by Gary Brozek
At about the same time, Marc and I started listening to a program on Colombian national radio that played all jazz and blues. I was a big fan of the blues, not a real aficionado, but I knew what I liked. I thought that Marc might get into it, and he did. We’d lie in the dark at night and Muddy Waters would come out of that little plastic box. Suddenly a bit of home was transplanted into the jungle. We also listened to Radio Netherlands and a weekly program called Curious Orange. After a hard day’s march, it was always good to have something to settle down with. Music kept us going during the day—all we had to do was to mention the title of a song and we were off in our heads and out of the mud and the mire.
One night we were listening to Radio Netherlands, waiting for Curious Orange to come on. The program was in English, and we heard a mention of Colombia and the FARC. A young Dutch woman had left her family at the age of twenty-two. She told her family and friends that she was going to Colombia to teach poverty-stricken kids. For the past two years, no one had heard from her. She was from a fairly wealthy family, had spent a semester in Colombia, and was fluent in Spanish, English, German, and Dutch.
Marc said to me, “Do you remember—”
I cut him off. “I know where you’re going with this. The pretty girl at the proof of life. I knew she was from somewhere else. I thought Cuba, but who knew?”
“That was her. How many other European-looking women are running around with the FARC?”
“How the hell does a young Dutch girl get mixed up with this bunch?” I thought again of Lauren and was grateful that no matter what else, I could count on her not having joined a terrorist organization, unless something had drastically changed at the Delta Delta Gamma sorority.
We listened a while longer and learned that the young woman’s name was Tanja Nijmeijer. The description they gave of her fit with what we remembered. How she’d ended up with the FARC was difficult to figure out. She’d said all the right FARC bullshit and she could hardly breathe without uttering something anti-American. That fit with the profile of the young idealist her family and friends described who was so upset with the social and economic injustice she’d seen in Colombia that she’d gone back to help right the wrongs.
By the end of 2006, we hadn’t managed to recover our losses from the highs of early October, but the radios and one another had helped us to avoid a complete free fall. If we were a barrel of oil, we were at about forty-eight dollars—not bad but not setting the world on fire, either. None of us was too happy with being on the march again, but as the year came to a close we did manage to enjoy a few moments—even if the enjoyment came vicariously. Christmas Day 2006, the FARC let us rest in our temporary camp. They offered us a bit of their homebrewed fruit-based alcohol. The stuff was pretty good, and a few sips to celebrate the holiday and the relief from the march were welcome. The FARC partied all day, mostly just playing volleyball and drinking. The games got louder as the day went on. We tried to ignore them, and we were glad to hear them yelling, “¡Pare la bulla!” at one another instead of telling us to keep it quiet.
At one point, one of the young guards who seemed like a decent guy waddled over to take his post. He was clearly shit-faced, and when he sat down on his platform, he could barely keep his head up. His buddies kept coming by to straighten him up, but he’d list to one side or the other, half asleep and fully buzzed. Finally they gave up and dragged him back over to the volleyball court. I was glad for the distraction and watched the other guerrillas give him hell. Marc was sitting next to me reading, and Tom was off playing chess. I nudged Marc in the arm.
“Merry Christmas, bro.” I pointed to where the FARC were playing.
“And Happy New Year, too. That’s Ferney. What is he doing here?”
“Look who’s with him.”
“And 2.5, too? I guess they’re having their own reunion.”
“Maybe what we’ve been hearing is true.” It was a surprise to see some of the guards we’d left behind at the abandoned hospital after the forty-day march. At one of our camps, some of the military guys had seen a group of four prisoners off in the distance. We suspected that this other group might be the prisoners we’d parted ways with back at the hospital. Now, as we saw their guard crew mingling with Enrique’s bunch guarding us, it seemed possible that we’d meet up with more people from Caribe.
Marc stood with his hands on his hips looking across the camp. He shook his head and looked up at the sky. The sun was just beginning to go down and everything was gilded by an amazing late-afternoon gold hue.
“I just hope there’s five of them. All I want for Christmas is for there to be five of them.”
“Me, too, bro.” I got up and stood alongside him. “Regardless, Marc, Julian was a great guy. We owe it to him and everybody else that didn’t make it to get the hell out of here.”
Just before we’d left Milton’s group, Tatiana had told us she’d heard that Julian Guevera, the military hostage who’d been forced to crawl on the forty-day march, had died in captivity. Julian was one of the most heroic of the hostages we’d encountered. He suffered from tuberculosis, and the FARC refused to treat him for it. When Tatiana told us that he’d died, I didn’t want to believe it. Whenever I thought I was having a rough day on a march, I thought of him and everything he’d been through—a serious gunshot wound to the head, tuberculosis, being chained through all those days and nights while struggling to march. I didn’t have a hell of a lot to complain about in comparison.
Marc had grown real quiet thinking about Julian and what I’d said.
“All we needed was the Catalinas, you know? Enrique said he was just waiting for orders to put us on that airplane. A wing and a prayer, Keith. I got the one covered, we just needed the other. So close. So close.”
“I know, I was tasting the turkey. I really was.”
“I’ve got a pack of crackers with our names on it. Let’s get Tom and celebrate.”
MARC
As 2006 rolled over into 2007, we continued to have at least one blessing to be grateful for. With the exception of the polyester-cord tethers we’d had to wear for a bit, we had never been chained, unlike our Colombian counterparts. None of us knew for sure why the FARC had not chained us, but we assumed that Enrique’s statement about us being well behaved had a lot to do with it. After the collapse of the despeje in October 2006, President Uribe once again reminded the world that the only viable option for the hostages was a military rescue. Tom, Keith, and I reiterated to one another how important it was that we remain chain-free. The Colombians handled the difference in treatment well, never complaining to the FARC that we should be in chains at night since they were. Complaining about your own bad situation was one thing; doing something to put someone else in a bad situation was another.
Shortly after the New Year, William Pérez and I were playing chess in my coleta. William could be unpredictable at times, and we suspected that he was bipolar. On some occasions, he was sullen and silent, and on others, he was energetic and enthusiastic. On this particular day, he was in one of his up periods. He’d come walking through camp shouting, “Marc, are you afraid of me today?” He was a good chess player and he kicked my butt all the time, but I liked the challenge. While we were playing, Moster, our new officiale and the FARC guard responsible for us, came in and began talking to Richard Marulanda. We were busy with the game, but we looked over at them and saw that Moster was upset with Richard about something. They kept glancing at us and then quickly looking away. Richard and William shared a coleta and were chained together at night. From what I could figure out, they’d had some kind of dispute and now Moster was intervening.
When Moster was through talking with Richard, he went to speak to William. Moster smiled and said, “How are you, comrade?”
I knew that William was a trusty, but the difference between the way Moster spoke to the rest of us and the way he addressed William was startling. It was like the two of them were buddies, not guard and hostage.
“Wh
at did Marulanda do?” I asked.
It struck me that Moster had already made up his mind about what happened and was not really investigating the source of the dispute at all. William basically blamed Richard for the problem that had cropped up, but he didn’t need to. Moster simply said, “Yes. Yes. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of everything.”
The next morning, when the guards came to unlock the Colombians’ chains, they left Marulanda chained up. Another guard dug a little trench near his bed, took William’s chain, and attached it to Richard’s.
We were all sitting and eating, and Keith asked, “What is up with that? What’d the dumb-ass Marulanda do this time?”
I explained what I’d witnessed. Marulanda could get on everyone’s last nerve, and he was not Keith’s favorite by a long shot, but there was little to justify something like this.
“That’s just wrong. The guy’s got to shit and piss right there because of what Pérez said.” A vein in Keith’s temple was throbbing and I knew he wanted to confront William. He looked at Marulanda and then at Pérez, who simply sat eating his food as if nothing unusual were going on. Keith stood up, and I tensed, thinking that he was going to go after William. He didn’t; instead he walked over to where our food had been set out for us, ladled out a bowl of soup, and brought it over to Marulanda. For the next week, Marulanda remained in chains. He didn’t gripe about it, and just kept to himself. I’d always suspected he was a tough guy and could put up with a lot. Marulanda didn’t want to say what the fight had been about, but he eventually told us that William was upset because Marulanda had been moving around a lot at night. His movements rattled the chains and woke William up. They’d exchanged words and that was the extent of it. At least until William took matters into his own hands.
Ever since we’d arrived at the Reunion Camp, we’d known that William was a trusty, but seeing what Enrique and Moster had done to Richard made us realize just what William was capable of. We hated seeing anyone in chains, and the thought that another hostage was responsible for putting someone there sickened us all. After that, I stopped playing chess with William. He seemed to have slipped into a black cycle and I wondered if maybe guilt had brought on his darker mood.
Incidents like this made the ever-shifting dynamics of the hostages difficult to predict. Alliances changed, positions in hierarchies moved, and all the three of us could do was watch as the personalities ebbed and flowed. Of everyone, Jhon Pinchao seemed the least integrated into the group. Like the other military and police guys, he’d been held since 1998, but though we’d spent quite a bit of time with him, none of us really knew much about him. As my language skills developed, I struggled to find common ground with Jhon. I liked him and he was a good-hearted person, but it was still difficult to say that I, of any of the three of us, formed a friendship with him. The one person he seemed to communicate with was Ingrid, and I thought it was great that she had reached out to him.
Jhon always seemed to be on the fringe of any group, and he had a kind of intense expression that sometimes led you to think that he was either thinking very deeply or not thinking at all. At one of our more permanent camps during that spring of 2007, we had access to a deep section of river where we could actually swim. Usually the rivers and streams were too shallow, but the rainy season had flooded the banks of this particular river. Jhon didn’t know how to swim when he was first taken, but with the help of other hostages, he started to learn, and that spring he became obsessed with it. Out of all of us, Tom was probably the most comfortable in the water, and watching him trying to teach Jhon, we couldn’t help but smile at Jhon’s thrashing and kicking, which he did with a ferocity that churned up water like crazy. He didn’t move very far considering all the energy he was expending, but as Tom pointed out, the guy just had an inefficient motor—lots of horsepower but no torque. That didn’t stop him from practicing, though. Like the chess players and the card players, he’d found something to help pass the time.
While we swam and played chess when we could, on occasion, the FARC would put us to work on projects that were for our “benefit.” According to FARC policy, as hostages we were not to be asked to do work for them. Enrique had a way of skirting that rule by telling us that if we wanted something, we had to help build it. Such was the case in early April 2007 when Enrique told us that if we wanted a volleyball court, we had to bring in the sand. All of us got together and carried bags of sand from the river to the camp. We all pitched in. Tom had been really sick for a few weeks, but even he was out there, glad to be able to move at all after weeks in his hammock.
To see every one of us, Lucho and Ingrid included, working collectively boosted morale, but even though Ingrid was hauling dirt with the rest of us, we were still not allowed to talk to her, a point that Moster reiterated numerous times during the volleyball-court construction. As I brought sand up to the camp, I tried to imagine what it was like to be singled out that way. That Ingrid was forbidden to interact fully with the group seemed as harsh a punishment as what Richard had to endure, but instead of a week, she had been punished for months. After years in captivity, I knew that one person’s mood or energy level had a profound effect on the rest of us. As we watched her flinch at Moster’s reprimands, it was clear that Ingrid was struggling, that the effects of her captivity were taking a toll.
Like Tom, I’d been battling a pretty serious jungle sickness around the time that we were building the volleyball court. Though I was well enough to join in the swimming adventures and the camp building, the illness had forced me to think long and hard about my captivity and the impact it had on me. In between grabbing my stomach and loads of sand, I’d come to a painful realization: I hadn’t heard from my wife, Shane, in years. My mother was on the message programs all the time, and I heard from my kids, my father, and my brother regularly as well. Shane, however, had gone silent. I relied on my faith and told myself that whatever was meant to happen had happened. I didn’t want to believe that Shane had moved on, but there was little evidence to the contrary. Keith and I discussed the issue endlessly, and I came to the conclusion that I was essentially a single man again. I was still determined to be a good father to Destiney, Cody, and Joey, but I couldn’t hide from the truth anymore: My wife had taken her life in a new direction.
Over the last three years in captivity, I’d been good about following the plan to reform my life that I’d set into motion all the way back at the New Camp. Coming to terms with my relationship with Shane seemed a necessary step in that plan. I couldn’t live with illusions of any kind. In keeping with this, I also had to confront the prejudices that I’d developed in camp. The nights that Ingrid and I had spent listening to the radio together had opened my eyes to the way that I’d rushed to judgment on her. My initial impression had been pretty presumptuous, and I wanted to be open to the possibility that there was more to her than I’d thought.
Because Ingrid had basically been in isolation since we arrived at the Reunion Camp, I hadn’t been able to give her a second chance. I wanted to believe that the person I’d shared the radio with, the woman who’d comforted me when I’d seen the video of Shane, was the real Ingrid. In some ways, I needed to believe that people were good-hearted but occasionally did bad things. That’s what I’d concluded about my wife, and if I could feel that way about someone I’d known for almost twenty years, I could do it for someone I’d only spent a few months with.
A few days after we built the volleyball court, I decided to deal with this issue directly, and I approached Enrique.
“I want to be able to speak to whoever I want to speak to. None of us like having these restrictions placed on us. It’s just going to cause problems for us all.”
Enrique shook his head and issued the no-surprise response. “I’ve received orders that the other prisoners not be allowed to speak with her.”
I wasn’t going to give up that easily. “We’ll speak to her in Spanish so everyone knows what’s being said. We’ll do whatever, but wha
t you’re doing is cruel and it’s going to cause problems for all of us.”
Enrique pulled off his glasses and rubbed the kidney-shaped welt on either side of his nose. “The orders are these: You will be on one side of the camp. Ingrid will be on the other. You will not communicate with her.” And with that, he walked away.
On April 15 (a day you can pretty much always remember no matter what jungle you’re in), I was sitting in my coleta tearing apart an old pair of sweatpants. I had traded for a scalpel, and was using it and the salvaged thread to take in the waist on a new pair of sweats I’d been given. I was engrossed in what I was doing, when I saw a pair of female hands cross my line of vision. Ingrid sat down and began helping me with my project. We whispered hello and looked to see if the guards had noticed us. They didn’t seem to, so Ingrid and I kept on chatting—mostly just checking in on each other and how we were doing mentally. At one point, she stopped plucking at the threads and put her hands in her lap.
Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m so worried about my mother. She is not well. She’s frustrated. I heard on the news that when Uribe canceled the negotiations for the exchange, she said that he had issued a death sentence for us all.”
“I’m sure she’s trying to keep the pressure on the government. She didn’t mean that literally.”