Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle

by Ingrid Betancourt

  “It’s our hospital,” the youth sitting with us in the cab declared proudly. “He’ll pull through. We’re used to this.”

  We had been there less than a minute when the leader ordered us to leave. Other armed men jumped onto the bed in the back, standing up in spite of the jolts and speed of the vehicle.

  After ten minutes the vehicle stopped again. One of the recent arrivals jumped out and opened the doors. “All of you, out! Quickly!” He pointed his gun at us and grabbed me by the arm. “Give me your cell phone. Show me what you’ve got in there!” He searched my bag and pushed me forward, pressing the barrel of his gun into my back.

  From the beginning I had held on to the hope that they were taking us to a place where they would care for the wounded man and that we would then be permitted to turn around and leave.

  Now I had to face what was happening to me. I had just been taken hostage.

  FOUR

  “EL MOCHO” CESAR

  I had shaken the hands of Marulanda, Mono Jojoy, Raúl Reyes, and Joaquín Gómez—the last time being just two weeks earlier—and this led me to believe we had established a dialogue, protecting me from their terrorist actions. We had discussed politics for hours, we had shared a meal. How could these affable individuals be the same men who had ordered our abduction?

  And yet their subordinates were threatening to kill me as they forced me to follow them. I tried to retrieve my travel bag from the vehicle, but the person shoving me with his gun yelled at me not to touch it. He ordered hysterically that I be separated from the others, and I saw my companions in misfortune line up pitifully on the other side of the road, each held at close range by an armed man.

  I prayed with all my strength that nothing would happen to them, already accepting the fate I believed to be mine. My mind was operating in a thick fog, and I registered sounds and movements only after they happened. It seemed to me this was a déjà vu. Or maybe I had just imagined it. I remembered a photo in the newspaper. In it, a car was parked beside this very road, or perhaps a road just like it, the way ours had been. Corpses were lying facedown, scattered around the vehicle with its doors still open. The woman who had been shot along with her escorts was the mother of a member of Congress. When looking at the photo, I had imagined everything—her terror at the immediacy of death, her resignation to the inevitable, and then the end of life, the gunshot, the nothing-ness. Now I understood why it had obsessed me. It was a mirror of what awaited me, a reflection of my future. I thought of all the people I loved, and I thought it was so stupid to die like this.

  I was in a bubble, curled up within myself. So I did not hear the engine, and when he pulled up beside me in his huge, latest-model Toyota pickup truck and lowered the automatic window to speak to me, I was unable to look at his face or understand his words.

  “Doctora6 Ingrid. . . . Doctora Ingrid. . . . Ingrid!”

  I snapped out of my torpor.

  “Get in!” he ordered. I landed in the front seat, next to this man who was smiling at me, taking my hand as he would a child’s.

  “Don’t worry. You’re safe with me.”

  “Yes, Commander,” I answered without thinking.

  It was Cesar, “El Mocho” Cesar, leader of the FARC’s fifteenth front. There was no mistaking it. He was definitely the commander. He seemed delighted that I had guessed as much.

  He looked around. “Who are these people?”

  “That’s my assistant.”

  “And are those your body guards?”

  “Not at all. They’re working with me on the campaign. One of them is in charge of logistics. He arranges our trips. The other is a cameraman we hired. The oldest one is a foreign journalist, a photographer from France.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to you. But them . . . I need to verify their identity.”

  I blanched, only too aware of what he meant.

  “Please, believe me, none of them are security agents. . . .”

  He gave me a cold look, lasting no more than a second; then, imperceptibly, his attitude softened. “Do you have everything you need?”

  “No, they wouldn’t let me take my bag.”

  He put his head out of the window and gave some orders. I understood what they meant more from the gestures that accompanied them than from the words themselves. I was trembling from head to toe. I saw that Clara had been separated from the group and ordered to get into the rear of the truck. A man ran to fetch my bag and quickly slid it between my legs before jumping onto the bed of the truck, just as Commander Cesar was putting it into reverse. I turned around. Clara was now sitting on one of the two benches that had been installed on the bed, wedged between a dozen armed men and women whom I had not noticed earlier. Our eyes met. She gave me a faint smile.

  I turned back in time to see the rest of my friends being pushed roughly inside the vehicle that until now had been ours, with a guerrilla behind the wheel.

  “Does the A/C bother you?” Cesar asked, his tone courteous.

  “No, thank you, it’s fine like that.” He was a small, dark man, his skin burned by the sun. He had to be in his fifties, with a prominent belly betraying what must once have been an athletic body. I noticed that he was missing a finger.

  He followed my inspection of his person with amusement and said, “They call me ‘El Mocho’7 for obvious reasons!” He displayed his stump, adding, “A small gift from the military.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do I scare you?”

  “No, why would you scare me? You are actually very polite.”

  He smiled broadly, delighted by my response.

  “The commanders asked me to say hello to you. You’ll see, the FARC is going to treat you very well.”

  I looked away.

  “Do you like music? What sort do you like? Vallenatos,8 boleros, salsa? Open the glove box. There’s everything you want in there. Go on! Pick something!”

  The conversation was completely surreal. But I acknowledged the effort he was making to put me at ease, so I played along. Dusty CDs had been tossed in haphazardly. I didn’t know any of the artists and had difficulty reading what remained of their names on the labels of the obviously pirated discs. I rejected them one by one and noticed Cesar’s impatience at my lack of enthusiasm.

  “Take that blue one. Yes, that one. I’m going to let you listen to the music we make. This is a pure FARC product. The songwriter and the singer are guerrillas!” He wagged his index finger to emphasize the fact. “We recorded them in our own studios. Listen to this!”

  It was grating, ear-shattering music. The car’s sound system was ultramodern, with fluorescent lights shooting in all directions like the dashboard of a spaceship. Worthy of a drug trafficker! I couldn’t help thinking. A second later I felt bad when I saw the man’s childlike pride. He fiddled with the dials with the dexterity of an airline pilot, while somehow controlling the wheel, along that hellish road.

  We passed through a village. I was dumbfounded. How could he drive around so nonchalantly with me, his hostage, in front of everyone?

  Once again Cesar read my thoughts.

  “I’m the king here! This village belongs to me. It’s Unión-Penilla. Everyone loves me here.” As if to prove the point, he rolled down the window and waved to passersby. Along the village’s main road, a shopping street by all appearances, people returned the gesture, as they might greet the mayor.

  “Being the king of a village is not good for a revolutionary!” I remarked.

  He looked at me in surprise. Then he burst out laughing. “I have been wanting to meet you. I saw you on TV. You’re prettier on TV.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Thank you, that’s very kind. You make me feel a lot better.”

  “You’re starting a new life with us. You must be prepared. I’ll do my best to make things easier, but it’s going to be hard for you.”

  He was no longer laughing. He was calculating, planning, making decisions. Inside that head, vital things were being formul
ated for me, things I could neither anticipate nor assess.

  “I have a favor to ask you,” I said. “My father is ill. I don’t want him to learn of my abduction on the news. I want to call him.”

  He looked at me long and hard. Then, as if carefully weighing his words, he replied, “I cannot allow you to call him. They could locate us, and that would place you in danger. But I will allow you to write to him. I’ll fax it. He’ll get your letter by the end of the day.”

  More than three hours had passed since we’d driven through Unión-Penilla. I desperately needed to relieve myself. Cesar assured me that we would be arriving in a few minutes, but minutes turned into an hour, and we were still surrounded only by empty fields.

  Suddenly, after we’d come around a bend, I saw six small wooden huts lined up in threes on either side of the road. They all looked the same, like shoe boxes—no windows, rusted tin roofs, all covered in a veneer of dust that turned what must once have been brightly painted walls into a uniform shade of gray.

  Cesar braked sharply in front of one of them. The door was wide open, and you could see through to the end of the back garden. It was a small house, modest but clean, dark and no doubt cool.

  He pushed me inside, but I refused to take another step until I knew that Clara was right behind me. She got out of the vehicle and took my hand to make sure we would not be separated.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll stay together.” Cesar indicated the toilets at the end of the garden. “Go ahead. A girl will show you the way.”

  The garden was full of flowers of every color. I thought then that if our place of imprisonment was to be this little house, I could resign myself to my misfortune.

  A small shed with a wooden door appeared to be the toilet. I didn’t see the young girl until a few seconds later. She could not have been more than about fifteen, and I was struck by her beauty. Dressed in camouflage, gun held firmly across her chest, she stood astride, swaying her hips coquettishly. Her pretty face, her flaxen hair coiled on her head, like a little bird’s nest, and the femininity of her earrings contrasted with the severity of her uniform. Almost shyly she greeted me with a beautiful smile.

  Inside the shed the smell was revolting. There was no toilet paper. The drone of large green flies hovering over the putrid hole made the experience all the more vile. Once outside, I nearly fainted.

  Cesar was waiting in the house with a cold drink for us and two sheets of paper that he laid on a small table in the living room. He explained that we could use the paper to write a message to our families.

  I spent a long time thinking about the words I would choose in writing to Papa. I told him that I had just been taken hostage but that I was being treated well and that I was not alone because Clara was with me. I described the conditions under which we had been captured, how distressed I was to see one of the guerrillas lose his leg by stepping on an antipersonnel mine they had planted, and finally I said I hated the war.

  I wanted him to sense through my words that I was not afraid. And I wanted to prolong our last conversation, to ask him to wait for me.

  Cesar returned, telling us we could take as long as we needed but that we were not to give any indication of our location or of the time, nor should we mention any names, because if we did, he would not be able to send our letters.

  Of course he was going to read my letter. He could even censor it! He had left again, but I still felt his breath on my neck as if he were peering over my shoulder. Never mind. I wrote what I had planned to write, taking care not to let my tears fall onto the paper. All I could see was darkness. My lucky star had just vanished.

  Cesar left but soon returned; a small, barrel-shaped man with a large, bushy mustache and greasy hair was with him. When he saw us, he looked panic-stricken, as if he had set eyes on the devil. He interlaced his fingers nervously and was clearly waiting for instructions from his leader.

  “This is Doctora Ingrid,” said Cesar.

  The newcomer extended an enormous hand covered in soot, which he quickly tried to wipe on his jeans and holey T-shirt.

  Cesar continued in a measured voice, articulating every word, as if to make sure he would be properly understood and not have to repeat himself.

  “Go and buy some clothes: pants, jeans, something chic, and short-sleeved shirts, pretty ones, for women, do you understand?”

  The man nodded quickly, his eyes rooted to the floor in extreme concentration.

  “Get some underwear, too. Make sure it’s feminine. The best quality.”

  The man’s head moved up and down, as if on a spring, and he held his breath.

  “And rubber boots. Get the good ones. The Venus. Not the Colombian-made ones. And also get me a good mattress, double thickness, and a mosquito net. But make sure they’re decent. I don’t want the useless stuff you dug up last time! Send everything straight to Sonia’s. I’m counting on you. I want quality, do you understand?”

  The little man took his leave, backing out of the room before pivoting on the step and disappearing.

  “If you’re ready, we’ll get going right away.”

  It was the end of the day. The heat became tolerable as we bumped along a wretched, dusty track pitted with craters full of stagnant mud. Large, centuries-old trees blocked the horizon, and the sky winding above the road was bloodred. Now Clara and I were in the front cabin. The sound system had finally been switched off, and our silence was invaded by the cheeping of millions of invisible birds that burst into the sky in small black clouds as we passed by, only to turn back almost immediately and resume their positions in the cover of the foliage. I tried to lean my head out the window to watch the silhouettes of these magical, free birds above the treetops. If I had been with Papa, he would have wanted to gaze at them just as I was doing. This marvelous spectacle was painful—the happiness of these birds was hurting me, and so was their freedom.

  “You’ll have to get used to eating everything,” Cesar remarked. “The only meat here is monkey!”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I retorted. It wasn’t true, but I felt the need to come up with a witty remark. “You have to get me salad, fruit, and vegetables. With all this greenery, I don’t suppose that’ll be a problem.”

  Cesar remained silent. He seemed, however, to be enjoying my conversation. I pushed it a bit further.

  “And if you really want to make me happy, get me some cheese!”

  Ten minutes later he stopped the truck in the middle of nowhere. The guerrillas who were in the rear of the vehicle got out to stretch their legs and piss matter-of-factly in front of everyone. Cesar also got out and issued instructions, then headed off with two of the guerrillas toward a small house I hadn’t noticed initially, hidden between the trees. He came back smiling, a plastic bag in each hand; the other two men were just behind him, carrying a case of beer.

  He handed me one of the plastic bags.

  “Here, this is for you. I’ll get you some whenever I can, but it’s not easy here.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. Inside the bag was a large piece of fresh cheese and a dozen small limes. I noticed the men’s sidelong glances and placed the bag in the shade under the seat.

  The track had now narrowed, and the trees seemed to have taken over. We could no longer see the sky through the canopy of vegetation.

  Suddenly, after crossing a furrow, the vehicle swung sharply to the left and crashed through the bush. I put my forearm over my eyes to protect myself from the impact, but instead of hitting something the truck just barged its way onto a path and ended up in the middle of an open area of beaten earth. All the vegetation had been cut away. We stopped. It was starting to get dark. Night was falling.

  The squealing of brakes had announced our arrival, and a large German shepherd came trotting over, barking diligently, doing its duty.

  Cesar got out of the vehicle. I did the same on my side.

  “Be careful,” he warned. “This dog is fierce.”

  The dog lurched toward me, barking wit
h all its might. I allowed it to come close and smell me, and then I stroked it lightly between the ears. Cesar was watching me out of the corner of his eye.

  “I love dogs,” I ventured. I didn’t want Cesar to think he could intimidate me.

  The clearing was surrounded by huts; a little farther away were some tents, and a large open shelter lined with low wooden trestle tables every few feet. One of the huts had an earth wall all the way around it; another was open, with rows of benches laid out like church pews facing a small television set that hung from the branch of a large tree protruding through the side. It was the first time I had set foot in a FARC camp.

  “Let me introduce you to Sonia.”

  A large woman with dyed-blond hair sticking up military style held out her hand to me. I hadn’t seen her arrive and somewhat belatedly held out mine. Her handshake was bone-crushing, and I yelled in pain. She let go, and I shook my hand vigorously to bring back the circulation. Cesar was amused.

  Sonia was bent double, laughing uncontrollably. Then, catching her breath, she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “So now you know. You have to treat her gently,” said Cesar, and he left.

  Before I even had a chance to say good-bye to Cesar, Sonia put her arm around my shoulders, like an old schoolmate, to take me on a tour of the camp. Clara followed.

  Sonia was the commander of this camp. She lived with her partner, a younger man of lower rank; she ostentatiously gave orders to him to leave no doubt who was in charge. She took us into her hut, the only one, in fact, that had a wall and therefore a degree of privacy. Standing in the center of the room between a mattress on the floor and a plastic chair was a small refrigerator: she opened it proudly. It contained only two soft drinks and three bottles of water.

  “It’s for medicine,” she explained, as if to apologize for having such a luxury.