A Captive of Rebels -- and Fear -- Deep in Colombia

It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

“Our commander wants to talk to you,” said a bearded militiaman. “It won’t take long. Maybe he’ll give you an interview.”

About 10 rebels manned the roadblock along a narrow strip of highway that cuts through Colombia’s sun-scorched eastern savanna. All wore civilian clothes and untucked shirts, suggesting they had guns hidden in their waistbands.

The request didn’t make sense. Guerrilla commanders in Colombia aren’t usually looking to talk. Nailing down an interview with them means laying low in a remote place, making contacts, sending word, waiting for a response.

I thought, “This isn’t right. They’re going to kidnap us.”

The rebels handed me a plastic cup of pink soda, and I passed it quickly to Scott Dalton, the photographer traveling with me on a freelance assignment for The Times. I knew that if I were to drink it, they would see that my hand was trembling.

Then they escorted Scott and me down a dirt road, beginning an 11-day ordeal that took us into the jungle lairs and secluded safe houses of the National Liberation Army, or ELN -- a 4,500-strong guerrilla group with a penchant for blowing up pipelines and kidnapping civilians. My mouth went dry and my stomach clenched in a tight knot. It was Jan. 21. Several days would pass before I would even take a deep breath.

We spent most of the time in jungle clearings, guarded by rebels as young as 15 with automatic rifles slung across their backs and grenades clipped to their belts. We had little news of the outside world, and we had no way of knowing whether we would be released in two days or two years. At times, we weren’t sure release was an option.

Our captors later told us that our detention had been unplanned, but once the ELN had seen the attention it stirred, the guerrillas wanted to take their time and handle our release carefully.

Until our kidnapping, foreign journalists enjoyed an unspoken immunity in Colombia. The country’s armed groups -- Marxist rebels and their right-wing paramilitary foes -- had pretty much left us alone to report from ground level on the passions fueling 38 years of civil conflict.

And it was a journey our families would make with us, full of fear and bleak uncertainty. We anguished over how they would hear the news of our kidnapping. We imagined them crumbling. We felt we had been selfish to work in Colombia.

After two rebels escorted us down the dirt road, we were kept waiting half an hour before being introduced to a uniformed ELN commander with the nom de guerre Patachicle, or Gumfoot. He swatted mosquitoes with a green towel and asked matter-of-factly, “If you were to be detained, whom should we contact?”

Then a second leader showed up, a rough, agitated man wearing a silver chain. He said he was a political commander from a different rebel group, the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He demanded credentials and interrogated us. For a horrific moment we thought we were being kidnapped by both rebel armies at the same time.

“If you detain a member of the international press there are consequences,” I told the FARC commander as he flipped through our passports. He grinned broadly, looked right into my eyes and responded, “What consequences?”

With that ugly smile, we felt our press privileges stripped from us. We remained with the ELN, becoming just two more civilians among 3,000 people kidnapped in Colombia every year.

Scott and I were not just displaced physically when we hiked to our first makeshift jungle camp. We had entered another world, where refrigerators and toilets do not exist. A world where a sharp knife has great value and a palm pilot none. A world where blazing trails through dense jungle terrain or recognizing the hum of a far-off helicopter are valued skills.

We carried two cellular phones, two laptop computers, a novel by Paul Auster and thousands of dollars worth of sophisticated camera equipment. Our captors carried machetes.

The difference between our worlds was so glaring that it soon became the topic of jokes. One day, as Scott rifled through a bag of nuts and crackers, a rebel asked him what he was looking for. “A cold Heineken,” he replied.

Our unschooled captors had lots of questions about history, world leaders and current events. They admired how quickly Scott read his novel and how I scribbled down thoughts in my notebook. They loved to talk. One guerrilla told Scott he thought Adolf Hitler had been the worst U.S. president.

The same rebel told me I was the first U.S. resident he’d ever seen, “except for the ones on television.”

Our captors were insistent about two things: U.S. capitalists were stealing their oil, and corrupt Colombian politicians were squandering public funds. They used the words “imperialist” and “American” interchangeably.

We had come to this frontier zone to report on escalating rebel violence. Oil-rich and lawless, Arauca province has become a focal point of President Alvaro Uribe’s campaign to rid Colombia of entrenched outlaw factions by awarding special powers to the armed forces. It is also home to the Cano Limon oil field, operated by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum.

Rebels dynamited the Cano Limon pipeline more than 170 times in 2001, depriving the Colombian government of about $500 million in oil royalties and prompting locals to call the pipeline “the flute” -- a reference to the number of holes from the bombings.

The attacks prompted the U.S. to take action. In a move that rewrote the rules of involvement in Colombia, the White House began channeling $98 million into U.S. training and equipment for local troops protecting oil installations. Until then, U.S. military aid was limited to fighting this nation’s booming illegal drug trade.

The first U.S. trainers, 70 in all, arrived in Arauca two days before Scott and me.

“Let them [the trainers] come here on foot to learn the reality we live, that this is a guerrilla war,” said a commander known as Pablo, leader of an ELN faction called the Eastern War Front.

Officials insist that the American trainers will not be allowed to enter combat, but some U.S. lawmakers worry that their nation is already getting tangled in a messy civil conflict with no end in sight.

“We’ve been at war for 38 years,” Pablo said. “We’ve been in training for 38 years.”

The Eastern War Front represents the richest and most independent branch of the ELN. It fills its war chest with exorbitant ransom payments and “vaccines,” or protection money extorted from state contractors conducting public works. The contractors, in turn, are paid from royalties on the region’s lucrative oil exports.

Meanwhile, Occidental channels tens of thousands of dollars into the Colombian military every year, tanking up army helicopters, furnishing outposts and providing packed lunches for troops guarding the Cano Limon pipeline. In this way, profits from Arauca’s oil end up funding both sides of the region’s intractable war. Peace talks between the government and the ELN are stalled, and Pablo gave little hope of a quick solution to the conflict.

I asked him what he would do for a living if he wasn’t an ELN commander.

“I went right from home to the guerrillas,” he said. “You marry this. I don’t have much experience in civilian life.”

We talked with our captors whenever the fear of our captivity didn’t weigh us down. There was always the chance of a rescue attempt, and some rebel groups have been known to kill kidnap victims rather than leave them behind during a military attack. In captivity, making friends is like buying life insurance.

I spoke at length with Gumfoot’s girlfriend, a woman with thick muscles, a worn expression and a boisterous laugh. She was my age, 35, and a grandmother, and she wore a low-cut, see-through top with her fatigues and rifle. She found it difficult to believe that I’d never washed my clothes in a river and that I didn’t have any children yet.

Another fighter, a shy, sturdy man, didn’t talk to us at all. At one point, I sat down next to Scott, put my forehead on his knee and sobbed as quietly as I could. Once I’d dried my eyes, the quiet combatant approached me and pressed three coconut candies into my hand.

I asked several rebels how they decided to join up.

“Sometimes it’s [the lure of ] a pretty rebel girl, sometimes it’s the gun, sometimes it’s the uniform,” a subcommander told me. “But then you start thinking about all the inequality in society.”

A gangly 15-year-old girl told me she had joined because her parents were always arguing.

*

Red-Carpet Treatment

Our guards had been told to give us the red-carpet treatment. This meant that we could ask for special treats -- we requested fruit and playing cards -- and that we were never tied up. The ELN rebels never looked through our bags, and when we moved from camp to camp they carried four wooden planks to serve as a bed for us. The night before our release, they brought cold beers.

There are an average of eight kidnappings a day in Colombia, and most of the victims aren’t so lucky. Some are chained to a bed or a tree for months while their families receive threatening phone calls seeking hefty ransom payments. Some families pay a ransom only to be told they will have to start negotiations all over again. One police officer has spent five years in FARC hands.

Unlike most victims, we later learned, we had The Times as well as U.S. and Colombian officials working tirelessly to achieve our release.

As nervous as I was, I found it difficult to eat. Our meals consisted of what one reporter friend calls the five-starch guerrilla diet: yucca, potatoes, plantains, corn tortillas and rice. Toward the end of our captivity the guards killed an armadillo, scraped its armor clean and threw it in a pot with oil, onions and cumin.

“Do you eat armadillo in Texas?” I asked Scott, who grew up in the town of Conroe.

“No, but we do run over ‘em,” he said.

The trials we endured were more emotional than physical. The higher we marched up the mountain, the deeper our spirits sank. The thud of helicopter blades overhead brought thoughts of a bloody attempt to free us and sent our captors scrambling upriver to clear a new camp.

We began to wonder whether the ELN had put a price tag on our release. “You two are famous,” Gumfoot said. “You must be worth at least $50 million.” I later learned that no ransom demand was ever made.

A low point came Jan. 27, nearly a week into our ordeal. We’d been told it was the day of our hand-over, and we hiked down from the mountain expecting to see a Red Cross vehicle waiting for us. Instead, Gumfoot met us with the news that the release had fallen through and that I was to grant an interview to the ELN’s clandestine radio station as evidence that we were still alive.

Our window on freedom was shuttered.

As the days passed, I tried to adopt a routine. We would rise with the sun, listen for news of our abduction on the rebels’ small, crackly radio, sit on a rock and sip overly sweet coffee. Then I’d walk downriver to bathe, wash a few clothes, practice yoga and write in my notebook. In the afternoons we read, talked and played gin rummy.

These card games were like a balm for my bruised soul. Sitting on our mattress under a mosquito net strung between palms, we would light a candle and play past dark. Scott would chuckle and shake his head as my erratic playing threw off his expert calculations. And outside our little oasis of tarp and netting the jungle muffled our laughter, the rebels took turns on guard duty and helicopter gunships droned in the distance.

*

Fear Mixed With Beauty

Even at the darkest moments we found ourselves in spectacular places. We moved six times, but we were usually near a river that ran cool and clean over white and orange boulders. Small yellow fish nipped at our legs in the water, and huge butterflies with metallic blue wings fluttered around us. Parrots squawked overhead.

The night before our release we slept at a flimsy wooden farmhouse strung with hammocks and surrounded by whispering bamboo.

Freedom came as unexpectedly as our abduction. While I was interviewing Pablo on the bank of a muddy stream, a guerrilla brought him a note. “It’s all arranged,” he said. “The Red Cross is coming this morning. I guess I couldn’t give you any better news.”

We later learned that the ELN had asked for a humanitarian commission to retrieve us the previous day, Jan. 31, but that delegates canceled the trip for security reasons. The same afternoon, Uribe delivered a fiery speech vowing to press on with military offensives in Arauca despite our delicate situation.

Hiking down from the foothills the day before our release, I spoke with a gregarious ELN commander. He told me we would be free soon. Then, as we trekked through a sloping sheep pasture, he said warmly, “You should come back to see us. We’d be very happy to talk to you.”

“Don’t wait for me,” I said.