Hostage Nation (34 page)

Each trip into FARC territory fascinated Botero. He never ceased to be amazed by the way the guerrillas acted and defined themselves—what he saw as a throwback to a Marxist guerrilla movement in a world where Marxism no longer existed. But no trip into FARC territory had ever been as unusual as the one Botero made on January 20, 2008. As he hiked up the muddy mountainside, he could hardly comprehend how he found himself with such strange traveling companions. In front of him on the
trocha
was the enormous American public defender Robert Tucker, and behind Tucker was an American woman Tucker had brought along to act as his translator.

Robert Tucker, Simón Trinidad's public defender in four federal trials held between 2006 and 2008, and Lara Quint, assistant federal public defender, who helped translate exchanges between Trinidad and Tucker during the trials. Photo: Jorge Enrique Botero
.

“When Mr. Tucker first called me and asked if I could get him an audience with a FARC commander, I was very impressed by his interest, his capacity to take a risk and to do something that was obviously going to be dangerous. I was also sort of stunned because what he was asking seemed to be very much against the U.S. policy not to negotiate with the FARC.” Tucker asked Botero to make sure that he could meet with a commander who could make the decision to release Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes in exchange for an offer that Tucker would bring with him. “I told him that this was very difficult because it would have to be a collective decision of the Secretariat, and all of the Secretariat members would never be in the same place at one time.” It was early January 2008, and Trinidad's sentencing date of January 28 (which had been postponed from November 2007) was swiftly approaching. Botero wasn't optimistic about making the meeting happen, since the FARC usually took months to agree to anything so out of the ordinary. So he was shocked when only ten days later, he received an e-mail response to his inquiry from Raúl Reyes, who said that the FARC would be very interested in talking with Trinidad's lawyer. Reyes and all of the Secretariat members had been closely following Tucker's work through Colombian news reports and the trial chronicles of attorney Paul Wolf. “They all felt that Tucker did a great job for Trinidad, even though the guerrilla commander was convicted in the end,” says Botero. “Several commanders told me that they respected Tucker very much. They said, ‘Here is a man that is not earning money from this defense; he's a public defender. We have to applaud him because he did not leave his client hanging. He did a very professional job.'” Botero was informed that he and Tucker would be received by Iván Márquez. Tucker agreed and coordinated with Botero about making the trip. Although Botero was dying to know what offer Tucker was going to make, as a journalist, he did not want to be in the business of negotiations, and so he didn't ask.

The journey into the mountains began in the early morning, and Botero was immediately impressed by his gringo companions. “Tucker was really calm. He was never nervous. He was always looking around
with a lot of curiosity. He was joking like a person who is not thinking that he is in danger.” Tucker's translator was calm as well, but the Americans did have one concern. “They kept asking about weapons—if the guerrillas were going to be armed. I told him that yes, the guerrillas would be armed, very armed.” At dusk, Botero, Tucker, and the translator arrived at a small house belonging to a campesino family in the Serranía de Perijá and were told to wait for the arrival of the guerrilla commanders. Hours later, fifty-two-year-old Secretariat member Iván Márquez, a thickly built man with dark curly hair and a neatly trimmed beard, arrived with his entourage. All of the guerrillas were dressed in combat fatigues and were carrying semiautomatic rifles. The group consisted of Márquez; his companion, Lucia; and a senior guerrilla named Rodrigo Granda, along with half a dozen young soldiers, both men and women.

Botero had met Granda thirty years before, when the two were both university students participating in political marches. Tucker also knew who Granda was because of the guerrilla's interesting history. Granda had been captured in Caracas in January 2004 by Colombian police commandos (reportedly without the authorization of the Venezuelan government) and secretly transported to Colombia in the trunk of a car. His capture was a coup for Uribe because Granda was the FARC's acting “foreign minister.” Granda was held for over three years in a Colombian prison, and his liberation came in a most unusual way. In May 2007, with enormous pressure mounting on newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy to do something to help free Ingrid Betancourt, Sarkozy persuaded Álvaro Uribe to release Granda from prison. Sarkozy's argument was that the FARC would be thrilled to get their high-level commander out of jail and therefore would be so thankful to the Colombian government that they would respond with a similar gesture and release Betancourt. Uribe initially resisted Sarkozy's appeal, because with so many Colombians in captivity, he did not want to give the impression that Betancourt's freedom was more important to the government than the freedom of any of the other hostages. However, Uribe finally gave in to Sarkozy, and upon Granda's release, the guerrilla commander was made to swear he would not return to the FARC. Sarkozy then publicly asked the guerrillas to make a “similar gesture,”
and thousands of French people waited for the FARC to respond with the release of their beloved Betancourt. Nothing happened. The FARC completely ignored the request to reciprocate. Colombians were not surprised. Within weeks of his release, Granda was once again in the mountains with Iván Márquez, his AK-47, and his revolutionary rhetoric. “I will never demobilize or call for an end to armed struggle until our objectives are met,” he said in an interview with a French newspaper in May 2007. For Sarkozy, it was a painful embarrassment. For Uribe, it was a successfully calculated move: those in France and the international community who said he was not doing enough through diplomacy to free the hostages were temporarily silenced.

However frightening the assemblage of armed guerrillas looked, the reception they gave Tucker at the campesino house was quite warm. Márquez, Granda, and a group of guerrillas who were part of Márquez's personal guard sat down at a table near the kitchen to greet one another. “It was bizarre because I introduced them as if I were introducing business associates: ‘Mr. Tucker, this is Iván Márquez; Mr. Márquez, this is Trinidad's lawyer,'” says Botero. At the same time, the presence of the attractive
gringa
translator had dampened any climate of hostility. “All the guerrillas stared at her because she was so pretty, so nice, and always smiling. She awoke many sighs among the guerrillas,” says Botero. Márquez began the meeting by thanking Tucker for the effort and the professionalism with which he had handled the case. Then to Tucker's astonishment, Granda and Márquez cited various things that had impressed them about Tucker's defense of Trinidad during the trial. “While we were talking, the guerrillas began preparing dinner on a woodstove, and just before we were served, Tucker told the FARC commanders that he wanted to discuss an offer. He said, ‘If you release the three Americans, the prosecutor could request a shorter sentence for Simón.'” Granda and Márquez looked at each other in disbelief. Botero was speechless. He had expected something more substantial in Tucker's offer. It was the same offer that Ken Kohl had made publicly, a proposal that the guerrillas had categorically rejected. Botero knew that Márquez was expecting Tucker to offer Trinidad's and Sonia's freedom for the liberation of the three Americans. “Márquez told Tucker that his proposal would be ‘taken to the Secretariat,' but he
was also firmly discouraging,” says Botero. “They took the offer a little bit like it was a joke. They said, ‘How long of a sentence are you talking about? Forty years? So Simón only has to live to be one hundred years old, not
one hundred and twenty years old
, to get out of prison? Well, that's fine. Thanks a lot, Mr. Tucker, but this is not sufficient.' Tucker was a little taken aback, like he hoped for something more, like he hoped for more flexibility, more pragmatism. But he didn't think it had been a waste of time. He said, ‘Well, I've done as much as possible to try to help my client.'” After the frustrating exchange, the mood lightened and the meeting went the way of revolutionary music and conversation. There were Cuban cigars and rum. Before noon the following day, Tucker, the translator, and Botero headed down the mountain.

In an August 2008 interview, Ken Kohl said that he had never made a specific offer for Tucker to deliver to the FARC, but he added, “Certainly, we wouldn't be against whatever [Trinidad's] attorney wanted to do to try to get those guys out. And if they were successful, we certainly would recognize that in sentencing Trinidad.” But days before the hearing, Tucker was empty-handed; he had nothing to offer the prosecutor when Trinidad's sentencing day arrived.

On January 28, 2008, in the same courtroom where Simón Trinidad had been convicted for conspiracy to commit hostage taking, Ken Kohl asked Judge Royce Lamberth to condemn Trinidad to the maximum sentence allowed in the extradition agreement—sixty years in prison. In Kohl's argument, he compared Trinidad to Osama bin Laden and said that the guerrilla should be punished as a terrorist. Kohl pointed dramatically at Trinidad in front of a courtroom packed with reporters, saying, “Because that's what he is—a terrorist.” In Tucker's subsequent statement, he rejected the comparison to bin Laden and told the court that, contrary to what the prosecution argued, a harsh sentence would not encourage the FARC to release the three Americans. Then Tucker—freshly back from his secret meeting in the mountains—argued that the U.S. government
should
allow negotiations for the release of hostages and that it should amend its policy regarding negotiations. Judge Lamberth, unmoved by the public defender's proposal for changing U.S. policy, announced to Tucker and the packed
courtroom that he, as a judge, had nothing to do with the U.S. policy on negotiation.

Then Trinidad spoke. Reading from a long speech for over an hour, he denounced terrorism in all its forms and said it was his sincerest wish that the three Americans be returned safely to their loved ones. He said that when he joined the FARC, he knew he could lose his life and liberty fighting for justice and peace in his country. He concluded what would likely be his last public speech with the declaration of a dedicated revolutionary: “Long live Manuel Marulanda. Long live the FARC. Long live Simón Bolívar, whose sword of freedom continues to run through America.” After Trinidad's speech came the judge's sentencing decision. Attorney Paul Wolf summarized Lamberth's final comments:

Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba sat in the courtroom gallery, fuming and holding back tears. Córdoba had not stopped working to help free the remaining political hostages, including Stansell, Howes, and Gonsalves, and she knew that Trinidad's incredibly harsh sentence could severely damage prospects for getting any more hostages out. Gary Noesner and those at Northrop Grumman were disheartened because they felt like the sentence would be a major detriment to getting the Americans released, and it seemed like they had run completely out of options. The hostages' families feared it was a terrible maneuver
by the U.S. government. But none were more distressed than the hostages themselves, who immediately learned of Trinidad's sentence through radio broadcasts. Luis Eladio Pérez wrote that Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes were “tormented by the topic of Simón Trinidad and Sonia with their respective sentences [Simón Trinidad with sixty years and Sonia with sixteen and a half years]. But particularly that of Simón Trinidad, because they had heard some guerrillas declare openly that they would be sentenced to the same number of years as Simón Trinidad, but in the jungle.” Several weeks later, the FARC would make its position clear through an interview with Iván Márquez posted on the Web site of the Bolivarian Press Agency (ABP): “The Colombian government and the White House should think about not putting more obstacles in the way of a humanitarian exchange with sentences like this, which in the end amount to 60 years of prison in the jungle for the three Americans held by FARC.”