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

by Gary Brozek

  “Hear that?”

  I strained my ear and caught something faint; the sound waves vibrated the bones in my chest. “I got something but I don’t know what.”

  “Blackhawks. I’m sure of it.” Keith looked like he did the first time he’d received a radio message from his family. “If we spot them and those birds have got the FLIR units on their chins, then we know. My God, honest-to-goodness American forces could be in our vicinity.”

  As we were talking, we could all hear what we hoped was the distinctive sound of American firepower. We looked at one another and in that moment something wonderful and terrible passed through us all. If we knew the Blackhawks were in the area, so might the FARC. If they knew American pressure was on them, how would they react?

  The FARC’s Plan A was to run. The tempo of our marches increased and we were punished by the pace. We also moved farther from the river and deeper into the jungle. One night, as we settled down to sleep, Keith was taken to see Enrique. While on the march, they’d discovered some metal tubes on the ground. The tubes had a clear plastic cover on one end and a Cannon plug on the other. Keith could barely contain his laughter when they asked him what they were. He saw immediately that a small camera was inside the lightly pressurized tube. He didn’t want the guerrillas messing with it, so he told them that it was a camera—it was so obvious that one of them would have eventually figured it out. He asked to see it, and while examining it, he noticed a North Carolina manufacturer’s address printed on the batteries.

  To a guy like Keith, it could only mean one thing—Fort Bragg. He figured that the Blackhawks and the cameras meant that some Special Forces units were likely on the ground and definitely in our airspace. As sick as I was feeling, I was thrilled by the news, but we had to keep quiet about it. We convinced one of the guards to pass a note in English to the other hostages alerting them to the fact that something was undoubtedly up. We needed them to be prepared to move in case of a rescue and a FARC response.

  As the days progressed, we got the sense that we were being herded by the Blackhawks. They never came close enough that we saw them, but we definitely felt and heard their presence. We also knew that the FARC were being hemmed in by the Colombian military. We had been heading downriver for a time, when the FARC switched tactics and headed back upriver. A sense of urgency surrounded all this. We were running low on supplies. Fortunately, because I was sick, Keith took on extra food and worked a deal with the guards to get some of the last packages of milk and sugar. We were down to meals of four or five spoonfuls of rice. Without those extras, we would have been in really bad shape.

  The FARC were in no better condition than we were. They were really on the run, and during the times we were on the river, things weren’t any easier than the marches. Trying to get those boats back upriver was a real chore. At some points, the FARC didn’t want to or couldn’t run the motors, so some of the guerrillas jumped out of the boat and grabbed a rope to tow us. Exhausted and bleary-eyed, they seemed to be drones on the verge of collapse.

  If the exhaustion wasn’t going to get them, then the fear would. One day we were on the move when we learned that two guards Enrique had sent ahead had been killed. Enrique was getting desperate. We had limited supplies, he was down two men, the Blackhawks were tracking us, and his guerrillas were getting antsy. A couple of days later, a pair of Blackhawks pounded over our heads. We each stood there as they flew past us, reveling in the sheer display of American might. We felt like we were on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier as an F-18 was catapulted into the sky. It had been more than five years since we’d been that close to another American, and almost as much as I missed my family, I missed my country. Even something as faceless as a helo held deep significance for us all.

  Those Blackhawks had the opposite effect on the FARC. They were terrified. Milton had browbeaten his troops in the presence of helos and screamed about his underlings’ decision-making abilities. Enrique took a different approach. After the flyover, when it was clear that the helos were not coming back, he gathered his guerrillas around him and instructed them to bring out the pots.

  “Why are we eating now?” Tom asked.

  “I know, I don’t get it. We’re on less than half rations.” Keith shrugged.

  A moment later, we heard the sound of something other than rice being poured into the pots. In a few minutes, we heard and smelled the distinctive sound and odor of freshly popped corn. We sat huddled in the forest watching the wide-eyed and nearly trembling FARC drinking their afternoon ration of coffee or chocolate while munching on popcorn.

  “Those guys are really shaken up,” I said between bites.

  “Those Hawks did what they’re supposed to. That show of force put a lump in my throat.” Keith grinned, then tossed a kernel of corn into the air and caught it in his mouth. “Quite an afternoon matinee.”

  “This thing is over,” Tom said, an air of determination and dread in his voice. “Time is running out on them—” His voice rose at the end as if he was asking a question or leaving a blank that we could have all filled in. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud as I was when those helos came over. It was the most breathtaking thing I’ve seen in five years.”

  Very early the next morning, the tension was back in the camp. We’d been in total blackout conditions the night before, and Tom had spilled some soup in his hammock. He was trying to get cleaned up when the guards came over and began hassling us to get on our way. Tom said, “Why didn’t you just get us up at midnight?”

  Enrique’s voice cut through the gray predawn. “Who said that?”

  Tom responded calmly, “I did.”

  Enrique strode toward him, his pistol drawn. He leveled it at Tom. “I’ll kill you.”

  “Just do it. I know you don’t have the orders to do it. Let’s see if you can do something on your own.”

  Enrique lowered the gun, as if he intended to shoot Tom in the groin.

  “That’s not going to kill me. If you’re going to shoot me, have the decency to make it a clean kill.”

  Enrique lowered the gun and pointed it at Tom’s foot. I didn’t know what to do or to say, but Tom stayed completely calm.

  “Do that and I can’t march.”

  Enrique said, “Then I’ll shoot you in the arm.”

  “Then you’ll give our position away. Thanks.”

  Enrique was on the verge of completely losing it, but he walked away. A minute later, Tom was double-chained. The look on the guards’ faces told us everything we needed to know. We’d seen the disbelief and resignation on the faces of Milton’s crew. The guards understood that Enrique was losing it—control of himself, of his guerrillas. They understood that he had crossed the line of needless and excessive cruelty. If he was crumbling under the pressure, they were next in line.

  One of the guards took Keith’s chain and added it to Tom’s. We hadn’t been marching in chains to that point, except when Tom was being punished, and now he had double loops around his neck. We were disgusted. Keith pulled a few things out of Tom’s backpack, including his tent top, and put it in his. Tom also had to discard a few things that had once been precious commodities.

  Keith tried to lighten the mood. “Think of all the cigarettes you had to trade for that shit.”

  Tom smiled. “With Lucho gone, it’s no fun. We had the market cornered. We were setting prices. We had everyone by the balls.”

  “Just be sure you don’t lose yours to fucking Enrique. The guy is not holding up well. If we play our cards right, we might be able to make it out of here. Chains aren’t going to help.”

  I edged closer to Keith and Tom. “There are so many friendlies around here I can feel them. I feel like all we need is five minutes on these guys”—I nodded toward our guards—“and we could be out of here. I can hardly keep my feet from taking off.”

  As it turned out, we were all speaking too soon. The guards came over to us with a new chain for Keith. No more free marching. The chains went
on both of us, and instead of a single guard, we had two of them assigned to us for the next several days.

  Just as it seemed the FARC were at their breaking point and the Blackhawks were zeroing in on us, all the helo activity stopped. By the end of April, it was as if someone had flipped a switch and they were gone. We were able to reach a resupply point and for a few hours we simply sat and waited, too exhausted to do anything but eat. We were barely conscious when suddenly Ingrid and William Pérez emerged from the jungle. “Now what is that?” Keith asked. He was clearly irritated by the sight of them.

  I was relieved to see Ingrid looking about as well as could be expected after our month on the run. It was the first time that she and I had seen each other since that night on the boat. I was pleased to see her again, but when she greeted me, I knew immediately that something had changed. She was not the same woman that I’d held hands with that night on the bongo. The light that I’d seen in her eyes was no longer there.

  Based on the way William was looking at me, I sensed it had something to do with him. Ingrid didn’t treat me coldly, but there was a distance that hadn’t been there before. She seemed to be looking at and acting around William the way that she had with me, but she was openly affectionate toward him in a way she had never been with me.

  One of the things that Ingrid had shared with me was how difficult it was for her to be a woman in captivity. We’d seen how easily and casually the FARC had coupled literally and metaphorically, and from the outset, it seemed as if Ingrid allied herself with one man in each of the camps. Maybe it was a way to be protected, maybe it was a function of loneliness, but she’d complained to me that she didn’t like being forced into a position of helplessness. She shared some of her thoughts about this in letters she’d written to me. I had tried to be honest with her and told her that as much as I understood what other people were doing to her, she was responsible for herself. She was a strong woman and she could stand up to anyone. She told me that she was done with feeling afraid and intimidated. She was capable of being alone and not relying on anyone else.

  Now that she appeared to be with William Pérez, I was sad to see that she had reverted to form, that whatever forces were at work on her in the jungle had again reduced her to seeking refuge in someone else instead of in herself and in her faith. I had always had the impulse to fix things for people and to fix people themselves. I didn’t consider Ingrid a project, but I wondered if some of her fragility was due to her being on her own for the first time in her life. As much as she had traveled and as much as going off to boarding school at a relatively young age had helped her gain independence, like a lot of adults, she’d never truly been on her own. What I sensed in her was also true of me. I’d been married at nineteen. Being taken captive was the most protracted period of self-reliance that I’d ever experienced. I was pleased to find that I had discovered a strength inside me that I might have never seen if I hadn’t been tested in this way.

  I couldn’t presume to know what Ingrid had been through, but I saw someone who had led a life that, until being taken hostage, was by most people’s standards one of relative ease. We’d all been tested, and it seemed like she had taken the less difficult route, fallen back on habits she’d claimed she wanted to break.

  During his time as a prisoner, William Pérez had done what he could to make his life in captivity easier. Taking all the favors he did from the FARC, acting as a trusty, Pérez relied on someone other than himself to survive. I struggled to understand why Ingrid was drawn to someone like him. We always said that life in the jungle as a captive would strip us bare and reveal us for who we are. The accomplished, charismatic and ambitious Ingrid I knew and liked and respected very much seemed to exist side by side with the proud, haughty, and very insecure Ingrid I felt sorry for. It may not have been fair to judge her, and I tried to be charitable, but I just couldn’t get past the feeling that all the things we’d talked about, all the visions she’d shared of a better life and a better Colombia, rang false. I wasn’t sure if it was the politician or the woman I was disappointed in, but it seemed impossible to separate the two.

  In the days following our reunion, Ingrid approached me to explain what had happened and why she’d changed. She said that the other camp had been very, very difficult. William was the only one of the group she could speak with. She needed someone out there.

  Listening to her, I bit my tongue. I wondered how she could fix a country that she thought needed fixing when she wasn’t willing to put in the effort to help herself; it seemed as long as there was someone around to do things for her, she’d never merge the image of who she wanted to be with who she really was.

  SIXTEEN

  Fat Camp

  May 2008–June 2008

  KEITH

  Not eating is a strange thing. The less you eat, the more attuned you become to what you’re feeling on the inside. You focus on the sheer pain of emptiness, so much so that it’s easy to forget the toll that it takes on your appearance.

  When William and Ingrid joined us in early May 2008, we could see that they’d endured exactly what we had, since their group had been on our heels every step of the way. When you witness yourself starving day by day, the changes are gradual; when you see someone who has been absent for a couple of months of starvation marching, the effects are startling. Seeing them made me reevaluate my appearance. I was definitely at my lowest weight. Sometimes people talk about someone having chiseled features, but the three of us looked more like we had whittled features. We were sticks that someone had taken a knife to and hollowed out our cheeks and necks.

  As bad as the three of us looked, starvation appeared to have taken a greater toll on Ingrid. We all had the same skeletal bodies, but it seemed like something had been extinguished inside of her—maybe it was the fight in her eyes. Before, if someone said something she disagreed with or didn’t like, you could see flashes of anger and indignation; now those lightning bolts had been reduced to the dim sparking of an empty cigarette lighter’s flint.

  Given our malnourished state, it was lucky for all of us that our camp was settled at a little estancia along a river. In more than five years of captivity, we’d eaten fruits and vegetables about a dozen times, but at this camp we had a bumper crop. It became clear almost immediately that the FARC wanted to fatten us up. That worried me and had me thinking that I was in worse shape than I thought. All day long it seemed as if the guerrillas were bringing us more food. We had boxes of vanilla-filled shortbread cookies, more rice and beans than we’d ever seen. At every meal, we ate until we couldn’t force down another bite and the guards teased us for not being able to eat any more. It was like our mothers were there urging us to eat.

  This was one time when we weren’t intentionally going against the FARC’s wishes. Even when our stomachs got used to the idea that we could fit more into them than a few tablespoons of rice and a few sips of unknown-origin broth, we still could not down all that the FARC brought to us. We began to stockpile extras, something we hadn’t been able to do in a long time. We were being as frugal as possible, hoarding whatever we could for the next inevitable famine.

  Food wasn’t the only bounty we received. One morning Enrique came into our section of the camp. The six of us were together with the other hostages somewhere nearby but not visible to us. Tom and I were talking, and Four Eyes said to me, “Keith, this is for you.” He handed me a Sony multiband radio. We’d been asking for radios for more than five years, and finally here was Enrique handing me the king of jungle radios. I held the thing in my hand, and it felt like I had been given a half pound of gold. I wasn’t about to kiss Enrique’s ass, but I did say, “That’s great.”

  Enrique looked at Tom and smiled. “And one for you.” From behind his back he pulled out a tiny little green radio that looked like something you’d give your toddler so he could pretend he was listening to something. It was cube-shaped and had a little foldout solar panel to recharge the batteries. Tom didn’t rise to Enrique
’s bait. Instead of getting on him for what was clearly a slap in the face, he simply flipped the switch on the radio. Some Christian ministry or another must have had them made, because only two stations came in. In place of a dial, it had a little button you pushed to change between the two frequencies. Both stations played religious programming twenty-four hours a day. At the first word out of that radio, Tom smiled a big toothy grin at Enrique. Unbeknownst to Enrique, on our recent march, Marc had traded cigarettes to get a radio. Now, with Tom’s and my new radios, that brought our count up to three. We no longer had to rely on other people for news.

  Through much of April, we’d only had spotty radio reception, but one of the things we learned immediately was that the FARC were taking their lumps and so was Chávez. The Colombian intelligence agency or the military had seized and then analyzed the contents of the laptops that Raúl Reyes had with him when he was killed. According to Colombia’s top police official, the computers showed evidence that the Venezuelans had offered $300 million to the FARC. The official also accused Chávez of accepting financial support from the FARC for the previous fifteen years, going all the way back to when Chávez was in prison following an attempted coup d’état. To answer accusations that Uribe had planted evidence on the laptop, the Colombians had Interpol examine the computers, and they determined that the Colombian government hadn’t tampered with them.

  Everyone knew that $300 million wasn’t lunch money for the guerrillas; Chávez must have been expecting something in return for it. Ingrid said she believed that Chávez had grand designs on dominating the region and uniting nations into a Bolivarian Gran Colombia. I figured the guy had a big enough ego that he’d want it named Chávezlandia.

  In addition, we found out that the FARC’s secretariado had taken another hit when Iván Ríos, the head of the central bloc, was killed by his own security chief. He brought Colombian officials Ríos’s severed right hand, his ID, and his laptop to prove that Ríos was dead. Eventually, fingerprints confirmed that the hand belonged to Ríos. The U.S. had a $5 million bounty on Ríos, and the security chief who reportedly turned in his boss—or at least that one part of him—asked for the reward. We were never sure if he got it, but we were sure of one thing. One less was good enough for us, especially a big important one like Ríos.