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

by Gary Brozek

  After our baths, we were fed french fries and asked if there was anything else we needed. I’d developed some kind of jungle rash and I asked for medicine to treat it. To my surprise, I received it—the entire tube and not just a single treatment. We bedded down on a platform resting on sawhorses, and with the exception of a rat living up in the rafters, we were pretty much left alone the whole evening. Outside, we could hear the FARC conducting some kind of meeting. They sang their “We Love the Peace” song and the “Legalization Is the Solution” chant while speakers addressed the crowd on some aspect of FARC-ness. We estimated that about thirty to forty guerrillas were there, and the general tone of the place was much more orderly and military-like than it had been with the field units. They all had on the same uniforms, they were more disciplined about wearing their hats, and they seemed to be better squared away generally than the guys we’d been with in the jungle.

  The Fat Man seemed a bit on edge and we saw all kinds of activity going on in the room next to ours, where they were setting up for the proof of life. We also smelled some kind of Pine-Sol like cleaner, and figured they were really going all out for us. That was when Sombra told us that the great and magnificent Mono JoJoy would soon be joining us once again.

  Sombra said that he wanted me to know that he had seen a picture of my son. I was stunned. Didn’t he mean sons? Patricia was pregnant with twins, what had happened? Did I misunderstand what he said? Sombra shrugged when I asked for details. Marc and Tom tried to assure me there was some mistake, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Twenty or so minutes later, Mono JoJoy walked in, accompanied by a guerrilla we’d never seen before. Mono JoJoy started speaking to us, and at that point it became clear that the other man with him was his interpreter/translator. The only thing was, it seemed like the guy was so nervous about everything that he could barely converse in Spanish let alone English.

  In the middle of this mini Tower-of-Babel moment, I spotted a woman in a FARC uniform standing in the background. She clearly wasn’t Colombian, and she stood out immediately. Her high, prominent cheekbones had been made sharper by what I figured must have been a diet similar to ours. Her skin was pale compared to the other guerrillas, her nose and cheeks were red-tinged from exposure to the sun and elements. Light brown hair framed her oval face, and even the harsh conditions she must have lived under couldn’t hide the fact that she was a very attractive young woman who looked extremely out of place in a FARC uniform.

  She stepped forward and started a conversation with me in accented but perfectly constructed English, and I knew we had our translator. There was something odd about this whole situation and her entry into it. I couldn’t place her accent or get her to tell us who she was. All I could do was ask her to serve as our translator with the FARC. I said that she spoke far better English than the man with Mono JoJoy, and since he had no objections, she stepped in.

  Just as she began to translate, a civilian, who could speak English as well, walked in carrying a video camera and it was clear he was taping.

  “My name is Jorge Enrique Botero,” he said, addressing the three of us. Before we could get any questions out, he turned to Marc. “I have a message for you from your mother.”

  MARC

  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the proof of life, but when Botero uttered those words, I realized just how hard this was going to be.

  After telling me that he had a message from my mother, Botero immediately turned his back on me and stepped to the other side of the table. I was stunned by what he had said and I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t given me the message. The last thing I expected out of this POL was to hear from anyone in my family. I willed myself to focus on what was going on.

  Mono JoJoy started telling us that we were being held because we had violated the FARC’s national sovereignty. We’d heard this lame explanation before and found it laughable—a terrorist organization is not a sovereign nation. JoJoy went on, with the young woman translating for him.

  “From the moment you crashed,” he said, “you are part of the group of prisoners of war. Our mission is to keep you alive to do the exchange of prisoners.”

  That was the clearest statement of their intent we’d had since all this began, but it also wiped out any hope of a unilateral release—something we’d been told would happen from the time we were on the twenty-four-day march. At that point, Keith stepped in and spoke up for all of us, hoping to get more clarification.

  “If Colombian president Uribe refuses to negotiate,” he said, “if he doesn’t go along with the idea of prisoner exchange, then we could be here for five or ten years. How are you going to get us out of here?”

  “Negotiations will begin.” JoJoy responded. “We don’t know when. Our commander in chief, Manuel Marulanda, ordered us that you could send a sign of life to your families. Because of this, a Colombian journalist is here. Is that okay with you?”

  We all said yes, but we were disappointed that JoJoy hadn’t fully answered our question. Keith asked him again how we could possibly get out of there. JoJoy used the Spanish word for exchange—canje—which meant us being exchanged for FARC prisoners held in Colombian jails, and monetario—or money. By the time Tom got all this translated, it was clear that our session with JoJoy was almost over. We wanted to ask him about the ransom; having that as an option was an enormous relief. Tom stepped up for us and asked Mono JoJoy to clarify what he meant about monetario.

  “Humanitario. Humanitario,” the translator replied. There would be no ransom. No release. Just some kind of exchange.

  Mono JoJoy stood and we all shook hands again and said, “Respectos.” I wasn’t feeling any kind of respect for him, but the proof of life mattered more than my feelings. The same was true of how we felt about the journalist who would interview us. We didn’t know Botero at all, but the fact that he was allowed into the FARC camp and his chummy demeanor didn’t sit well with us. We knew in some ways we were being used by him, but we also wanted to let our families know that we were okay—even if he wasn’t from the States or from CNN.

  Before we got to make our statements to our families, Botero wanted to ask us some questions. Alfredo, a FARC higher-up, let us know that he was going to sit in on all this. Botero was having trouble with his camera lens fogging up, so we took a brief break and he handed us a couple of printouts, a Newsweek magazine, and a paperback copy of John Grisham’s The Street Lawyer.

  Keith started reading the printout of an article he’d been handed. It was off the Internet and was a story about us on MSNBC.

  “Oh, man. This is not good,” he said suddenly. He tried to explain what he’d read to Tom, but the camera started rolling again. Tom, who’d also been reading something that Botero gave him, said, “We’ve invaded Iraq.” Before he could fill us in any more, Botero was ready.

  The first question that Alfredo asked was, “Who hired you?” Keith began by explaining what he’d read: Northrop Grumman was no longer dealing with the reconnaissance contract that had brought us to the country. The contract had been awarded to a company called CIAO. None of us had ever heard of it, but we were incredulous that someone who was contracted to do intelligence operations would called themselves CIAO. This initials confusion would only make things harder for us.

  Sure enough, the next question Alfredo asked was, “Are you working for the CIA?”

  “No. No,” we all said.

  Keith still had the document in his hand, so Tom and I let him take over, “This says that a company called CIAO. That’s ciao—C-I-A-O not C-I-A.” I wasn’t sure if we convinced them or just muddied the waters even more.

  The session moved from topic to topic, with Keith asking most of the questions, trying to find out as much as he could about our situation. In the back-and-forth, Botero confirmed something we’d suspected since February 13: Tommy Janis had been executed along with our host-nation rider, Sergeant Cruz. Botero asked us if we had any message for the family of the Colombian, and
Keith gave them the rough outline of our time spent with him on the day of the crash. We expressed all our condolences to the family, but our minds were more on Tommy J than with Cruz. We’d all held out some small hope that he had been taken hostage and separated from us, however, we weren’t surprised to hear that his body had been recovered. Tommy J was ex-military and ex–Special Forces and we were pretty sure that he had tried to escape, fulfilling the duty he had been sworn to do while in the service. He’d also said to Tom on one occasion that if he were ever taken hostage, he would do whatever it took to get out of there. We didn’t need any kind of official report to confirm our suspicions.

  With Botero behind the camera, the bad news kept coming. We learned that shortly after our plane had gone down, another American plane had crashed. About a month after our engine failure, the second Grand Caravan in the fleet had crashed on takeoff, killing all three on board. These guys were heading out to look for us, and they died. Ralph Ponticelli was probably the one that we were closest with, and when we learned that he had died, Tom and I both started to well up with tears. Learning that Tommy Schmidt and Butch Oliver had also lost their lives made us feel even worse.

  Botero must have planned all these revelations in order to elicit some emotion from us, and he succeeded. Tom was so upset about Ralph’s death that he grabbed the copy of the day’s Miami Herald they had intended to use in the POL to shield his face from the camera. Botero zoomed in tighter, framing Tom in a close-up. Tragedy makes good TV, but this was just piling it on.

  I’d been thinking about my mother’s message and wondering if it was a letter, a cassette tape, or something else. Botero took out a videotape, put it in his camera, and wired up a small monitor for me to view the video. After seeing him use Ralph’s death to capture Tom at his most vulnerable, I was determined not to become a part of Botero’s propaganda scheme. Despite how I was feeling about hearing a voice from home, I told myself I wasn’t going to cry when I watched the message. It helped that Botero messed something up and started playing it without sound, forcing him to rewind it before giving me the headset.

  The setup was simple. My mom was at home, sitting on the couch with the camera steady in front of her. Gradually the camera panned over to a photo of me in my air force uniform that she had on a shelf. When she finally spoke, her voice was a measured calm, like she was making an effort not to show just how upset she was.

  “I just want to tell you that I love you very much. I hope you come home soon, safe and alive—and also your colleagues. There are hundreds of people praying for you and I just need you to come home because I miss you so much and I worry about you. Please stay strong. You’ll be home soon. I love you.”

  I sat there as stone-faced as I could, biting my lip to keep it from quivering, clenching my jaw to keep it from chattering. A variety of emotions were churning inside of me. I was ecstatic to see a familiar face and hear a familiar voice, but I was broken up to see that face in so much pain. I was angry with the FARC for putting me in that position, guilt-ridden for having done this to my loved ones.

  I hated that this journalist was manipulating us, but I tried to remember something Keith had said to us earlier, before we’d even gone on camera. We were all gathered in the room where we slept, and we decided that we had to go along with what the FARC were having us do—not for them, but for our families. They’d dressed us up and put us in our best clothes and given us haircuts and fed us well so that we’d look as happy and healthy as possible. After Mono JoJoy had left and we regrouped in the room, Keith said that we each needed to look good for our families. He was straightening Tom’s collar as he said it and he went on to say that we needed to be strong for them so that they wouldn’t worry. We had to let them know we were fine and being treated well (even though we weren’t). That was our only job today. That was what we had to do to the best of our abilities. Call that manipulation if you want, but we were doing it out of compassion, not to hurt or deceive.

  After viewing my mom’s message, we took another break. We went out onto the porch, and for the first time we weren’t blindfolded when we were outside the building. I walked up to the young, pale-skinned woman who had been translating, who was standing on a slice of ground nearby. My mind was so scattered by everything we were hearing that I just needed confirmation of some part of it.

  “Do you think that we’re going to live through this?” I asked her.

  She was smoking a cigarette and took a casual drag before exhaling. She grimaced and kind of shook her head. And then said, “I don’t know. It depends on what your government does.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the government has troops right now here in Colombia, and they’re training to do a rescue.”

  I paused, waiting for her to continue. When she did, she had a puzzled look on her face. “You didn’t hear about the other hostages?”

  I told her we had no radios, had no way of getting news about anything. She stubbed out her cigarette on a porch post. She shrugged and matter-of-factly told me that there was a group of hostages that the government had recently tried to rescue. Among them was the former governor of one of the departments, she thought Antioquia, and a former defense minister named Echeverri. When the military came in, the FARC killed both of them along with ten other military hostages. Her words echoed her previous statement, and other things we’d heard from the FARC in the jungle: “Rescue comes. We kill everybody.”

  She wasn’t being overly dramatic, but her understated, matter-of-fact tone had the desired effect. I told Tom and Keith what I’d learned, and they were as shaken as I was. We were called back inside, and before Botero could ask his first question, Keith turned to Alfredo.

  “During a rescue, what is your mission?” he asked. “Isn’t it to kill us?”

  It would have been too much to expect to have Alfredo man up and say yes. Instead he gave us the usual response, “No. During a rescue, if you’re killed, it will be by Colombian military bullets. It won’t be our fingers that pull the trigger.”

  His words completely contradicted what the female translator had said. As cold-blooded as she was about the deaths of innocents, I at least had some respect for her telling the truth. But after Alfredo’s statement, it became clear that she also had been taking a great deal of pleasure in frightening me.

  Botero followed that exchange with this question: “What do you think when you hear the word rescue?”

  We’d just heard five minutes before about a group of hostages being obliterated, so what could our response be? We all said essentially the same things, but I think that Keith put it the most eloquently when he said, “Enough lives have been lost in our accident and its aftermath. We’ve lost four colleagues, and a fifth man who was completely innocent. I don’t want to die. None of us want to die. I am sick of death. Life is the only victory and I pray for a diplomatic solution.”

  After a few more questions from Botero, we took another break. The translator got into a discussion with one of us—this time it was Keith. I edged over to them when I heard her say something about Cuba and the U.S. embargo.

  “The reason,” she said, “that the U.S. instituted the trade blockade was because if the U.S. lifted it, everyone in the U.S. would flee there.”

  Keith looked at her.

  “Have you ever been to Cuba?” he asked. “Because I have. My first girlfriend was Cuban. My sister in-law is Cuban. I was raised in Florida in a heavily Cuban neighborhood.”

  The translator said nothing and took a drag on her cigarette. I could see that she was getting irritated with him and his ability to stand up to her.

  “What’s your relationship with Cuba?” he continued. “What color is you passport? Your accent seems a bit Cuban American, am I wrong?”

  She didn’t respond to any of these questions. She had enough and she walked away without a word.

  Keith looked at me and said, “What’s with this city guerrilla girl anyway?”

  He was rig
ht. She was definitely a wannabe revolutionary. Though she was dressed in camouflage pants, they were clearly non–standard issue. They rode low on her hips and were tailored. She also wore what we’d come to know in Colombia as an ombligo—a shirt that exposed her belly button and was held up by thin spaghetti straps. She’d also mentioned that she had heard about our capture when she was in Bogotá—most likely shopping for her outfit.

  In the end, speculating about the translator was the least of our problems. Tom, Keith, and I were suffering from information overload. We’d all been figuratively and at times literally living in boxes for the previous six months. We hadn’t heard any news except for a few bits of rumor—we were going to be released—from the guards. As much as that day was supposed to be a proof of life, it had turned out to be a proof of death—Tommy J, Sergeant Cruz, Ralph Ponticelli, Tommy Schmidt, and Butch Oliver, along with the other Colombian hostages who were massacred. Throughout the day, I suffered from one of the worst headaches I’d ever had—from the stress, the news of death, my mother’s video—it was all too much. We hadn’t spoken openly for the last few months, but now words had invaded every pore, infiltrating our brains until they hurt.

  Botero asked us more questions; sometimes we could understand his broken English, other times the young woman translated for him. His inquiries ran the gamut from what we missed most (family) to what our daily routine was like (boring). We knew that our families might see the video, and we did our best to put a positive spin on everything. At every opportunity, we told them that we were well; we were healthy; we were being treated humanely. None of it was true, but it was what we needed our families to hear.