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

by Gary Brozek

  “That’s a good plan. That’s what I would do,” Keith replied, barely able to contain his smirk.

  These exchanges with Gómez were hardly an interrogation—more like a simple conversation about our situation. That was both reassuring and disconcerting. What if he was talking so freely with us because he knew we were about to be let go and he was trying to influence our report to the outside? What if he was talking so freely with us because he knew we were about to be executed? Toward the end we told Gómez that he was making a big mistake by holding us captive. He got a bit worked up and said that we were a gift to Uribe because the Colombian Army wanted to kill us and make it look like the FARC had done it. Uribe wanted to make the FARC look bad in the eyes of the world.

  We asked Gómez point-blank if the plan was for us to be killed. He repeated his earlier statement: The Colombian military would be the ones who killed us just to damage the reputation of the FARC. The FARC wanted to release us. When they set us free, they would put on a big show. He wanted it to be an international event with ambassadors and journalists from around the world.

  We were skeptical about his message, but the significance of our meeting him was undeniable: For the whole of our twenty-four-day march, we had been hoping to get answers. Now we were getting them, and while Gómez was blowing a lot of hot air, at least he was someone with the power to affect our situation. Even though he seemed to be, if not delusional, then definitely exaggerating, we tried to make him understand the situation as we saw it. We laid out a more plausible scenario. By holding three Americans hostage, Americans whose government would not directly negotiate with terrorists (he flinched at that word as well), he was simply encouraging the U.S. to further its support for the Colombian government in its efforts against the FARC. That meant more U.S. military support and more money. More equipment and more training. All targeted against him and his compatriots.

  We also told him that because he now held Americans captive, the rules of the game were changed. Before we’d been taken hostage, when we or other Americans flying reconnaissance missions had seen FARC guerrillas, we could take no action against them. The only way that we could take direct action against the FARC was if there was an American life in imminent danger. We were now those endangered Americans. The rules of engagement were very different for those employed by the U.S. government to work in Colombia. By holding us, they were opening Pandora’s box. Instead of simply working indirectly against the FARC, by interfering with their narco-trafficking, the U.S. could strike directly against them because they were holding American hostages.

  To his credit, Gómez agreed with our assessment. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of FARC members had traveled internationally, many of them to Cuba. The also met with some communist leaders in other parts of the world to be trained and educated. We weren’t certain that Joaquín Gómez was one of them, but it was likely. That would explain his more expansive worldview.

  But his ego was more powerful than his powers of reasoning. Pastrana’s decision to allow the FARC a safe haven or DMZ had given the FARC credibility in their own eyes and in the eyes of others in the region and around the world. Just a year or so before we were captured, Front commanders like Gómez and Ramírez, Mono JoJoy, and the rest of the FARC secretariado thought that they were the puppet masters pulling the strings. They had the president of a major Latin American power bowing to their demands. Unfortunately for them, they’d capitalized on their increasing legitimacy not by negotiating but by doing what terrorists do—killing and terrorizing. Not negotiating in good faith had consequences; now they were on the run and paying the price. Instead of safe haven, they were back to tramping around the countryside with the military in hot pursuit. Gómez and the other FARC leaders had been knocked off their imagined pedestal, but with us in his grasp, he had climbed back on it.

  With the exception of his brief flashes of anger whenever we mentioned drugs, Gómez was cordial. Keith played up to his ego when he mentioned the Browning Gómez was carrying. He got a big grin on his face and pulled it out to show it off better. Keith took over talking to Gómez directly with the little Spanish he had. Keith tried to tell him something about the weapon’s history, and the FARC Front commander led Keith out of the building.

  Marc and I were led outside as well. We could see that Keith was in a vehicle with Gómez and a couple of his bodyguards. Burujo and Ramírez were in the front seat of a Toyota Land Cruiser—a silver one this time. Marc was placed in the backseat of that car and I was put in another. A minute or so after Keith’s car drove off, we followed.

  The young guard watching me chambered a round and kept his gun on me during the five-minute ride to our next stop. No one spoke. In fact, the driver had turned off the radio as soon as we’d gotten under way. We drove down another dirt road until we came to what looked like a more permanent FARC compound. The structures were built much the same as others we’d seen, but instead of nylon tarps for roofs, these had corrugated tin roofs. Around each of the buildings, wooden walkways had been built to keep people out of the mud, with other walkways bisecting the compound and running along the perimeter.

  When we entered, we had to walk past another of the wall-less structures. A group of about fifty to sixty FARC guerrillas—low-level types of all ages and both genders—were clustered there. Their stony stares made me feel like I was doing one of those perp walks I’d seen on the television news when a suspect is led past a gauntlet of angry citizens and cops. One guy caught my attention. He was very short and very, very fat with a thick mustache. He reminded me of a Mexican bandit. All he needed was a pair of bandoliers crossed on his chest to complete the look. We were led into a small room that had clear plastic walls partitioning it off from the larger open space.

  We took the three plastic patio chairs in the room. Down a ways from us in another room, Sonia was sitting. She was joined by the fat man I’d just noticed. The pair started talking and looking at us. The guards, most of whom had been with us on the march, were as wiped out as we were. Some of them were struggling to keep their eyes open. It was nearing midday and the temperature was climbing. We’d been so used to being in the mountains or under the jungle’s canopy that the heat was at first welcome.

  We were brought plates of empanadas, fried potato balls, and bananas. After we ate, six new guards, totally unfamiliar to us, came into the room. Instead of sitting, they formed a semicircle in front of us. Like the other FARC we’d seen at this compound, they stared at us, expressionless. Ten minutes later, Burujo, Gómez, and Ramírez came into the room, along with another mini-entourage. We stood up briefly to greet them, but our short conversation was interrupted by a commotion outside the door. A few seconds later, the source of the commotion entered the room. Another FARC upper-echelon commander walked in. He was taller than all the others and thickly built. He wore a red beret with a star on it but was otherwise dressed like the other bloc commander. We could tell he was somebody important within the FARC because Gómez, a man we knew to be the leader of the Southern Bloc and therefore a pretty big deal, jumped up and offered him his chair.

  He held out his hand to Keith and then to me. Then a chill ran through me. He hesitated before shaking Marc’s hand and his brow furrowed and he stared hard at Marc. He must have been told that I was the one who spoke the best Spanish because he looked at me while gesturing toward Marc.

  “Is he American?” he asked.

  Marc sensed what was being implied and immediately answered that he was. Marc had a darker complexion than the rest of us, and his dark hair further set him apart from Keith and me. I knew that this man was wondering if Marc was Colombian, mistaking his Portuguese and Italian features for Latin American. I quickly explained Marc’s heritage, knowing that if they suspected he was Colombian, he would likely be killed. The FARC leader said something, but I was having a hard time with his accent and the speed of his words. When I sorted things out, I said again—as did Marc—that he was indeed an American.

  The
FARC leader was introduced to us as Mono JoJoy. As commander of the Central Bloc, Mono JoJoy seemed far too busy to deal with us. After he shook our hands, he turned to Joaquín Gómez and said, “They are not our hostages; we are theirs.” This was just another variation on the idea that they were responsible for keeping us alive. According to this theory, the Colombian military was who we really needed to fear because they would kill us for their own gain and to discredit the FARC. By that point, we were tired of hearing that line. We all knew that the opposite was true. If the Colombian military came to rescue us, the FARC would execute us. We didn’t bother to dispute Mono JoJoy’s ridiculous claim. Even if we had wanted to, we didn’t have time.

  KEITH

  Martín Sombra was the overstuffed empanada of a man we’d earlier seen speaking with Sonia. When Mono JoJoy introduced him to us, he said, “He will take good care of you.” We all looked at one another. This guy couldn’t even take care of himself, how was he going to care for us? Sombra was no more than five foot three or four, and he seemed nearly as wide as he was tall. Sombra just nodded, and we all watched as Gómez, Ramírez, JoJoy, and their entourage departed. Sonia left with them, too. The only ones who remained were the six guards who fronted us like an execution squad and Sombra.

  “Relax, guys,” the fat man said to us. “Everything is going to be okay. We’re going to set you free. We’re going to have good food for you first, and we’re going to take you to a place where you can rest.”

  The food-and-rest part sounded good, but we all knew the parts about being okay and going free were just more bullshit. Sombra was just trying to keep us calm. A calm hostage is easier to take care of and less likely to try an escape. If Sombra thought he was adopting a soothing, buddy-buddy manner, he was way off base. His high-pitched squeaky voice put us all on edge and contrasted sharply to his Porky Pig looks. He sounded like a cross between Mickey Mouse and someone who had been sucking helium out of a balloon. He told us to grab our chairs because we were moving out.

  We loaded ourselves and our chairs into the back of another pickup, where we sat with three guards. The truck drove off and wound its way through a series of unmanned guard stations. Though we were no longer marching, our digestive distress hadn’t ended and we had Sombra pull over so we could head into a field to do our business. When we came back, Sombra and a guard who’d been introduced to us as Milton were sitting in our chairs in the middle of the road, smoking cigarettes, taking great big drags on them with every breath like they were racing.

  They finished and Sombra managed to get back onto his feet like a pregnant woman pushing herself up off a couch.

  “I’m going to give you new names,” he said, looking us over. He pointed to me and told me my name was Antonio. Tom was Andrés. We couldn’t understand what name he was assigning Marc, so Marc said, “I’m Enrique.” And so we were the newly christened three amigos. We saw through the bullshit of trying to give us new identities, but we decided to put up with it for now. It was all so transparent and stupid, but essentially harmless since we knew what they were trying to accomplish. If they could break down one small part of our reality—our names—they figured it was going to be easier for them to manipulate us. We ended up flipping that scheme, coming up with our own code names for many of them. That way, if we were talking about them in English, they wouldn’t hear any of their names and know they were being talked about. From hour one on, Martín Sombra was Fat Man.

  As we drove on, we saw a pile of eighty-pound propane cylinders stacked together. We’d heard that the FARC made them into weapons by cutting off the tapered tops and then slicing the cylinder in half to use the tubes as mortars. They’d pack a charge in one end along with a load of nails and other shrapnel and fire away. Inaccurate as all hell and as a result indiscriminately deadly. Not that collateral damage mattered to them. Seeing those things reminded us that despite how disheveled and disorganized these guerrillas were, they knew how to ruin people’s lives.

  Our meeting with Mono Jojoy had allowed us to see for ourselves how the hierarchy functioned in this terrorist organization. Though we had been on the jungle floor with our misfit bunch of guards, now we had a better sense for who had been calling the shots in the month since our crash. I’d been observing Sonia as best as I could throughout the march. She spent a lot of time on her shortwave radio in communication with someone—that someone was possibly the Fat Man, but more likely Mono JoJoy. As haphazard as our movements sometimes seemed to be, it was clear that Sonia was being directed to this drop-off point—whether that was from day one or later didn’t matter. I saw then that the march, as agonizing as it had been, was also purposeful. The FARC were used to handling hostages and they had a plan in mind for us. I just wished I knew what it was.

  After we’d driven less than ten miles, we came to another abandoned camp, a smaller part of the larger compound we’d first entered. Like the area where we’d met with the various FARC bloc leaders, this section had been abandoned. We could see one building, and a small clearing cut into the jungle. We got out of the truck and a guard rushed around with a chair so that Fat Man wouldn’t have to stand while he addressed us. Another guy stood right next to him, clearly his second in command.

  Fat Man lowered himself into his chair and swept his arm around to indicate everything in this smaller compound. “We do all of this for you.”

  “All of this” was essentially the one building, what we immediately called our “hooch.” It was about sixteen by twenty feet and walled on three sides. The fourth wall was made of chain-link fencing. At least it had a roof, so that if this was where we were going to be bunked, we’d at least be mostly out of the weather. I resented Sombra’s thinking we should be appreciative because they’d opened a prison camp for us. Thanks very much. We’ll be sure to tip our guards accordingly.

  I wanted to cut through the crap, so I rolled out my best Spanish, “¿Quién es el jefe aquí?” I wanted to know who the boss was. We’d met a bunch of different FARC that day and I wanted to know who was directly responsible for us.

  Fat Man gave us the party line: There are no bosses. Everyone is equal here. I cut him off and flat-out said, “That’s great, but if we need food, who do we talk to.”

  Sombra jerked his head toward the man standing next to him: “Ferney.” His name was pronounced like the words fair and nay as in negative. We immediately dubbed him the Frenchman, and the immediate impression that he made was that he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. When the Fat Man had been entertaining the other troops earlier and getting them to laugh at his jokes, the Frenchman was the only one who remained stoic. The guy seemed to have no soul at all; he was dead emotionally. It was the Frenchman who led us into our new home away from home.

  As we walked up to the building, I knew immediately that this marked the end of our days as kidnapped contract workers and began our life as prisoners. The whole morning had been filled with meetings and conversations about our situation, but now reality was the three-hundred-pound gorilla who sat wherever he wanted. He chose to sit right on us. I felt something deep in the pit of my stomach, a kind of despair that I hadn’t ever felt before, even when the march was at its worst. Glancing over at Marc and Tom, I could tell they felt the same way. The place was just depressing. The canopy of jungle foliage and trees didn’t allow any sunlight to enter, the building had clearly been there awhile, and the wood was showing signs of rot. When we walked inside, there was nothing on the floor but the unevenly cut and spaced boards on which we’d have to sleep. Some other furniture, again made out of the tablas we’d seen before, a couple of chairs, a shelf. A beam, about the size of a flagpole, ran from one end of the structure to the other.

  None of us wanted to think about the fact that this tin-roofed shanty was going to be our home for the foreseeable future. We all immediately stepped back out of it onto a patio-like area in front of the chain-link. At one time the patio area (which was really just a dirt/mud area in front of the hooch) had also been fenced in
. Postholes and a couple of jagged bits of wood stuck out of the ground. I hoped that they would put that fence back up so that at least we could be outside if we wanted.

  One of the guards pointed to a tree nearby and a shelf that was nailed to it. He told us we could put cracker crumbs on the shelves and the monkeys would come to take them. We’d already seen a few monkeys running through our prison camp. We looked at one another. Marc shook his head and said, “Monkey Village.” The name stuck. It wasn’t really a term of endearment. At one point during the march, we’d come across a troop of monkeys. The FARC were as fascinated by them as we were, but one of the guerrillas warned us to be careful. The monkeys would fling their feces at humans and urinate on them from the tree limbs.

  Night was coming on fast. The Frenchman came into our hooch and told us that he wanted the uniforms we’d been wearing. He was going to resupply us. The most any of us got was two uniforms, a T-shirt, two pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks, one sheet, and a mosquito net. Marc was the only one to get another T-shirt. I only had one pair of underwear because they had nothing in my size. They took away our other clothes and we were pretty much geared up. He asked us if we needed anything else. We told him we wanted a radio and reminded him that he’d told us earlier that he would get us one to listen to. We were desperate to know anything from the outside world, especially what was being done on our behalf. The Frenchman assured us that we’d have radios, and he said he’d make sure a rooster would come sing for us. And with that he left.

  After the Frenchman left, the door was chained and locked shut. We were given a five-gallon oil jug with the top cut off it to use as our toilet. I think we were all in our own world at that point. We didn’t say too much as we spread out over the three platform beds a piece of black plastic they’d also left for us. We lay down underneath our sheets and mosquito nets as the jungle and the knowledge that we were now truly hostages settled over us.