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

by Ingrid Betancourt

  That afternoon, under that wretched rain, curled around my unhappiness, I understood that I could be like them.

  My companions arrived, exhausted. They’d made a long detour that had obliged them to go through a mosquito-infested swamp, and they’d had to cross over a steep pass in order to reach us. They could hear crossfire not far away. There had been fire contact with the army. The guerrillas had managed to “save” them.

  We began to look for a place to set up our tents.

  “Don’t trouble yourself with that, Doctora,” said one of the soldiers. “Between Flórez and me, we’ll have those tents up for you in no time.”

  This was Miguel Arteaga, a young corporal with a pleasing smile. “We’ve perfected our own technique. Flórez cuts the stakes, and I drive them in,” he explained.

  And they were indeed very nimble at the job and made it look very easy. I couldn’t help admiring them, both for their skills and for their heart. They always offered to help me set up my tent during the following four years we were together.

  The trees opened in circles above our heads, revealing a heavenly vault full of constellations I was by now familiar with. We all sat on the ground on our plastic sheets to wait for them to bring us some food. Our conversation quickly focused on our shared anxiety. Some were whispering, not to be overheard by the guards—one of us had received information alleging that we would be handed over to another front.

  The guard arrived, lugging two huge stewpots.

  “Bring your bowls!” he shouted. “Today you’re spoiled—you’ve got mico and rice!”

  “Stop lying,” said Arteaga. “You’ll have to come up with something better. You really expect us to believe your story about monkey meat?”

  I leaned over the stewpot. It was indeed monkey meat. They might have skinned it and cut it into pieces, but you could identify it—the arms, forearms, thighs. The meat had been cooked so thoroughly, probably on charcoal, that the muscles were charred.

  I could not eat a bite. It felt like partaking in some sort of experiment in cannibalism.

  I said I wouldn’t eat any, and this gave rise to a general outcry.

  “You’re pissing us off with your Greenpeace behavior!” said Lucho, mocking me. “Before you start showing so much concern about endangered species, you’d do better to show some concern about us. We’re the ones on the verge of extinction.”

  “I don’t think it’s monkey meat,” said someone else. “It’s too scrawny. I think it must be one of us.” And he began counting heads.

  Meat was one of those rare things we dreamed about the most. Nobody wanted to know where it came from, still less to ask existential questions about whether it was appropriate to eat it or not.

  For me the situation was different. I’d been shaken by my own murderous impulses. If I was capable of acting like them, then I was in danger of becoming like them. The worst would not be to die; the worst would be to become something I abhorred. I wanted my freedom, I clung to my life, but I was determined not to become a murderer. I would not kill, even to escape. Nor would I eat monkey meat. I don’t know why the two seemed to go together in my mind, but it made sense.

  It was our first day of rest since we’d left Sombra’s prison on October 1, and the men spent the day sewing and repairing their equipos. I spent mine sleeping. Guillermo came. I was not glad to see him, although he brought me some more boxes of medicine. I’d made the inventory of my possessions. He had taken everything for himself. All he left me was my Bible.

  I found it easier to let go of the objects that were precious to me than of my grudge against him. I had hoped that he would be staying with the other group and that I’d never have to see him again. He could sense the unpleasant effect his presence had on me, and his pride was wounded. Oddly enough, he did not react with his usual scorn and insolence. On the contrary, he suddenly became friendly and charming, and he sat at the foot of my hammock to tell me his life story. For many years he had worked for the mafia, in charge of finances for a drug trafficker operating somewhere in the Colombian Llanos region. He described the luxury he’d lived in, the women and money he once had at his disposal.

  I listened, in silence. He went on to explain that he had lost an important sum of money and his boss had put a price on his head. He had joined the FARC to escape from that, becoming a nurse out of necessity, to meet the FARC’s requirements for study. He had taken some training courses and the rest he’d learned on his own, reading and doing research on the Internet.

  Nothing he told me made me feel sorry for him. For me he was a barbarian. I knew he was capable of putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger without hesitating. What irrepressible pleasure I took in bombarding him with a detailed list of all the things he’d pocketed! I saw him shrinking by the second, surprised that I was able to account for everything so quickly.

  “Keep it all,” I said, “because clearly you don’t know how to make people obey you.”

  He was irritated when he left, and for the first time in many months I didn’t care. In Sombra’s prison the group pressure had been so strong that I’d slipped into a cautiousness that sometimes turned into obsequiousness. I didn’t like to see it in other people, even less in myself. I had often been afraid of Guillermo, of his ability to detect my needs, my desires, and my weaknesses and to use his power to hurt me. When I had to confront him, my voice trembled, and I was angry with myself for my lack of self-control. Sometimes I would spend an entire day preparing how to ask him for a certain medication or for some absorbent cotton. My attitude would trigger in Guillermo reactions of impatience, abuse, and domination.

  The wheel of life had turned: I was reminded of María, a secretary who had worked with me for years. She was greatly intimidated by me, and her voice broke when she wanted to speak to me. I felt myself becoming like María, disturbed by power, paralyzed by the awareness I had of the need to please the other in order to obtain whatever, at a given moment, might seem vital. How many times had I been Guillermo? Had I also answered impatiently, annoyed by the other person’s fear? Had I believed I was truly superior because someone else needed me?

  I hardened my heart while listening to Guillermo, because I was condemning everything in him that I did not like in myself. I was beginning to understand that humility, wherever one might be on the wheel of fortune, was the key. I’d had to go to the bottom of that wheel to understand.

  The next day, Sombra came over. He seemed to want to talk, and he had time. He sat down on a tree trunk and signaled me to sit next to him.

  “I was a little boy when your mother was a beauty queen. I remember her well. She was magnificent. That was another era, when queens were truly queens.”

  “Yes, Mom was very beautiful. She still is,” I answered, more out of politeness than because I felt like talking.

  “Your mother is from the Tolima region, like me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, that’s why she has such a strong character. I listen to her every morning on the radio. She’s right, what she says to you. The government isn’t doing anything to obtain your release. In fact, for Uribe it would be better if you don’t get out.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Is she still looking after the orphans?”

  “Yes, of course she is. It’s her life.”

  “I was an orphan, too. My parents were massacred during the violencia. I was well on my way to becoming a crook. At the age of eight, I had already killed a man. Marulanda took me in, I followed him everywhere, up to now.”

  I was silent.

  “I’ve always been Marulanda’s right-hand man. For a long time, I was the one who was in charge of the FARC’s treasure. It’s hidden in a cave, in the Tolima region. There’s only one way in, and I’m the only one who knows it. You can’t see it from outside—it overlooks a ravine. You have to climb up the rocks. The FARC has accumulated mountains of gold; it’s fabulous.”

  I wondered if he’d gone mad, or whether the
story he was telling me was a yarn he’d made up for my benefit. He grew very animated, and there was an unusual gleam to his eyes.

  “There’s a castle nearby. It’s a very well-known place—I’m sure your mother has been there. The land belonged to a very rich man. He was killed, so they say. It’s all abandoned nowadays. Nobody goes there anymore.”

  He believed his story. Maybe he’d made it up a long time ago and repeated it so often that he could no longer distinguish truth from make-believe. I was also under the impression that the story derived from his childhood memories. Maybe he’d heard it as a child and made it his own story now. I was fascinated to see him lost in this mystical world that belonged to him alone. I had learned at a very young age that in Colombia anything could happen. Reality was never circumscribed by what was possible. The barriers of the imagination were impermeable, and everything could live together in the most natural way.

  Sombra’s tale, with his mountains of gold, his secret passages, the curse he maintained would fall on anyone who tried to remove any of the treasure took me back to the imaginary world of Colombian folklore. I asked him outlandish questions, and he replied, delighted that I was interested, and for a moment we both forgot that he was my jailer and I was his victim.

  I would have liked to despise Sombra. I knew he was capable of the worst things, that he could be cruel and cynical, and the prisoners loathed him.

  But in certain situations I also glimpsed, as if through the cracks in his personality, a sensitivity that touched me. I found out, for example, in the jumble of gossip that went around the prison, that La Boyaca was pregnant. When he came back from his little trip, with the letters from my mother, I congratulated him, thinking he must be happy to become a father. It was as if my words had stabbed him, and I quickly apologized, dismayed at the pain they seemed to cause him. “It’s just that ...” He hesitated. “The commanders decided it wasn’t a good time for La Boyaca to be pregnant. The army is everywhere. . . . She had to have an abortion.”

  “That’s terrible,” I replied. He nodded in silence.

  Clara’s child was born a few months later. I would often see Sombra playing with the baby, walking around the camp with him in his arms, happy to be pampering a little one.

  I had accumulated countless grievances against him, but when he was there next to me, I found it hard to hold them against him. I had to confess I had a liking for this vulgar, despotic, brigand of a man. I sensed he must feel similarly conflicted about me. I must represent everything he’d always hated, everything he’d fought against his entire life, and the guards had supplied him with every possible and imaginary piece of gossip, so he must mistrust me as much as I mistrusted him. And yet every time we spoke together again, our compass showed us a different north.

  While we were talking, one of the guards called out. Sombra looked up. Two men I’d never seen were waiting for him. He talked with them for a long while, then limped back over to me. “Your time with me is over. Let me introduce your new commanders. You must obey them from now on. You know the rules. I haven’t had any trouble with you. I hope they won’t have any either.”

  There must have been a note of joy in my voice when I held out my hand to Sombra to say, “I don’t suppose we will ever meet again.”

  He spun on me like a snake who’s been trampled on, and he hissed, “You are mistaken. I’ll be your commander again within three years.”

  The poison immediately took effect. I had never entertained the possibility of staying in the hands of the FARC for five years. When Armando had revealed to me that he’d been in captivity for five years, I looked at him as if he were a Chernobyl survivor, with a mixed feeling of horror and commiseration, plus relief at the thought that no, that wouldn’t happen to me. Sombra’s words unleashed a flood of anxiety. All through the march, he’d been dangling the glimmering lure of release. When he had spoken about the French and the negotiations they’d begun with the FARC, it was only a strategy to make me hold out, a strategy to keep me moving. In one second I saw before me the film of that endless march—the swamps inundated with clouds of mosquitoes, the roller coasters of the cansaperros, the ravines, the rivers infested with piranhas, entire days under a baking sun, the rain, hunger, and sickness. Sombra had played a clever trick on me, and he had come out the winner.

  Two men were appointed to take over and ensure my transportation. I stood before them and said, “I don’t want to be carried in the hammock. From now on I’ll walk.”

  Sombra’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He had thought of everything—except this. He looked at me angrily, particularly as I was making him lose face, but finally he decided to keep quiet. Sombra’s troops were lined up along the path. I was proud to set off on my own two feet, to leave behind those people. And with them the prison, the humiliation, the hatred, and everything that had poisoned our existence for a year. I felt it like revenge: They were the ones who were staying. I lacked the strength to carry my backpack, and even just putting one foot in front of the other made me dizzy. But I felt as if I had wings, because I was the one leaving.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  THE CHAINS

  EARLY NOVEMBER 2004

  From the first minutes of my contact with Jeiner, the young commander who had taken over from Sombra, I felt as if I’d stepped onto another planet. He walked by my side, taking my hand to help me cross a little stream and stopping the entire group so that I could catch my breath. Before the end of my second day in their company, Jeiner sent a contingent of young boys to bring back supplies. They were waiting for us on the path with fresh coajada and arepas.52 I chewed every bite religiously, savoring all the juice and texture. For so long we’d eaten nothing but little portions of rice. The delight was like a fireworks display. The effect lasted for hours; my taste buds were on fire and my guts had gone wild, rumbling indiscreetly like an unoiled gear suddenly beginning to work.

  The weather was fine, and the jungle was at its most magnificent. We entered a new world. The light pierced through the foliage, scattering beams of color as if we were walking through a rainbow. Crystalline waterfalls leaped over gleaming polished rocks and set the fish free; they took flight and landed, wriggling, at our feet. The water wound its way between the trees, leading to a bed of emerald green moss, where we sank up to our knees. We continued without hurrying, as if we were on a stroll. We even camped for a few days around a turquoise-blue pool carpeted with fine sand. It was at the base of a waterfall that zigzagged through the trees to disappear mysteriously into the forest. I would have liked to stay there forever.

  The team that Jeiner commanded was made up of children, the youngest hardly ten years of age, and they carried their rifles as if they were playing war games. The eldest girl was Katerina, a black girl scarcely out of adolescence, who had been appointed to prepare my meals according to very strict instructions from Jeiner, intended to speed my recovery. I was not allowed any salt, and everything had to be boiled in disgusting medicinal plants whose most obvious property was to ruin the taste of all the food. Katerina was scolded one evening because I hadn’t eaten the noodles she prepared, and I felt bad for her. I later understood that the second in command, a young guy called “the Donkey,” had it in for her because she’d refused his advances. Her girlfriends were particularly hard on her and asked to have her replaced immediately by somebody else. The world of children could be even harder and crueler than that of adults. I saw her crying in her corner, and I tried to smile and talk to her whenever I ran into her during the march.

  We had come to a house, in the middle of the virgin forest, where enormous fruit trees intertwined their branches with the jungle foliage. On one side of the house, there was an enormous satellite dish, as if a huge blue mushroom had grown there under the effect of ionizing radiation.

  It was there that I met Arturo, one of the commanders of the First Front of the Eastern Bloc, Jeiner’s superior. He was a black giant of a man, with an intelligent gaze and a self-confident swagger.
When he saw me, he rushed up to me and smothered me in his arms, saying, “We’ve been worried as hell about you! Are my guys treating you right?”

  He handed out precise orders, then did half the work he’d delegated by himself. His army of children gathered around him, and he would hug them as if they were his own. If these children were looking for a father, they have surely found one, I thought, imagining what must have happened in these children’s lives for them to end up as cannon fodder in the ranks of the FARC.

  “You are mistaken,” pointed out Lieutenant Bermeo. “These kids have a greater chance of surviving in war than the adults do. They are braver, more agile, and sometimes more ruthless. The FARC is all they know. There are no borders between play and reality. It’s later on that it gets complicated, when they realize that they’ve lost their freedom and they want to run away. But by then it’s too late.”

  My new companions had been observing the guerrillas for years, and nothing could fool them. When I mentioned how bad I felt about the business with Katerina, Bermeo warned me, “Don’t let your feelings show. The better they get to know you, the more they’ll manipulate you. They managed to put pressure on you, and you started walking. That’s what they wanted, for you to feel guilty about being carried in a hammock, although it’s their job. They take us hostage, and we’re supposed to thank them on top of it!”

  That was the same evening I met Arturo. He seemed delighted to speak to me. We sat down next to each other on a dead tree and spoke about who we were in civilian life. He described his childhood on the Pacific coast, on the esteros53 of the Río Timbiqui, in a jungle as thick as this one. I knew the region well. Arturo began to talk about his African origins. Centuries before, men like him had been brought as slaves to work in the mines and sugar plantations. “My ancestors ran away. They preferred the jungle to having a chain around their necks. I’m the same. I’ve chosen the jungle, not to be enslaved by poverty.”