by Gary Brozek
Good enough couldn’t adequately describe our reaction to the news that the FARC’s number one man, Manuel Marulanda, had died back in March. The FARC said that he’d kicked because of a heart attack and this was plausible. After all, he was seventy-eight years old, and we’d heard that he hadn’t been in good health for a while. Rumor had it that the guy who would replace Marulanda, Alfonso Cano, was highly educated, a psychiatrist, and according to the FARC guerrillas we talked to, a bit “softer.” They told us that he was the guy in charge of the FARC’s “ideas.” Cano had founded the Clandestine Colombian Communist Party, and the whole CCCP initials and the reference to the former Soviet Union’s CCCP was kind of clever. Our hope was that injecting some new blood, and shedding more FARC blood, would bring about some positive changes that might lead to our release.
MARC
Finding out that Marulanda, Reyes, and Ríos had all died within a short time of one another helped us to understand a number of things. Suddenly it was clear why the FARC had us on the run. Furthermore, we now saw why Enrique had become so much more vile in his treatment of all of us—especially of Tom.
It was easier to really feel good about someone dying, someone we considered evil, when we didn’t know him personally. In the case of the hideous guard Rogelio, we were glad he would no longer be around to plague us or any other hostages. We took a great deal more pleasure in the deaths of those three FARC leaders, because it seemed to us that the FARC, as a viable organization, was dying. We could imagine some impoverished family in the boondocks of Colombia viewing Marulanda as a hero. To us, and to the rest of the world, the guy was a murderer. Under his leadership, the FARC had kidnapped thousands, killed thousands, and ruined the lives of thousands more of their own people. As Keith often pointed out, “The guy gave up his right to be thought of as a human being a long time ago. He’s nothing but an oxygen thief at this point.”
Aside from debating the implications that these developments had for us, our time at the Fat Camp was one of the few periods when we didn’t fully engage in a lot of other activities besides eating, reading, and listening to the radio. We needed to recoup our energy. We exercised, but not with the intensity we had at the Exercise Camp. We played chess, but not with the passion we had at the Chess Camp. It seemed like we were taking our cue from the FARC, and they were in a low-activity mode. We were balancing out the flurry of activity that had taken place politically in Colombia.
We were encouraged to learn that Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico had traveled to Colombia to discuss our situation. We didn’t know if it was because he was Hispanic himself and felt comfortable with the language or if one of our family members had been able to get his attention somehow, but we were grateful nonetheless. Being able to add his name to the growing list of Americans involved in some way helped to offset the disappointment we felt when the Blackhawks stopped coming around.
The FARC also seemed to pay closer attention to Ingrid. Even Enrique, who had little regard for her previously, was acting much friendlier. Having William in her corner also helped. Ingrid benefited from the special treatment he’d long been receiving. Just by getting to watch a DVD, William and Ingrid were ahead of us. In addition to William’s presence, it was easy to figure out why the FARC were going out of their way to please her. In her November proof-of-life video, she had looked frail and weak. Compared to how she looked in May, that video showed her in great spirits and in top form. If they were going to use her in another video, they had to get her healthier.
I was concerned about Ingrid as well, but I looked at the situation from the energy perspective. The FARC had set up this rest camp to get us back in physical shape. I needed to be better mentally and spiritually as well. I decided that Ingrid’s choices and decisions, as much as I might have disagreed with them, were hers to make. I had enough to do to get my own situation squared away.
All six of our group were housed under our tent tops in a confined area. When we slept, there was barely a foot to eighteen inches between us. As a result, contact with Ingrid was unavoidable and not unwelcome, but not something I sought out. After a few weeks of the fattening-up routine, I noticed that she was paying more attention to me. I was polite to her, but suspicious, too. When she realized that I wasn’t responding to her the way I had before, she stopped being subtle and came out and told me what she wanted from me.
“Marc, I would like the letters and notes I sent to you.”
I looked at her and could see that some of the old, original Ingrid had returned. Though she said she “would like” those things back, it was clear that she meant “give me.” When we’d gotten close, she’d dropped the I’m-somebody-and-you’re-not tone. Now it wasn’t fully back in place, but enough of it was creeping in around the edges to make me uncomfortable.
“I don’t understand, Ingrid. What you sent to me is mine. You can’t have them back. You gave them to me.”
Ingrid persisted, and I asked her to please respect what we’d shared and leave it at that. For days, she wouldn’t, and I could tell that she was getting angrier and angrier. She and William segregated themselves from everyone as best they could and the mood of the camp plummeted. We were back to where we’d been before and none of us was too happy about it. Some of the old issues among the Colombian hostages started to surface, but Juancho did the right thing. He came to Keith and said, “I can feel it coming on again. Why it is that when we have a woman in the camp things get this way I don’t know. I’m staying away from her. We all should.”
I didn’t like having to do this, but I knew that for my sake and the sake of everyone else in the camp, I just had to avoid any more confrontations with Ingrid.
We were all spread out in our small area working away when Mario, the guard in direct charge of us, came up to Keith, Tom, and me and said, “Guys, you need to get all your stuff together.” He led us back to our hooch.
“Where are we going?” I asked after I’d packed everything up.
“Come with me and bring your pack.” Mario led me out into an open area.
He pointed to a spot where the FARC had spread out black plastic sheets. “Not this again,” I muttered.
“Come on. This is ridiculous. You guys just searched us.” Tom’s agitation was clear and uniformly shared. We knew the civilians were coming to speak with us and maybe the FARC needed to search us again for security reasons, but since we had been segregated from the other captives, we had not been in contact with anyone else. We couldn’t have possibly gotten our hands on anything new.
“Mario, what is going on? Why are we being searched again?” I asked.
Mario looked around and started in on some lame excuse about Enrique and following orders.
“Empty it.”
I did what he asked.
I had knelt down and started to pull everything out of my bag when I saw Ingrid approaching. She was walking with her head down and her arms folded across her chest. She looked up and caught my eye, holding my glare for a second and looking as defiant and arrogant as I’d ever seen her. That was when I knew what was up. Mario had been feeding me a line of bullshit about Enrique and orders from above. The orders for this search had come from Ingrid.
Mario took every piece of paper, every note, every notebook, and scanned the pages before handing them to Ingrid. He then asked, “Are these the documents you are looking for?”
Ingrid looked each item over, and said, “No.”
“Look, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for. I burned everything,” I told them.
Mario continued tearing through my stuff, handing every scrap of paper to Ingrid. I could tell he was getting frustrated. He started indiscriminately tossing my things on the ground.
I was furious and couldn’t believe what was going on.
Mario finally stopped and said, “There is nothing.”
“I know that he has them. He didn’t burn them. He told me he would give them back to me.”
“Mario,” I sai
d, “I don’t have them. I did burn them.”
I heard Ingrid heave a huge sigh of anger and disbelief.
“I would have given them back to her if she would have given me mine.”
Ingrid stormed off, her long hair swinging like a pendulum. In a way, I could understand why she was so angry. After I refused to return some of the letters she had written to me, she’d given back a few of my letters to her. I’d decided that if we each agreed to return every one of them, I’d be okay with it. Her response was to have the guards go through my things and subject my friends to the same harsh treatment.
After Tom and Keith were searched, they returned to the hooch. I was still stunned, and I could tell that Keith was really angry.
“In my five and a half years of captivity, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Keith began. I could tell he was just taxiing down the runway. His anger was going to take off. “I’ve been in chains for months, I’ve been starved, pushed past my physical limits, had every one of my human rights violated by the FARC, but none of that can compare to the feeling of having someone who is allegedly on my side collaborating with the enemy. And for what? Because she wanted some notes and letters back from you? You told her she couldn’t have them, and she couldn’t find a way to get them out of you. So, like a schoolgirl, she went to the teacher to rat us out.”
“I know. I know,” I said, “I think it was William. You know how he is.”
It was a violation that went beyond any we’d seen before. With a handful of exceptions, most notably when William had Richard put in chains, trusties never used their connections to the FARC against other prisoners. With this stroke, the line between us and them had been obliterated. These were terrorists we were dealing with. We’d had our lives threatened by these people, and now it seemed as if she was using them to get some notes and letters back from me. I couldn’t believe that Ingrid was treating us like she was on the FARC’s side. It wasn’t like her, but I could believe that William would instigate it.
Worse, we had expressed our feelings for each other in those letters. Asking for them back was like trying to take back those thoughts and emotions. If I’d learned anything in captivity, it was that we all escaped from reality for moments at a time. Whether it was the Freedom Ride, thinking of our houses back home, or whatever, we all had places to escape to. Ingrid and I had gone to one of those places together, but to dismiss what we innocently shared or to cast it as something we should regret or could do us harm down the line was a distortion of the truth. We’d done nothing wrong, and I hated what she seemed to be implying by asking for them back. I wasn’t one of the many kinds of “them” that Ingrid might imagine were after her or out to hurt her. I’d been helping her, at great risk to myself and the relationships I had with the other hostages. Denying this was not something I could do.
“Marc, bro, I am so sorry. That was the sickest thing I’ve seen out here. You’ve just been betrayed by someone who you reached out to in the goodness of your heart when no one else gave a fuck about her. You did the Christian thing, the charitable thing, the hardest, rightest, most stand up thing in the world, and this search is how you’ve been repaid.”
“That’s just how some people are. It’s almost like she can’t help herself. She put her image and her fear of it being damaged above our friendship. I don’t really get it.” My voice started as a whisper but picked up in intensity as I spoke. “I’m so pissed I can’t even think straight. If there’s one thing you don’t ever do it’s going to the enemy like that. Unbelievable.”
“Did she get what she was after?”
I hesitated for a moment before a smile crept across my face. I shook my head. “No. No. They couldn’t put their hands on anything. Nothing and no one is going to touch me now.”
Later that day, our chief guard came to us and said, “Pack up. We’re moving all of you.” None of us was ready for another march. We stowed all our gear and waited for the order to move out. The head guard and three others approached us. I didn’t think much of that since each of us typically had his own person watching him. Instead of marching us out of the camp, we were told, “Requisa.”
“Not this again.” Tom sighed. “We just stowed everything.”
“I wonder what it means?” I asked.
“Wonder if there was another escape?” Keith picked up his backpack and shook the contents onto a sheet of black plastic the guards provided. At least our things wouldn’t get all dirty. The thing we’d noticed about the searches was that they weren’t especially professional and thorough. Going through a line at the airport in the States was a lot more invasive and productive than what the FARC did. This one, though, was a little more thorough. With the search complete, the six of us marched fifty yards into the woods to make camp.
TOM
Ingrid’s initiation of a search on Keith, Marc, and me did one thing. It made the three of us realize that no matter what, we could at least count on one another. Maybe the shared experience of the most recent starvation march and all of us doing what we could to help one another out to get through it also contributed. We were united in a way that we hadn’t been before. I didn’t want to think about it too long or analyze it. I just wanted to enjoy the goodwill and keep whatever positive energy we had flowing.
As far as we were concerned, whatever tension was in our group of six wasn’t a result of anything we had done. We decided to just get past being singled out for another search after the one Ingrid had initiated. Also, we’d been searched many times previously and it was likely that we would be again.
“Given all that happened with the FARC, the escapes, the killings, it made sense that they were shaping up a bit,” I said.
“Too little too late for these shitheads. They’re never going to shape up. How the hell they can—”
“‘Think of themselves as soldiers. When I was in the corps…’” We all laughed at Marc being able to recite chapter and verse of one of Keith’s favorite sermons.
Marc said, “Remember the time you were using that flight-instructor stuff with Jhon and Juancho? Those guys were in the land of nod and you kept going on and on.”
It felt good to be able to laugh about some of those things. We’d been together a long time. It’s difficult to reminisce about an experience as painful as captivity, but with the two of them there, it was possible.
The weeks following our brief separation from the other three passed in much the same way as they had at Fat Camp. We listened to the radios but the news about our release had begun to stagnate. We were still eating well, and one evening Marc had been served too much rice. He wandered over to the trash hole. He came back and I could tell something was up. Keith must have also because he asked, “What is going on, bro?”
Marc sat down near us and checked to see how close the guards were. I moved my eyes but kept my head facing Marc. “There was a cardboard box. It had letters cut out of it. It spelled ‘Acuerdo Humanitario Ya.’ They weren’t just cut out, but they were like traced, stenciled. They had red spray paint on the edges.”
“Are they making signs or T-shirts or something?” Keith asked.
“Humanitarian Agreement Now.” I tossed the words around in my head. That was something we’d all been hoping for, but it seemed odd that the FARC would stencil those words on anything unless it was intended for public display. “Keith’s right. It has to be signs or T-shirts.”
“You think they would make us wear those in another proof of life?” Marc asked.
“If they’re as desperate as they seem, why not?” I figured that as a piece of propaganda, a bit of video with all the hostages wearing T-shirts or carrying signs demanding an exchange of prisoners was pretty good.
“Well, we said before, with all the food and better treatment, they wanted us to be camera-ready,” Keith said.
“We did get asked our clothes sizes again. They must be making us each a shirt.” Marc’s voice carried a note of finality.
We all agreed we should take
advantage of this next proof of life. At this point, it was best not to do anything to diminish our chances. The videos weren’t of interest to us; instead we focused on writing letters to our families. We hoped that there would be some way to get them sent out. For the next two days, we did little besides eat and write. The guards seemed to be noticing our sudden interest in literary activity, but we kept on in spite of it.
When our proof-of-life clothes arrived, there were no “Humanitarian Accord Now” T-shirts. Mario brought them to us, and we just about lost it. At first, we thought it was funny, but then we got upset thinking that Enrique was trying to make us look like we’d crossed the line to the other side. Our new clothes consisted of cheap blue jeans, the kind we’d seen poorer Colombians wearing when they came into the city in their good clothes. With the pants, we were handed campesino-style western dress shirts. All we needed was a straw hat and we would have looked like we’d stepped off the set of one of the Mexican B movies we’d watched on the DVD players.
“I’m not wearing this.” Marc shook his head and tossed the clothes to the ground.
Mario looked completely surprised. “Why not? What is wrong with them? They are in your size.” He was acting like he’d gone out and shopped for us himself.
“Because this isn’t how I’m dressed when I’m out here. I want to look just like I look now.” Marc pulled at one leg of his sweatpants and then tugged at the collar of his T-shirt. “I can’t go marching around wearing jeans and a shirt. We’re all heavy-loaded as it is. I’m not going to wear them and I’m not going to carry them.”
