If you are looking for a primer that summarizes recent Colombian history in a colorful way, this is the book for you. John Otis is a Bogota-based reporter who has written for various newspapers on Latin American events, and was once South America bureau chief for the Houston Chronicle. Ostensibly the book is about the capture of three gringos who get kidnapped by the FARC, but Otis uses that merely as a starting point, and explores nearly every angle possible about their capture and rescue. The result is a dizzying kaleidoscope and panorama about the conflict in Colombia, with enough barely believable magical realism to convince you that this could only have happened here.
The book starts with the story of the three Americans: retired airline pilot Thomas Howes, former air force analyst Marc Gonsalves, and former marine Keith Stansell (pictured above from left to right). They were hired by military contractor Northrop Grumman to do the kinds of work that the Pentagon increasingly outsources to the private sector, in this case flying over the jungle to find and take pictures of clandestine cocaine labs, evidence of which would then be handed over to the U.S. government. The salaries for this type of work, in the six figures, make up for the high risk, at least in the mind of these guys looking to pay off mortgages and credit card debt. Unfortunately, the money that pays for their salaries is made up in cutting corners elsewhere, and the Cessna plane that the contractors were flying in only had one engine, despite several internal memos at the company warning of the dangers of having no backup engine in case one fails. While flying over the jungle on February 13th, 2003, the three men (and two others who were shot by FARC when they were discovered) crashed after their engine dies, deep in FARC territory. The men are kidnapped, and ended up being held for 1,966 days as prisoners of the guerrilla group.
Their ordeal is fascinating enough: they walk through the jungle shackled in chains, even sleeping chained together. Their families wait for years in agony for any scrap of evidence they are alive, and deal with mostly unresponsive bureaucracies in the U.S. government and at Northrop Grumman that seem to have a “shit happens” lack of urgency in their communications with the families. Stansell, without knowing a thing, finds his life unraveling out in the real world, where his American fiancée finds out about the Avianca stewardess he had gotten pregnant, and leaves him for another man.
But Otis zooms out, covering the stories of other kidnapping victims who stay in the same camps as the Americans. There is the amazing story of policeman Jhon Pinchao Blanco, the only person to have ever successfully escaped from the FARC. After eight years as their prisoner, and after whittling away at his chains with a piece of wood for about a year at night when nobody could see him, he manages to break free and scamper away in the darkness before the guerrillas notice. Dodging FARC patrols, he swims down river, surviving on bugs and leaves for two and half weeks until miraculously running into an anti-narcotics squad in the tiny jungle town of Mitu.
There is also former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt (above), who had ventured in to FARC territory without the proper security detail and against warnings not to do so. She proves to be a lightning rod for strong opinions; Blanco says she was his inspiration to escape, while Stansell calls her a “spoiled bitch." Otis stays admirably neutral, describing the French ex-husband who flew over the Amazon jungle dropping thousands of leaflets proclaiming his support, and the mother who called into a radio show nearly every day to send her messages of love and hope. Ingrid’s campaign manager, Clara Rojas, has her own adventures in the rain forest, eventually having the first child born in FARC captivity (by cesarean! Ouch!) with a guerrilla as the father. It was Blanco’s escape that led to Colombian authorities knowing about the child and Betancourt’s location, setting the table for the eventual rescue.
Then there’s the platoon of Colombian soldiers assigned with searching for the kidnapping victims, a hapless group that ends up getting lost in the jungle and subsisting on monkeys and bats cooked over a spit. Their fortunes change, however, when they stumble on a FARC cache of millions of dollars, in both American and Colombian currency. After some deliberations, they decide to pocket whatever money they can for their troubles, and eventually make their way back to civilization. Their commander tells them not to go on a spending spree and get noticed, but once they are contact with other people the money flows freely. In the city of Popayan, they buy electronics and new clothes, and pretty much take over the whorehouses. Some of the smarter soldiers mail their families the money hidden in newly bought televisions, but before long word spreads and a number of soldiers are caught and jailed, while others are killed by FARC as revenge for the theft. Amazingly, about half of the soldiers are still at large with the money they took. This story alone could be a book by itself, and indeed was later turned into a hit Colombian movie called “Soñar No Cuesta Nada."
After years in captivity, Blanco’s information gives the authorities something to work with in terms of an attempted rescue of the hostages. Painstakingly, the Colombian military worked on first eavesdropping and then intercepting FARC radio communications, eventually placing a mole in the group. The government then created a fake humanitarian non-governmental organization to take the hostages to see FARC commander Alfonso Cano; the soldiers involved in the fake organization took acting classes and wore Che Guevara T-shirts to make their roles seem like the real thing. Then, once the hostages were in a helicopter with the soldiers and several FARC members, the soldiers subdued the guerrillas and flew the hostages to safety. It was a total bait-and-switch, and it worked. The mission, called Operacion Jaque (Operation Check, as in chess), is an elaborate piece of strategy that will make any war buff swoon.
I haven’t even touched on all of the historical background Otis crams into this book; there are mini-histories of the rise of FARC and the paramilitaries, an explanation of how the drug trade works and collaborates with these illegal armed groups, and the time that FARC’s leaders were wined and dined by various European governments in the hopes of seducing them out of the jungle and into peace with champagne and caviar. The book is packed with gossip and top-notch reportage; Otis has seemingly interviewed everyone with even a passing appearance in this tale. Even Colombian news junkies will find new nuggets of information here, but newbies to the world of guerrillas and kidnapping will learn a lot and be highly entertained at the same time. The book can be purchased here.
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