News of a Kidnapping Read online

  In his meetings with Rafael Pardo, they studied alternative courses of action but always ran up against the government policy that left open the threat of extradition. They both knew this was the most powerful tool for pressuring the Extraditables into surrendering, and that the president used it with as much conviction as the Extraditables when they used it as a reason for not surrendering.

  Villamizar had no military training, but he had grown up near military installations. For years his father, Dr. Alberto Villamizar Florez, had been physician to the Presidential Guard and was very close to the lives of its officers. His grandfather, General Joaquin Villamizar, had been minister of war. One of his uncles, Jorge Villamizar Florez, had been the general in command of the Armed Forces. From them Alberto had inherited his dual nature as a native of Santander and a soldier: He was cordial and domineering at the same time, a serious person who loved to drink, a man who never misses when he takes aim, who always says what he has to say in the most direct way, and who has never used the intimate tu with anyone in his life. The image of his father prevailed, however, and he completed his medical studies at Javieriana University but never graduated, swept away by the irresistible winds of politics. Not as a military man but as a Santanderean pure and simple, he always carries a Smith & Wesson .38 that he has never tried to use. In any case, armed or unarmed, his two greatest virtues are determination and patience. At first glance they may seem contradictory, but life has taught him they are not. With this kind of heritage, Villamizar had all the daring necessary to attempt an armed solution, but rejected it unless the situation became a matter of life or death.

  Which meant that the only solution he could find in late November was to confront Escobar and negotiate, Santanderean to Antioquian, in a hard and equal contest. One night, tired of all the wheel-spinning, he presented his idea to Rafael Pardo. Pardo understood his anguish, but his reply was unhesitating.

  "Listen to me, Alberto," he said in his solemn, direct way. "Take whatever steps you like, try anything you can, but if you want our cooperation to continue, you must know you can't overstep the bounds of the capitulation policy. Not one step, Alberto. That's all there is to it."

  No other virtues could have served Villamizar as well as his determination and patience in sorting through the internal contradictions present in these conditions. In other words, he could do as he wished in his own way, using all his imagination, but he had to do it with his hands tied.

  3

  Maruja opened her eyes and thought of an old Spanish proverb: "God doesn't send anything we can't bear." It had been ten days since their abduction, and both she and Beatriz were growing accustomed to a routine that had seemed unthinkable on the first night. The kidnappers had repeated over and over again that this was a military operation, but the rules of their captivity were harsher than those of a prison. They could speak only if the matter was urgent, and never above a whisper. They could not get off the mattress that was their common bed, and they had to ask the two guards--who watched them all the time, even when they were sleeping--for everything they needed: permission to sit, to stretch their legs, to speak to Marina, to smoke. Maruja had to cover her mouth with a pillow to muffle the sound of her cough.

  Marina had the only bed, lit day and night by a perpetual candle. On the floor beside the bed lay the mattress where Maruja and Beatriz slept, their heads facing opposite directions like the fish in the zodiac, with only one blanket for the two of them. The guards sat on the floor to watch them, leaning against the wall. The space was so narrow that if they straightened their legs, their feet were on the prisoners' mattress. They lived in semi-darkness because the one window was boarded over. Before they went to sleep, the cracks around the only door were stuffed with rags so that the light from Marina's candle would not be seen in the rest of the house. The only other light came from the television set, because Maruja had them turn off the blue lightbulb in the ceiling that gave them all a terrifying pallor. The closed, unventilated room was heavy with foul-smelling heat. The worst time was between six and nine in the morning, when the prisoners were awake, with no air, with nothing to drink or eat, waiting for the rags to be pulled away from the door so they could begin to breathe. The only consolation for Maruja and Marina was that they were given coffee and cigarettes whenever they asked for them. For Beatriz, a respiratory therapist, the smoke hanging in the little room was a calamity. She suffered it in silence, however, since it made the other two so happy. Marina, with her cigarette and her cup of coffee, once exclaimed: "How nice it will be when the three of us are in my house, smoking and drinking our coffee and laughing about this awful time." Instead of suffering, on that day Beatriz regretted not smoking.

  The fact that the three women were in the same prison may have been an emergency measure: Their captors must have decided that the house where they had been taken first could not be used after the cab driver indicated the route they had taken. This was the only way to explain the last-minute change, the wretched fact that there was only one narrow bed, a single mattress for two people, and less than six square meters for the three hostages and the two guards on duty. Marina had also been brought there from another house--or another farm, as she called it--because the drinking and disorderliness of the guards at her first prison had endangered the entire organization. In any case, it was inconceivable that one of the largest transnational enterprises in the world did not have enough compassion to provide humane conditions for its kidnappers and their victims.

  They had no idea where they were. They knew from the sound that they were very close to a highway with heavy truck traffic. There also seemed to be a sidewalk cafe with drinking and music that stayed open very late. Sometimes they heard a loudspeaker announcing either political or religious meetings, or broadcasting deafening concerts. On several occasions they heard campaign slogans for the Constituent Assembly that was to convene soon. More often they heard the whine of small planes taking off and landing just a short distance away, which led them to suppose they were somewhere near Guaymaral, a landing field for small aircraft about twenty kilometers to the north of Bogota. Maruja, who had known savanna weather from the time she was a girl, felt that the cold in their room was not the chill of the countryside but of the city. And their captors' excessive precautions made sense only if they were in an urban center.

  Most surprising of all was the occasional roar of a helicopter so close it seemed to be on the roof. Marina Montoya said it meant the arrival of an army officer who was responsible for the abductions. As the days passed, they would become accustomed to the sound, for during their captivity the helicopter landed at least once a month, and the hostages were sure it had something to do with them.

  It was impossible to distinguish the line between truth and Marina's contagious fantasies. She said that Pacho Santos and Diana Turbay were in other rooms of the house, so that the officer in the helicopter could take care of all three cases during each visit. Once they heard alarming noises in the courtyard. The majordomo, the man who managed the house, was insulting his wife as he gave hurried orders to move it that way, bring it over here, a little higher, as if they were trying to force a corpse into a place that was too small. Marina, in her gloomy delirium, thought that perhaps they had cut up Francisco Santos and were burying the pieces under the tiles in the kitchen. "When the killings begin, they don't stop," she kept saying. "We're next." It was a terrifying night until they learned by chance that they had been moving an old wash tub that was too heavy for four men to carry.

  At night the silence was total, interrupted only by a demented rooster with no sense of time who crowed whenever he felt like it. Barking dogs could be heard in the distance, and one very close by sounded to them like a trained guard dog. Maruja got off to a bad start. She curled up on the mattress, closed her eyes, and for several days did not open them again except when she had to, trying to think with more clarity. She was not sleeping for eight hours at a time but would doze off for half an hour and wake to fin
d the same agony always lying in wait for her. She felt permanent dread: the constant physical sensation in her stomach of a hard knot about to explode into panic. Maruja ran the complete film of her life in an effort to hold on to good memories, but disagreeable ones always intervened. On one of three trips she had made to Colombia from Jakarta, Luis Carlos Galan had asked her, during a private lunch, to help him in his next presidential campaign. She had been his media adviser during an earlier campaign, traveling all over the country with her sister Gloria, celebrating victories, suffering defeats, averting mishaps, and so the offer was logical. Maruja felt appreciated and flattered. But when lunch was over, she noticed a vague look in Galan, a supernatural light: the instantaneous and certain vision that he would be killed. The revelation was so strong that she persuaded her husband to return to Colombia even though General Maza Marquez had warned him, with no further explanation, that they were risking death. A week before they left Jakarta, they heard the news that Galan had been murdered.

  The experience left her with a depressive propensity that intensified during her captivity. She could find nothing to hold on to, no way to escape the thought that she too was pursued by mortal danger. She refused to speak or eat. She was irritated by Beatriz's indolence and the masked guards' brutishness, and she could not endure Marina's submissiveness or the way she identified with the regime of her kidnappers. She seemed like another jailer who admonished her if she snored or coughed in her sleep or moved more than she had to. Maruja would set down a glass, and Marina with a frightened "Careful!" would put it somewhere else. Maruja would respond with immense contempt. "Don't worry about it," she would say. "You're not the one in charge here." To make matters even worse, the guards were always uneasy because Beatriz spent the day writing down details of her imprisonment so she could tell her husband and children about them when she was set free. She had also made a long list of everything she hated in the room, and had to stop when she discovered there was nothing she did not hate. The guards had heard on the radio that Beatriz was a physical therapist, confused this with a psychotherapist, and would not allow her to write anymore because they were afraid she was developing a scientific method to make them lose their minds.

  Marina's deterioration was understandable. After almost two months in the antechamber of death, the arrival of the other two hostages must have been an intolerable dislocation for her in a world she had made hers, and hers alone. Her relationship to the guards, which had become very close, changed on account of them, and in less than two weeks she was suffering again from the same terrible pain and intense solitude she had managed to overcome.

  And yet, no night seemed as ghastly to Maruja as the first one. It was interminable and freezing cold. At one in the morning the temperature in Bogota--according to the Meteorology Institute--had been between 55 and 59 degrees, and it had rained downtown and in the area around the airport. Maruja was overcome by exhaustion. She began to snore as soon as she fell asleep, but her persistent, uncontrollable smoker's cough, aggravated by the damp walls that released an icy moisture at dawn, kept waking her. Each time she coughed or snored, the guards would kick her in the head with their heels. Marina's fear was uncontrollable, and she backed them up, warning Maruja that they were going to tie her to the mattress so she wouldn't move around so much, or gag her to stop her from snoring.

  Marina had Beatriz listen to the early morning news. It was a mistake. In his first interview with Yami Amat of Caracol Radio, Dr. Pedro Guerrero attacked the abductors with a string of defiant insults. He challenged them to behave like men and show their faces. Beatriz was prostrate with terror, certain that she and the others would be the ones to pay for his abuse.

  Two days later, one of the bosses, his well-dressed bulk packed into six feet, two inches, kicked the door open and stormed into the room. His impeccable tropical wool suit, Italian loafers, and yellow silk tie were at variance with his churlish behavior. He cursed the guards with two or three obscenities, and raged at the most timid one, whom the others called Spots. "They tell me you're very nervous," he said. "Well let me warn you that around here nervous people get killed." And then he turned to Maruja and said in a rude, impatient voice:

  "I heard you caused a lot of trouble last night, making noise and coughing."

  Maruja replied with an exemplary calm that could have been mistaken for contempt.

  "I snore when I'm asleep, and don't know I'm doing it," she said. "I can't control the cough because the room is freezing and the walls drip water in the middle of the night."

  The man was in no mood for complaints.

  "Do you think you can do whatever you want?" he shouted. "Let me tell you: If you snore again or cough at night, we can blow your head off."

  Then he turned to Beatriz.

  "And if not you, then your children and husbands. We know all of them, and we know exactly where they are."

  "Do what you want," said Maruja. "There's nothing I can do to stop snoring. Kill me if you want to."

  She was sincere, and in time would realize she had said the right thing. Harsh treatment beginning the first day is a method used by kidnappers to demoralize their captives. Beatriz, on the other hand, still shaken by her husband's rage on the radio, was less haughty.

  "Why do you have to bring our children into it? What do they have to do with any of this?" she said, on the verge of tears. "Don't you have children?"

  Perhaps he softened; he said he did. But Beatriz had lost the battle; her tears did not allow her to continue. Maruja had regained her composure and said that if they really wanted to settle things they should talk to her husband.

  She thought the hooded man had followed her advice because on Sunday, when he came back, his manner had changed. He brought the day's papers with statements by Alberto Villamizar, which attempted to come to some agreement with the kidnappers. And they, it seems, began to change their behavior in response to that. The boss, at least, was so conciliatory that he asked the hostages to make a list of things they needed: soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, cigarettes, skin cream, and books. Some of the things on the list arrived that same day, but they did not get certain books until four months later. As time passed they accumulated all kinds of pictures and mementos of the Holy Infant and Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which the various guards gave to them as gifts or souvenirs when they left or came back from their time off. After ten days a domestic routine had already been established. Their shoes were kept under the bed, and the room was so damp they had to be taken out to the courtyard from time to time to let them dry. The prisoners could walk around only in heavy wool men's socks, in a variety of colors, which had been given to them on the first day, and they had to put on two pairs at a time so that no one would hear their footsteps. The clothes they had been wearing on the night of the abduction had been confiscated, and they were given sweatsuits--one gray set and one pink for each of them--which they lived and slept in, and two sets of underwear that they washed in the shower. At first they slept in their clothes. Later, when they had nightgowns, they wore them over their sweatsuits on very cold nights. They were also given bags to hold their few possessions: the spare sweatsuit and a clean pair of socks, their change of underwear, sanitary napkins, medicines, their grooming articles.

  There was one bathroom for three prisoners and four guards. The women could close the bathroom door but not lock it, and were permitted no more than ten minutes in the shower even when they had to wash their clothes. They were allowed to smoke as much as they wanted, which for Maruja was over a pack a day, and even more for Marina. The room had a television set and a portable radio, so the captives could hear the news and the guards could listen to music. The morning news programs were played at very low volume, as if in secret, while the guards played their raucous music at a volume dictated only by their mood.

  The television was turned on at nine, and they watched educational programs, then the soap operas and two or three other shows until the midday newscast. It played the longest fr
om four in the afternoon until eleven at night. The television stayed on, as if it were in a child's room, but no one watched it. Yet the hostages scrutinized the newscasts with microscopic care, trying to discover coded messages from their families. They never knew, of course, how many they missed or how many innocent phrases were mistaken for messages of hope.

  Alberto Villamizar appeared on various news shows eight times in the first two days, certain that the victims would hear his voice on at least one of them. And almost all of Maruja's children worked in the media. Some had regularly scheduled television programs and used them to maintain communication that they assumed was unilateral, and perhaps useless, but they persisted.

  The first one the prisoners saw, on the following Wednesday, was the program aired by Alexandra on her return from La Guajira. Jaime Gaviria, a psychiatrist, a colleague of Beatriz's husband, and an old friend of the family, broadcast a series of instructions for maintaining one's spirit in confined spaces. Maruja and Beatriz knew Dr. Gaviria, understood the purpose of the program, and took careful note of his instructions.

  This was the first in an eight-program series produced by Alexandra and based on a long conversation with Dr. Gaviria on the psychology of hostages. Her primary consideration was to select topics that Maruja and Beatriz would find interesting and to conceal personal messages that only they would understand. Then Alexandra decided that each week she would have a guest who was prepared to answer preselected questions that would stimulate immediate associations in the captives. The surprise was that many viewers who knew nothing about her plan could at least tell that something else was hidden behind the apparent innocence of the questions.

  Not far away--in the same city--Francisco Santos lived in his captive's room under conditions as miserable as Maruja's and Beatriz's, but not as harsh. One explanation is that in addition to the political usefulness of their abduction, there may also have been a desire for revenge as far as the women were concerned. And it is almost certain that their guards and Pacho's belonged to two different crews. Though it may have been only for reasons of security, the crews acted on their own and did not communicate with each other. But even so, there were incomprehensible differences. Pacho's guards were more informal, more autonomous and accommodating, and less concerned with hiding their identities. The worst difficulty for Pacho was having to sleep shackled to the bars of the bed with a metal chain that was wrapped to prevent skin abrasions. The worst for Maruja and Beatriz was not even having a bed to be chained to.