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

by Gary Brozek

  “Regardless, I’m afraid that what she said is true.”

  I took Ingrid’s hand and said, “We’re going to get out of here.” I told her about the rainbow I’d seen shortly after we’d been taken hostage and the sense of calm I’d experienced.

  “That’s a nice story. A fairy tale of a kind. Pretty to believe but not based on this reality.”

  Our conversation was brief and I didn’t speak to her again until she asked to borrow my scalpel a few days later. I gladly lent it to her. I wanted a chance to speak with her again, to gauge up close how she was doing. Over the next few weeks, she borrowed and returned the scalpel on several occasions, and each time we got to sneak in a few words of encouragement and connection. The last time she returned the scalpel to me, I noticed that something was different about it, but I didn’t have the time to figure out exactly what. I returned it to my stash of things and jumped into a game of chess with Tom. We passed the rest of the day engrossed in one of our epic battles.

  The next morning the sound of guards running around rousted us out of our beds. We stood there bleary-eyed as Moster came dashing in, followed by Enrique. They were both completely geared up—weapons, vests, harnesses and chains, their rifles. They were all standing outside Jhon Pinchao’s hooch.

  “What the hell is going on?” Keith asked.

  “Something’s up with Pinchao.” I shrugged. “You hear anything?” I asked Tom.

  “All I can think of is that he took off.”

  “How the hell could he? He’s chained to Juancho every night.” Keith took a couple of steps closer to see if he could spot Jhon’s body in the coleta. By that time, Enrique was done checking things out. He turned to look at all of us and then spoke to his men, his voice quaking with anger. “If you find him, shoot him in the foot. He will not do this again.”

  Groups of guards charged their weapons and trotted off past us.

  “I hope to God he made it out,” I said to Keith.

  “Desperate or crazy or smarter than the rest of us.” I could hear the admiration and hope in Keith’s appraisal of the situation.

  A few moments later, Ingrid walked up to me and said, “Incredible, no?”

  “Yeah. I mean wow. How did he get out of the chains? They must have made a mistake when they locked them. When they put the lock on him, it didn’t fully catch or something.”

  Ingrid had been watching the guards running off. She turned to me and smiled, and all I could think of was the Mona Lisa. “Yes. Maybe that’s what he did.” I realized that she knew a lot more than she was telling. That scalpel wasn’t as sharp as it had been, and knowing that it had somehow aided Jhon in his escape made me feel pretty good about lending it to Ingrid. I was also glad to see the gleam back in her eye.

  FOURTEEN

  The Swamp

  April 2007–August 2007

  KEITH

  For the next few days after Pinchao’s disappearance, the camp was in an uproar. The guards were all tense and the little dirtbag Moster was beside himself. The three of us, however, were loving life. None of us knew for sure what Jhon had done or how he’d managed to sneak out of camp without his chains, but we were all rooting for him, no matter what his escape meant for us.

  In the immediate, it meant that May Day 2007, three days after Jhon left, was going to be moving day. We weren’t sure if our departure was a result of the escape or if it had been scheduled. We packed all our gear and were ordered to stand on the volleyball court. Marc, Tom, and I stood there watching as the FARC completely dismantled the camp. It was the same cover-your-tracks behavior that we’d experienced with Milton.

  “I’ve seen this before,” Tom said.

  “Yeah, Tom. I guess our cool zone is heating up, guys,” I replied. We all watched the guards drag leaves and branches over the walkway.

  “They must be afraid that Jhon got somewhere already and has relayed our position to the military,” Marc said. He was probably right on. It would have taken some kind of superhuman effort to get out of the middle of nowhere to someplace he could make contact with the military, but at that point ¿Quién sabe?

  Tom added to our song of praise, “Do you remember how he kept asking and asking for help with his swimming, and none of us saw this coming. Amazing. He slips out of camp and swims off in the middle of the night. That takes some guts.”

  While I didn’t know Jhon’s exact plan, I’d been aware that he was up to something for a while. For weeks, the guy had clearly been actively training, both physically and mentally. He had been getting swimming lessons and a cigarette lighter from Tom, while I’d been giving him navigation lessons. Jhon had asked me if we wanted to go with him. I’d considered it for a few minutes, but the odds were so stacked against us that I didn’t think it was the right move. He understood, but was determined. For three or four days before he left, he kept coming to me with more questions about navigation. The day before he left, he told me that I was to forget everything he’d been saying. That’s when I knew he was going to try to make it out.

  A gunshot interrupted our retelling of the Gospel of Jhon. It was followed in rapid succession by five more. We were all stunned, and Moster seemed most surprised. He kept yelling, “¿Qué paso? ¿Qué paso?” and “Did the man arrive?” He sprinted past us, and a few of the guards started their nervous tittering. A moment later, one of the guards, a guy with one eye clouded over, came up to us and said, “I have some bad news. We were out searching for Pinchao. We heard screams from the river and we saw Pinchao get dragged under by an anaconda.”

  The instant the word anaconda left his mouth, we knew the snake story was a feeble attempt to cover something up. We stood there in silence, stupefied. What we didn’t know was if they’d captured and then shot Jhon. That scenario didn’t seem plausible; it was unlikely that he’d have stuck around camp for the seventy hours following his escape.

  “Keith, I just want to believe that he made it, but I don’t know.” Marc picked up his equipo and let it dangle from his hand.

  “I hope he remembered some of the stuff I taught him. Land navigation is tough enough when you’re first learning it and you’re on solid ground. In this swamp shit, I don’t know.”

  Still high on Jhon’s escape, everyone—all the prisoners and the guards—set out on the river, once again in the large bongos or canoes. It was clear that Enrique was not happy with what had happened and was concerned about our location being detected. For the first few days after we left, we traveled a lot at night. The FARC wanted as much time as possible to move, so we frequently set up camp in the boats or made quick, hammocks-only camps alongside the river. With the torrential rains of the season continuing on and off for days, the river was constantly rising and nearly everything around us was covered in water. Our boats were skimming along the treetops and we were about as miserable as we could possibly be.

  Every time we came to a populated area, Enrique would find “dry” land and have us march along through stinking, boot-sucking mud. We’d skirt the town and then head back to the river, where we’d get on the boat again. I was having a hard time keeping track of where we were going, but it seemed as if we were always heading south downriver. Just how far we could go and still be in Colombia started to play on my mind.

  I’d long suspected that Venezuela provided a safe haven for the FARC. The admiration they had for Hugo Chávez wasn’t simply because they liked his policies and how he used Venezuela’s oil reserves as a tool to get what he wanted. The FARC guerrillas weren’t sophisticated enough in their understanding of the politics of the region for that. It seemed to me that there had to be a more direct link between Venezuela and the FARC.

  Direct support of a terrorist group is an easy thing to suspect and a difficult thing to prove. We’d known for a long time that our uniforms were from Venezuela and we believed that the FARC’s arms and other munitions had to come from there as well. Even before we’d seen the Venezuelan supplies, we viewed Chávez as being, if not sympathetic to the
FARC, then at least using them for his own gain. If Colombia’s military and other resources were tied up in battling the FARC, they were weaker in other areas.

  In the time I’d spent in Colombia, I’d gotten a very clear sense that Chávez wanted to be top dog, not just in Venezuela but in the whole region. Our discussions with the politicians and what we heard on the radios didn’t do anything to convince me otherwise. I hated Chávez’s depiction of the U.S. as a meddling and corrupting influence. I’d heard a lot of the same shit from the FARC, and as far as I was concerned, there weren’t that many differences between Chávez and them. As some of the politcals explained it to me, Chávez would do anything he could do to stir up shit because it took his country’s attention away from his failed domestic policies. Flex your muscles, put on a good show, let the region know that you’re not going to let anybody kick sand in your face, build national unity and pride at the price of innocent lives like ours. Fucking great guy.

  The longer we traveled on the river, the clearer it became that the FARC were taking advantage of Chávez’s apparent sympathy for their cause by traversing the porous border between Venezuela and Colombia. Eventually we started picking up Venezuelan radio stations, something we’d never done before. Those stations weren’t coming in fuzzy or distorted—they rang through loud and crisp, with the signal getting stronger each day we moved south. In my gut I knew that we had crossed the border, and one glance at Enrique’s GPS unit would have confirmed it. I took note of the fact that the guerrillas seemed as accustomed to the terrain in this border region as they were with their strongholds in central Colombia.

  Two and half weeks into our boat march, we had bedded down for the night. Suddenly Lucho’s voice split the still night air, “¡Marc! ¡Marc! Pinchao esta vivo. ¡Está en Bogotá!”

  Marc was nearest to him, and he got up to listen. His face split into a huge grin. He tilted his head back and pumped his fists. Everybody was looking at him, and he told Ingrid, setting off a chain reaction of good news: Jhon had made it. According to the radio, he’d wandered around for seventeen days before running into a group of indigenous Colombians who took him to the police jungle commandos who were in the area destroying labs and coca fields. Now Jhon was safely back in Bogotá, dehydrated and malnourished but alive.

  I climbed out of my hammock and over some of the others, ignoring the guards’ orders to stay where I was. Tom joined Marc and me, and we sat there just relishing the moment. We pounded one another on the back and whooped it up at the thought that Jhon was out of the shit and back home with family. We were sitting along the river, the breeze was fresh, and the air tasted of freedom. It didn’t matter that it was secondhand freedom, it was the closest we’d come to savoring the real thing in four years. We figured that with Jhon free, he’d be able to give the Colombian military solid ground truth about our location. The radio broadcast had mentioned something about Jhon being discovered in the Pachoa municipality near the Papurí River. Even though we’d been heading south ever since his escape, just having that little bit of information gave us even more hope.

  As joyful as we were at the news of Jhon’s success, Enrique was just as angry. The next morning, he issued an order that we all be searched. We all hated requisas. It was a pain in the ass to take all the junk we’d accumulated over the years and dump it out so that we could show the FARC just how piss-poor we all were. To make matters worse, it was raining, so we all had to put up with everything getting soaked and dirty. We protested, but it didn’t do us any good. The FARC stripped us of anything that might help us escape, including any extra food, medicine, knives, files. They patted us all down, checked the clothes we were wearing, inside our boots—the whole gestapo deal.

  We then broke camp and got into the boats. Instead of allowing us to spread out a bit, they confined us to roughly half the space. Every one of the guards seemed a lot more aggressive and they pulled the plastic sheeting down over us. That kept us out of the rain, but it also exposed us to the fumes from the fifty-five-gallon barrel of gasoline that they were carrying as well as the fumes from the engine. Our heads were swimming and our stomachs turning, but they wouldn’t let us out of that toxic plastic bubble. We were crammed in close quarters, and if you were lucky enough to be near the gunwales of the boat, you could lift the edge of the plastic up a bit to sneak some fresh air into the little enclosure.

  On top of all that, they started to end their runs at about three o’clock in the morning. They wouldn’t let us unpack anything or set up our tents. They stopped clearing any ground for us, and it was sleep in the virgin jungle for an hour or so and then head out again. At one point, we killed a couple of coral snakes. They weren’t the giant constrictors, but two-to three-foot devils with the most venomous bite in the jungle. None of us liked the idea of sleeping on the jungle floor, and the threat from snakes, tarantulas, and every other insect in the jungle made it even harder to get any shut-eye in spite of our sleep-deprived state.

  As much shit as the FARC were dishing out to us, none of us complained once about the fact that their tightening the screws on us was a result of Jhon’s escape. If there had been any yapping about that, I know that the three of us would have shut it down damned quick. How we behaved before, during, and after Jhon made it out was a source of pride to all of us. We didn’t come right out and say it to one another, but we all felt that part of us had escaped with him. I just hoped that my part of Jhon was sitting in some nice nightspot in Bogotá enjoying a relaxing bourbon while puffing on a nice Cuban belicoso cigar.

  MARC

  Jhon’s escape and Enrique’s subsequent clampdown reminded us that every high also carried a low. I had long ago learned to deal with the ups and downs of jungle life, and rather than dwell on the valleys, I tried to keep my mind focused on what was directly in front of me. Anticipating the bad times only made those times last longer. Rather than get all worked up about what was coming next, I decided it was better to enjoy the view from up top than to tense up for the inevitable drop.

  On the boat rides following our retreat from Jhon’s escape camp, we were all together in the closest quarters we’d been in. One night we were told to set our sleeping gear in the boat. Sleeping in the hammocks continued to be hard because of my back, so instead I slept on the ground. I was complaining to Tom about my sleeplessness, when Moster interrupted us.

  “You, “he said, pointing to me. “In the bow.”

  Tom frowned and said, “So what? We can’t talk to each other anymore?”

  Moster ignored him and pointed to my new spot.

  “Thanks, Tom. It’s not worth it. I’ll move.”

  I followed Moster’s outstretched arm and finger to my new spot. I was being placed next to Ingrid. Normally, she was separated from us, but since Moster had been pointing to that exact location, I figured we could talk. I was glad to have the opportunity. I wasn’t sure if Ingrid had trouble sleeping in hammocks like I did or if she was just glad for the company, but we chatted for a while, just checking up on how each of us was doing. Eventually, we started talking about Jhon.

  “I’m glad he’s gone and grateful to God that he made it,” Ingrid said.

  I detected something wistful in her tone, like there was more that she wanted to say but was afraid to.

  “But?” I asked.

  Ingrid looked at me and I watched as her pupils narrowed. I felt a twitch in my stomach; it was the same feeling I’d felt in school when a teacher asked me a question and was waiting for my response. I felt like I was being evaluated in some way.

  “I wish that I had gone with him. I wish that I was out of here.”

  I was struck by the simple honesty of her words and the way they mirrored my own feelings. We all liked Jhon and marveled at what he’d done, but there was a bittersweet quality to knowing that he was free and we weren’t. Call it envy, call it reality, but I said to Ingrid, “I wish it had been me, too.”

  “It’s hard to keep believing that my time will come.”
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br />   I decided that she’d opened the door to the subject, so I asked, “Is it hard being outside all the time?”

  She looked up into the night sky and said, “No rain.” She laughed softly. “I know what you mean, and yes, it isn’t easy being the outcast, particularly when you’ve not done much to deserve that status.”

  “Do you mean because both of you tried to escape and Lucho’s not kept from everyone else?”

  “In part, yes. But because I am the only woman here, the FARC use it to their advantage.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant. I hesitated before asking, “Do you mean they’re worried about another Clara? Another baby?”

  “Not so much that. It is difficult to explain.”

  I heard some of the enthusiasm in her voice drain. I’d tried to put myself in Ingrid’s position a couple of times, but her comments about being a woman made me realize that I could only go so far in understanding what captivity was like for her.

  “Do you miss being with the other women? Having someone to talk to who could understand.”

  “Not really. Some. I’ve been around men most of my life. Ambitious men. Powerful men who wanted to control me. The FARC are more crude, but they feel the same way, that I should be kept in my place since they think that I seem not to know where it is myself. I miss my children. I miss my mother. I share more of a bond with them.”

  Our conversation veered to talk about our families. I was surprised to learn that Ingrid had been in California for a while, that she’d given birth to her son by the immersion method.

  “That seems pretty hippy and out there.”

  “Hippy?” She laughed and the light in her eyes returned. “It is the most natural way to enter the world. From water to water.”

  She asked about Destiney and Shane, and for some reason, I opened up to her a bit. I suppose it’s natural for a man to feel more comfortable talking to a woman about those kinds of things. I told her again that it hurt to know that my wife hadn’t been making the effort to keep in contact. I didn’t feel like going into it any more deeply, and she put her hand on my forearm and said, “I understand. It’s complicated, but I think I know what you mean and how you feel.” And I was sure she did.