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

by Gary Brozek

  When we first met her, Keith, Tom, and I sensed that she was someone we could trust to deal fairly with us. She also had a lilting, singing quality to her voice. It didn’t matter what she was saying, it all sounded beautiful. Her religious beliefs contributed to her kind nature and fair treatment of us, but it was also just who she was. Her husband was a dairy farmer and a real hardworking, self-made guy. As a result of her upbringing and values, we all identified with her as she did with us.

  A day or two after our arrival, we got to spend more time with Jorge Eduardo Gerchen Turbay and Gloria Polanco. They were clearly very close to each other. It was Jorge’s abduction during the FARC’s hijacking of an Aires Airlines commercial jet in February 2002 that had caused then Colombian president Pastrana to cancel peace talks, end the DMZ, and intensify efforts against the FARC. Because he was a well-respected career politician, Jorge’s kidnapping resulted in a massive search for him. Keith pointed out that in comparison to the initial efforts to find Ingrid, the Colombians had pulled out all the stops in their search for the man who asked that we call him Jorge. We could understand why he was so well regarded from the moment we met him. Soft-spoken, he was extremely dignified and gracious, but though he had only a year or two on Tom, he looked much older. Life in the jungle was not something a man of his background and standing was prepared for. His thick wavy hair had turned gray and that more than likely added to the impression of his being older, but he generally seemed in poor health and walked gingerly, obviously troubled by back pain.

  Gloria, meanwhile, doted on him, cared for him, and ministered to his needs with real devotion. We all admired her for that, especially given what she had been through herself. Her husband, Jaime Lozada, had been the governor of Huila, one of Colombia’s thirty-two departments. They were living in Neiva, the department’s capital (a department is similar to a state in America), when the FARC targeted their apartment building and took multiple hostages in July of 2001. The FARC used explosives to destroy the door to their apartment, but Jaime Lozada was not at home when the raid occurred. In his place, they took Gloria and two of her sons, Jaime Felipe and Juan Sebastian, hostage. Afterward, the FARC openly asked for ransom for the two boys, who were both teenagers.

  In much the same way that Gloria cared for Jorge, it seemed to us that Lucho did for Ingrid. Under different circumstances, there would have been a lot to like and admire about Lucho. He was a career politician, starting off at the age of twenty-five as the ambassador to Paraguay. He left Colombia’s diplomatic corps and had been the governor of the Nariño department and then a senator. He was on what he called a “political push,” campaigning in the south of the country when the FARC stole his truck. With one of his bodyguards, he went to a FARC stronghold to negotiate to get the truck back. They kidnapped him and kept his truck. With his thin, angular features and a dusting of gray in his Vandyke beard, Lucho looked somewhat wolfish, and his clear, intelligent eyes added to the perception that he was always watchful and wary.

  Despite the status of these politicians, we weren’t intimidated by them. As politicians, they would have insights into our situation that might prove very helpful. We were definitely strangers in a strange land, and it was good to know that despite our rough start, they could potentially help us survive this ordeal. But with these personalities came new risks. Whereas before, we just had to worry about the dynamics among the guards, now there was a whole new set of connections of which we had to become aware. If our rocky beginning at Camp Caribe taught us anything, it was that the name of the game now was knowing whom to trust.

  KEITH

  Before my mother passed away, she taught me a lot of things about life and people. One of the expressions she used came back to me the first day we were in with the politicians: “How you start is how you finish.” My mother meant that in terms of starting a task and being prepared to follow through with it, but she also meant it in terms of relationships. You shouldn’t be quick to judge people, but in the end you often found out that how people first presented themselves to you was pretty accurate and indicative of how you’d ultimately interact with them when all was said and done.

  I’m no genius, and I claim no special skill when it comes to figuring people out, but even I could see what was up with Camp Caribe almost immediately.

  I had to give Ingrid credit for being big enough to come to me the morning of our third day there and tell me that she had once again gone to the FARC, asking for us to be taken out of their section. I was pissed and told her so, but I was mostly upset because I had already learned from one of the more reliable guards that Ingrid had sent notes to Sombra telling him that we were CIA agents and she wanted us out of there for that reason. Along with Lucho, she also sent another note claiming that we had microchips in our blood and the FARC needed to be careful as a result of our being so closely tracked.

  I couldn’t believe that fellow prisoners would put us in such danger. They were both senators and in the eyes of the FARC extremely valuable bargaining chips. More than that, they were educated. The simpletons holding us prisoner knew that Lucho and Ingrid were smart and could easily have believed them. We could have been executed because she wanted more space in the camp for herself. It was reckless and irresponsible and I was so angry I could hardly see straight. Thanks to Marc and Tom, who were both willing to listen to me rant and provide me with some perspective, I was able to contain my rage at that moment.

  Later in the day, Marc, Tom, and I agreed to meet with all of the political prisoners to discuss the new arrangements. It was clear to everybody that putting the three of us into the mix had raised tensions around camp. Nobody wanted that, so we agreed to sit down in the hooch and have an honest talk about the situation and what we might be able to do to remedy the problems. Lucho took the lead in the meeting. “It is important to sort out any difficulties immediately. We will each take our turn expressing our feelings about how everyone is behaving. We will all know how we each feel and there will be no secrets.”

  What followed was a few minutes of general griping about us, none of which was true. What how we smelled or if we wore underwear had to do with anything I couldn’t figure out. I just let them whine and get it out of their systems. I was only half listening when, unprovoked, Lucho started shouting. “¡No hay putas aquí! ¡No hay putas aquí!” I’d heard the word putas before, and I sat there confused about why he was going on about whores. Tom was trying to translate, but Lucho was so upset and yelling so loud that we couldn’t hear Tom.

  I turned to Ingrid and asked her what he was saying and she said, “He’s defending me.” I couldn’t figure out what he was defending her from, and the only answer that made any sense was that he thought the three of us had nothing on our minds but getting in the pants of these female politicians.

  I’d seen enough of Lucho walking around marking his territory to know that he was really protective of Ingrid. The man was insecure about his standing in the pack, we came in as outsiders, and he needed to defend his territory. That was, if not fine with me, then at least understandable. He perceived us as a threat. What I couldn’t understand was his apparent view that we were a trio of lowlifes who viewed the presence of women in the camp as an open invitation for sex. Worse, I was being lectured on morality by a guy who was married and whom the three of us had seen being openly affectionate toward Ingrid. I wasn’t going to put up with that, so I walked out.

  Later on, Marc and I had a chance to talk about what took place. As usual, Marc was more even-tempered than I was, and he helped to calm me down some. He said it hurt him to think that people believed such rotten things about him when he had done nothing but think of his wife and how much he missed her. We were both offended by the assumptions that had been made and the words that Lucho had said, but neither one of us could figure out what had made him shout “There are no whores here!” in the first place. Maybe it was just some of his Latin macho gone wild. Maybe it was just defensive. Either way, there was something about i
t that just didn’t add up.

  The more Marc and I talked, the more I realized that what Lucho and Ingrid were doing wasn’t just the product of their own imaginations. I remembered a conversation that we had had with Smiley prior to coming to the political camp. We hadn’t been told yet where we were going, but Smiley couldn’t help himself. He told us that he wasn’t supposed to say anything to us, but he kept on whispering, “Hey, there’s going to be viejas,” which means old ladies (as in how some people refer to their mate as their old lady or old man regardless of their age). He said that there were four of them and we could have sex with them. We had no idea what he was talking about or why he would tell us that. We also remembered that on the boat ride to the camp, Sombra had warned us about Ingrid. He’d come right out and said that we shouldn’t trust her and that she was a snake.

  As I recalled Smiley’s and Sombra’s words, some of the pieces started to fit together. We sometimes saw Sombra as stupid. I’d seen signs of that in abundance, but I also saw signs, a lot less frequently, that he could be cagey and manipulative. I figured that if Sombra, through his guard Smiley, had planted a seed in our heads that we were going someplace where there were women who’d have sex with us, the Colombians might have been fed a similar line of bullshit about us. Sombra was trying to play both ends against the middle and divide us. I’d read about some of the tactics the Nazis used in their concentration camps, and the idea of divide and conquer was as old as the Roman hills. A camp in which people fought against one another was an easier camp to control. If we were all unified, then we would have been more of a threat to them and not to one another. It was classic prison-camp psychological warfare and we were victims of it.

  Even though I’d figured some of what was going on, I wasn’t ready to dismiss all the petty behavior of camp as simply a product of FARC mind games. That would have been giving the FARC way too much credit. Sombra may have been intentionally stirring things up, but that didn’t explain all the selfish bullshit I saw around us—people fighting over water, space, and the other scant resources we had. The three of us had been living in mud for the last two months and hating every minute of it. By comparison, this place, as horrific as it was, was like staying at the Four Seasons, and yet, with all the bickering, at times I found myself missing the mud and the isolation.

  It didn’t help that Marc, Tom, and I were struggling in our friendship. We always said that being held captive together forced the three of us into an arranged marriage. In Camp Caribe, it was like our marriage had been suddenly dropped into the middle of a polygamist sect, so that while we were going through this tense period with the politicals, the three of us were also divided. In part it was the same language barrier that had always been difficult playing itself out on a larger scale now that there were more personalities. Because of Tom’s Spanish, he could interact with everyone else on a level that Marc and I could not. Tom really enjoyed being with the others, and unable to speak for ourselves, we felt left out. Since we were taken hostage, Marc and I had relied on Tom to keep us in the loop about what was going on, and we didn’t think of our need to understand as an extra burden on him. By this point in our “marriage,” it was like we’d fallen into a habit of each of us having specific household tasks. Simply put, Marc and I took Tom’s ability to translate for granted, and we probably stopped asking him to do it and stopped thanking him when he did.

  Of course, I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms at the time. Instead I was thinking about how on the boat ride to the political camp, Tom had been taking a break from doing a lot of translating. It seemed to me that he spent a lot of his time talking to Sombra and the two of them were sharing some laughs. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to socialize and be a buddy with Sombra, and I didn’t want Tom to, either. He wasn’t doing anything but being Tom—a gregarious kind of guy—but his approach to things was different from mine. The FARC was our enemy and we used the guards to gain an advantage, nothing more. Tom hadn’t crossed any lines or done anything he shouldn’t have, but episodes like the boat ride made language an easy target for my anger and frustration. I hated having to rely on him to do one of the most fundamental things that makes us human—communicate with others. It was as if I had a broken leg and had to have someone bring me my food. I was still hurting and wondering about the fate of the twins.

  My resentment only got worse the longer we were at Camp Caribe. I saw how Tom was interacting with the Colombians. He was doing nothing but being himself and enjoying their company, but as with his jokes with Sombra on the boat, it worried me. Sombra’s warning to us about Ingrid may have been a ploy, but based on what I had witnessed in my brief interactions with her, I didn’t need him to tell me that she was a snake. I’d seen what some people might call her charm and her charisma, but I’d also seen how she’d gone from pissed-off bitch to welcoming hostess in the span of just a couple of minutes. I knew she wasn’t crazy; she was smart. She was a politician. I sensed that she saw no advantage in continuing to openly confront us. When the decision came down that we were staying in that part of the camp no matter what she said or how much she whined, she had to switch gears. The woman was shrewd.

  On top of my suspicions about Ingrid, I knew that in dealing with people in captivity, whether it was the guards or the politicals, knowledge was currency, knowledge was power. Having to constantly ask what someone had just said, knowing that I couldn’t understand, and knowing that other people knew I couldn’t understand was tough. We’d walked into a situation where we were already outnumbered. I hadn’t anticipated an adversarial nature to our relationship with our fellow prisoners, but Ingrid and Lucho had made it clear from the beginning that there was us and there was them. They believed they had a home-field advantage because they’d been in the camp longer and it was their country; I wanted to change that.

  When I shared my reservations with Tom and told him to be careful, he got upset with me. He thought I was telling him what to think and how to conduct himself. Tom and I had butted heads a few times before, and I knew that he was a smart guy who sensed that wherever there are people there are going to be power struggles. As such, he tried to dismiss my concerns with his knowledge of the Colombian culture. It was true that Tom had spent a lot more time in Latin America than I had. He understood the culture and the class dynamics better than I did. He tried to explain to me that in Colombia, the upper class had a way of dealing with other people from different classes. But I just shut down to those answers. I didn’t want to hear it. I was an American, and I was going to act like an American no matter where in the world I was, and that was that. I could see Tom growing defensive, thinking that my stubbornness was unproductive, but we were both doing what we had to do to make it. We were just doing it different ways, yet we couldn’t see that in the heat of the moment.

  There was a clear pecking order, with Ingrid and Lucho on top, Gloria and Jorge next in line, and the other three—Clara, Consuelo, and Orlando, a guy I hit it off with immediately—as outsiders of that clique. To me, Orlando “Big Cat” Beltrán was a politician through and through, but a more generous one. On our first morning with them, he saw that I only had a T-shirt that was too tight and rapidly disintegrating. He pulled a pile of new and barely used clothes from underneath his bed and dug through his supply until he found a T-shirt that might fit me. He handed it to me and said, “Mejor.” I couldn’t disagree; anything was better than what I had.

  Orlando was a congressman who had also been taken hostage in 2001. He was a big guy, nearly six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and thick through the chest and arms. He earned his nickname for the graceful way he moved and his stealthy manner. I didn’t ask him how he’d accumulated all the clothes he had, but I had a pretty good idea. From our first conversations, it was clear that Orlando was a mover and a shaker—the kind of guy who loved making deals and always had his eye on what he could do next.

  In time, I figured out that Orlando was the “single guy” among the politicians. Like L
ucho and Ingrid, Jorge and Gloria spent most of their time with each other. It was clear that as much as she was a kind of nurse for him, their feelings for each other went far deeper. I understood what Tom had been saying about different values and cultural norms, but when you see someone kissing and caressing someone else, see them showering together and generally acting like a couple, you make certain assumptions about the nature of their relationship.

  We didn’t see Clara or Consuelo engaging in any of those behaviors with any of the men, and we didn’t see either of them sleeping next to or sometimes in the same “bed” as a man the way we did with Lucho and Ingrid and Gloria and Jorge. While none of us was about to stare and gape at what went on at night, we assumed what the nature of those “couples” relationships was. We were fine with that, knowing that they were all consenting adults. What we didn’t like was when those relationships turned into power plays to control some aspect of our lives. Live and let live and all that, but don’t tread on me.

  For that reason, Orlando, like Marc, Tom and me, seemed to be slightly on the outside of their circle. There was some class resentment toward him, since like Consuelo, he was not born into the upper class. He was street-smart, a definite wheeler-dealer, man-of-the-people type, but he could hang with the others in any kind of political discussion. Like us, he kept his eyes and ears open and was quick with his analysis of situations and circumstances.

  I didn’t think that Marc, Tom, and I had any kind of hierarchy among us, but when we were introduced into this new mix, I sensed that we were in real danger of getting the short end of the stick at every turn. I decided to exert myself more to bring things to a better balance. As the largest guy among us and as the one with the loudest voice and most forceful personality, I could be perceived as being the alpha male. That was a position I enjoyed. I remember once early on, Tom and I were talking and he said to me while pointing at my fist—“I never want to be on the wrong end of that.” I told him not to worry. No matter what. No matter how upset I got with him or Marc or anyone else, I wouldn’t attack them physically. I’d defend myself when attacked, but I wouldn’t go after anybody. Like me, Tom had read about prison camps in Germany and he knew some things about hierarchies. We’d all worked in companies and organizations, so we were familiar with the game playing that could go on, and we had to be on the lookout for it—especially with all these new players in the lineup.