Hostage Nation (40 page)

“I think the way the military and this General Huber guy controlled the men and their families in San Antonio is scandalous,” says Noesner. “But the guys aren't going to protest. Their families think everybody down there [Brooke Army Medical Center] walks on water, so everybody's happy. But the way they set up an interview for these guys I think was very unprofessional, at a minimum. And it was so blatantly self-serving on the part of the military to manipulate Tom, Marc, and Keith so that they would come away feeling a certain way and saying a certain thing about the U.S. government. But it was successful. The government pulled it off. They won. The families and the guys have bought it hook, line, and sinker.”

The Pentagon backed off from taking credit for Operación Jaque, with a DOD spokesperson saying only that “the two countries' militaries
have a strong relationship that includes ‘a certain amount of cooperation and information sharing.'” However, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, painted a somewhat different picture in an exclusive interview he gave to
The Washington Post
. “This mission was a Colombian concept, a Colombian plan, a Colombian training operation, then a Colombian operation. We, however, had been working with them more than five years on every single element that came to pass that pulled off this operation, as well as the small bits that we did on this operation,” Brownfield said. The
Post
article also reported that “a special 100-person unit made up of Special Forces planners, hostage negotiators and intelligence analysts worked to keep track of the hostages. They also awaited the moment when they would spring into action to help Colombian forces carry out a rescue.”

Journalists who called the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá to follow up on the role played by the United States were told that Brownfield would not be doing any more interviews. Noesner believes Brownfield's assessment is highly inaccurate. “If you take away the purely military components that were focused on a rescue, it was probably never more than a handful of people who ever worked this case at any time.” And according to Noesner, there was never an FBI negotiator deployed to Colombia to work on the case except for very brief periods.

After the men had undergone a comprehensive medical check, which found them to be in generally good health, and after they had been in the reintegration program for a full week, Huber reportedly ignored the base psychologist, who said the men were ready to return home, and kept them on the base an additional three days. On the day they were to leave, the men were put before the press at another event at the military base. Standing in front of their waiting plane on the tarmac, the three made brief statements about how much they were looking forward to going home but took no questions.

On July 12, 2008, ten days after their rescue, Stansell, Gonsalves, and Howes left the sheltered confines of the military base to begin the process of living as free men. Five and a half years of absence had taken a toll on the personal lives of Gonsalves and Howes. Gonsalves returned to a wife he loved, who had dug him into a world of debt and had no desire to have him home. While he dealt with the real challenges
of rebuilding his financial life, Gonsalves worked to reestablish a relationship with his stepsons and his teenage daughter, whom he'd not seen since she was ten. Howes and his wife, Mariana, separated shortly after his release. Only Keith Stansell came back to a complete family, although not the same one that he'd left behind when he was kidnapped. Stansell and Patricia Medina found a house in Florida to share with their twin boys and Stansell's two older children. And on Medina's birthday at the end of July, Stansell's twenty-year-old daughter, Lauren, baked Medina a birthday cake. Medina says, “They gave me a framed photo of our family: Keith, Kyle, Lauren, Nicholas, Keith Jr. [the twins], and me. It was the most meaningful gift for me, and it tells me that we will be together forever.” On November 22, 2009, Medina and Stansell were married in Bradenton Beach, Florida.

Several weeks after their release, Northrop Grumman invited Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves to a dinner in their honor in Maryland. The meeting was a chance for Northrop Grumman executives, as well as others who had worked on the men's case from the private sector, to meet the former hostages. Gary Noesner attended the meeting and was surprised by the men's reaction when the topic turned to Botero. “Jorge's name came up,” says Noesner, “and Marc made some very disparaging comments about him. He said, ‘Yeah, he was working for the FARC the whole time.' That's when I pulled Marc aside and said, ‘No. There's more than meets the eye here, Marc. There's a lot more than you may realize. Botero was actually very helpful to us.” Noesner gave Gonsalves his contact information and offered to fill him in on what had happened with regard to their case during the five and a half years of their captivity. Gonsalves never contacted Noesner. On February 28, 2009, Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves released the memoir of their ordeal,
Out of Captivity
. In the book, they harshly indicted Botero for his interview of them, calling it a “propaganda scheme.” “The fact that they came out of captivity with hatred toward me is very logical and normal after everything they lived through with the guerrillas,” says Botero, who admits to feeling hurt and upset by the charges, even though he understands their animosity. “The only contact that they had with the outside world was with me. So they want to associate me with the FARC.”

Two weeks after the book's release and during their press tour, each of the former hostages received the DOD's Defense of Freedom Medal (the civilian equivalent of the Purple Heart) at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Florida. At the ceremony, the military once again reiterated all they had done for the men. Again, the men tearfully acknowledged the support of the U.S. government. “You were sending us reminders that you were looking for us,” said Gonsalves, describing how he would hear the “buzz” of aircraft engines. “We would look up and try to see it, but we could never see it because it was up so high, and there were just so many trees. But we knew what it was, and that gave us strength to carry on. Thank you for never giving up on us. Thank you for doing everything that you did to bring us home.” Howes seconded Gonsalves's sentiments: “You folks are basically my family,” he said. “You spent an incredible amount of time trying to get us out and you never forgot us.”

For Juan Carlos Lecompte, Ingrid Betancourt's return to freedom was nearly as difficult to comprehend as her captivity had been. After six and a half years, during which the majority of Lecompte's time, energy, and money had been put into searching for a way to win his wife's freedom, Betancourt left him less than twenty-four hours after she was rescued from captivity. Lecompte says that after the two spent her first night of freedom getting reacquainted and discussing all of the things he had done to help free her, “she told me that she wanted to be with her kids because she felt a certain guilt that she didn't see them grow up,” Lecompte said. The following day, Betancourt left with the rest of her family for France, where thousands of French supporters and members of the media awaited her. After several days had passed with no word, and it was apparent that Betancourt was not planning on coming back to him, Lecompte, in what he said would be his final interview, told
Semana
magazine, “It's a complicated situation that I'm in. I don't want to have to believe that everything with Ingrid is finished.… Her love for me could have ended in the jungle. And what can I do? While she organizes herself, is brought up to date, you have to give things time. I've already waited six and a half years.… She knows where I am the day she wants to return. With Ingrid or without Ingrid
I am going to continue in the most natural way I can. And you know what I'd like? For this to be my last interview. I want to remove myself from the grip of the media.” In early 2009, it was clear there would be no reconciliation: Betancourt filed for divorce, based on six and a half years of de facto separation.

In October 2008, Simón Trinidad was transferred from the D.C. Jail to a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, to serve his sixty-year sentence. Although exasperated at the idea of a fifth trial, defense attorney Robert Tucker moved to appeal Trinidad's conviction. (In October 2009, the D.C. court of appeals committee agreed that there had been prejudicial evidence used in the trial by the prosecution. However, the committee deemed that it had been harmless to the defendant, and the appeal was denied.) While Trinidad remained in solitary confinement, with almost no contact with the outside world, and Sonia (who said she had no desire to ever return to Colombia or to the FARC) began her sixteen-and-a-half-year sentence in a women's prison in Texas, the movement that they had dedicated their lives to had become a shadow of its former self. After the deaths of Reyes, Ríos, and especially of Marulanda, the FARC ranks felt beaten. Operación Jaque was another major blow to morale.

Official figures released by President Álvaro Uribe's administration seemed to demonstrate that the balance of power had shifted decidedly in favor of the government. In early 2009, Uribe said that the army had caused more than fifty thousand casualties to the insurgent forces since he took office in 2002. The numbers were disputed by military analysts, who argued that if they were accurate, there would be no conflict in Colombia at all. The Colombian think tank Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris reported that between 2006 and 2008, the FARC lost a significant amount of territory and suffered constant desertions. But despite Uribe's eulogy, it also became apparent in early February 2009 that the FARC remained dedicated to continuing their waning revolution. The guerrillas remained powerful in the departments of Tolima and Huila, in central Colombia, and in the northern part of the country. The Eastern and Southern Blocs withstood continuing military strikes. Ex-governor Alan Jara, a hostage held for more than seven years, who was
released in February 2009, said, “It's a mistake to think that the FARC is defeated. I witnessed during my seven years that every day more young people joined the ranks.”

According to Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, while desertions were rampant, the majority of those who abandoned the FARC between 2002 and 2008 were found to be recent recruits who had been part of the organization for only three to six months. However, in fall 2008, twenty-eight-year-old midlevel guerrilla Wilson Bueno Largo, known as “Isaza,” would become a poster boy for the Colombian government's push to encourage desertions. (If a guerrilla escaped and brought a hostage with him, there would even be a substantial reward.) Isaza had been one of the jailers assigned to guard professor and former Colombian congressman Óscar Tulio Lizcano, who, after nearly seven years in captivity, was one of the FARC's longest-held political hostages. Hearing the government radio campaign offering reward money for deserting with a hostage, the twelve-year veteran guerrilla decided to take the minister of defense up on his offer. In a harrowing escape, Isaza and the sixty-two-year-old Lizcano, who was so weak that he could barely walk, traveled for three days and nights in the jungle before being intercepted by Colombian troops. Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos made good on his promise, and Isaza received a reported $400,000. French president Nicolas Sarkozy then offered Isaza political asylum in France. The former guerrilla's traveling companion on his flight to Paris was none other than the world's most famous former hostage, Ingrid Betancourt. After touring eight Latin American countries to gain regional support to denounce the FARC, Betancourt was once again returning to France. While she was thrilled with Isaza's desertion and found great symbolism and meaning in the two of them traveling together to Paris, the story got almost no attention in the French media. Over the several months since her heroic homecoming to France immediately after her release, Betancourt's popularity had waned. For the French, there was far less adoration for a free Betancourt than there had been for the hostage. Part of the reason had to do with the fact that Betancourt appeared physically fine upon her release—not close to death, as everyone had thought. She also perturbed the proletariat by allowing herself
to be photographed by the upscale magazine
Paris Match
and jetting around the world to meet the pope and several heads of state.

After the July 2008 success of Operación Jaque and the public revelations by former hostages about the brutality of the FARC, the international community rallied around Uribe's fight against Colombia's terrorist insurgency. But several months later, in November 2008, a horrifying truth, long rumored but never so blatantly exposed, would significantly tarnish the image of those seeking to put an end to the guerrillas. A gruesome story emerged that members of the Colombian military had murdered eleven young men and disguised the corpses as those of guerrillas for the purpose of gaining monetary rewards. Civilian recruiters had lured the victims from Soacha, a poor Bogotá slum. Promised quick work and easy money, the men were taken three hundred miles north of Bogotá to the department of Santander. One of the recruiters (who later turned himself in to authorities) says that he was responsible for three of the “deliveries” from Soacha. In late January 2008, the recruiter picked up the young men when they arrived at a bus terminal in the town of Ocaña. He gave them drugs and alcohol in a local bar. Then he took them to a military checkpoint so that the soldiers there could shoot them. The three deliveries earned the recruiter nearly a million pesos (five hundred dollars). The story was exposed when an undertaker handling the bodies (which were reported to him as combat fatalities) became suspicious. None of the men had any identification on them. But most disturbing of all, underneath the guerrilla uniforms that the cadavers wore were the bloody civilian clothes that the men had been murdered in. The family members of the missing men began to investigate their sons' disappearances, and when they discovered what had happened, they made a tremendous public outcry, which was widely covered by the Colombian media and impossible for Álvaro Uribe to ignore. The result was that Gen. Mario Montoya, the head of the Colombian army, who'd long been at the center of several human rights investigations and reportedly had connections with paramilitaries, was forced to resign, along with twenty-seven other army commanders. The resignation came just four months after Montoya had received international praise for his part in the hostage-rescue mission.
The horrific murders exposed a pattern of similar crimes brought about by a policy within the Colombian military that rewarded soldiers with money, time off, or promotions for delivering dead guerrillas. More than fifty civilians were allegedly killed by the Colombian military in extrajudicial executions between January 2007 and June 2008, according to a 2008 report by the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination Group—a number almost twice that recorded during the previous five years. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights termed the killings “systematic and widespread” and called for investigations. “Multiple sources report that unlawful killings by the Colombian army are continuing despite efforts by the Minister of Defense to stop it,” Vermont senator Patrick Leahy said in an e-mailed statement published in August 2008 in the
Los Angeles Times
. “After providing billions of dollars in training and equipment to the Colombian army, we should expect better, including vigorous investigations and prosecutions of these crimes.”