by Gary Brozek
“This is all about the FARC. Here’s some pictures of the top brass—”
He stopped midsentence; we all did.
Suddenly the room filled with the unmistakable sounds of helos coming our way fast and low. The FARC went into scramble mode, and we were in Full Metal Jacket. The helos came in right over the top of our camp, and we were once again beatin’ feet. So much for our rest period; we were back on the march, trekking through the jungle in the dark. Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, the sky opened up and a gather-the-critters-two-by-two deluge soaked us. Living in South Georgia and spending a bunch of time in various tropical-like climates, I was used to big rainstorms, but this one was epic.
We marched on for another three days, setting up temporary camps and spending the last night of those three sleeping under a derelict dump truck that was sitting up on concrete blocks. We were freezing our asses off and huddled together for warmth, but the smell of diesel fuel and motor oil made it hard to get a decent night’s sleep. The next morning, we could see that we’d stopped just outside a tiny village. On one exterior wall of the little school building was a mural of the most exotic and beautifully colored fish I’d ever seen. The rest of the buildings were run-down and drab, but that school was as vibrant a thing as I’d seen over the last three weeks. It got us thinking about our kids again.
“I hope Shane is putting the right ratio of peanut butter to jelly on Destiney’s sandwiches,” Marc said. He scratched at the dirt with the heel of his boot. “How could Shane explain any of this to her?”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing. My little guy is probably wondering why it’s taking me so long to get home this time. He gets into his routine just like me and doesn’t like it when things get all gummed up and out of sorts,” Tom added. I let out a sigh.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I got my boy’s birthday coming up soon. Never missed a one of them,” I said.
We went on for a while talking about birthday gifts, cakes, and pizza parties. For a minute we were out of there and back home. Silence filled the room; the emotional price of talking about home was instantly clear.
We were loaded into a different dump truck, a late-fifties model Ford with a big round cab. The whole lot of us—the FARC and all—were packed into its bed and taken for a crazy drive down a narrow mountain road that led to another village. This one was a bit bigger. One house stood out in our minds. We were told that it belonged to one of the FARC bosses. So much for economic equality; it was clear this was the nicest, most expensive place around, and it was ringed by a barbed-wire fence. We were escorted inside this boss’s house, and his wife fed us some soup. I started to eat, but lying on the floor was a McDonald’s paper sack. Spilling out of it was the box that had once held a Happy Meal. At that point, I lost it. I went outside and fell to my knees and started crying.
In a situation like that, you never know what’s going to trigger something deep inside you. I took Kyle to McDonald’s quite a bit and we’d hang out in the restaurant while he ate his Happy Meal. We had a rule. Finish your food then you got to play with the toy. We’d sit and play for a while and then go on home or finish up whatever errands we were running. Those memories came flooding back, and it was all just too much thinking of Lauren and Kyle and that I might not ever see them again.
Tom and Marc came out and sat with me for a bit, at first respecting my need to be alone with all the crap I was feeling.
“It’s so weird,” Marc said. “To be seeing roads and cars and signs of civilization. It’s like we could just step right back into it, but we can’t. We can’t touch any of it.”
We stayed silent for a minute. I thanked them both and we went back into the house to finish eating. After the meal, we marched on through the center of the town, past the slaughterhouse, empty at that hour, the hooks and blood drains just waiting patiently. We were walking down the middle of the street and there was no one around. The houses were all brightly painted in vivid blues, reds, and oranges. Every house seemed to have flower boxes in the windows with roses or some other flowers spilling out of them. Yet everything seemed deserted, shut down. The village square was empty, the church doors closed, the bell tower silent. At one point, I looked down a narrow avenue off the main drag and saw a man peering at us around the corner of a building. We kept walking.
Finally the FARC led us past a building where there were some people sitting at crude benches. The smell of tanning solution and leather was heavy in the air. We stopped for a minute. It was clear the FARC wanted us to see how industrious these people were; they were making the leather weapons vests the FARC wore. Instead of being impressed, the sight had the opposite impact on me. These people were clearly slaves of the FARC, making who knew what kind of money—if any—to do their work. None of the workers looked up at us. Word must have gone around that the three Americans were coming through. Don’t look. Don’t touch. On the outskirts of town, we passed by the cemetery. Even the dead folks knew better than to look up as we shuffled along kicking up dust devils.
We stopped a click or so outside of town, just pulled up alongside the road, and sat for a few hours. The FARC sent some guys back and they returned with fresh-baked bread and sodas for all of us. A few hours later, a larger group of FARC, about a hundred strong, came down off the hillside and marched us out of there.
Three days later, our twenty-four days of marching came to an end.
FOUR
The Transition
March 2003
TOM
On the last day of our twenty-four-day march, we exited the jungle and found ourselves at a pickup point near a large clearing where a number of ranchers had fenced off the area. We arrived in the late afternoon and were told that we’d be picked up at eight that night. Until then we just had to wait.
As the sun fell, the temperature dropped.
By the time our driver arrived, it was around one in the morning, and we were all freezing. Across the field we could see headlights coming toward us, bucking up and down as the vehicle crossed the rutted ground. Behind the wheel of this Toyota Land Cruiser was a FARC guerrilla wearing a Tommy Hilfiger headband around his shaved head. What an American fashion designer had to do with Marxist doctrine was not something I could figure out. We loaded up in the backseat, and Sonia sat in the front. The driver looked at Sonia and told her to chamber a round in her weapon. He instructed a couple of other guerrillas who were going to ride along on the running boards to do the same.
Then he turned to us with a sleazy smile, “You’re surprised? You didn’t think the FARC had vehicles, did you?”
The arrogant bandanna boy could drive and was proud of it. We guessed that few of the FARC could, though saying this guy could drive was a bit of an exaggeration. At one in the morning, blackest of night, he tore out of there with the radio blasting and one hand casually flung over the steering wheel. He spent most of his time staring at Sonia and making small talk with her, trying to impress her with his skill and wit. We thought that our first time sitting on comfortable seats in more than three weeks was going to be something close to enjoyable, but it was just another fright-night special of suspension-fracturing ditches, stomach-churning switchbacks, and more FARC nonsense. After an hour, we stopped in the middle of the road. A Toyota pickup with a canvas rubberized tarp hung over a metal-tubing framework pulled out of somewhere and parked alongside us.
We climbed in the back of this new pickup, a different version of the Land Cruiser that was a real mountain bruiser with a stiff suspension. With a jolt, we were off again, bouncing crazily around in the bed, hanging on for dear life. Even with that rough ride, we all dozed off periodically. At one point, just as the sky was starting to bleed across the eastern horizon, we stopped again. Someone ran off into the dark and returned with a mattress that was no more than three inches thick. We scrambled out of the truck bed while our guards arranged the mattress, and when it was set we took off again. What must have been an hour later, we
came to the largest, most complex FARC camp we’d seen yet.
It must have been a former maintenance yard, a holdover from the days of the despeje or demilitarized zone that former Colombian president Pastrana had created in 1998 to bring the FARC to the bargaining table. While this camp was clearly still up and running, the despeje had been lifted in February of 2002, after the FARC carried out a series of terrorist acts. The last straw came when they hijacked a commercial airliner and took Jorge Eduardo Gechem Turbay, a Colombian Liberal Party (PLC) senator and chairman of the peace commission hostage. Before that, they had attacked several villages and cities, killing scores of civilians, and kidnapped several other government officials including Congresswoman Consuelo González de Perdomo, Congressman Orlando Beltrán Cuellar, Senator Luis Eladio Pérez Bonilla, and Congressman Oscar Tulio Lizcano among many other lawmakers. In their boldest move, they posed as police officers and kidnapped a dozen Colombian legislators. The situation grew so bad that in December of 2001, the Colombian legislature passed a law stating that kidnapped candidates could still run for office even though they weren’t present. In the run up to the elections in March of 2002, the FARC kidnapped 840 people in 2001 and 183 persons in the first three months of 2002.
Kidnapping for ransom was a booming business for the FARC, but it wasn’t the only terrorist tactic they employed. In an eighteen-month period, the FARC also killed at least four hundred members of the Colombian military, starting in early 2001. Using car bombs and improvised mortars, they wreaked havoc in a way they hadn’t done previously. During that same time, three Irish Republican Army members were arrested in Colombia and accused of training the FARC in bomb making.
All of these activities brought an end to the peace talks and the DMZ. Shortly after the talks fell apart in early 2002, the FARC responded by kidnapping Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and several others while they were traveling in guerrilla territory. The heat had been turned up on the FARC ever since, with pressure coming from both domestic and international sources. When Álvaro Uribe ran for president in 2002, his “democratic security” policy was at the heart of his platform. His father had been killed by the FARC and his promise of taking a hard line in dealing with them helped carry him to victory in August of 2002. He took office at a precarious time in Colombia’s history, with groups like the FARC seemingly in control of a country whose forty years of civil war was not going to end anytime soon.
Our work was a testament to the fact that the U.S. was heavily invested in ensuring that Colombia achieve some form of political stability. Much of the U.S. funding for Colombia came through something called Plan Colombia, which involved billions of dollars in military, social, and antidrug aid. Without it, the drug traffickers and other criminals would continue to make the country and the region unsafe.
A conservative, Uribe’s policies put him at odds with many of the other leaders in the region, especially Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Ricardo Lagos in Chile, who were far left of center. As Chávez rose to prominence in South America, he used Colombia’s ties to the U.S. as a way to gain influence among the fledgling governments in the region. Chávez seized on every opportunity to characterize Uribe as a puppet, who was willing to trade billions of dollars in U.S. aid in exchange for his country’s freedom to control its own destiny. In the rhetoric of Chávez, any ally of the U.S. was a potential enemy of South America, regardless of the increased stability U.S. influence might bring to the region and Colombia.
With many South American countries emerging into the light of democratic reforms, battles were being waged to decide who was going to ally with whom. The result of all this was that the FARC’s gain also seemed to help Chávez’s cause. The longer Colombia’s struggle with the FARC went on, the more the country had to rely on U.S. aid, which hurt its standing in South America and gave Chávez more regional leverage.
And now we were thrown into this mix of political kidnapping, murder, foreign tension, and domestic strife. With no peace settlement or negotiations in sight, we didn’t know if they considered us a bargaining chip or just some guys to kill to make a statement about their intent to keep the violence going. They’d been exchanging their prisoners for profit the way we’d once returned soda bottles for a deposit. Maybe that was what was about to happen to us.
At this new camp, we were led to a large roofed but wall-less structure where they must have stored their large trucks and road-building equipment. It was the size of a small airplane hangar and in the middle of the floor sat three wood-plank beds, each separated by ten feet. The only other thing in the hangar was a round table on which the slimy FARC set a box of fruit.
Two men walked in wearing neat camouflage uniforms and carrying wooden chairs that they sat down on. At first, all I could focus on were the weapon vests they wore. They each had pistols strapped at each hip, and a rifle was slung over one shoulder. One of the pistols had a billiard ball—an eight ball to be precise—engraved on the handle. They were also wearing scarves the color of the Colombian flag—red, blue, and yellow. Both of them were short and somewhat squat and older than our guards. They had to be close to forty by my best estimation.
We all immediately recognized the one with the pencil-thin mustache—the folds near the corner of both eyes revealed that he was of mixed ancestry—some indigenous and Spanish blood. His name was Fabián Ramírez. In one of our briefings, we’d learned he was the commander of the 14th Front, and one of the men primarily responsible for the drug operations in the Southern Bloc. His real name was José Benito Cabrera Cuevas, and according to our sources, his masterminding of the FARC’s cocaine policies meant that he was responsible for hundreds of tons of cocaine making their way to the U.S. and elsewhere. He participated in setting and implementing the FARC’s cocaine policies, while directing and controlling the production, manufacture, and distribution of hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States and the world. His taxes on the drug trade led to millions of dollars being socked away in the FARC’s coffers, and his enforcement of the FARC’s rules regarding cocaine had put hundreds in their graves. He’d also made a statement following the kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt that the FARC would take hostage any of the presidential candidates. In addition, he indicated that the government had until the end of 2002 to negotiate for her release before the FARC “did what was convenient.”
The other man with Ramírez introduced himself as Burujo. He had a much darker complexion than Ramírez, and he lacked the folds near the corners of the eyes. His voice was soft and quiet, so much so that just to translate properly, I had to incline my head toward him every time he spoke.
At first, their questions were about what we were doing there. They also asked if we were CIA. When we told them we weren’t, they both wrinkled their faces in disgust. I didn’t care if they believed us or not. I was thinking they could shoot us right there if they wanted to. I was too tired to care. The pair only talked with us for a few minutes. I got the impression they wanted to say more, but another man came walking up to us. He was slightly taller than the others, and he carried himself with a casual arrogance. Along with his camo uniform and the Colombian colors he wore on his shoulder, he had a kaffiyeh—a houndstooth scarf like Yassar Arafat and the PLO wore—wrapped around his neck. Like the others, he was armed, but he had a Browning chrome-plated pistol. He tapped its butt with his fingertips to make sure we all saw his fancy weapon. Burujo and Ramírez had stepped away. They were next to Sonia, who was beaming and standing at taut attention. Clearly this was somebody she wanted to impress and the others respected or feared.
He stood looking at us each in turn, kind of theatrically, I thought. Marc, Keith, and I exchanged glances and rolled our eyes. Then the guy spotted the box of fruit. He walked over to it and took out an apple. I fully expected him to polish it on his uniform for even more dramatic effect, but he didn’t. He took a bite out of it, chewed for a few seconds.
“You see what happens when you get involved in a war?” he
began. He then continued by accusing us of fighting against the guerrillas.
“We’re counternarcotics, nothing more,” Marc, Keith and I told him one by one. “We don’t fight the guerrillas. We fight the drugs.”
Every time we used the word drugs or narcotics, he flinched a bit.
“Bullshit” was his only response to our telling him the truth.
He went on a political rant. He told us that the Colombian government and the army had been tracking us throughout our twenty-four-day march. He said it didn’t matter if they had. The Colombian government couldn’t do anything to hurt the FARC because the FARC didn’t have a casa blanca; instead they had a casa verde—their house of green, the jungle. Because they didn’t have a headquarters, because they kept on the move constantly, they couldn’t be bombed or raided.
By then, I’d figured out who this man was. He was Joaquín Gómez, the leader of the Southern Bloc. Our intel had pegged him as the guy who collected the revenues generated by the FARC’s drug-trafficking operations. Ramírez reported to Gómez, so we’d seen the latter’s name a few times on our target sheets.
Gómez went on talking, telling us again that the FARC knew that they were being spied on.
“That’s right,” Keith said.
He raised an eyebrow and looked at Keith. “So, you are saying there is no safe way to communicate.”
Keith shrugged. “That’s what you are telling us. That you have no secure phone. Everybody can intercept your communications. The army followed us. They know we’re here. They know you’re here. You’re trapped is what I’m saying. There’s nothing you can do.”
Gómez said the best way to combat the technology that enabled us to be tracked was to go back in time. We’d already felt that we’d traveled back in time. How much further could they go? Instead of using radio communications, Gómez said, they were going to use messengers to carry handwritten communiques back and forth.