Even Silence Has an End

by Ingrid Betancourt

  I explained to Sombra that we needed some brooms to sweep our lodgings and that cutting a big window on the façade of the barracks would afford those who were on the bottom bunks more light. Sombra listened to me, inspecting our accommodation, and went away assuring me that he would send one of his guys with the brooms and the chain saw.

  My comrades gathered around me. Sombra’s attitude was unusual for them.

  “He’s always said no to all our requests! You are really lucky he listens to you. Let’s see if he keeps his word.”

  Heartened by the thought that we were about to have a new window, we began to make plans: With the planks that would be removed, we could make shelves. We’d request extra planks to build a big table where we could all eat together, along with a smaller table by the entrance door to put the pots bearing our meals.

  This created a feeling of kinship. As the atmosphere became more relaxed, we’d meet in the courtyard, beneath the few trees still standing, to swap stories. Orlando was the first one captured, and he had immediately been sent to join the fifty or more officers and NCOs held by the FARC for years. Consuelo was captured next. Locked up with the soldiers and policemen, she had bleak memories of her months as the only woman in the FARC camp. Gloria had been abducted with her two sons and separated from them without warning, to be placed in a group of interchangeables. Jorge had been kidnapped in a plane three days before my capture. Gloria and Jorge were put together by the guerrillas a few weeks before being locked up with the rest of the group.

  The escape attempts and betrayals had hurt some and estranged others. Suspicion had arisen among them, and wariness was rife. Their rapport with the guerrillas was shaky. They’d been in Sombra’s hands for over a year now. They were afraid of him and despised him, but they didn’t dare even admit it for fear we might tell on them. Sombra’s troops maintained a reign of terror over the prisoners. They told us that one of the NCOs, after a fight with another prisoner, had been shot.

  My companions wanted to speak, to confide in us, but the terrible things they had experienced kept them silent. I could easily understand. As you share memories, an evolution occurs. Some facts are too painful to be told; in revealing them you relive them. And then you hope that as time goes by, the pain will disappear and you’ll share with others what you’ve experienced and unburden yourself of the weight of your silence. But often, even if you no longer suffer when you revisit the memory, you keep quiet out of a feeling of self-respect—a reluctance to expose your humiliation. Over time, you sense you must not distress others with the memory of your own misfortune. If you share certain things, they will stay alive in other people’s minds. So the most gracious and appropriate thing to do would be to let them die inside you.

  THIRTY

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE AMERICANS

  LATE OCTOBER 2003

  The broom arrived as Sombra had promised. But not the chain saw. The guards on duty in the watchtowers were inaccessible. If we had a request, we were obliged to wait for the receptionist to come. For the first time in my experience, it was no longer a girl; only the men had permission to come to the prison. And as if to make things simpler, it was the big guy with the mustache and the ranger’s hat, Rogelio, in the role. He opened the heavy metal gate first thing in the morning and put the pot with our meal down on the ground, without saying a word. Our comrades ran up to speak to him before he vanished, but he pushed them back inside, quickly closing the door and raging, “Later, later!”

  During the day he passed by the fence several times, ignoring my companions’ calls and solicitations. Rogelio laughed as he went away, pleased with how he had thumbed his nose at them. My situation had changed. Until now I’d had fairly easy access to the camp commander. The commander had been the one in charge of solving my problems. Now it was this young guerrilla. He was responsible for our contact with the outside world. He was the only one to whom we could make any requests. When my comrades tried to be pleasant to him, he responded with disdain.

  Since we’d moved into the prison, our captors had taken several more turns of the screw. We were beggars now. I couldn’t bear to hang on to the chain-link fence, mewing to attract his attention. I hated the idea of licking the boots of this character who was all fake smiles or hypocritical friendliness. But the man loved to be flattered. Very quickly he established hierarchical relationships with us. There were those he liked and to whom he responded more quickly and listened to more patiently, at times even with interest. And then there were the others, those of us with whom he felt duty-bound to be discourteous. I found myself crudely rebuffed in front of everyone every time I needed something, whereas he would hasten to satisfy a request from someone who was in his good graces. In the very first hours that followed our confinement, I watched with consternation how this network of complex relations was established. Those who had the presence of mind to unabashedly play the game of courtesy immediately acquired a higher status than the rest of us. And in an almost natural way, they gained the upper hand over us as well, because it was through them that it remained possible to obtain certain favors, favors that at a given time might suddenly become vital.

  A grave, intense division now arose among us. In the beginning it merely seemed superficial; those who had chosen to be obsequious, and in turn felt judged by the rest of us for doing so, would still help the others with their needs. Everyone had something to gain, and none of us could be sure that we wouldn’t behave the same way at one point or another out of sheer need.

  For Lucho and me, our need to protect ourselves from ourselves and to maintain the unity of the group compelled us to call on our comrades to write a letter of protest to the members of the Secretariado. It was highly unlikely that our letter would ever end up in the hands of Marulanda. But we hoped in this way to establish a direct channel to the leaders, even if it was only to Sombra. The receptionist had to go, or at least be neutralized. I wanted, moreover, to make a written declaration, a testimony of our refusal to accept the treatment to which we were subjected.

  They had no right to lock us up in a concentration camp, even in the eyes of their revolutionary doctrine. I did not want the members of the FARC to go about quietly finding ways to justify themselves and feel good about it. Plus, I dreaded that we might end up growing used to it.

  I talked about this with Lucho for a long time. He also thought that one of us would be liberated soon and that we should write a secret letter to Uribe asking him to authorize a military operation for our release. He believed I would be the one who would get out, thanks to France’s intervention.

  So we all got together for a conference inside the barracks. There was a downpour; our voices would be muffled by the sound of the rain on the metal roof. Those who were in more frequent contact with the receptionist were afraid that our letter might bring on reprisals. But sensing that they might be accused of cowardice or collaboration with the FARC, they argued about the form of the letter. The secret message to Uribe was less problematic. In principle everyone was ready to sign it, probably because they all assumed it would never reach its destination. Gloria was the only one who abstained. She did not want to authorize a military rescue operation that might endanger the lives of her children, still held hostage by the FARC. Everyone understood her position.

  We spent a whole afternoon writing the letter to the Secretariado. Lucho went back and forth between us, like a good conventioneer, to add this or remove that, so that everyone would be satisfied. The rain had stopped and I saw one of our fellow prisoners speaking through the fence with the receptionist. I thought I could detect a servile attitude, but I rejected my impression to avoid disturbing the harmony of our group. Later I saw that same person talking for a long time with Clara. In the evening when we were all getting ready to sign the letter to the commanders, Clara refused because she didn’t want any problems with Sombra. I didn’t insist. Those who were getting cold feet about continuing our protest used this escape hatch to declare that we all had to be united an
d that if we weren’t, they would also abstain. So the letter to the Secretariado was abandoned.

  The letter to Uribe was signed by half of our newly created company, secretly, so that the others who had refused to sign wouldn’t know about it. The ones who had gone through with it were running the risk that it might fall into FARC hands and that they would be punished. The group’s division seemed sealed. They entrusted me with hiding the letter, something I did for many years, keeping it even long after we had parted and scattered into different camps. No one ever found it, despite numerous searches. I had folded it, wrapped it in plastic, and sewn it inside the reinforcement at the elbow of my jacket. I reread it several times, long after we had all written and signed it, and it always gave me a twinge of sorrow. In those days we were still able to hope.

  On a morning when we remained disheartened by our lack of success and by the split that had divided us, the prison awoke in an uproar. We could hear the sound of engines. Several fast boats had just arrived. The guards were in their parade uniforms. Rogelio wore a vest covered with ammunition and a parachutist’s beret that hung over one ear and had the FARC tab embroidered on the front. He was so proud of himself! It wasn’t hard to get the information out of him: Mono Jojoy was here on an inspection tour.

  We rapidly agreed on what we would say when he came to greet us, thinking this would be the opportunity to express the indignation we’d meant to convey in our aborted letter. We set up our hammocks in the yard—because space was at a premium, we had made minute calculations and had agreed the day before on where to hang everyone’s hammock—and we waited for Mono Jojoy.

  Space was perhaps the only advantage that the military hostages had over us and we envied them for it. The day we arrived in the prison, I saw them for the first time. I was in the middle of exchanging my first words with Gloria when I turned around at the sound of a metallic clanking. There were men’s voices angrily calling behind me. For a moment I thought it was guerrillas chasing after pigs that had gone astray, because that had happened before.

  Forty or more men in rags emerged from the bushes, with long hair, stubble on their faces, and a huge chain around their necks binding them together. Flanked by armed guards, they were walking in single file, carrying heavy backpacks, laden down with enormous old pots, moldy mattresses that were half split open and rolled up against their necks, chickens attached by their feet swinging upside down from their belts, pieces of cardboard and empty oil drums wedged behind the straps of their bundles, and radios all dented and patched together hanging from their necks like an additional yoke. They looked as if they had come out of a labor camp. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Guerrillas were circling them, shouting stupid orders to keep them walking. Holding to the bars of my prison’s metal gate, breathless, my eyes popping out, I watched as this terrifying procession went by. I could make no sound. I recognized Alan. He turned around, and when he saw me, he smiled uneasily and said, “Hola, Ingrid. . . .”

  The other soldiers all turned around, one after the other. “It’s Ingrid, it’s the doctora.”

  They stopped walking. Some greeted me from a distance with a friendly wave, others raised their fists in a sign of resistance, some barraged me with questions I couldn’t answer. The boldest among them came up to the gate to offer their hands through the bars. I touched them, wishing that my hand’s contact could convey the emotion I felt and bring them some comfort. These bedraggled men of the jungle had been persecuted, tortured, and yet they had the guts to smile, to forget themselves, to act with dignity and courage. The guards shouted insults and threats to stop them from talking to me. The men were quickly locked back up in the building behind ours. We couldn’t see them, but we could hear them. As a result we had conversations with them, speaking in hushed voices, placing our lips against the cracks between the planks on either side of the narrow passage where the guards performed their rounds. Communication between the two buildings was forbidden.

  That is how we learned that Sombra had kindly granted them the space to practice some sports, a privilege we didn’t have. In the vastness of the jungle, where everything was lacking except for space, the guerrillas had chosen to confine us in a narrow, insalubrious place whose conditions led to nothing but crowding and conflict. The few hours of cohabitation we’d shared had already unveiled the tensions created by our needs as individuals to defend our own space. As it did in primitive societies, space had once again become the essential, basic property, and its fundamental value lay in assuaging our injured pride: Whoever had the most felt superior.

  Settled in our hammocks as if we were in an observation post, we could follow Mono Jojoy’s inspection tour. He kept a safe distance from the fences and circled our enclosure so that our voices couldn’t reach him, and he avoided meeting our eyes. If he’d been inspecting his cattle, he wouldn’t have acted otherwise. Then he vanished.

  An hour later a group we didn’t know emerged from the northern wing of the prison. Three men—two mature tall blonds and a third younger man, all wearing shorts and carrying lightweight backpacks, surrounded by half a dozen heavily armed guerrillas—walked alongside our fence, close by, on the wooden walkway that the guerrillas had just set up that went all the way around the outside of the prison. They were looking straight ahead, and they went on walking until they reached the soldiers’ barracks.

  “Hey, gringos! How are you? Do you speak English?”

  The soldiers were thrilled to practice their few words of English. We looked at one another, disconcerted. Of course. They must be the three Americans who had been captured a year earlier and who were also part of the group of interchangeables.

  One of our companions who had the closest rapport with Rogelio announced knowingly, “Yes, those are the Americans. They’re going to put them in here with us.”

  “Here?”

  “I don’t know, with the soldiers or with us. I think it’s going to be with us.”

  “What do you mean? There’s no room!”

  He frowned at me. Then, as if he’d found the thing that would hurt, he let out slowly, “They’re prisoners like us. And we welcomed you when you came. You have to do the same with the others.”

  I was embarrassed. Yes, of course, we had to welcome them as best we could.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE BIG ROW

  NOVEMBER 2003

  The metal gate opened, and the three Americans entered, their jaws clenched, their gazes apprehensive. We shook hands, introduced ourselves, greeted one another, and made room for them to sit down. The companion who had just lectured me took them under his wing and showed them the facilities. There were no bunks for them. Everybody began to speculate about what the guerrillas would do. We had the answer within the hour.

  Brian, who was one of the strongest guerrillas in the group, showed up with the famous chain saw on his shoulder. Two other men followed him, carrying wooden planks and rough-hewn beams. They asked us to remove all our belongings and go out. In a few minutes, one of the bunks was cut from its base and pushed over to one side up against the wire mesh beneath the opening that served as a window. In the space that remained, they managed to fit a new bunk, squeezed in between the two others, with just enough room to reach it from one side. We all watched without saying a word. The room was once again covered in a reddish sawdust that stuck to one’s nostrils.

  Brian turned to me, bathed in sweat. “Right, where is it you wanted a window?”

  I was flabbergasted. I thought that Sombra had forgotten our request.

  “I think we should have a window here,” I answered. With my finger I drew a huge imaginary rectangle on the wooden wall that looked out over our inner courtyard. Keith, the one of the three who had entered the prison first, was murmuring something behind me. He didn’t seem pleased with the idea and was complaining to himself. One of our companions tried to calm him down, but communication was difficult, because he spoke so little Spanish. He managed to convey that he wanted the wall t
o remain intact. He was afraid of being cold at night.

  “Come on, make up your minds!” Brian remonstrated.

  “A window, a window!” exclaimed the others, worried that Brian might just turn around and depart.

  The incident left a tension in the air. Keith came over to me to smooth things out. He spoke in English.

  “Do you know that when you were kidnapped, our mission was to look for you? We flew over the region for days. Who would have thought that we’d eventually find you . . . only here!”

  This was news. I was unaware that the American embassy had contributed to the search. We began to talk eagerly. I told him how Joaquín Gómez had bragged about the FARC’s having shot down their plane.

  “That’s completely wrong. They didn’t bring us down. We had engine failure. That’s all.”

  Then, as if he were confiding something, he leaned close to my ear. “In fact, they’re really lucky, because we are the only prisoners who truly count here, the three of us and you. We’re the jewels in their crown.”

  I kept silent. His comment disturbed me. Then I answered, weighing my words, “We are all prisoners here. We’re all the same.”

  That made him angry. He felt I had criticized him, and he didn’t like it. And yet the last thing I wanted was to have him think I was lecturing him. I smiled and added, “You’ll have to tell me your story in detail. I really would like to know what you’ve been through up to now.”

  Lucho was behind me. I hadn’t seen him come up. He took me by the arm, and the conversation ended there. We were beginning to build some shelves. Orlando had managed to get some nails and borrow a hammer. We had to hurry, since we had the use of it only until the end of the afternoon. We set to work.