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

by Gary Brozek

  A couple of months after the POL, Mono JoJoy made another appearance, announcing this time that we were going to be placed in yet another camp—only this time we wouldn’t be by ourselves, we’d be with the political prisoners. We had a pretty good idea of who would be there—we’d read all about the various kidnappings of major politicians and candidates before we’d been taken hostage. We never thought that all the FARC’s high-value prisoners would be put together in the same place, and we were excited about the possibilities this development represented. We were eager to meet with them. Suddenly, after months of only having one another, we’d have many more people to interact with. Suddenly we’d be thrust back into some semblance of a society.

  In spite of the uncertainties involved, we were all convinced that this political camp would bring nothing but good into our lives. More people, less boredom, more freedoms. As usual, we were surprised by how wrong we were.

  SEVEN

  Caribe

  October 2003–December 2003

  MARC

  On October 20 of 2003, we approached the political prisoners’ camp with real anticipation. It didn’t take long for that feeling to be replaced by dread. In front of us stood a large compound completely surrounded by chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Spaced at intervals around this rectangle stood six elevated guard shacks, manned by guards with automatic weapons. Inside the perimeter fence, a second chain-link fence completed another rectangle. Within that enclosure was a large structure, as big as a two-car garage. We all stopped and looked at this brutal reality: For the first time, we were in a compound that reminded us of the photos we’d seen of actual POW camps—not the neat and clean camps from Hollywood like in The Great Escape or Stalag 17, but a dingy, used version of them.

  Sombra urged us on and paraded us around the perimeter of the compound, still outside the main fence. As we walked along the first wall, inside the compound we saw a group of people dressed in civilian clothes, idly swinging in hammocks. They looked our way but made no effort to approach. Farther along, we saw a courtyard and another building. A group of men were standing in that open space looking out at us. Music and the buzz and hum of conversation came from inside the building. We continued our walk around the perimeter until we reached the front gate, where a desk and chair sat along with two impassive sentries.

  As we stood waiting for Sombra to give the order for the gate to be opened, one of the prisoners, dressed in somewhat ragged civilian clothes like the others, approached us. He had hair down to his waist and a full beard, both of which made him look like a Colombian version of Robinson Crusoe. He greeted us in Spanish with a polite, “Buenos días.”

  A large group of prisoners—there must have been about twenty of them—came out of the building and jogged over to the fence. Like the man who greeted us, they were all dressed in worn-down civilian clothes.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked in Spanish.

  “Some of us four years. Some five. Some of us six,” one of them answered in decent but heavily accented English.

  I felt my stomach curdle. The group was in a bad way. One of them had a nasty rash that covered nearly his entire back, others were missing teeth, and some were going bald and stood slightly stooped over. My first thought was how bad I felt for them. Then I realized that I could end up like that, too.

  We assumed that we were going to be imprisoned with this group, but Sombra said, “Vámanos,” and continued to lead his prized possessions around the outside of the camp. A smaller, fenced-in enclosure sat to one side, and quite a few chains hung from it. They weren’t around the prisoners’ necks, but they still screamed out to us that this was a prison camp. Sombra led us back around to the gate. We were waiting to go inside when a woman, fairly slight and with long wavy hair trailing after her, bustled up with a group of maybe five or six others in her wake. We followed Sombra through the main gate and saw that the woman and the group with her were in another smaller, fenced-off enclosure.

  Just as we were about to be let into this smaller space, we heard the woman say to one of the men in Spanish, “There is no room in here. What are we going to do? We can’t take them in here. This isn’t going to work. We have to tell them.”

  “Ingrid, we do for them what we did for you. We welcome them in,” the man responded.

  We didn’t need to hear her name spoken to know that the woman who didn’t want us in her part of the camp was Ingrid Betancourt. Almost a year and a week before the day that we had crashed, Betancourt had been captured by the FARC. Keith had told me once that the day after she was taken, as a favor to our host nation, he had been the mission commander on a flight over the spot where she’d been kidnapped. They didn’t expect to find her, but they did an aerial reconnaissance of the area. Keith remembered finding it odd at the time that a U.S. subcontractor had been tapped to do the search and not the Colombian military.

  I’d heard the news of her being taken while I was still in the States. Since I was applying for jobs in Colombia at almost the same time she was taken, anything that had to do with Colombia interested me. Later, when I was first living in Bogotá, I saw an enormous billboard with a photo of her with the slogan, FREE INGRID beneath it while driving through the city. When you see someone’s likeness on a billboard, it is kind of hard to forget that face.

  Ingrid Betancourt was a French-Colombian politician, who had been a Colombian senator and was a candidate for president in 2002 for the Oxygen Green Party she had founded. Shortly after the Colombian government revoked the FARC’s DMZ, Betancourt went on a campaign trip to that area, despite the government’s and the military’s insistence that she not travel to such a dangerous spot. While in the contested lands, she was stopped at a FARC checkpoint and taken prisoner. She was from a prominent family and her first husband was a fellow student from a prestigious school she’d attended in Paris. He worked in the French diplomatic corps and Ingrid had traveled widely as a result.

  Based on how she greeted us, she didn’t seem very diplomatic herself. Ignoring what her fellow captive said to her, she approached Sombra and repeated her concerns about space while adding others. What surprised me most was that she seemed to issue an order to Sombra when she used the command form of the verb to put, saying, “Póngalos en alguna parte más.” Even if I hadn’t been picking up more Spanish, I would have been able to detect that she wasn’t making a request, but issuing a command. She wanted us put in some other part of the camp. Her tone was sharp, and I could see the look of disgust on Sombra’s face. He told her that we were educated guys and that we were staying there.

  For some reason, Sombra seemed to cave in to Ingrid’s pressure and allowed her to lead him inside the building the political hostages had just exited so that they could discuss the situation further. We could hear two women’s voices, Ingrid’s and another woman’s, and they were giving Sombra hell. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, he came out of the building and stomped past us without a word.

  The three of us were a bit stunned. This wasn’t the greeting we’d expected, and we’d basically been rejected sight unseen. We stood in the doorway and peered into the building where Sombra and Ingrid had been arguing. The place was a palatial mansion compared to anything we’d been in before. Even if they added three new beds, it seemed there would be plenty of room for everyone to fit. We lingered there like unwelcome relatives who’d dropped in for a surprise visit. I was trying to be open-minded and give them the benefit of the doubt. I wondered if I would have responded the same way and thought of this place as “my” house and the newcomers as uninvited guests. I hoped not and I hoped that after the initial shock of seeing us (we’d been told we were moving to their camp but I didn’t know if they had been told about us as well), they’d get over it and welcome us.

  There were a total of seven Colombian prisoners and they were whispering together, breaking into small groups, and discussing things some more.

  “Well,” Keith said, turning to us with an exa
sperated look, “I guess this is better than them coming over here and sniffing us.”

  I recalled a conversation that Keith and I had had in the previous camp. Keith had been talking about hunting, dogs, and wildlife in general. We got on the subject of dominance and submissiveness in dogs, their pack mentality, and pecking orders in the animal kingdom. I knew that Keith was interpreting this as a display of dominance, but I couldn’t figure out why he saw things as he did. We were pretty used to being together as a trio. If someone else had come into our group, it would have taken some time to adjust. We had only been at the camp for a few minutes, perhaps they just needed some time to adjust.

  After a short debate with one another, they came and greeted us. This time they seemed genuinely happy to meet us, even Ingrid, who said to me in her precise English, “We’re happy you’re here. And do you know what we are going to do tonight? We are going to have a party. And we’re going to dance.”

  She smiled and walked away, and I was left trying to figure out what had just happened and why this woman had so suddenly and drastically changed her attitude toward us. I chalked up the oddness of the greeting to the shock of them having their routine disrupted, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea that their first reaction had been to shun us. We were all eager to have more people to talk to, and having someone else who spoke English was especially appealing to Keith and me. We were also thrilled to see that they had radios, which meant contact with the outside world. Several of them had small transistor radios and there was also a larger multiband AM-FM radio they referred to as a panalón or panel radio.

  “Your families are both doing well, Keith and Marc. We have heard from them on the radio,” Ingrid told the two of us.

  Tom was off speaking to the other politicals while Ingrid explained how it was that our families had been able to get any information to her. “Because there are so many hostages in Colombia, several radio stations allow family members and friends to send messages to them. They then play them over the air. Generally at night or in the early hours of the morning.” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “Hostages are not good business and don’t attract advertisers, so they must do this at odd hours.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me. I’d stay up twenty four/seven to hear from them.”

  Ingrid nodded. “And your efforts would be rewarded. Your mother has been all over the airwaves. We hear her messages all the time. Clearly she loves you very much. My mother is the same.”

  She went on to tell us that each of our families wanted us to know that they were okay and that our company was taking good care of them. Hearing those words was a tremendous relief for all of us, as we had talked about and worried over whether the company was taking care of our families since we’d first crashed. To have someone independently and without our asking tell us that they were being provided for was a welcome bit of news.

  Still, there was more anxiety than joy in the air. It was like the proof of life all over again—a lot of information was coming at us quickly. Ingrid and the others were all talking at once, but we stayed focused on her because with her we didn’t need Tom to translate. She introduced us to a somewhat short but dignified-looking man named Luis Eladio Pérez, whom they all called Lucho. He looped his arm around her waist and joined in the conversation like we were at a cocktail party.

  The two of them filled us in on the news that they’d been hearing about the FARC and the possibility of peace talks, hostage exchanges, and releases. We trusted them since they were Colombians, politicians, and knew the culture and all the players. Both Lucho and Ingrid seemed certain that Ingrid’s release was just around the corner. In fact, she believed that the whole reason the camp we were in was built was that the FARC knew she was about to be released. They wanted her to see all the prominent hostages so that she could verify that we were alive and well.

  “Can you believe that?” Keith said as Ingrid walked away. He looked like he’d taken a bite of a rotten piece of fruit. “The frickin’ princess thinks that the FARC built this castle for her alone. How arrogant is that?”

  It did seem odd that she would believe that about herself. I knew that she was just one of hundreds and hundreds of Colombians being held captive. That her capture had even been newsworthy in the U.S. made me think that she was one of the most prominent captives there. It didn’t matter to me; she’d obviously thought about how she’d first greeted us and made an about-face. She’d delivered good news and that was what I was focusing on. But she’d rubbed Keith the wrong way. He was big on hostages treating one another with as much dignity and respect as possible to offset how badly the FARC were treating us, but I was willing to let her reaction go as surprise and move on.

  After that brief flurry of interaction, we were given some time to settle in, but no sooner had we put our things down on the benches than one of the other women approached us again. She’d introduced herself earlier as Clara Rojas, and now she wanted to discuss a bath schedule. Clara was very slight, almost fragile-looking, and her bright but nervous smile seemed to flicker on and off like a neon sign with little relation to what was being said. Clara had been Ingrid’s campaign manager and had been with Ingrid when the FARC had taken her. Because Clara was speaking in Spanish, I couldn’t really understand what she was saying, but she seemed really agitated. From what I could gather, it seemed like every other sentence began with the word Ingrid.

  When Clara stopped talking, Tom explained that Ingrid and Lucho had pretty much decided what the bathing schedule was going to be—the rest of us just had to fill in the other slots. This fit with what we’d already sensed and could see in the arrangement of our living quarters. We were coming into their previously established territory and we were going to have to fit in where we could. If the outside area seemed to be dominated by Ingrid and Lucho, at least the building was large enough to house the ten of us easily, and it was equally divided.

  Tom was invaluable in helping us to understand the dynamic at work here. Even before arriving at what we named Camp Caribe—because of the piranha-like fish that were abundant in the nearby water—Tom had explained to us that Colombians had a definite love-hate relationship with Americans. We were in their country, and now we had “invaded” their prison camp. For most of their lives, Colombians had heard that the best things in the world came from the U.S. According to Tom, many Colombians considered Disney World and Miami a prime vacation spot and the center of commerce and finance respectively. Tom believed that many Colombians, particularly of the upper class like Ingrid and Lucho, resented America’s idealized position as the land of opportunity being rammed down their throats. They’d grown tired of some seeing the U.S. as an example of the biggest and the best but had a grudging respect for it.

  Knowing all this and understanding that in several different ways we were outsiders, we needed to tread carefully and let things sort themselves out. We had been successful in dealing with the FARC by doing nothing but behaving as respectfully and humanely as we possibly could. We saw no reason to change our approach, especially since we were dealing with fellow prisoners and not our enemy. I didn’t think that any of us had an especially strong sense of fairness and justice, but compared to some of the Colombians in that group of seven, it seemed like we did.

  Moving into a place where people had been together for a while proved to be an interesting experience—almost like being the new kid at school and having to figure out who the cool kids were, who was friends with whom, and all of that. It took some time to get to know everyone, and it seemed like each of the three of us, as was normal, had conflicting views of everyone. I was immediately suspicious when one of the Colombian men, Orlando, came to us late the next day to tell us that there’d been some dispute over where we were going to sleep. We thought it had all been settled, but Orlando told Tom that Clara was trying to get the FARC to give us a triple-decker bunk bed to save space for everyone else. We didn’t know whether to believe him, since we hadn’t heard Clara say anything
like that to us. Orlando seemed to want to throw Clara under the bus, but for what purpose? Immediately I made a mental note to myself to watch this guy.

  Not every one of the politicals presented such a mystery to us. Consuelo González de Perdomo was one of those who seemed to share our view of how we should have been treating one another. Consuelo was a first-year congresswoman who was abducted in 2001 while on her way to the capital. She told us that she had represented Neiva, a rural district in Colombia, and she had been a schoolteacher before turning to politics. Ironically, she came from a leftist family and probably held the most anti-American views of any of our new bunkmates. Despite that, she treated us well. Consuelo was extremely religious and a devoted mother, who talked a great deal about her babies and cried every time she spoke of them. At first, I assumed that she had small children, but it was only when we got to know each other a bit better that I found out they were both in their twenties. She didn’t moan and wail and make a spectacle of herself when she cried, she was always very dignified—except when it came time to play banco russo (Russian bank) the card game she taught us and took great pride in whipping our asses at.