by Gary Brozek
When I learned that my mom was in Colombia, part of me was afraid because it wasn’t a particularly safe place for her to be. At the same time, though, I was thrilled just to know that she was that much closer to me and proud that she’d come to Colombia to meet with people in the government and family members of other hostages. The Colombian media made a big deal out of her weeklong visit, and after hearing the news, Ingrid immediately told me. She seemed genuinely happy for me, and when she invited me to share her radio during the early-morning/overnight message programs, I was taken aback. Just hearing her words, I realized that this wasn’t the same Ingrid I’d spent the last ten months with. Instead of a selfish, domineering woman, she seemed to be a bit kinder, with less of an edge. Still, I was suspicious of her offer and wondered what she might want from me in return for this favor.
If she was using bait to lure me in, then she chose the perfect one. Who could resist the opportunity to hear their mother’s voice? Because we had to keep the volume low, we sat right next to each other, with our heads inclined and the radio pressed to both of our ears. We sat that way for hours the first night, and while I didn’t get a message from my mother, Ingrid got one from hers. At the first sound of her mother’s voice, Ingrid’s breath caught, as though she was choking on air. We were so close together that I heard her gulp as she tried to stifle a tear. My Spanish still wasn’t good enough to understand the message, but I was happier that way. I didn’t want to know what had been said. Ingrid, however, whispered the details in my ear anyway. For the rest of the night we sat there smiling together, sitting in the dark listening to the rest of the show, each of us in that little cocoon of radio voices and silence.
It wasn’t until the next day that I really stopped and thought about how emotionally intimate that moment had been. I’d shared similar experiences with Keith and Tom when we relayed messages or related painful stories from our past. On the surface, that night with Ingrid seemed no different from these, but at the same time I could tell it was different. Tom, Keith, and I had no choice but to share those moments with one another. We were all we had those first months together. With Ingrid, I thought I knew her and she did some things that I questioned. Other people I trusted had far less respect for her, or in Keith’s case, no respect at all. I remembered what Keith had said about character gradually revealing itself. I knew that he had already tried and convicted Ingrid for her crimes against the rest of us. But maybe she was not the person we thought she was. Maybe Ingrid was a far more complicated and multidimensional person than she’d allowed us to believe.
That one night didn’t completely alter my opinion of her. A few hours sharing a radio wasn’t going to undo months of selfishness and haughty pride. Just as we’d all been thrown by her ability to switch from wanting us to be kept out of the camp one moment to telling us that we should have a party to celebrate our arrival the next, I wasn’t sure which Ingrid Betancourt was the real one—if, in fact, there was a real genuine Ingrid in there anywhere.
Over the remainder of the week my mother was in Colombia, Ingrid and I sat huddled together listening to the show. Each night I heard nothing from my mom, and Ingrid could tell I was disappointed. When the message portion of the program was over, she would pat my arm and try to console me. Finally, late on the last night that my mother was in Colombia, a Saturday, the announcer spoke her name. By that point, Ingrid and I were both drowsy; sitting in the absolute dark in the quiet hours of the morning, it was sometimes hard to stay awake through the whole program. Our heads had been pressed together for so long that my neck was aching and my back had long since gone tight.
All those aches disappeared the moment I heard my mother say my name. Her voice brought me back from the brink of sleep, and all at once I was sitting in a jungle hooch somewhere in southern Colombia with a woman I knew but didn’t know. My eyes welled with tears and my breath shortened. Ingrid must have sensed my emotion. She slid her hand into my mine and held it, running her thumb along the top of mine. My mother’s message was brief, but by the time she was finished, I’d forgotten every word. I asked Ingrid to repeat what my mother had said. She told me that my mother loved me. She missed me. She wanted me to be strong.
I bit down hard on my lip. In her retelling, Ingrid had produced the same emotions in me, as if I were hearing the original message all over again. I felt like my mother was right there with me and the gut-gnawing homesickness of it all nearly knocked me over. I asked Ingrid to tell me again what my mother said. She patiently repeated her words a second time. Finally, still not satisfied but knowing that what Ingrid had done for me was enough, I sat with her and listened until the program ended and the soft static faded as Ingrid lowered the volume completely.
I went to bed and lay there unable to sleep. The excitement of hearing my mother’s voice was still like an electric shock coursing through my body. I remembered going into the confessional at St. Paul’s Church when I was a kid. I had to kneel down and speak into a small rectangle meshed with wire. There I examined my conscience and let the priest know all the ways that I had sinned. Somehow hearing that message with Ingrid that night brought back that memory in sharp detail. I could smell the tang of the leather kneeler and the wood-spice fragrance of the incense from the just-concluded Stations of the Cross ritual and the sweet smell of the beeswax candles. I could hear the sound of the priest sliding the divider and see the wedge of light playing across the ledge where I rested my elbows, and my hands folded in prayer.
I hadn’t gone to confession in many years. I’d kept my faith in God but not in the Catholic Church. I’d prayed every day in captivity for guidance and for my safe return. That night, I included one more person in my prayers. I told God that I was sorry that I’d chosen to see the bad in someone and thanked him for shedding that small wedge of light on a person in whom, until then, I’d only seen darkness.
For a few days after I’d gotten my mother’s message, I would ask Ingrid again to repeat the words she’d heard. She always smiled and told me that it was fine that I’d asked. She said she understood, and I was glad that she did.
NINE
Ruin and Recovery
September 2004–May 2005
TOM
If President Uribe’s objective with his Plan Patriota was to flush out the FARC and get them on the run in order to wipe them out, then his efforts nearly did the same to us. On September 28, 2004, after eleven months with the politicals, we fled Camp Caribe.
None of us was comfortable knowing that our fate was so closely linked with the FARC’s. The inside perspective of the politicals helped us see that a new phase in the FARC-Colombian conflict was beginning. Uribe’s government had lost all patience with the guerrillas, demanding action on a new scale. Uribe no longer believed in the FARC’s ability to negotiate fairly and honorably, and now he would make the FARC pay a price for their misguided overestimation of themselves and their power.
How the FARC treated us was often a reflection of how they were being treated themselves, and our hasty departure from Camp Caribe didn’t bode well. We knew that based on all the activity around us, we had to leave the area, but the speed with which we left came as a surprise. We were given little information about what was going on, and while that itself was not a strange thing, it was odd given the scope of the moving required. All they told us was to pack up and get ready to leave. Everyone was heading out—all the politicals, all the military guys, the three of us, and all the FARC, even Sombra. They wouldn’t say how long we’d be gone or whether we’d return.
The brutality of the forty days we marched after we abandoned Camp Caribe rivaled anything we’d been through before. For the first several months at the camp, we had done a good job of getting ourselves into decent physical condition, but since June 2004 when Plan Patriota was first announced, the FARC fed us so little that we were weak even before we started the march. Existing on what we called cow-guts soup—because of its foul smell and the disgusting bits of cow that floated on th
e thickly congealed fat layer—and a few spoonfuls of rice or beans had taken its toll on us.
In addition, the three of us were marching with many more possessions than we’d carried back in October of 2003. We had all accumulated so many things that we couldn’t possibly take it all. Though we left a lot behind, we took what we considered necessary. I attached my mattress to my equipo. I thought that having a comfortable place to sleep made all the difference in my attitude and ability to manage. I was wrong. Trying to maneuver through the jungle with that large roll on my back required me to do hundreds of squats as I bent under vines and downed trees. I soon abandoned it and quite a few other things to lighten my carriage. Everyone else did the same, and the longer we marched, the more we reduced our loads to the essentials.
If we were grateful for anything, it was the lessons of generosity and perseverance the military prisoners displayed. They insisted on giving whatever they could to help us, even though we weren’t allowed to speak with them. For several days, we set up a temporary camp just a few kilometers from Camp Caribe, where the three of us found ourselves next to the military prisoners. I met a young man and former policeman named Jhon Jairo Dúran. He was in his midthirties, though he looked much younger with his closely cropped thick dark hair. He’d been kidnapped six years earlier and his deep faith seemed to sustain him and inform all the choices he made about how to conduct himself. I don’t know why he chose to risk talking to me, but he gave me a cotton sheet and a lined parkalike jacket. I tried to gesture to him that I would be okay without, but he wouldn’t listen. He gave me some rope and string, and they, too, proved vital on that forced march.
Everyone had it bad, including the FARC. Once again we saw the lower-level FARC guerrillas being treated like pack animals. They carried heavy propane cylinders, cookstoves, and large bags of food. They ferried one load ahead, returned, and then set out again with another heavy load. They repeated the process over and over again. Our young friend The Songster had his own gear and Ingrid’s—she was too weak from what she claimed was a bout with dysentery—as well as a large cooking pot strapped to his back. He’d wobble and fall down. Keith would help him back to his feet. Eventually, Ingrid could not walk at all. She was placed in a hammock like Keith had been on our first march. The FARC weren’t too happy about having to carry her, and at every opportunity they accidentally swung her against the many spiny trees that grew near the creeks.
Like most people, I’ve complained at one time or another of hunger pains or said I was “starving.” Until this march, I hadn’t really experienced either of those. Knee-buckling pain, similar to severe muscle cramps, raked our stomachs. We were so weak that our heads spun and our vision blurred and narrowed. Marc and I both had extreme pain in our knees and my legs swelled to the point that my kneecaps were a tiny bump of bone anchored in a sea of tissue. Keith’s back injuries continued to plague him, but he seldom complained. He said that he took much of his inspiration from the military prisoners, who were chained together by the neck throughout the march. Their rigorous physical training helped them, but no one had it easy.
Everyone did the best they could to help the others, but the FARC were suffering as badly as we were and they took out their frustrations on us. At one point, Clara, who was carrying her own backpack and doing the best she could, fell in the mud, losing one of her boots in the process. Emanuel was being carried by several female guerrillas, and now she struggled in this deep stew of mud and prickly vegetation by herself. I stepped out of line and went to help her. We each had a guard in front of us and in back of us. They both yelled at me, “¡Vámanos! ¡Vámanos!”
I continued to move toward Clara. “I’m going to help her. She can’t get up.” As I bent down to lift her up, I heard the sounds of rounds being chambered in their AK-47s. Ignoring my wife’s plea that I not do anything to endanger myself, I shouted at them, “Go ahead. Shoot me. You don’t have the balls or the orders to shoot me, so go ahead.”
I finished helping Clara get to her feet while the two guerrillas glared at me.
Several days before, we’d had a group of six Blackhawk helos fly overhead and the guards had done what we’d come to expect—they surrounded us with their weapons drawn. I was getting tired of that, and even though I knew they were as stressed as we were and likely to snap, I couldn’t put up with their total lack of humanity. Unlike the previous encounter, when we had been in relatively good shape, we were beaten down and vulnerable. I half expected someone to make a run for it. Fortunately, the helos stayed away, and after a tense few minutes of standing there with a circle of terrorists with their weapons drawn taking a bead on us all, they ended up yelling at us to “vámanos.”
I was especially angry because we noticed that when we did get our meager amount of food, the guards doled it out to us, making sure that there was some left for themselves. They were under direct orders not to do that. If we had complained, we would have simply angered them even more and who knew what they might have done to us as a result.
Their breakdown in discipline was something that Keith had anticipated for months. He told Marc and me time and time again that these men and women of the FARC weren’t true soldiers and when things got tough we had to be careful. We were all being pushed beyond our limits and we lashed out at the guards with increasing frequency.
In contrast to the FARC’s breakdown in restraint, and in defiance of their cruelty, the military prisoners conducted themselves in a way that awed us. One of them, Julian, suffered from a painful condition. He had what appeared to be a large blood blister that ran up his legs and groin and into his torso. It looked like a river on a relief map. After the first two weeks, the guards had either lifted or were too tired to enforce the ban on speaking with the military guys. Julian told us that as a policeman, he had taken a bullet to the head during an altercation in Bogotá. Mono, a FARC guard, told us that he’d been present at the battle when Julian was captured. Julian had fought valiantly and had killed a number of guerrillas.
After a few weeks of the deprivation we faced, Julian fell while we were marching. His guards yelled at him to keep going, and he did. He couldn’t stand, but he crawled, using his hands and his one good leg while dragging the other behind him. He knew that if he held up the march, the rest of us would suffer. To see him crawling while another prisoner was carried in a hammock was a sight more painful than our hunger. After we came to a camp, Jhon Jairo demonstrated the kind of humanity that the FARC did not. He went to Guillermo, the camp medic, and pleaded with him to take off Julian’s chains. Out of respect for Julian and Jhon Jiaro, Guillermo agreed; Julian walked and crawled for the rest of the forty days unchained.
As was always true, for every FARC good deed, there was also a bad one. Keith needed Guillermo’s help after we had negotiated a rope-assisted river crossing, during which Keith had stepped on a spiny tree and its nettles embedded themselves under the nail of his big toe. Instead of administering any kind of painkiller or even cleaning the area, Guillermo took a scalpel and began hacking at Keith’s foot, essentially slashing and pulling up the nail to get at what was buried beneath it. While he was working on Keith he was muttering about how weak Americans were. Another FARC guard, Cereal Boy, was standing nearby watching. He knew that Guillermo was purposely making things more painful for Keith, and standing behind Guillermo so the medic couldn’t see him, he mouthed words of encouragement to Keith. For some reason, Guillermo didn’t like Keith and later insisted that he be chained to another prisoner for a day’s march.
We were truly at our breaking point on that march. When we were offered a few bites of box turtle feet, we ate them. When we finally reached a resupply point, we were handed one pack of cigarettes apiece and a single block of panela. Our systems were so depleted that when we ate the raw sugar, it was like we had mainlined it directly to our adrenal glands. After eating half the block one night and a good part of what was left the next morning, for the first part of that day’s march I was supercharged.<
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As the march progressed, the hundred or more FARC escorting us had whittled down their numbers as well as our original number of thirty-eight hostages. The first to leave after about two weeks were Ingrid and Lucho and eight of the military prisoners along with many FARC. Ten days later, four other prisoners along with Consuelo and Gloria (who were both stalwarts throughout the march), Clara, Alan, Jorge, and Orlando were separated off. Finally, after another seven days, ten others departed, leaving our group with the three of us and five military prisoners—Javier Rodríguez, Jhon Jairo Durán, Erasmo Romero, Julian Guevera, and Julio Caesar Buitrago.
As we had been learning all along, we all found a way to get through each day. Our bodies were growing weaker, but we found some reserve of strength somewhere. Keith found his in defiance—he refused to let the FARC win. Marc found his in his faith, beginning every day with a prayer. I called upon the old reliable that kept us going always—family and a return to our homeland. At one point, I stumbled, fell, and lay there in the mud thinking that it would be easy to just stay where I was, but I didn’t. I picked myself up and kept putting one foot in front of the other. From knee-high mud through neck-deep water and up-and-down cansa-perros—hills that were high enough to tire out dogs—into shivering nights when our bodies were so depleted of calories that we could not stay warm, we stretched the limits of what we thought we could endure.
For all of us, getting back to our own country and the freedoms we enjoyed there played a crucial role in our perseverance. Keith and Marc told me that one of the ways they got through the day was by focusing on a specific fantasy. Those fantasies usually revolved around the simple pleasures of their lives back home with family. Whether it was a day spent at the beach, at a ballpark watching a youth league game, or dinner at the kids’ favorite spot, we didn’t think about anything wild or elaborate.