Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle

by Ingrid Betancourt

  I tried to reassure myself by thinking that the time would come for my escape, but I would have to prepare it, down to the smallest detail, if I were to succeed. In my belongings I was dragging around a rusty machete that El Mico had mislaid near the landing stage after going fishing, a few days before we left Andres’s camp. Thinking that I was about to be released, I’d wanted to keep it as a trophy. I had wrapped it up in a towel, and so far no one had discovered it. But this new group did not look as if they’d be easy to deal with. I would have to take more precautions. Just thinking about it made my heart beat wildly.

  I came back to the boat, still anxious. Sombra was handing out soft drinks and cans that opened with a metal ring, containing tamal, a sort of full meal consisting of chicken, rice, and vegetables, typical of the Colombian department of Tolima. Everybody dug in, famished. I couldn’t even open my can. I could not bear the thought of food. I gave my ration to Clara, who opened it, delighted. Lucho was looking at me. He would have liked me to give it to him, but he was too far away.

  We continued on our journey, one boat behind the other, down a river that changed with each bend, becoming impossibly wide in some places and very narrow at others. The air was heavy, and I did not feel well.

  Among the bushes blocking the riverbanks, I saw an enormous royal blue barrel bobbing on the water, caught in the mangroves. It was one of those used to transport chemical products for the cocaine laboratories. So there must be people somewhere around here, I surmised. Farther along we came upon another, identical one that also seemed to be lost in the water, and so it went—every twenty minutes we would see a barrel drifting. I scoured the banks in the hope of seeing some houses. Nothing. Not a soul. Only royal blue barrels in this green world. Drugs are Colombia’s curse.

  We must have gone nearly a hundred miles, zigzagging along with an endless stream of water. Sombra stared straight ahead, looking at each bend with a trained eye.

  “We’ve just gone over the border,” he said knowingly to the captain.

  The captain answered with a grunt, and I got the impression that Sombra had tossed out this piece of information to mislead me.

  We went around another bend, and the boat’s engine stopped.

  Ahead of us was a FARC camp. It was built at the water’s edge. Small boats and pirogues were bobbing gently, moored to a massive mangrove. As far as you could see, the camp was submerged in a vast pond of mud. The troop’s incessant comings and goings had turned the ground into a mess. They should create a path with boards, I thought. The boats glided prow-first to the shore. Girls in camouflage uniforms, their black rubber boots filthy up to their knees, emerged from their tents one by one when they heard the sound of engines. They stood in single file, at attention. Sombra quickly got to his feet, stepped over the prow of the boat, and with his short legs jumped to the ground, splattering mud on the women who had come to salute him.

  “Say hello to the doctora!” he ordered.

  They replied in unison, “Hello, Doctora.” Fifteen pairs of eyes were trained on me. In my heart I prayed, Dear Lord, please don’t let us stay here too long! as I looked around at the sinister place, mud covering everything. On the ground were two huge, badly washed stewpots, and some pigs trotted over to them, their snouts protruding aggressively with every intention of rummaging around in there.

  In contrast to the sheer filth of the place, the girls all displayed impeccable hairstyles—thick, cleverly woven braids that hung like gleaming black bunches of grapes on their shoulders. They were also wearing brightly colored belts with geometric patterns that immediately caught my eye. The belts were made with a technique I did not know. In the depths of this hole, the FARC girls had created fashion trends. They gathered in small groups to whisper and look at us, giggling at our expense.

  Sombra shouted again, and their gossiping evaporated, as each girl went off to take care of her own business. We were made to sit down on rusty gas bottles that were rolling around in the mud and were brought some food in enormous bowls. It was fish soup. I had an entire fish floating in my bowl, its dead eyes staring at me through a film of yellow fat, its huge hairy fins hanging over the side of the bowl.

  Sombra ordered us to prepare our caletas for the night. Two girls were moved elsewhere temporarily so we could use their mats. As for Lucho, they set him up in the middle of the mud. Two gas bottles for a base and two wooden planks placed across them served as a bed, with a canopy stretched overhead in case of rain. The mud was simmering from the heat in the ground. Gases from food and fermentation broke through pockets of mud and rose to the surface. The unhealthy buzzing of millions of mosquitoes filled the space, and their vibrating drilled into my temples like the painful warning of a fit of madness. I had arrived in hell.

  TWENTY-SIX

  SOMBRA’S SERENADE

  The next morning before dawn, the camp was bustling with activity. Thirty or more well-armed men set off before daybreak in the two motorboats that had brought us here. All the women stayed at the camp, and Sombra ruled over them as if over a harem. From my mat I could observe the way he sprawled across an old, torn mattress and the guerrilleras served him like a sultan.

  I meant to go and say good morning to him, but the girl who was on guard duty stopped me. I could not leave my caleta without Sombra’s permission. I asked her if I could speak to him, and my message was relayed to him. He made a gesture with his hand that was easy to interpret—he was not to be disturbed. His answer followed the same path back to me: “Sombra was busy.”

  I smiled. From where I sat, I could see him perfectly. He was indeed very busy with a tall brunette with Chinese eyes whom he held on his lap. He knew I was looking at him.

  I could see no open space in the camp to house us. Unless they built the caletas on piles, just where the pigs lived, in the swamp to the left of the camp. This seemed unlikely. And yet that is what they did. Three girls, assigned to the job, hurried onto the slope with shovels and furiously dug into the earth to create a wide enough ledge to accommodate our caleta, like a balcony overlooking the pig pond. They packed us off to our new shelter before the morning of our first day was out. Whiffs of putrefaction came to us in waves.

  My rapport with Clara was tense once again. Clara was suspected of having taken the straps from the backpack of one of the guerrilleras. We could be subjected to a search. My companion knew I was hiding El Mico’s machete and that if they went through our things, I would have a hard time explaining where it had come from. When I mentioned this to her, she had a fit.

  Sombra came to see us. He made a show of checking our setup and inspecting our belongings. I was relieved that I had taken my precautions. Then, in an authoritarian tone, he declared, “You have to get along among prisoners. I won’t tolerate any dissension!”

  Clear enough. Someone must have told him about the tension between my companion and me, and he had come to get involved, pleased to play the role of peacemaker. “Sombra, thank you for your interest, and I’m sure you’ve already been well informed about our situation. But I feel I have to tell you that any differences between my companion and me are our business. I ask that you not interfere.”

  Sombra had stretched out on Lucho’s caleta. He was in uniform, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down, unable to restrain his huge stomach. He was looking at me with his eyes partially closed, not letting a single expression show through, weighing each of my words. The girls who were on guard duty were following the scene closely. The tall brunette with the Chinese eyes had come to listen and was leaning against a young tree a few yards away. The silence began to weigh.

  He burst out laughing and came to take me by the shoulders. “No need to get angry like that! All I want to do is help you. Nobody’s going to get involved in anything! I tell you what, just to make you feel better, I’m going to give you a serenade. It will relax you. I’ll send someone to get you!”

  He set off in a good mood, with his retinue of young women around him. I was speechless. A serenade? What was
he thinking? He was making fun of me, that much was clear.

  A few days later, when Lucho and I had already concluded that Sombra was talking nonsense, we were surprised to see a squad of girls arrive, inviting us to follow them to the commander’s caleta.

  Sombra was waiting for us, stretched out on his tattered mattress, his huge, round stomach squeezed into a khaki shirt, its buttons ready to pop. He had shaved.

  Next to him stood Milton, a guerrilla of a certain age whom I had noticed the day we arrived. He was a skinny guy, with prominent bones. His pale white skin was permanently affected by rosacea. He was sitting uncomfortably on one corner of the mattress, as if he were afraid of taking up too much room, and between his legs he held a fine, well-varnished guitar.

  Sombra gave the order to bring some empty gas bottles for us to sit on. Once we were settled, as if on pews in a church, he turned to Milton. “Okay, go ahead.”

  Milton took up his guitar nervously with his dirty hands and black thumb-nails that grew like claws. His hands were suspended in the air, his eyes rolling in every direction, waiting for Sombra’s signal, which didn’t come.

  “Well, go ahead, begin!” barked Sombra, annoyed. “Play anything! I’ll follow you!”

  Milton was petrified. I didn’t think he could get the slightest sound out of his instrument.

  “Ah! What an idiot! Come on, play the Christmas tango! Yes, that’s it. Slower. Start over.”

  Milton was trying his hardest, scratching at the chords of the guitar, his eyes riveted on Sombra’s face. He played surprisingly well, using all of his swollen, scaly fingers with amazing dexterity. We began to encourage Milton and congratulate him spontaneously, which didn’t seem to please Sombra too much.

  Exasperated, he began singing in a deep taverner’s voice. It was an infinitely sad song about an orphan who would have no Christmas presents. Sombra used the pauses between the verses to shout at poor Milton. The scene was truly comical. Lucho made a superhuman effort not to burst out laughing.

  “Stop! Enough! You’ve played enough!”

  Milton stopped abruptly, petrified once again, his hands in the air. Sombra then turned to us with a satisfied expression. All three of us hurried to meet his expectations, applauding as loudly as possible.

  “Right, that’s enough.”

  We stopped applauding.

  “Milton! Let’s sing the one the girls like. Go on, hurry up, for God’s sake!”

  And off Sombra went again in his powerful bass voice, singing false notes, ready to hit poor Milton on a whim or out of irritation. It made a hilarious show: one of them unrelentingly playing the guitar while the other sang at the top of his lungs as they both sank slowly into the mud. They looked like Laurel and Hardy.

  Behind the ogre who frightened everybody was a man I could not possibly take too seriously yet who moved me. I could not be afraid of him. I knew perfectly well that he could be abusive and remorseless. But his nastiness was his shield, not his deeper nature. In this world of war and violence, he could not afford to be taken for a fool.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE BARBED WIRE

  The activity in the camp worried me. Every morning at dawn, eighteen or twenty or so big fellows went off by boat upstream and came back just before twilight. Another group disappeared into the forest behind our caletas, above the slope. I heard them working with chain saws and hammers. On my way to the chontos, I could see permanent dwellings that were beginning to take shape through the trees, rising from the ground fifty yards or so behind the camp. I didn’t want to ask any questions; I was too afraid of the answers.

  Sombra came to see us shortly after the serenade, followed by his tall brunette, La Boyaca, and a jolly, fat girl named Martha. They were dragging huge oilcloth bags behind them, which they threw into our caletas: “This is from Mono Jojoy! Take out your checklist. If anything is missing, tell me.”

  Everything we had asked for was there. Lucho could not believe his eyes. The day when we’d drawn up our lists, when he saw that I was including items that had hitherto been forbidden, such as flashlights, forks, and knives, or plastic buckets, he’d ventured to ask for shaving cream and aftershave lotion. He was laughing like a kid when he discovered that his boldness had paid off. As for me, I was in raptures on discovering a little Bible, bound in leather and closed with a zipper. As a bonus Mono Jojoy had sent us sugary treats, which we shared among ourselves with reluctance, as well as T-shirts in gaudy colors that none of us fought over.

  I was surprised at the amount of supplies that were being delivered to the camp. I commented on this one day to Sombra, who wised me up. “The chulos can spend all they like on airplanes and radar to look for you. But as long as they have corrupt officers, we will always be stronger! Look, the zone where we are now is under military control. Everything that comes in has to be accounted for. We have to indicate who it’s destined for, the number of people per family, their names, ages, everything. But all it takes is for one of them to want to supplement his income and their entire plan falls apart.”

  And then he added, maliciously, “And it’s not just the lower-level officers who do it! It’s not just the little guys. . . .”

  His comment puzzled me. If the army was trying to find us, it was true that the existence of corruption could mean additional months or even years of captivity.

  That was the crux of Mono Jojoy’s message, in supplying us the way he did: We had to be prepared to hold out for a long time. The FARC deemed that there was no way to negotiate with Uribe. Since his election a year earlier, he had waged an aggressive campaign against the guerrillas. Every day he inflamed people’s minds with incendiary speeches against them, and his approval rating soared. Colombians felt they had been tricked by the FARC. The peace negotiations that the Pastrana government had begun were seen as proof that the Colombian state was weak and that the FARC had taken advantage of this to strengthen their position. Colombians were disgusted by the arrogance of the Secretariado, and they wanted to be finished once and for all with an insurrection they repudiated, because it attacked indiscriminately the rich and the poor and spread terror throughout the country. Uribe had a good grasp of the nation’s mood, and he would not budge. There would be no negotiating for our release.

  In the evening I went to speak with Lucho in his caleta. He put the radio on loud enough to cover our voices, and we settled in to play chess on a folding magnetic chessboard that Sombra had lent us.

  “What do you think they’re going to do with us?”

  “They’re building some huge thing back there!”

  “Maybe it’s going to be their barracks.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s too big for the three of us.”

  We were listening to The Bolero Hour, a program that broadcast music from the 1950s. I liked this program. I knew by heart all the words to the songs they broadcast, because Mom had sung all of them all day long from the moment I was born. It was also the hour of depression, bleak breakdowns, and the sorrowful stocktaking of time lost forever. Lucho and I took turns in unveiling the fathomless depths of our sadness.

  “I am afraid of dying here,” he repeated.

  “You’re not going to die here, Lucho.”

  “You know, I’m very sick.”

  “Not at all. You’re in terrific shape.”

  “Stop making fun of me, I’m not joking. I’m diabetic. It’s serious. I can go into a coma at any moment.”

  “Okay. Explain, what do you mean exactly?”

  “It’s like fainting, but it’s much more serious. You can burn your brain and become a vegetable.”

  “Stop! You’re frightening me!”

  “I want you to know, because I might need you. If ever you see me go pale or pass out, you must give me sugar immediately. If I have a seizure, you have to hold my tongue—”

  “Nobody can hold your tongue, dear Lucho!” I replied, laughing.

  “No, I’m being serious, listen to me. You have to be careful that I don’t cho
ke on my own tongue.”

  I listened intently.

  “When I regain consciousness, you have to keep me from sleeping. You have to talk to me all day and all night, until you are absolutely sure that I have my memory back. In general, after a hypoglycemic crisis, you want to sleep, but you must not, because you might never wake up again.”

  I listened carefully. He was dependent on insulin. For two years he had not had a shot of insulin. He wondered what miracle was keeping him alive. I knew. I could see it in his eyes. He was clinging to life with a fierce determination. He wasn’t alive because he feared death. He was alive because he loved life.

  He was in the middle of explaining to me that the candies we had received could save his life, when the guard called out to us. “Hey! Stop listening to music, you’re missing the news!”

  “So what?” we replied in unison.

  “So what! They’re broadcasting your proofs of life.”

  We jumped out of our chairs as if we had been given an electric shock. Lucho was hurriedly fiddling with the dial to tune in Radio Caracol. The voice of Darío Arizmendi, the station’s star journalist, came through loud and clear. He was giving a recap of our messages that had just been broadcast on television. I managed to hear only certain snippets of my speech, and I couldn’t check whether my recording had been edited. But I could hear my mother’s voice, and Melanie’s statement. Their exultation surprised me. In a way it hurt me, and I was almost angry with them for being happy about so little. There was something monstrous about the relief granted to them by my kidnappers, relief that was nothing more than a ruse to prolong our separation. I was filled with pain at the idea that we had fallen into their trap: This proof of life was not a condition for our liberation. There were no negotiations with France. It was a cruel way to inform us that our captivity was to be prolonged. They had managed to exert pressure without any intention of freeing us. We were trophies in the hands of the guerrillas.