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

by Gary Brozek

  Of course, Rogelio was also in charge of alleviating chuchorros. The first time I saw one on someone it was Keith; it looked like he’d taken a .38-caliber round in the arm. The hole was perfectly shaped like an entry wound. When Rogelio came around and Keith pointed it out to him, Rogelio knew exactly what to do. With all his might, he squeezed the swollen flesh around the hole. His eyes were tearing with the strain and he was gasping for air—and he was the one doing the cure. After a few minutes of pushing and pressing, what looked like a cross between a slug and a slug—a bullet and the insect—popped out of the open wound. Rogelio wasn’t done. He said that he had to get “the mother.” He pressed some more. Eventually a hard marble like a ball of hardened pus also came out.

  Rogelio pronounced Keith fixed. The FARC didn’t have any kind of ointments or liquids at that time, so they took the antidiarrhea medication they had and ground it into a powder, poured it into the wound, and slapped some tape over it. It seemed to us that Rogelio took particular pleasure in being the “popper,” and perhaps for this reason, when Marc and I developed chuchorros, we didn’t go to him. He didn’t like either of us very much and we imagined that if he had worked so hard on Keith, he would really put it to us.

  During our time at the Exercise Camp, we also came into contact with an ailment we’d encountered earlier in our captivity, something called a nuche. Again, we hadn’t heard the word before and assumed it was part of a Colombian dialect and not something we’d find in a Spanish dictionary. A nuche was like a worm or a larva that was left by a certain type of fly. Similar to the chuchorros, except it didn’t have a hard marblelike mother as its source. We assumed that whatever caused the swelling and wound was transmitted by a fly.

  Nuche also produced a gunshot-type wound, around which the flesh would swell a bit and harden into a shape like a mushroom cap. The first time it happened to me I assumed it was just a pimple or an ingrown hair. When it grew in size and oozed a yellowish discharge for quite a while, I knew I had to get it checked out. This was back when we were with Sombra, who identified it and told me that he had a jungle cure for it. He asked me if I wanted him to use it. I figured if they’d been dealing with the problem for a while, he should know what he was doing, so I agreed to let Sombra treat me.

  I sat in a chair and he sat next to me, lighting a cigarette as if we were gathered together for a chat. He took long lung-filling drags on it before exhaling into his cupped hand. He repeated that action until the cigarette was done and a dingy yellow smudge of nicotine was left in the palm of his hand. He rolled that around a bit until he had made a kind of paste, which he then rubbed into the wound. Taping it up, he told me to come back the next day.

  When I did, he removed the tape and looked things over. He asked if I was ready and told me that if anything started to really hurt, he would back off. Sombra lit a cigarette and brought the lit end close to the wound. He put it as close as he could without burning me. He asked another guard to squeeze the area. In a few seconds, the guard held a translucent worm about an inch long and a quarter inch in diameter in his palm. The worm had been eating my flesh until the nicotine in the cigarette had made it sick, caused it to stop chewing, and forced it to release its jaws. The squeezing part was obvious.

  When I got another nuche at the Exercise Camp, we replicated Sombra’s cure, only with a little more care and attention paid to sterilizing the area. Keith served as the extractor. At one point, I had three nuches at a single time. He got them all out, but he squeezed with such force that one of them shot out of me; never to be found. After that, Keith became the expert in nuche removal, and we joked that one day he could hang out his shingle in Colombia and make good money.

  As the months passed at the Exercise Camp, my issues with Rogelio spread beyond my health and his propagandizing. As much as I disliked Rogelio for the way he treated us, I disliked him even more because of his treatment of a girl named Vanessa, whom he was with. She was a very young woman who had no self-esteem. That was the only reason I could figure out for why she was with as despicable a character as Rogelio. What really puzzled me was that she was the only one of the FARC in camp who’d completed high school. Seeing her waste her life in the jungle with the FARC and with Rogelio really got to me.

  The FARC had control over every aspect of the guerrillas’ lives—including what passed for romantic relationships. Though we saw a lot of promiscuity and swapping of mates—you have to keep in mind that these were mostly teenagers and young adults in their early twenties—none of their official pairing off could be done without the approval of their superiors. If they wanted to be a couple, they had to get approval. The FARC weren’t interested in increasing their numbers through childbirth. The women were given contraceptive pills, and if a woman did get pregnant, she would have to abort the fetus—no questions asked. This didn’t stop the FARC guerrillas from engaging openly and frequently in sex. That, the FARC commandantes couldn’t control, but in all other ways they allowed the guerrillas little freedom with their love lives.

  Becoming closer to many of the guards at the Exercise Camp helped us to see how the FARC’s tight restrictions on its foot soldiers set off a chain reaction that impacted us. Because they had so little command of their own lives and made so few choices for themselves, we were just about the only things that they could actually control. Even though they were never able to control us completely, the need to assert themselves over us had a lot to do with their cruel and arbitrary treatment. Knowing this didn’t justify their actions, of course, but it did help explain them. It was easy, both literally and figuratively, to put myself in the boots of those low-level FARC every now and then. I didn’t have to walk a mile in their shoes because I’d already done probably hundreds of miles in the ones they grudgingly supplied me. Even though the FARC refused to give me glasses for so long, I could see them clearly for what they were.

  It was no secret that among the three of us, I was the most difficult for the FARC to deal with, and that was okay with me. If the only way I could confront their need to control me was by being standoffish, I was comfortable with it. We each had our different ways of coping with Keith’s proverbial shitheads. Sometimes the way I engaged them came back to bite me, but I got back at them, as I knew I would in the end. I wasn’t going to give in completely, and neither were Keith and Marc. I made my decision to cooperate with them on my terms, but we all went along with them in the larger sense because this would ultimately be a victory for us. We’d survive.

  It was precisely this kind of big-picture thinking that evaded the FARC. Sometimes when we were trading with the guards, they’d take advantage of us in one way or another. There was always a steep learning curve for us as far as that went, but it was always easier to learn from our mistakes than to make a big fuss. The guards knew when they were giving you the short end of the stick on deals, and their guilt motivated them to help us in other ways. When we were on marches and in real need of something, like plastic bags to keep our gear dry in a torrential downpour, one of the guards would usually come through for all of us, including me. I think they just liked the idea of being able to exert some kind of power over us that was good for once.

  If my being led astray in deals made them more likely to help us all out when it really mattered, then it was a sacrifice worth making. If my being on bad terms with most of the FARC meant that they would treat Keith or Marc better, then whatever I suffered didn’t matter. If the FARC didn’t want to give me my share of food or supplies, it was not a problem. The three of us had an unstated and never-violated policy of sharing everything as equally as possible. If my role was to be the bad guy, the old guy whom they didn’t care if he lived or died, then so be it. In the long run, the more confidence they had in Marc and Keith, the better for all three of us. By being the focus of their anger and ill will, I could sometimes distract them. I knew how far to push things so that they never brought the heavy hammer down on me or the three of us. I guess in my own way I was just another
jungle pest, hoping to get under their skin and eat away at their flesh a bit.

  What the FARC never really understood was that we seldom did anything without a reason that benefited us. Even our more visceral reactions, raw and impulsive as they were, still retained something calculated and measured. At one time or another, we all lost our control when dealing with the cruel and unfair actions of the FARC, but we never lost sight of our goal: getting our freedom back.

  If there was one thing that separated us from the FARC, besides barbed wire and wooden fences, it was that we knew how to plan long term. As much as were playing hopscotch across the Colombian countryside and were unable to figure out exactly where we were on the map, we were always able to think strategically and keep sight of our position on the game board.

  ELEVEN

  Dead

  November 2005–May 2006

  TOM

  From our cage at the Exercise Camp, it was hard for us to see whether Plan Patriota was effective, but by November of 2005, we certainly knew that it was in full force. During the fall of 2005, we had heard the FARC doing a lot of road building, and that activity must have caught the attention of the Colombian military. By November, the OV-10 and Fantasma attacks that always spooked Milton intensified and became nightly occurrences. Milton had a special fear of the Fantasma, which he called “the Pig,” but we knew better. Even though it didn’t have the deadly weapons system capabilities of the Pig, in many ways the aircraft the FARC referred to as “the Cross” actually posed a greater threat to us.

  What the FARC called the Cross was in fact a surveillance airplane manufactured by the Schweitzer Aircraft Corporation. Its long thin fuselage and thin gliderlike wings earned it its name. Schweitzer was known for manufacturing gliders and the Schweitzer SA2 we all spotted above us could easily be mistaken for one. With its long wingspan, it could stay aloft even after the pilot significantly cut power to its engine. A special muffler system further quieted the plane, making it nearly silent. Because it didn’t have the distinctive whine of the Pig, didn’t send rockets down to crater the earth, or spray bullets like the OV-10, the FARC underestimated its capability. Doing so would prove to be a deadly mistake. The FARC were afraid of missiles. We were afraid of the intelligence that the Cross produced and the rescue attempt or attack that might follow any detection of our location.

  Our concern stemmed from the fact that we knew the Cross was outfitted with some of the most advanced surveillance equipment available. Because it could fly so slowly and had a FLIR system that enabled it to effectively penetrate the jungle, the pilot and operator could pinpoint targets with great accuracy. Those targets were then given to the pilots of the Pig and the Kfir interceptors and they executed the precision bombing runs that so frightened Milton. The FARC failed to connect the dots. If it weren’t for the work of the Cross, the rocket attacks would not have been nearly as precise. President Uribe was not about to carpet-bomb the countryside. While he said that he would use blood and fire, instead he was using the microscope and the scalpel.

  As 2005 drew to a close, we fled the Exercise Camp into the mountains, but we couldn’t avoid one bit of news: Lucho and Ingrid had escaped. This led the guerrillas to tighten their security on us a bit, seizing our flashlights and increasing the number of guards on duty. We noticed one equipment change for the FARC. Many of them started carrying compasses. We could tell that we were marching north, but we made frequent stops so that Milton and his brain trust could consult their compasses. It was clear that they had no idea how to follow the heading they were given. The Plumber told us that they’d been instructed to follow a 010 heading—essentially due north. He also confirmed what we’d already figured out: Their trouble with the compasses had caused us to wander far off course during the first three days of what was to have been a five-day march. Every time we marched, no matter how far from that original 010 we’d wandered, we always resumed another 010 heading from that point. Instead of traveling in a straight line as instructed, it was like we were walking up a series of stairs. We might as well have been using an Etch A Sketch to navigate.

  To make matters worse, Milton was up to his usual tricks, telling the others that he didn’t need a compass, that he could navigate the jungle by using his head. (The only way we figured that would work was if there was still some shrapnel in his old head wound, and that shrapnel was magnetized.) Eventually, we were so lost that Milton sent out an advance scouting party of Mono and Alfonzo to find our destination.

  Two days after our five-day march was supposed to end, we arrived at an older camp where we were to stay and resupply. Despite our movement, the pattern of relentless Fantasma attacks continued at this new location much as it had at the Exercise Camp. Milton was clearly stressed and showing it. One night we evacuated the camp at the sound of the Fantasma approaching and emptied into a trench nearby that we had been using as our hideout during the nighttime attacks. The three of us hung back at the end of the line in the trench to give ourselves the best chance of running, if it came to that. The Fantasma hadn’t attacked yet. It was orbiting above a position not too far from our own.

  Milton began screaming at Rogelio and Cereal Boy, his voice rising until he was nearly shrieking. “What is that airplane doing? What is it doing?”

  Neither Rogelio nor the Plumber responded. The plane’s purpose was obvious. By circling it was able to receive more information about its possible targets and then wait for the Kfirs to come in. Milton was nearly foaming at the mouth as he barked at his number one and number two.

  “If you are ever going to be a commander, you have to make decisions. What is that airplane doing!” Still, neither of the pair could say a word. They were either too frightened or they honestly didn’t know.

  After we’d gotten more provisions and the FARC calmed down, we set out. We were told that we’d been given a week by the Front commander, Efren, to reach a rendezvous point, but it seemed that Milton had simply stopped caring about whether we got to where we were going. He’d halt the march whenever he felt like it and go hunting in the jungle, disappearing for stretches at a time while we waited for his return.

  At first, we assumed that with these breaks he was just doing his guerrillas a favor. All our exercise had paid off, making us fit and strong, but now the guerrillas were the ones struggling. Our increased strength and endurance didn’t go unnoticed. Milton made several angry remarks to his crew about their failure to keep up with us, using the boot instead of his brain to motivate his people.

  When that didn’t produce the effects he wanted, Milton took another approach. On one of his hunting stops, we all noticed a group of spider monkeys overhead. Milton took his rifle and brought one down with a single shot. It fell just off the trail. He walked over and grabbed it by its tail and hauled it toward us. We had clustered together, and Milton dragged the monkey into the center of our group.

  We could see the monkey’s chest heaving. It was lying on its back and was clearly alive. Milton walked over to one of his guerrillas and pulled his machete out its scabbard. He hefted the tool in his hand, and for a split second it was as though we could see the large knife going through a transformation as it turned from a tool into a weapon.

  Milton looked at the monkey and then at us. He raised the machete and rotated it in his hand before bringing the flat of the blade down on the monkey’s head. As he did this, he yelled the word whack! like he was in a sick comic book and was narrating the sound effects. Blood poured out of the monkey’s head and into its eye. Still, it was breathing.

  He grabbed the monkey’s right leg and began sawing at the socket of the hip. A few of us turned our back at the first blow and more did after he severed the leg. We could hear him hacking his way through flesh and sinew, the cracking of the joint. Our stomachs turned. He continued with the other leg. I turned to look, hoping the animal was out of its misery. The monkey lay on its back, eyes open, still breathing.

  The three of us stood and stared at one another. We
looked away at the ground, the trees, anywhere but at Milton. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of Milton as the surgeon performing Clara Rojas’s C-section. No wonder Emanuel’s arm had been broken. I felt bad for the monkey, but in that moment my mind was on that suffering child. Emanuel so frequently lay on his back staring up at the sky, unseeing and, we hoped, unfeeling. As horrific as the scene was before us, I was haunted by the image of Clara standing at the fence in the compound in Camp Caribe as she yelled for her baby to be brought to her.

  Milton’s butchery was far too much for any of us to bear. We knew he was an uneducated and impoverished man. He grew up in an environment that had formed his mind-set and his definition of cruelty, but we could not excuse what he was doing to that animal, what he had done to Clara’s baby, or what he had done to us all.

  Milton called for one of the girls to step forward and then one of the guys. He had the guy tie the bloody leg to the girl’s backpack. Her eyes were brimming with tears and she was shaking. He did the same with the other leg and the other guerrilla. Then he gave the order to move out. His boot and not his head was still in command. We all filed past the monkey that lay on its back, eyes open, still breathing.

  MARC

  By the time we reached our next long-term camp, I’d finished the chess set I’d begun almost a year before. We quietly passed the three-year mark in captivity on February 13, 2006, in an area adjacent to an old FARC compound that had become our new camp. Tom and I made a board from a scrap box, and suddenly a game that we’d wanted since our first months of captivity was within our reach. Just as physical activity had taken up much of our time at the Exercise Camp, at what we called Chess Camp, the ancient game of warfare and strategy dominated our time. We had epic matches with one another that lasted all day. Sometimes the guards even gathered to watch, and when they could manage it, they would sneak in a game or two with us.