by Gary Brozek
“Oh my God.” The words rasped out of my throat. “Ingrid!” I ran toward where she had been moved. I could see that the thick steel chains were wrapped around her neck.
My guts heaved and I thought I was going to vomit.
Across the way, Ingrid sat slumped and sobbing, the chains from her neck snaking to a nearby tree. Moster had made good on his threat. At that moment I wished that it was my hands around that disgusting animal’s neck, choking the worthless life out of him.
It broke my heart to see someone I cared about so much in such obvious pain. I felt helpless, and I knew the image of Ingrid sitting there was one that would haunt me for a long time.
Shortly after the confrontation between Lucho and Malagón, Tom, Keith, and I were lying in the dark. The sweep of flashlights first caught my eye and then I heard the clink of chains. Just from the sound, I knew that these were not the usual FARC chains. Instead of a deep tinkling sound, these had a distinctive metallic thud. I thought of the chains that people used to carry around in their cars in New England to drag one another out of ditches alongside the snow-slick roads. The threat of chains had hung over us for so long; now I thought it was going to be realized.
It turned out the chains weren’t for us. A few weeks before, while on the march, Enrique had gotten into a verbal spat with Juancho. Enrique had stormed off, threatening to bring out the big steel for the military and police prisoners. He said that it would be all Juancho’s fault. He was finally making good on his threat. I heard a guard named Asprilla, speaking to Keith.
“Tell your friends to keep behaving the way they’ve been behaving and there will be no chains. We got orders from above to keep you guys out of them unless absolutely necessary. Keep respecting us and each other and it will stay that way.”
Keith told him we had no plans to alter what we’d been doing, and he asked if it was really necessary to impose that punishment on the others. He didn’t get a reply.
One morning a few days after the new chains came out, Tom heard Amahón and Lucho talking. They were shackled together in their coleta. At first, he thought they were having some kind of joint nightmare or were hallucinating together. They kept mumbling about “los diputados” and bullet holes and wanting the bodies. Lucho was very agitated and Amahón was doing his best to calm him down, but he wasn’t in much better shape himself.
Tom came to Keith and me and told us what he’d overheard. We flipped on the radio and quickly learned what was upsetting Lucho. In 2002, twelve local politicians from Valle del Cauca had been taken hostage. They were referred to as los diputados. We’d heard their story a long time ago, but the radio confirmed an ugly new twist: eleven of the twelve deputies had been killed.
The FARC issued a communiqué stating that they had come under an attack by an unknown group and the deputies had been killed in the cross fire. We weren’t sure how the one had survived, but we knew this communiqué was just a cover story. The government responded to the FARC’s allegations by stating that it had made no rescue attempt. The FARC had been on edge for a while, and we figured they could have stumbled across any other group in the jungle and thought it was the Colombian military. In the confusion, the prisoners had been executed. The families were asking that the bodies be returned to them. It seemed unlikely that the FARC would comply. There would have been too much evidence of their murders.
We didn’t have long to dwell on the massacre. The next day we were told to pack up. We brought our equipos down to the boat launch and one of the guards began announcing names; he pointed to the left side of the boat or the right and we sat according to his directions. The three of us, Lucho, Juancho, and Miguel Arteaga were all on one side, and the others—including Ingrid—sat on the opposite side. Ingrid and I exchanged a look. This could only mean one thing: We were being separated. I walked over to her.
“The FARC are separating the groups because they don’t want the two of us together.”
She looked at me and nodded in agreement. We both got increasingly agitated; they were doing this to keep us apart. We decided we would write letters of protest to Mono JoJoy requesting to be placed in the same camp. In them, we would make clear to Mono JoJoy that we wouldn’t put up with this abusive treatment, that they couldn’t keep us apart and deny us our free will.
When we loaded onto the boats, the FARC tried to separate us by piling all our equipos in the center. Ingrid was on one side of the barrier, and I was on the other. We moved through the moonlit night, sensing that we were going to have to part ways. I laid my arm on the equipos, and I felt Ingrid’s soft hand in mine.
“We won’t let them do this to us,” she said.
“They can’t keep us from talking to one another. Can’t keep us from communicating somehow.”
We spent a good part of the night on the river before we came to a small temporary camp the FARC had prepared for us. After sleeping for a few hours, we woke up and set up our tents—the six of us—while the others sat and watched. When we were through, it was time to say good-bye.
Over the last four years I gotten used to such hasty departures, but this was particularly tough. I didn’t know when or if I would see Ingrid again. We both promised to do what we could to be reunited, but in the end we knew this wasn’t much. We hugged and reminded each other to write the letter of protest. A minute later, they loaded Ingrid’s group onto the bongo. All I could do was stand by and watch as the boat slipped out a sight, feeling very much like a part of me was also leaving.
TOM
I wasn’t happy about the other group’s departure, but I dealt with it. In the end, my vote was for peace. If we could get rid of some of the tension in the camp, I was all for it. As one FARC guard explained things, “The complicated go and the uncomplicated stay. We don’t want any more troubles.”
We relocated in a place about four hours from where we’d separated from the others. After setting up camp by midafternoon, Asprilla, the guard who had promised Keith that we wouldn’t be put in chains if we continued to conduct ourselves well, came up to us.
“Tonight you are going to be in chains.”
“You told us if we kept doing—”
Asprilla plowed right through my objection.
“This will only be for the nights. During the day, you will not have chains. I didn’t want to surprise you later.”
He didn’t look disappointed at being the bearer of bad news. After he left, the three of us huddled up.
“Well, here we are. No surprise,” Keith said.
“Let’s just hope they take these things off tomorrow morning,” Marc said.
“So, look. We’ve talked about this before,” Keith continued, “and nothing is going to break us down. No matter what these fuckers throw at us, they will not break us down. Chains suck. We suck it up. The military guys have been in them for years. We can beat this.”
“You’re right, Keith,” Marc added. “Let’s keep our routines. Tomorrow morning when you normally do your English class with Juancho, I’ll go with you. We can stretch out the chains so I can get to Miguel’s worktable. Then, after breakfast, we’ll exercise, just like always. Now is when we really need to work together.”
“Agreed. We can’t let it divide us. Whatever else is going on among us, we don’t let these chains add to it.” I looked at Keith and Marc. None of us was happy with this development, but having other people we trusted and respected in the same situation made it a bit easier to deal with.
“We’re going to do this. I’m not going to let these things start fucking with me.” I liked Keith’s attitude and I hoped that each of us was going to be able to walk the walk.
The first time I felt the cold metal around my neck, I found myself thinking of heavy tow chains. The weight of them was bad, but not as bad as I’d imagined. The real problem was not the weight but the grip. They made you feel like you were being choked. Every time I swallowed, my Adam’s apple rubbed against the steel. Keith and Marc were chained together, while I was chai
ned to Lucho. From that day on, he and I shared a hooch adjacent to where Marc and Keith slept. At least the proximity would be a good thing.
Shortly after they fastened the chains around us, Lucho and I agreed that we needed to get along no matter what. We had good reason to feel confident that we could do this. In all the time we’d been together—the six months since we had been reunited—we’d never exchanged a harsh word. Now, without Ingrid around to rile up his jealousy, I figured he was the best person outside of Marc and Keith for me to be paired with.
As predicted, the chains didn’t come off in the morning or the rest of the day. Even when we went to bathe, they stayed on us. We had a talk with Asprilla and convinced him that the cheap Chinese locks on the chains would oxidize and seize up. Unexpectedly, he saw the wisdom in not ruining the locks and we were free to bathe without the danger of the chains snagging on some underwater obstruction.
If nothing else, the restraints helped us learn to be adaptable. Privacy was always an issue, but the chains were long enough to allow us at least sixteen feet of space. The orquetas or forked sticks came in handy for draping them. On that very first morning in chains, I saw Marc and Keith walking on their separate steppers. Their chains hung down from their necks to an orqueta strategically placed between them. They did the same with the pull-up bar. Marc put a good spin on the chains by saying, “The extra weight is going to help me get even more buff than before.” He’d lost nearly fifty pounds in captivity and looked to our eyes fit and healthy, though I imagine that anyone who didn’t see the gradual transformation would have been shocked at his skeletal appearance.
During the first few weeks with the chains, we all learned little tricks to make them more bearable. Sleeping with a chain around your neck takes some getting used to or at least some minor engineering marvel. I had held on to a piece of parachute cord that Jhon Jairo Durán gave me way back on the forty-day march. I looped it around the links and around my waist, putting enough tension on the chain so that it didn’t rest on my neck.
Fortunately, along with Keith and Marc, I had another being I could rely on to get me through the savagery of the FARC. Just before we’d arrived at the Reunion Camp, we’d been joined by a small, stout dog who’d wandered into one of our temporary camps. I immediately identified with the little guy. Like us, he was plagued by nuches and insect bites. He reminded me of a stubby-legged yellow Labrador retriever with his characteristic “smile” and pleasant disposition. Beneath his patchwork of fur and exposed skin, I could see his ribs. He smelled like a hound from hell, but there was something about him that drew us together.
I gave him the name Tula—which means burlap bag—because of his color and the coarse, chewed-up nature of his fur. I didn’t want to admit that he hung close to me just because I fed him, but in time I think he really enjoyed my company as much as I did his. I spread out a bit of black plastic on the ground, and Tula slept there each night. When we got to the Reunion Camp, everybody took a liking to the animal I’d come to think of as my dog. Tula was like any dog, a real chowhound, but he was respectful, never stealing food and waiting patiently for any scrap we would toss him. Arteaga was another dog lover, and he helped me get Tula in better shape. He got rid of the nuche worms, and the FARC gave us used motor oil to clean up his mange. Within a few weeks, Tula no longer smelled so bad and had started to fatten up; he provided a pleasant diversion from the stress of camp life.
Tula was a real trooper, and he enjoyed the bongo rides, standing up in the bow of the boat stretched to his full height with his nose held proudly in the air, looking like the bowsprit on a sailing vessel. Eventually Enrique decided that Tula was better off with him, and since Enrique had easier access to food than I did, he managed to lure the dog away from me. Tula still wandered from camp to camp and person to person, but he no longer slept near me. I didn’t mind so much; it seemed that like us, Tula was doing whatever he could to get by.
Initially, focusing on Tula and keeping to our routine made things a bit more bearable, but after a few weeks, I realized that maybe the chains were having a greater effect on me than I thought. About a month into our chaining, sometime near the Fourth of July, I was sitting and reading Don Quixote. Maybe it was irony on top of irony on top of irony that got me, but LJ, a guard, and Arteaga, the trusty, were talking about the FARC and how even though they were down in numbers, they could pick off the military guys one by one and eventually take over the country. Here I was reading a book about a delusional but admirable idealist, and these two guys were running their mouths off about what great things the FARC could accomplish. The fact that one of them was a prisoner who wasn’t setting the guard straight bothered me.
“You guys are just a bunch of assassins. You go out and grab innocent people and then, at the first sign of trouble, you kill them. That’s your military action.”
LJ looked at me and asked, “What are you saying? Do you know what you’re saying?”
His macho tone was too much for me. “Hell yes I know what I’m saying. And you should just take your commie bullshit and go to the other side of the camp with it. I don’t want to hear it.”
“You need to be respectful, Tom. You really don’t want me to report what you’re saying.”
“I don’t care. Go ahead and tell Enrique.”
LJ went away and returned a few minutes later with Enrique. I was in my hammock when Enrique told me to come out of the coleta so we could talk.
“I’m not coming out. If you want me for something, you come in here.”
Each of the commandantes—whether it was Sombra or Enrique or the lower-ranked Milton—was a mini-dictator in my eyes. Enrique was the worst of the bunch. He was full of his idealistic talk about equality, and I would see him sitting in a chair looking like the lord of the manor with a young girl lounging beside him. He would keep his laptop computer with him and all his troops would gather around to catch a glimpse of el jefe’s movie selection.
By not bowing to his command, I wanted to show up the little dictator in front of his troops. He wasn’t used to anyone talking down to him, and it gave me a bit of evil pleasure to put him in his place in front of his guerrillas. He stomped off and returned a moment later with his .22 rifle. The FARC often used it for hunting. Enrique sent his officiale, Mario, inside my hooch to talk to me. I stayed in the hammock.
“Come outside,” Mario ordered.
“No. If Enrique wants something to do with me, he’s going to have to come in here himself.”
I could see that in addition to the rifle, Enrique had brought another set of chains. Keith and Marc showed up, and Enrique began talking to them. That pissed me off even more and I started shouting at him, giving him hell for every grievance I’d felt since I’d been with him. Over my shouting, I could hear what he was saying to Keith.
“You have to reason with him, Keith. You have to keep your men under control.”
Keith stopped Enrique immediately. “We don’t tell Tom or anybody else what to do.”
“If he doesn’t calm down and stop yelling at me and my guards, I’ll have to shoot him in the foot. If that doesn’t shut him up, then I’ll have him dig a hole for himself and he’ll live in that.”
I didn’t think that Enrique would shoot me, but I didn’t rule it out. I knew I’d lost control but I didn’t care. I was sick of being treated like crap and seeing other people like Arteaga get treated better. I was sick of being lied to, sick of being told that I would be in chains just at night only to have the chains stay on all the time. I had kept so much inside for so long, I exploded.
In the end, it was a pretty hollow victory. I stood up to Enrique and vented at him, but he punished me. For a few weeks, I wasn’t joined to Lucho. The guards added another chain to mine, and wherever I went I had to be secured to something—a post, a tree, or a bench. When I went to bathe I wrapped the length of chain around my neck so I looked like I had an enormous, steel turtleneck sweater on. I didn’t care. I knew that I’d be able to o
utlast Enrique. Marc and Keith gave me a few days to cool off before they talked to me. They said that if I didn’t cooperate, the FARC were going to dig a hole, put me in it, and cover it with boards.
“Tom, you don’t want to be in that hole. Rescue comes, you’re just a rat in a box. They’ll gun you down so easy. It makes no sense to keep pushing this thing,” Keith said.
“Tom, I know what you were feeling. I’m praying for you. I know you don’t need it, but you’ll get through this.”
I looked at Marc and nodded. “I appreciate it. It’s over. I’ll do my time and we’ll get on with it.”
FIFTEEN
Politics and Pawns
August 2007–May 2008
TOM
During the third week in August, shortly after my battle with Enrique, we were listening to the Voice of America and learned that Ingrid’s mother and several other family members of hostages had gone to Caracas to meet with Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez. Chávez had stated that he was willing to act as an intermediary between the FARC and the Colombian government.
“Why the hell is that leftist red-shirt-wearing bastard getting mixed up in this?” Keith said upon hearing the news. “Hey, I’m all for somebody intervening in this, but why that guy? If Uribe’s going to meet with him, it’ll be just to shit in Chávez’s beret and send him back to Caracas with it as a souvenir.”
Keith was right to be skeptical. Putting Chávez and Uribe together was like combining gasoline and a match. A socialist and conservative from two countries who were on the worst terms in decades didn’t offer much hope for a productive conversation.
“Maybe it took two years for those two to get over Colombia’s arrest of Granda,” Marc said. “Much as I hate Granda and the rest of the FARC, how do you think Chávez and Venezuela are going to act when its borders are violated and someone’s arrested. You don’t just go over someone else’s border like Colombia did without permission and snatch a guy and not expect any fallout.”
