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

by Gary Brozek

  The weeks after November’s dismal news were difficult at the camp, and Thanksgiving Day 2003 was not an easy one for any of us—particularly Keith. He knew that all of his family was gathered in Florida having an enormous cookout and he wasn’t there with them. For Marc, the first Christmas was bad. We heard Christmas songs on the radio and Keith and I could see Marc visibly deflating before our eyes. Not being with his kids menaced him. For all of us, though, the birthdays of our children were the worst. We knew each of them, and as those days approached—May 23 for Keith’s son, Kyle, and September 17 for his daughter, Lauren; November 20 for Marc’s daughter, Destiney; July 8 for Cody and February 28 for Joey; March 3 for my son, Tommy and June 21 for my stepson, Santiago—it seemed as if there was always some news we heard that gave us hope that we’d make them.

  It wasn’t until after Christmas that we got another radio message from some of our family members. We were up early as usual, listening a little after five on a Sunday morning. Consuelo had her radio on and she called us over. As soon as Marc heard his wife Shane’s voice, he burst into tears. He was sitting on Consuelo’s bed crying and then Keith got a message from his son, Kyle, and his fiancée, Malia. He started to cry. When I heard my wife’s voice for the first time on the radio, the air rushed out of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe and my vision narrowed.

  “Please, Tom, know that I miss you greatly. And, please don’t do anything that will endanger your life, we need you back home with us.”

  Mariana was quite aware that I could get a little mouthy and was sending me the message to hold my tongue and count to ten before I spoke. I had to walk away when she was through. Keith and Marc and Consuelo were all wrapped up together in their group, and I couldn’t join them. I was feeling a level of emotion that I had never before experienced in my life. I had to just go off alone; those feelings were not something I could really share with anyone at that point.

  Only someone who has endured that kind of forced separation can understand the combination of absolute elation and devastation that you feel at a moment like that. Hearing a voice you knew so well coming to you in the depths of the jungle was almost as if that person suddenly materialized in front of you—not just as a voice but as a palpable, physical presence. Those sound waves didn’t just vibrate your eardrums; they touched your whole body. The hair on our arms would stand on end and it really was as if that person was touching you. I’d seen in movies when jailed prisoners were visited by their loves and were separated by glass. I couldn’t understand why the actors put their hands on the glass. It wasn’t like those people could actually feel each other’s fingertips. When I started to receive those messages I understood just how capable an instrument our bodies are. They could tune in to signals in a way I’d never understood before.

  Those messages were few and far between, but depending on their content, they could either sustain or cripple you for days after. Keith was elated to hear from Kyle the first time, but a few days after receiving that message from home, he told us that he was troubled by something that his fiancée, Malia, had not said. She hadn’t told him that she loved him. As we did with any input we received, we turned this over again and again, analyzing each word and every possible interpretation. In the weeks after he received that message, I’d sometimes see Keith in his hammock, sitting by himself, and I knew that he was chewing on that message and what had been left out. As hard as we tried to be there for one another, there were moments when we knew to keep our distance, that we could only get so close to someone else’s grief or worry. Marc had a similar experience with his wife and things that she didn’t say. We came to realize that it was the people closest to us who could inflict the most pain but could also bring us the most joy as well.

  We all hated seeing one another down, especially if it had to do with home and the absence of messages. That just ripped into each of us and twisted our guts, whether it was happening to us personally or we were witnessing it happen to our brother. As much as Marc, Keith, and I were hurt by the more immediate slings and arrows from the other prisoners, that amounted to a whole lot of petty nonsense. It was the pain of home that the three of us felt more acutely than anything else.

  EIGHT

  Broken Bones and Broken Bonds

  January 2004–September 2004

  KEITH

  After Marc, Tom, and I had been at Caribe for a couple of months, everyone at the camp settled in to something faintly resembling a functioning family. Despite all the human drama, the three of us came to see that there were certain advantages that Camp Caribe had to offer. For one thing, we now had books and learning we could escape into.

  My excitement about the books wasn’t so much because I was looking to get lost in another world as it was because I was trying to develop what I considered to be another essential survival skill. I knew that Tom was doing a good job on a tough assignment—translating for us all—but I felt like I needed to better understand firsthand what was going on and being said. I also wanted to be able to express myself better. I knew that my loud speaking voice and physical size made it easy for someone to think I was bullying them when I was just saying hello. Gloria had a Spanish–English dictionary and she was kind enough to loan it to me. Every day I would take the dictionary and split off from the group to read it. The plot didn’t have much going for it, but I liked all the characters.

  Orlando’s English was about as good as my Spanish, and most of our initial conversations were more like grunt-and-gesture exercises. I guess we were the two cavemen there who had discovered fire but wanted to move on to the wheel and stop drawing pictures on the wall. At night, after the sun went down, Orlando and I would just sit and toss words back and forth like we were playing catch. Eventually, we started to have more or less formal lessons where we would help each other out.

  One thing that held us back a bit was that Gloria was very protective of her dictionary. If I kept it too long, I had to pay Gloria the librarian a late fee in cigarettes. Unfortunately for her, I was learning enough Spanish to understand from Orlando that Gloria’s dictionary was not really “hers.” One morning Orlando and Consuelo saw me paying my fine. When I sat down with them to start the lesson, they both said to me, “Mal hecho. Mal hecho.” I knew what that meant since badly done was one of the expressions they used to correct me. They went on to explain that I didn’t need to pay Gloria a fine. The FARC had handed the dictionary to her, but it was for the whole group. Though it was a public dictionary, she put her name in it and considered it her own—penmanship being nine-tenths of the law I guess. She tried to tell us that the FARC gave it to her and told her she was responsible for it, so she wanted to be sure nothing bad happened to it. We bickered about it for a bit, but eventually I resigned myself to paying the fine. In some ways, I felt like a chump, but that was better than having a daily confrontation. In the end, I understood that when you have so little, everything you “own” takes on huge importance.

  In addition to Gloria’s book and the lessons with Orlando and Consuelo, I got ahold of a simply worded book on the Panama Canal that had been translated into Spanish from English. It was perfect for me to develop my beginner’s Spanish. I would borrow the dictionary, grab the book, and read for forty-five minutes a day using the dictionary to help me. Every day at nine-thirty, I would study. Everything seemed fine, and no one had a problem with my little routine. Then, one morning, I went to get the dictionary and it was gone. Ingrid had it. So I spoke to Gloria and Jorge about setting up a schedule so that we could all have fair access to the dictionary. The thing that got to me, of course, was that Ingrid was perfectly fluent in Spanish and English and didn’t really need the dictionary. The FARC had built a small writing desk, and naturally Ingrid, and her shadow, Lucho, used it almost exclusively. She sat at the writing desk with the book serving as a paperweight essentially.

  Her not really needing or using it was part of a larger pattern of entitlement that she displayed at all times. Books were so valuable to us
all, and Ingrid, Lucho, and Clara in particular had a number of books stored under their beds that they refused to share. The three of us wanted to set up a system, like a library for honest adults, where all the books we had collectively could be set out and people could borrow them on the honor system. Our idea got shot down.

  “Oh, we’re not reading them now, but we want to in the future” was the response we were always met with. I got it. Even in camp there were the haves and have-nots. Marc and I used to say that we lived in the ghetto. We had the crappiest part of the hooch, while Ingrid and Lucho lived uptown in the best neighborhood.

  If I hadn’t seen the military prisoners behaving differently, I might have been able to give the politicians some slack. The military and police guys behaved so much better than the politicians did—from Colonel Mendieta, the highest-ranking guy in their camp, all the way down. They had a copy of a magazine that published a bestseller list for books. They gave the list to the FARC, asked for all the books on the list, and amazingly, they got all of them. They had a really nice collection of books, and anytime one of us sent a note over to their camp asking for a book, they sent it over. No questions. No hassles. Of course, their generosity had to be taken advantage of. The politicals borrowed more books than they could possibly read. When a note came back from the military guys asking that a particular book be returned, Ingrid and Lucho would get it and read it. “No. No. No. We can’t let that book go back. We haven’t gotten to it yet.”

  Those guys even helped us out with our lessons. They sent over a copy of How to Speak and Write English, a great little basic instructional book that I used to teach Orlando and Consuelo. It was interesting teaching the two of them. Orlando was making better progress because he didn’t care if he made a mistake; Consuelo could not allow herself to be anything but perfect. If she didn’t know an answer, she wouldn’t guess. Because of Orlando’s humble background, he didn’t have the social-class pressure of keeping up appearances to slow him down.

  I learned Spanish much faster than my counterparts did English mostly because I was immersed in Spanish all day every day. I was drowning in Spanish and it was really a case of sink or swim. At first I had the vocabulary but not the grammar. In time, I learned to conjugate verbs and get all the verb tenses straight. Consuelo was the verb mistress and an enormous help in refining me so I could make a proper debut in Colombian high society someday.

  For the most part, we managed to form some kind of livable arrangement during the first few months we were all together. On the whole, we all tolerated one another, enjoyed playing card games, and engaged in our language instruction the rest of the time. One exception to all this was Clara. Early on, we noticed that Clara, who seemed to be the most affected by captivity, started to isolate herself much of the time. We also witnessed an odd transformation of her body. Her arms and legs grew thin but her torso became larger. Pretty soon it was obvious to us all—Clara Rojas was pregnant.

  None of us said anything, but one day not long after she began to show, the three of us were sitting with several of the other politicals. Clara came up to us and seemed really nervous and excited. She had a way of twitching and fluttering her limbs as she spoke, and that day, her nervous energy was on full tilt.

  “I have something to tell you all that is very important and I hope you will listen to me carefully so you will have shared with me this important news that I have chosen now to tell you.” She barely paused before lunging headlong into the next sentence. “I am very pleased to announce to you all that I am pregnant with a child and I will be giving birth in four to five months. I ask that you respect my privacy such as it is under these conditions and not ask me any questions about this subject. Thank you in advance and please respect my wishes.” She nodded and blinked and walked away toward Ingrid and Lucho’s little setup.

  We all sat there like we’d just been at a very hastily put together press conference and someone’s representative had read a statement denying some allegations of wrongdoing but wasn’t going to answer any questions to clear up the matter. Clara had to know what we were all thinking and wondering about, and her desire to keep that matter private would have been fine under normal circumstances, but these weren’t normal circumstances, and even under normal circumstances, everyone would have wanted the question answered: Who was the father?

  Later, Marc, Tom, and I were sitting by Tom’s hammock spot when Marc said, “It’s got to be one of the politicals. Who else has she been around?”

  “The guerrillas is all I can figure.” Tom swung the pendulum in the other direction. “Clara wasn’t around the other male politicals at a point when it would make sense chronologically that one of them was the father.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me who it is just so long as folks know who it wasn’t,” I said. “Word of this is going to get out and I don’t want this pregnancy linked to me in any way. I can’t have that happen.”

  “I agree,” Marc said. “We can’t have our wives or fiancées wondering about what is going on out here. This is all tough enough without having to worry about what our wives are going to think when the news comes out. And trust me, it will come out.”

  “Well, I know it wasn’t one of us, but that won’t do us much good unless someone else steps up and vouches for us. Preferably Clara.” Tom nailed it on the head. None of us had been around her long enough to have been the one to impregnate her. We were curious out of natural human inquisitiveness but also to protect our asses. I was engaged to one woman and assuming Sombra had made a mistake, I was the father of twins with another; all the other guys in our camp were married. We were wondering what our women would think when they heard that a hostage was pregnant. Maybe I was just a little more sensitive to possible accusations and assumptions because of my personal life.

  The whole conversation made me return to Malia’s message and why she had seemed so distant. Telling me that “we all can’t wait for you to get back up here to South Georgia” made it sound as if I’d gone north for the summer like some retiree. If I had any chance with the woman I’d spent the last six years of my life with, the woman whom I’d taken this job for so I could provide us both with a big house we’d planned to build, then a “miss ya” wasn’t going to cut it.

  I figured that Malia had likely changed her mind. I’d told her when I confessed to her about my affair with Patricia and her pregnancy that she didn’t have to stand by me, that I’d understand if she bolted and wouldn’t blame her if she did. Instead she told me she loved me and that we could work things out. My being kidnapped wasn’t anything either of us could have foreseen or prevented, but if she’d changed her mind because of what happened before I was kidnapped, I could understand that. What I couldn’t understand was if she decided that because I had been kidnapped, she now had an excuse to do the easy thing.

  To make matters even more confusing for me, shortly before Clara had made her announcement, I was sitting in the hooch when I heard Lucho yelling, “Keith. Keith. Come over here. It’s Patricia. They’re going to play a message from her to you.”

  I had one of those brain-cramp moments when I thought he must be nuts, but then I saw him waving his radio. While I’d heard that one report about my “son” being okay, not knowing more left a huge hole in my universe. But at some point over the last several months, Patricia had taken it upon herself to start sending messages to me. I tore over there and skidded to a stop like a cartoon character. I held the radio to my ear. I was breathing hard, but it wasn’t because of the short run. Hearing the voice of anyone I’d known before was reason to be excited. After a few commercials and some announcements, I heard the voice that had thrilled me the first time I heard it on an Avianca flight from Bogotá to Panama.

  “Keith, this is Patricia. I want you to know that I love you. I hate it that I don’t know if you are able to hear me or not. The boys, Nicholas and Keith, are doing well, but they need you. Nick has three teeth and Keith has two—”

  I had to put the radi
o down then. Everyone was looking at me, and I was just so torn up, I didn’t know what to do. It was an enormous relief that both of the boys were alive. On top of that, to hear this woman whom I’d basically told to move on with her life. A woman whom I’d told not to count on me to be any part of the children’s lives other than financially supporting them. To hear that same woman professing her love for me was too much. It just didn’t make sense. I’d known and been with Malia for six years, but I’d dated Patricia for only six months. If my fiancée didn’t seem to be standing by me, why the hell would Patricia?

  In light of this message, it became even more important for Clara to tell people that I wasn’t the father and neither were Marc or Tom. Orlando agreed with us that Clara should tell people we weren’t the father, but the rest of the group said that it was a private matter. In some ways, I could understand their position about wanting to keep this piece of news quiet. If word got out about this kind of thing going on, then the two pairs—Ingrid and Lucho and Gloria and Jorge—were vulnerable. When we first arrived, I knew that the four of them were close, but as the months went on it was obvious that both pairs had become couples in every sense of the word.