by Gary Brozek
Consuelo was crying and we all tried to calm her and comfort her. The worst thing was, we heard the FARC giggling. Whenever we heard them do that, we knew they were nervous. Having a group of nervous guerrillas armed and ready to gun you down when the order came was not something I ever thought I’d have to deal with in my life, but I was strangely calm. I really had no control over the situation. What was going to happen was out of my hands. Normally, I hated that feeling, but we’d been struggling with control issues for so long in that camp, I’d come to understand better how to deal with things.
When the helos flew off and the order came to stand down, we all stood in stunned silence while the guards filed out. There would be no rescue that night, just the lingering effects of another confirmation of the FARC’s deadly policy. They had told us that they had no intention of killing us, but their word was broken as easily as the lie was given.
MARC
In the days after that second helo incident, it was hard to look at our guards as we had done before, even the ones we had developed decent relationships with. Whatever connection we’d made with them had definitely been severed. Seeing just how close they’d come to pulling the trigger was eye-opening. It reminded us that no matter what, we could never count on them to do what was right. We didn’t bother to discuss the situation with them. We knew what their answer would be. Instead of ¿Quién sabe? they would have said, “We were only following orders.”
I tried to put myself in their shoes. I didn’t know how I would have felt if I was told that my assignment was to take care of and to protect something (in this case someone) who was supposedly of great value to our cause. Would I have been able to pull the trigger when ordered? Would I have objected because I saw the illogic of the command or because of the humanitarian issues involved? I didn’t like thinking about the fact that neither of these questions occurred to our guards.
After the second helo attack, the FARC sorted through our gear again. This time they didn’t want flashlights—since they’d already taken them—instead they wanted our radios. Seizing these was just another way to increase security on us. The politicals had a number of radios in camp, including Consuelo’s large panel radio with shortwave capability. Giving them up would be hard. We needed to know that there was a world outside of the fencing that enclosed us. We needed to listen to the message programs in hope that we would hear from a loved one.
In addition, we had become heavily reliant on the radios because of the news reports. In June of 2004, we had been with the Colombians for eighteen months, when we learned via radio that President Uribe and the U.S. government had implemented a new plan to confront the FARC in southern Colombia. Named Plan Patriota (Plan Patriot), the program was heavily funded by the U.S. government, and it involved the U.S. actively training Colombian soldiers as special jungle commandos. According to the radio reports we heard, Plan Patriota was the most aggressive effort the Colombian military had ever engaged in to deal with the FARC, involving a substantial offensive against the guerrillas in southern Colombia.
Some of the sources in Colombia claimed that Plan Patriota took the disguise off of the U.S.’s efforts to cripple the drug trade. Whereas the stated aim of Plan Colombia—the strategy that had brought us and California Microwave into Colombia in first place—was to wipe out the drug trade, many Colombians, including a number of the politicians in our camp, had always believed it was merely a front for taking on the FARC.
Plan Patriota was designed to succeed where Plan Colombia had failed: wiping out the FARC. We had no idea how long Plan Patriota had been in effect, but a number of the Colombian radio commentators believed that with Plan Patriota, the U.S. and Colombian governments had decided to drop the pretense of drug interdiction and engage the FARC more directly. This raised the ire of some of the politicals at Caribe, but none of us wanted to debate them on the issue of U.S. aid to Colombia. What we did want to debate was how this would affect our chances of being rescued, freed, or executed. The news that more troops were on the ground and intent on capturing or killing the FARC was a mixed blessing. While we knew this heightened engagement of the FARC was the hard right thing for the governments to do, the offensive increased our chances of being killed.
Radios kept us connected to all of these developments as they unfolded, helping us stay ahead of the news as much as possible. Knowing that the jungle commandos were U.S.-trained was a good thing; if U.S. Special Forces were on the ground in Colombia, it would be the best thing. We needed to know who was coming after us so that we could plan our response appropriately. If the FARC was going to execute us during a rescue attempt, the radios were crucial to our survival.
The day the FARC came to seize the radios, I was standing by Orlando. 2.5 showed up in our hooch, and Gloria and Consuelo gave him the four radios they had. I looked over to the back of the hooch, and I saw Ingrid putting one of the small transistor radios in her boot. She saw me and pointed to her boot to indicate that she had it hidden. Keith and Orlando also saw what Ingrid had done. 2.5, meanwhile, glared at Keith.
“Does Ingrid have a radio?” he asked.
Keith met 2.5’s steady gaze.
“No, sir,” he said without skipping a beat. “She does not.”
Orlando said the same thing when asked. 2.5 shrugged and walked out.
At first I wondered why Ingrid would risk getting caught hiding a radio. It was either courageous or an act of selfishness, as though she believed that out of all of us, she deserved to continue to have a radio. I’d seen so many things in the months we’d been in that camp that it was difficult to treat any individual action as an isolated case. I was willing to wait this one out to see how things developed. I didn’t have to wait long.
Keith had stood up for Ingrid by lying to 2.5. I knew he did that for all of us and not just for her. Her lone radio would be a true lifeline for us all. Unfortunately, within days of the radios being taken, that lifeline was cut off. Before, we had listened to the radios openly, but after the seizure, that was no longer possible. Ingrid had to be very careful about when and where she listened. We all expected her to fill us in on what she heard about developments within Colombia and relay any messages she heard from our family members, but she didn’t do either of those things.
Her behavior was a shock to all of us. Because he’d put himself at risk by lying for her, Keith was probably the most upset among the three of us. He saw Ingrid’s actions as just another power play, an attempt to use the radio to control us. If she wanted to bestow a favor on one of us by passing along a message, we’d be grateful and more likely to do something for her in return. I didn’t want to be that cynical about her motivations or anyone else’s, but even if I viewed this act on its own, it was hard to come up with any other plausible explanation.
To add insult to injury, keeping us in radio silence took serious effort on her part. She had to go out of her way to do it. We were in such close quarters and with the same people all the time that it was difficult, if not impossible, to hide anything. A lot of our barriers or boundaries had already been broken down. The three of us were so familiar with the sight of one another squatting down to move our bowels that it didn’t even register in our minds that this was something unusual, that in our lives before, it would have taken extraordinary circumstances for us to have even contemplated doing it.
Sleeping in a small room with ten other people, eating with them every day, you developed a kind of casual and forced intimacy that I had only experienced before in boot camp. If you spoke with someone, you were almost always within earshot of others. If you whispered or wandered off to a secluded part of the enclosure with that person, you might as well have been setting off alarm bells or firing a signal flair into the sky to let everyone else know you were sharing some business.
In a way, Camp Caribe was a kind of boot camp. We were being tested physically and mentally. We were being stripped down and laid bare, torn apart so that new selves could emerge. Keith had noticed this proc
ess taking place in himself and the three of us. He said that “character will out.” In other words, captivity would reveal the essential nature of us all. The jungle would strip away all layers of camouflage. Now, in the case of Ingrid and the radio, it appeared that was exactly what was happening.
Keith complained about Ingrid’s selfishness to anyone who would listen, and Orlando was in complete agreement with him. For everything that Keith said, Orlando added another log to the fire, riling Keith up and saying that we couldn’t let her get away with it. While Keith’s motivations were almost always clear, Orlando seemed to instigate things for other reasons, always working to get the best deal. The more he stoked Keith up, the more I questioned how all of this was going to play out.
Eventually, Keith and Orlando decided that the best course of action was for all of us to confront Ingrid and demand that she share information with us. Lucho and Ingrid were in their part of the hooch, and we assumed Orlando went inside to ask her to join the rest of us outside for a discussion. When she came out, she was livid—so angry, she was shaking. She sat down on a chair and crossed her legs. One leg was bouncing, and when she tried to light her cigarette, she could barely keep the match lit she was moving so dramatically. Looking her straight in the eye, Keith told her that unless she started sharing the information from the radio with the rest of us, he was going to have to turn her in.
She returned his stare and for a moment neither of them spoke. This particular strategy was one we’d discussed before approaching Ingrid. It was a bluff, but we’d decided it was a bluff worth making. We had no intention of following through on the threat. We were all hostages and had to stick together, but since Ingrid was the one part of the group who refused to abide by this, she believed we were capable of turning her in. That she and the other politicians didn’t share our sense of camaraderie was sky-written across the heavens when Ingrid spoke.
“Instead of worrying about me and my radio, you should be concerned about Consuelo,” she said, her voice cracking. “After all, Consuelo was the one who had the large panel radio. How do you think she got it?” The only way she could have, Ingrid was insinuating, was by cooperating with the FARC.
A part of me had to admire Ingrid for her quick thinking. Her response had nothing to do with the situation at hand. It was a misdirection, and it wasn’t fair of her to accuse Consuelo of conspiring with our enemy. After all, she had already given it up. It was a low blow no matter how you looked at it, and everyone was up in arms.
Just as tempers began to rise, Orlando, who’d been silent until that point, stepped in and much to everyone’s surprise began to defend Ingrid, telling her how he was upset at “their” accusations and that he’d tried to defend her. At first I was a bit stunned by Orlando playing both ends against the middle so obviously. I’d seen him do it in much more subtle ways before, but this was as overt as they came. A few minutes before defending Ingrid, he had been the one urging us all on to confront her, saying how unfair her action had been to us all. Now he seemed to have forgotten that altogether.
Keith couldn’t believe what he’d heard. He asked Orlando to step to the side so that he could talk to him. Keith’s Spanish wasn’t great, but his simple and astonished question—“¿Qué pasa?”—didn’t need any interpretation. I couldn’t hear what Orlando’s explanation was, but Keith came back over to where Ingrid was sitting and repeated what he’d said earlier. Then he told her he was so disgusted that he couldn’t even be near her at that point. He walked away, shaking his head and muttering.
I stuck around just long enough to see Orlando convince Ingrid that it was in her best interest to give him the radio. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place. Orlando, the ace wheeler-dealer, had won the pot. He’d wanted the radio from the beginning and had leveraged our legitimate outrage to get it. A part of me stood back and surveyed this situation with some admiration for Orlando. He got what he wanted—the radio and the power that went with it. He managed to still look good in Ingrid’s eyes by defending her and offering a seemingly reasonable solution to the problem. Keith looked like the bad guy because he was angry, and I was sure in Ingrid’s mind she thought he was demanding possession of the radio and not access to information. Orlando walked away looking like the good guy in everyone’s eyes and in possession of the thing he wanted most.
In the end, little turns like this were what Caribe was all about. Small power plays, people competing for control. I felt like I was sitting in on a master class in the art of negotiation and power politics. I liked Orlando all right, but this incident highlighted that he was a master manipulator. I’d seen him get other people angry at one another. At various times he’d told us that Ingrid was writing letters to Sombra telling him that we were CIA agents or that we were dangerous and negative influences on camp life. When Clara was removed from camp to give birth, he told us that Ingrid was writing letters to her to encourage her to name Tom as the father of her baby. He’d planted a seed that we were dirty, smelly Americans who didn’t wear underwear, had rashes that would infect everyone in the camp, and were generally unhygienic. By nature, he was an instigator. I knew that he and Keith were close, so I mostly kept my perceptions to myself. Keith was usually an amazing judge of character, but in the case of Orlando, he seemed to have a bit of a blind spot—something he could have easily said (and did) about Tom and me.
I did have Orlando’s skills at manipulation to thank for confusing me even more about all the relationships among the prisoners and the guards. Not much more than a month or two into our time at Caribe, one of the lead guards, Fabio, came into our compound, followed by another guard carrying a small TV, a VCR, and a generator. They set the equipment up and inserted a video into the VCR. It was a proof of life video of the twenty-eight military hostages in the adjacent compound, and some of the politicians in ours—Orlando, Consuelo, Jorge, and Gloria. Like ours, their proof of life had also been produced by Jorge Enrique Botero. After the video was over, he inserted another tape. The first shots to appear were from a car driving through my mother’s neighborhood. I recognized the area immediately, and Fabio quickly turned the video off. We knew it was our proof of life, and we pleaded with Fabio to let us see it. Orlando helped us, convincing Fabio that everything would be fine if we saw it, and that we wouldn’t tell anyone. Fabio relented.
The three of us were all seated in front of the little TV, with Keith on my right side. Consuelo was sitting next to me on my left, and Ingrid was sitting next to Consuelo. When the video continued, we saw scenes of our family members. All three of us were extremely emotional by the first sight of our family members in such a long time. We were all choked up and had tears in our eyes. I saw my mother’s message again, but then I saw Shane. As soon as I saw her I burst into tears right there in front of everyone. I was watching my wife on that little TV, trying to concentrate with all my might, and find some type of mental telepathic force within me so that I could transport myself from that jail to my living room where I saw Shane seated and upset on our sofa. But I didn’t have that power, so I continued to watch the video, sobbing and hoping to see my children. Then I felt someone consoling me, caressing the back of my head. When the scene of my wife ended, I looked to my left, expecting to see Consuelo comforting me. But it wasn’t Consuelo, it was Ingrid. I looked into her eyes, and I could see pain. It was my pain, she was feeling my pain, and I could see that her empathy was real. I wondered again who this woman really was, how she could be capable of such generosity and such selfishness.
This whole display made me wonder how much I could trust what was being told to me. My Spanish was getting better, but I could easily have misunderstood something or been flat out lied to. I chose to believe that everyone was being honest with me about news like Plan Patriota and other items that affected my fate. I knew that no one would mess with messages from home. If there was one thing that was sacred to us all, it was those messages. We knew that we had to be very careful in assessing the truthfulness of anything t
he FARC told us; I didn’t want to have to do the same with what we heard from the other hostages.
Something told me that I had to up my Spanish skills more quickly. During our time in the political camp, I finally took to reading a book I’d been given in camp: the Spanish-language edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This book became my gateway to increased literacy. Like nearly everyone on the planet, I had heard of the books and the films that followed their publication. I hadn’t read them, but after I got the book at Caribe, I carried it around thinking that since it was a kids’ book, it might prove helpful in learning the language better.
I read the book and kept my journal with me. It seemed as if on every page I was coming across fifteen or so words that I was unfamiliar with. I’d jot those words down in my notebook and look them up later in Gloria’s dictionary. Sometimes I read aloud to Tom and he helped me get through, but not surprisingly some words didn’t seem to translate. As Tom read with me, we were both sucked into the world J. K. Rowling had created. I’d started out reading it with an agenda—to learn more Spanish in order to cut through some of the clouds of deception and doubt that our communication with the politicians had produced. I ended up almost completely forgetting about all that and just enjoying the story.
In early September of 2004, I learned via radio that my mother was in Colombia. By then, Orlando and Ingrid had worked out a system to share the radio. I found out that one of the reasons why Ingrid wanted a radio in her possession was that she received messages from her mother nearly every day the programs were broadcast. She was extremely close to her mother, and her mother’s devotion to her was clear from the frequency of the messages. When I heard this, I felt a little bad about the whole radio ordeal. My mom and Ingrid’s mom were a lot alike in their desire to stay in contact with their children. I heard messages from my mom far more frequently than anyone else among the three of us.