able to rest ranged from “a little while longer” to “pretty soon” to “¿Quién sabe?” or “Who knows?”

  This last one became more frequent and more frustrating as the days passed. On what would eventually become a twenty-four day march, ¿Quién sabe? was a tool the FARC wielded almost as frequently as the machetes they used to clear the jungle, with each tool producing a decidedly different effect. The FARC were masters of the machete, slicing and hacking with impressive ferocity or finesse depending upon the situation. From clearing the vines and the gnarled tree trunks in our way to delicately cutting and slicing bamboo shoots to extract water when there was nothing else to drink, their skillful use of their machetes was a testament to how long they had been hiding out in the jungle.

  ¿Quién sabe?, on the other hand, was more of a blunt instrument, something they used to bludgeon our hopes and flatten our spirits. Each time Keith, Tom, or I asked a question, we gritted our teeth to prepare ourselves for that potentially soul-killing answer. Annoying as it was, those two words didn’t discourage us from asking, since nothing could stop us from thinking about home and release.

  Evasive as these answers were, we gradually started to gain a better sense of our captors. Most of the foot soldiers marching with us were country boys and girls. Their behavior was crude and disgusting (spitting, openly scratching their crotches—which the men and some of the women did with the same frequency and intensity—nose exploring), but we also felt a measure of sympathy for them. We ran into our own ¿Quién sabe? when we tried to imagine what these young men and women’s lives had been like, how bad the conditions of their existence must have been to make them think that joining the FARC was a step up. A few of them we asked told us the same reason for having joined the guerrillas: “La violencia.” They didn’t go on to explain what violence had been done to them personally, and we wondered if maybe they meant that they enjoyed being able to inflict damage on other people.

  The FARC weren’t exactly subtle when it came to the nicknames they gave one another. Lapo had such a prominent lower jaw that he looked like a living caricature. He was named after a jungle animal that was the size of a deer but had the jaw of a moose. Nicuro (Catfish) had wide-set eyes and a droopy mouth. Anthrax had terrible body odor. Bin Laden had Middle Eastern features. And these young kids didn’t think anything of openly referring to one another by these names.

  When they weren’t calling one another names, the guerrillas were eating sugar, and lots of it. They each carried a block of brown unrefined sugar that they called panela. They would break off a bit of it and eat it. They’d also mix Kool-Aid–type drinks from small packets—Royale and Frutino. Sometimes when we’d stop at a stream, one of them would take out a big pot they’d been carrying on their back and mix up the fruit drink. Sometimes they’d add in one, two, or three pounds of sugar, depending on the availability. That began to explain how they were able to move so tirelessly through the jungle. Like us, they weren’t eating a lot, but their sugar snacks and drinks were like jungle Gatorade and energy bars.

  My initial impression of the FARC as a bunch of Halloween trick-or-treaters was strengthened by this reliance on sugar and the presence of candy among them. Candy was a prized possession and those in charge frequently doled it out as a reward to the underlings. As much as we grew tired of hearing ¿Quién sabe?, I’m sure that the FARC had to wonder why we kept using the words bizarre and surreal. To be marching through the jungle, frequently walking past coca fields that we’d likely surveyed from the air, with a bunch of sugar-smacking, lollipop-sucking, brainwashed terrorists had tapped out our vocabularies, so we resorted to using our old reliables.

  Even though they were little more than a bunch of teenagers, this group and others like it had wreaked havoc in Colombia, forcing the military to use deadly force against them. I was reminded of
just how serious this conflict was a day or so after we left the airplane wreckage. We were taking a fifteen-minute break on a hillside. Suddenly two members of the rear guard—those at the very end of the line—started screaming, “¡Policía! ¡Policía!” They ran past us and off into the jungle. The rest of the guerrillas started to panic and talk really loudly. Sonia stepped up and yelled for them all to shut up. They fell silent, and a moment later a FARC guerrilla from a different unit came walking up. He was another of the local guides assigned to help us navigate through the next bit of territory—not a policeman or military guy. So much for what brave warriors the FARC were. Still, their response revealed a more important truth: These guerrillas were being hunted, and many of them had been wounded before. While they looked somewhat laughable to us, they were also extremely volatile. After all, a terrorist organization made up of mostly young men and women isn’t anyone’s idea of an ideal fighting force. They were undisciplined, and without good discipline, who knew what they might do.

  The first time I saw them stand in ranks, military style, it was clear that they saw themselves as an organized disciplined group of fighters. On that particular morning, a FARC commander by the name of Oscar was scheduled to arrive, and we suspected that something was up because the FARC all put their hats on. We didn’t know exactly what that meant, but normally they didn’t wear them. When Oscar appeared, he obviously was the commander of the Front, which in their organizational hierarchy is basically the platoon that captured us. Their chain of command dictated that Sonia reported to him. Oscar was short even by Colombian standards at about five feet two or so. He was also overweight and carried a belly that swung like a hammock over his belt. The pinkie finger on his right hand was mostly missing, but a stub of bone stuck out of the fleshy nub that remained.

  When Oscar called the soldiers together, they were a motley assortment and their ability to form straight lines or stand at attention was more like a Three Stooges routine than a formation. By the time they finally got in a row, the three of us were about to burst out laughing. That morning was one of the few remarkably clear days we’d had in a while, and no sooner had they assembled in their disorder than a plane flew overhead. Oscar began waving and shouting, instructing his people to get back under the jungle canopy and the roof of a crude leanto type structure they’d built. After the plane was out of earshot, they abandoned the idea of playing soldier for that day.

  The FARC made few allowances for gender, and physically, most of the women shamed us. Their ability to march all day was impressive, to say the least. At one point, I asked one of the FARC women if I could pick up her backpack to see how heavy it was. It was so loaded with her gear and food and other supplies for the rest of the unit that I could barely get it off the ground. Keith and I both had daughters, and we were distressed that some of these girls seemed barely older than Keith’s Lauren. One young woman struck us as a particularly sad case. She was no more than seventeen or eighteen, and she looked like she belonged on a runway in Paris, not marching through the jungle with a rucksack whose straps would eventually scar her like all the other men and women we’d seen.

  Looking at her, we all knew that her youth wasn’t going to last—not physically and not spiritually. Many of the FARC women looked far older than their years, and most were in relationships with men much older than themselves. Even in those first three weeks with the FARC, we could see that as much as the FARC preached equality—and in some ways practiced it by having the women carry heavy loads, work equally hard, and take their turns at guard duty—in many ways the women were sexual captives of the FARC men.

  The difficult position of the women became fairly clear to us as the march progressed. The day after the group met Oscar, Sonia told Keith that he had to bathe. She knew that with his ribs being broken and in his poor condition, it would be difficult for him to bathe himself, so she called him over to her.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she said in a tone that none of us had heard before. “You’re going to have a great bath.”

  Three female guerrillas led him down to the stream. Keith lay down on a rock and the three of them helped him strip down to his underwear. They did the same themselves and they proceeded to give him a sponge bath. All Keith could do was lie there with a perplexed look on his face and take in just how bizarre the whole scene was. Afterward he came back up the hill to where I had been resting, when Uriel approached us.

  “How did you like that, Kees?” Uriel said, his Colombian accent dropping the th sound and making Keith’s name sound more like Kiss. “It isn’t so bad here, is it?”

  “Which one do you want?” another guard joined in, pushing a couple of more young female guerrillas toward Keith. “Take this one. Or the other one. A girl will be my gift to you.”

  “This is all I need,” Keith said to me, smiling as he ignored their comments. “I’m in the middle of the jungle getting a sponge bath from three young women. With my luck, aerial recon got a shot of that scene and it’ll be splashed all over the front page. Malia sees it and that’s the last straw.”

  It was easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, but I could detect a little bit of pain seeping around the edges of his joke. As much as we were getting to know more about the FARC, we were also getting to know one another better. Recently Keith had told me that not long before our crash, he and his fiancée, Malia, had just started to work their way through a pretty tough patch in their relationship. Keith wasn’t proud of what he’d done, but he’d had an affair with a Colombian flight attendant named Patricia while he was engaged to Malia. He’d confessed everything to Malia, but then learned that Patricia was pregnant with twins. He’d come completely clean and let Malia know that he’d screwed up and that whatever she wanted to do—leave him or work things out—was entirely her call. She’d decided the relationship was worth saving. Now Keith was worried about his kids and leaving Malia at such a tough time in their relationship, but he also had the added anxiety over being the father of yet-to-be-born twins. He said that he was upset with Patricia, initially thinking that she’d purposely gotten pregnant, but he couldn’t let that get in the way of feeling and being responsible for the kids he’d fathered.

  Although the guards knew nothing of what was going on in Keith’s or any of our lives, they cruelly played on our desire to get home. When our energy was flagging and our pace slowed to a crawl, they would relay this message to us through Tom: “If you walk faster, you will see your family in two days.”

  We had no idea if they were telling the truth, but their claims had the desired effect. We picked up the pace as best we could. Whenever we were together, we’d speculate about whether or not we should believe their words. Our consensus was that it was unlikely that we’d see our families in two days, but maybe that was their way of telling us that we were going somewhere to be released. In our depleted condition—mental, physical, emotional—we were easy targets for that kind of deception. When the two days passed and we were no closer to being with our families, we didn’t protest to anyone. We simply chalked it up as a lesson we were learning in Hostage 101.

  TOM

  Three days after marching from the airplane, we arrived at another finca, but unfortunately our second encounter with finca hospitality was only marginally better than our first. This time, instead of sleeping out on a mound of grass on the ground, we were led to a small bedroom. A couple of nasty, dirt-encrusted mattresses were on the floor and all around them were piles of FARC trash, saltine-cracker wrappers, and empty bags of powdered milk. Keith, Marc, and I hardly exchanged a word before we fell onto the mattresses and into a deep, immediate sleep.

  When I woke up, I was in a half-dazed, semiaware state for an hour or so. I could hear a lot of voices, and I found myself thinking of the few times when I’d been in South America during a festival. I’d do my sightseeing and go to bed, but the rest of the hard core revelers were still out there. Through my sleep-deprived haze, I could hear them carrying on. This
was like that, except it was no party.

  A couple of times I raised my head up and looked to the doorway to see a few FARC backlit in the door frame. Each time it seemed the faces were different, the figures posed in a new configuration. I wasn’t sure how long we were in the bedroom, but we emerged outside just as the sun was beginning to set. On our march, we’d been accompanied by about sixteen to twenty guerrillas, but at this finca, at least sixty guerrillas had gathered. We immediately got the sense that we were a curiosity at worst and celebrities at best. The staring that had marked our first days of captivity resumed as groups FARC guerrillas came to look at us. Some wanted to say a word or two and did so, while the rest just moved their eyes over us as though they were waiting for us to do something.

  The finca’s kitchen was attached to the house, but instead of having four walls and a roof, it just had a piece of canvas hanging over a few poles to keep the rain off the stove. Alongside the stove sat a large metal tub, big enough for a guy to climb into and bathe. One of the FARC pulled the tub out a ways from the kitchen area while the three of us watched. At first we thought they were going to prepare a bath for us, but a few moments later, we heard the sound of a cow lowing. The cow was led to the tub, and one FARC busied himself with tying the cow’s hind legs while another tied its front legs.

  The cow, a somewhat thin, haggard-looking animal that seemed to be about as exhausted as we were, just stared at us sleepily. Suddenly a guerrilla put the cow into a headlock and twisted its neck back and to the side, while the other slit the cow’s throat with his machete in a single, precise move. The cow’s eyes rolled back in its head and it looked completely startled. Unable to keep its balance, the animal toppled over in a heap, and the guerrillas knelt beside it, pressing their hands down on its stomach as blood spurted into a smaller pan they held.