Romeo and Juliet in Battle Dress

For a few days, the love story of Roque and Patricia gripped Colombia.

He was a conscript in the army. She was a guerrilla. Deep in a contested, forbidding jungle, they had cast their fortune together.

Colombians saw the triumph of their teenage love over a bitter, seemingly endless feud as a sign that peace finally might be possible between the government and Latin America’s oldest Marxist rebel group.

It was Romeo and Juliet in battle fatigues. But perhaps Colombians forgot that Shakespeare’s play is, in the end, a tragedy.

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The jungle in northwestern Colombia is so dense that it has defied attempts to build a highway linking North and South America. Instead, its rivers are its corridors. Guerrillas use them to bring guns and ammunition into Colombia and to take cocaine and heroin out. The army and right-wing private armies hunt the rebels.

Roque Montilva arrived at the jungle base at Pavarando as a lanky, 18-year-old draftee. He was just trying to get through his year of obligatory military service and return home to Santa Marta, a Caribbean beach town.

He was working as a file clerk when the rebels overran the base in a daring strike last August. They took Roque captive along with 19 other soldiers.

He was taken to a jungle camp and imprisoned in a hut with seven soldiers and 10 police officers.

Within days, Jose Francisco Arteaga, a seasoned counter-guerrilla soldier, was also captured. Roque spent his days sitting in a hammock, sharing cigarettes with Arteaga.

“I had been stationed at Santa Marta for four years, so we talked about Santa Marta,” Arteaga recalled. “Finally, I told him: ‘I’m going to take a chance. Either they kill me or I will escape.’

“He said, ‘I’m going with you.’ ”

“Then,” Arteaga said, “we got the opportunity of the girl.”

An Intense Gaze Suggesting a Challenge

She was a new guard who had arrived at the camp in February. She was undeniably pretty, with shiny, straight black hair, an oval face and a heart-shaped mouth. She worried Roque. She stared at him so hard that he feared she was trying to start a fight. He avoided her gaze.

One evening, another captive handed him a salve tin, indicating with his eyes that the staring girl had sent it. Inside was a piece of paper folded into a tiny square.

“If you want to escape, I will help you,” read the note.

What Roque did not realize was that the sweet-faced girl who stared at him was just as much a prisoner as he was.

She calls herself Patricia now. Before that, she was Marta or Elena. And before that, she had another name. When she was a child, she got new names instead of toys or birthday parties.

Patricia was a child of the war. Control of her family’s little patch of corn and cacao outside San Jose Apartado shifted from guerrillas to right-wing private armies, called self-defense forces. Occasionally, government soldiers came through.

Whoever was in charge, Patricia’s life did not change. She gathered wood, carried water and helped in the field. After her father abandoned the family, her mother gave her to a neighbor, who changed her name. Later, the girl came back home, and her name changed again.

She went to school for a while and remembers getting as far as second grade. One day, when Patricia was 12 or 14--the years all run together in the Colombian countryside--the guerrillas came for her.

“My mother just gave me to them,” she said in an interview later. Her mother probably had no choice, said Lina Gutierrez, deputy director of the Colombian Family Welfare Institute, a government agency.

“People who live in war zones just know that they have to give a quota of their children to the insurgency,” Gutierrez said. “She has seven or eight siblings, and half of them are in the guerrilla.”

Like Roque, Patricia was a conscript. But unlike his service, hers had no limits, either in time or in duties.

“You have to carry supplies and dig ditches,” said Patricia, whom the rebels called Elena. “You are always marching or guarding and tired and soaked. You work and work and never see any results. . . . There is no appreciation.”

Some days she was carrying a 45-pound backpack through the jungle, sweating, and some days she was camped on a mountainside so high that frost formed on the tent overnight.

The rebels also use teenage girls as spies, disguising them as prostitutes to wheedle information from soldiers. Although Patricia said she was never sent on such a mission, the insurgents did provide her with birth-control implants, indicating that such a possibility was always present.

The Colombian army estimates that 5,000 children serve the insurgent forces as virtual pack animals, spies and combatants. Arteaga, the soldier, said that children who looked no older than 10 died in the battle in which he was captured.

“Sometimes we were happy, when there were parties or a chance to sit around and talk,” Patricia recalled. “But sometimes I wanted to kill myself.” She estimated that she lived like that for about four years before she was sent to the camp where she met Roque.

When they were guarding the soldiers, she and her friend Cindy used to disappear into the jungle in the afternoon to cry. Arteaga remembers seeing their swollen eyes.

Patricia cried because she knew her life was in danger. She had been marked as a discipline problem.

“One day, they sent me from one place to another with supplies,” she recalled. “They were so heavy, and I was so hungry and tired. I saw a little house up on the hill, so I went there. The lady gave me some food, and I sat down to rest. I woke up there the next day.”

A Rebel Disgrace: Surrendering Firearm

Patricia hiked as quickly as she could to the assigned rendezvous point, but she was a day late. In punishment, the commander took away her gun.

“When you are disarmed, you are disgraced,” she said. The commander threatened to kill her if she broke the rules again. Between sobs, she and Cindy began to talk of deserting.

“I knew that if I was caught, I would be killed,” Patricia said. “But I was afraid that they were going to kill me anyway. I thought that by fleeing, I might live a few more days.”

Then Cindy was transferred.

“All of a sudden, I was alone,” Patricia said. “I wanted to run away, but I was afraid to go by myself. So I squatted down [near the captives’ hut] and started to analyze them all. And I decided that I liked Montilva.”

She tore a page from an old magazine and, in the margin, wrote a note offering to help him escape. The she put it in the tin of salve. She slipped the tin to another captive soldier and asked him to give it to Roque.

She waited for an answer.

Roque excitedly showed the note to Arteaga. With a borrowed pen, they scribbled “Yes” on another scrap of magazine and handed the note to Patricia when she took their food tray.

Now, with the incentive that Patricia provided, Arteaga, a tall, muscular 29-year-old, set a time limit: escape within two weeks.

By eavesdropping on guerrilla conversations, he had a good idea of the camp’s layout. With a pencil stub and a page from an old magazine, he sketched a crude map.

The logical escape path was the river, but he knew from eavesdropping that another rebel contingent was guarding more soldiers on the other bank. The river was heavily patrolled. They would have to flee into the jungle.

The rebels “had told us that soldiers who tried to escape died in the jungle,” Arteaga said. Early in his captivity, Arteaga had seen an escape attempt foiled by hunger.

“One soldier fled and was gone three days,” he recalled. “He couldn’t stand the hunger. He got to an Indian village and asked for food. While they were feeding him, someone from the village told the guerrillas he was there.”

When the soldier was recaptured, the rebels buried him up to his neck for 28 days, with guards spoon-feeding him. They uncovered him only when he began vomiting blood.

After seeing that torture, Arteaga was determined that if he escaped, he would not be caught alive. He began preparing Roque psychologically for an escape with no turning back.

Although he could not communicate with her, Arteaga knew there was no need to convince Patricia. If she was caught, she would be killed. All three realized that.

He did not count on much help from her beyond the initial escape.

“Only the [guerrilla] guides know their way through the jungle,” he said. “If the kids knew how, they would leave.”

Patricia slipped Arteaga a spool of thread. Unwinding the thread, Roque found a note wrapped around the spool.

“How?” she asked.

The soldiers returned the spool with instructions for her. After letting them slip away, she was to meet them at a canyon outside the camp. She sent one more note, telling them it would be her last. They should watch for a sign from her.

Walking past them the next day, she tapped her watch. Arteaga signaled 7, the beginning of her shift.

It was Easter Sunday, six days after she had passed the first note.

An Escape in the Darkness of Evening

At dusk, Patricia appeared briefly, to relieve the daytime guard. When she disappeared, Roque and Arteaga removed their combat boots and cautiously slipped through the corral around the prisoners’ hut.

They edged along in the darkness trying not to make a sound.

“I just kept waiting to feel a bullet in my back,” Arteaga said.

Finally, they came to the canyon and saw a figure. Arteaga quickly shone the illuminated dial of his watch in the person’s face. It was Patricia, with a look of total panic.

“It had taken us an hour for a walk that was usually 10 minutes,” Arteaga said. “She was desperate. She thought we’d been caught.”

The fugitives still had to pass one more guard. Skulking along, they heard a flashlight being clicked on. They ducked into the underbrush. The guard walked past them.

They moved forward cautiously. About 15 minutes after passing the guard, they heard a burst of gunfire.

The rebels knew they were gone.

“We must have been about 50 yards from the camp,” Arteaga recalled. “We started running with no idea of where we were going.”

They didn’t stop for four hours, when it began raining so hard that they could not move safely.

“We could not sleep,” Arteaga said. “The mosquitoes bit, and we were scared.”

At first light, they began walking again. They walked for 12 hours without eating and stopped to rest, still lost.

Roque would shinny up a tree periodically to look for the sun through the thick jungle and check for rebel camps or farms where someone might give them away. With the sun to guide them, they marched northeast, toward the army-controlled zone.

On the third day, they found fruit and, later, an abandoned camp that Patricia recognized. She and Roque saw the empty camp as a sign that the insurgents had left the area.

After the days of fear, the two younger escapees began to act like teenagers in love on a walk through the country. They laughed and chattered as Arteaga, an experienced point man, moved ahead of them. He reminded them that they were still in danger, and brusquely threatened to put one of them first in line unless they quieted down.

“I told them we were not safe until we saw a soldier,” he said.

On the fifth day, the trio arrived at Pavarando, once the bustling entry to the jungle but a ghost town since the base was overrun. They walked through the deserted streets and poked into houses, looking for food.

At the edge of town, they entered a house and threw themselves on the floor to sleep. It was their first solid rest in five days. Still, Arteaga roused them at 4 a.m. so they could get out of the area before the rebels began their morning patrols.

Finally, they reached the Sucio River. The river had swollen with the spring rains to 300 yards across, and it was moving fast.

“I can cross,” Roque said, and began stripping off his uniform. He swam at an angle, making his path across the water longer, but he didn’t have to fight the current as much.

Cold and wet, he walked through fields in his underwear until he came to a military post. Fearing an ambush, the soldiers took him back to their base to verify his story. When they finally believed him, he led them back to the riverbank, where Patricia and Arteaga shivered, fearing that they would be caught by the rebels. He had been gone more than three hours.

A Capital Welcome for Three Heroes

The three heroes were taken to Bogota, the capital, for a news conference and tour of the town. They went to museums and ate ice cream. Patricia told reporters to call her Marta. She and Roque obliged each time photographers shouted “Kiss, kiss” at them, like tipsy guests at a wedding reception.

The teenagers held hands and exchanged glances as Arteaga looked on like an older brother.

When reporters insisted on knowing about their future, Patricia ventured, “Maybe I can marry Roque, rebuild my life and forget about that hell.”

But the soldier from Santa Marta and the ex-guerrillera from San Jose Apartado had made fools of a rebel army that had been making impressive gains against the army all across Colombia.

The guerrillas issued no communiques on the incident, but the government, the army and, probably most of all, the young couple knew that they were not safe.

The army took charge of protecting Roque and Arteaga, whisking them away for medical and psychological testing. But Patricia presented a more complex problem. Even though she had turned herself in, she had technically committed the crime of subversion and, under Colombian law, was supposed to be jailed until pardoned. Further complicating matters, she was not sure whether she was 16, 18 or somewhere in between.

Officials at the Family Welfare Institute took charge of Patricia and tried to find her a safe place to stay until they could figure out her age and arrange for her to be pardoned.

Roque has visited her three or four times at her hide-out, but the army and the institute discourage the visits because of fears that the rebels’ urban militias will find the young people more easily if they are together.

He is out of the army now and wants to go home. His family has moved to avoid both reporters and possible guerrilla attacks. Roque has stopped giving interviews, and friends say he is trying to get his life back to normal. He has asked them not to tell anyone where he is.

An Uncertain Future, Perhaps in Scandinavia

Patricia is uncertain about her future. Gutierrez is trying to find a way for Patricia to leave the country, convinced that only then can the young woman be safe.

Patricia once met some people from Sweden who were visiting the guerrilla camp and has said she might like to go there, although she is not clear on where Sweden, or even Europe, is. Her rebel upbringing has left her an odd combination of knowledge and ignorance: She knows how to clean a rifle but not how to use a telephone.

She is learning to knit and is enjoying the chance to wear skirts and tennis shoes after years of fatigues and boots.

But she talks less and less about marrying Roque.

“He wants to be with his family,” said the young woman who lost her own family so many years ago. “He is gone now.”

Darling was recently on assignment in Colombia.