News of a Kidnapping Read online

  From the very beginning of his captivity, Pacho was given newspapers every day. In general, the press reports on his kidnapping were so inaccurate and fanciful they made his captors double over with laughter. His schedule had already been established when Maruja and Beatriz were abducted. He would stay awake all night and go to sleep at about eleven in the morning. He watched television, alone or with his guards, or chatted with them about the news of the day, soccer games in particular. He read until he got bored, yet still had enough nervous energy to play cards or chess. His bed was comfortable, and he slept well from the first night until he developed a painful rash and a burning in his eyes, which cleared up when the cotton blankets were washed and the room given a thorough cleaning. They never worried about anyone seeing the light from the outside because the windows were boarded over.

  In October an unexpected hope presented itself: Pacho was ordered to send proof to his family that he was alive. He had to make a supreme effort to maintain his self-control. He asked for black coffee and two packs of cigarettes, and began to compose a message straight from the heart, not changing a comma. He recorded it onto a minicassette, which couriers preferred over full-size tapes because they were easier to conceal. Pacho spoke as slowly as he could and tried to keep his voice calm and to adopt an attitude that would not reveal the dark shadows in his spirit. He concluded by reading aloud the headlines in that day's El Tiempo as proof of the date on which he taped the message. He felt satisfied, above all with the first sentence: "Everyone who knows me knows how difficult this message is for me." Yet when the heat of the moment had passed and he read it in published form, Pacho had the impression that with the last sentence he had put the noose around his own neck: He asked the president to do everything he could to free the journalists. "But," he warned, "what matters is not to ignore the laws and precepts of the Constitution, for these benefit not only the nation but the freedom of the press, which is now being held hostage." His depression deepened a few days later when Maruja and Beatriz were abducted, because he interpreted their kidnapping as a sign that matters would be drawn out and complicated. This was the moment of conception for an escape plan that would become his irresistible obsession.

  Conditions for Diana and her crew--five hundred kilometers north of Bogota, and three months after their capture--were different from those of the other hostages, since holding two women and four men at the same time presented complex logistical and security problems. In Maruja's and Beatriz's prison, the surprising element was the total absence of leniency. In the case of Pacho Santos, it was the informal, easy behavior of the guards, who were all his age. In Diana's group, an improvisatory atmosphere kept captives and captors alike in a state of alarmed uncertainty; the instability infected everything and grated on everyone's nerves.

  Diana's captivity was notable too for its migratory nature. During their long imprisonment the hostages were moved, with no explanation, at least twenty times, in Medellin and near it, to houses of differing styles and quality, and varying conditions. Perhaps this mobility was possible because their abductors, unlike those in Bogota, were in their natural environment, over which they had complete control, and maintained direct contact with their superiors.

  The hostages were not all together in the same house except on two occasions, and for only a few hours. At first they were divided into two groups: Richard, Orlando, and Hero Buss in one house, Diana, Azucena, and Juan Vitta in another not far away. Some of the moves came without warning--sudden, unplanned, no time to gather up their possessions because a police raid was imminent, almost always on foot down steep hillsides, slogging through mud in endless downpours. Diana was a strong, resilient woman, but those merciless, humiliating flights, in the physical and moral conditions of captivity, undermined her endurance. Other moves were heartstopping escapes through the streets of Medellin, in ordinary cabs, eluding checkpoints and street patrols. The hardest thing for all of them during the first few weeks was that they were prisoners and no one knew it. They watched television, listened to the radio, read the papers, but there was no report of their disappearance until September 14, when the news program "Cripton" announced, without citing sources, that they were not on assignment with the guerrillas but had been kidnapped by the Extraditables. And several more weeks had to go by before the Extraditables issued a formal acknowledgment of their abduction.

  The person in charge of Diana's crew was an intelligent, easygoing Medellinese whom they all called don Pacho, with no last name or any other clue to his identity. He was about thirty but had the settled look of someone older. His mere presence had the immediate effect of solving the problems of daily living and sowing hope for the future. He brought the hostages gifts, books, candy, music cassettes, and kept them up-to-date on the war and other national news.

  His appearances were infrequent, however, and he did not delegate authority well. The guards and couriers tended to be undisciplined, they were never masked and used nicknames taken from comic strips, and they carried oral or written messages--from one house to the other--that at least brought the hostages some comfort. During the first week the guards bought them the regulation sweatsuits, as well as toilet articles and local newspapers. Diana and Azucena played Parcheesi with them and often helped to prepare shopping lists. One of the guards made a remark that a stunned Azucena recorded in her notes: "Don't worry about money, that's one thing there's plenty of." At first the guards lived a chaotic life, playing music at top volume, not eating at regular hours, wandering through the house in their underwear. But Diana assumed a certain authority and imposed order. She obliged them to wear decent clothes, to lower the volume of the music that kept them awake, and even made one of them leave the room when he tried to sleep on a mattress next to her bed.

  Azucena, at the age of twenty-eight, was a serene romantic who could not live without her husband after spending four years learning to live with him. She suffered attacks of imaginary jealousy and wrote him love letters knowing he would never receive them. During the first week of captivity she began to take daily notes that were very bold and quite useful in writing her book. She had worked on Diana's newscast for some years, and their relationship had never been more than professional, but they identified with each other in their misfortune. They read the papers together, talked all night, and tried to sleep until it was time for lunch. Diana was a compulsive conversationalist, and from her Azucena learned lessons about life that never would have been taught in school.

  The members of her crew recall Diana as an intelligent, cheerful, animated companion, and an astute political analyst. When she felt discouraged, she confessed her sense of guilt for having involved them in this unforeseen adventure. "I don't care what happens to me," she said, "but if anything happens to you, I'll never have a moment's peace again." She was uneasy about Juan Vitta's health. An old friend, he had opposed the trip with great vehemence and even better arguments, and yet he had gone with her soon after his stay in the hospital because of a serious heart ailment. Diana could never forget it. On the first Sunday of their captivity, she came into his room in tears and asked if he didn't hate her for not having listened to him. Juan Vitta replied with absolute honesty. Yes, he had hated her with all his soul when they were told they were in the hands of the Extraditables, but he had come to accept captivity as a fate that could not be avoided. His initial rancor had also turned into guilt over his inability to talk her out of it.

  For the moment, Hero Buss, Richard Becerra, and Orlando Acevedo, who were in a nearby house, had fewer reasons for alarm. In the closets they had found an astonishing quantity of men's clothing still in the original packaging, with leading European designers' labels. The guards said that Pablo Escobar kept emergency wardrobes in various safe houses. "Go on, guys, ask for anything you want," they joked. "Transportation takes a little while, but in twelve hours we can satisfy any request." At first the amount of food and drink carried in by mule seemed the work of madmen. Hero Buss told them that no German could
live without beer, and on the next trip they brought him three cases. "It was a carefree atmosphere," Hero Buss has said in his perfect Spanish. It was during this time that he persuaded a guard to take a picture of the three hostages peeling potatoes for lunch. Later, when photographs were forbidden in another house, he managed to hide an automatic camera on top of a closet and took a nice series of color slides of himself and Juan Vitta.

  The guards played cards, dominoes, chess, but the hostages were no match for their irrational bets and sleight-of-hand cheating. They were all young. The youngest might have been fifteen and was proud of having won grand prize in a contest for the most police killed--two million pesos apiece. They were so contemptuous of money that Richard Becerra sold them sunglasses and his cameraman's jackets for a sum that would have purchased five new ones.

  Sometimes, on cold nights, the guards smoked marijuana and played with their weapons. Twice they fired off shots by accident. One bullet went through the bathroom door and wounded a guard in the knee. When they heard on the radio that Pope John Paul II had called for the release of the hostages, one of the guards shouted:

  "What the hell is that son of a bitch sticking his nose in for?"

  Another guard jumped to his feet, offended by the insult, and the hostages had to intervene to keep them from pulling out their guns and shooting each other. Except for that incident, Hero Buss and Richard took everything as a joke to avoid bad feelings. Orlando, for his part, thought he was odd man out, that his name headed the list of those who would be executed.

  At this time the captives had been divided into three groups in three different houses: Richard and Orlando in one, Hero Buss and Juan Vitta in another, and Diana and Azucena in a third. The first two groups were transported by taxi in plain view through snarled midtown traffic, while every security agency in Medellin was hunting for them. They were put in a house that was still under construction, into one two-by-two-meter room that was more like a cell, with a filthy unlit bathroom, and four men guarding them. They slept on two mattresses on the floor. In an adjoining room that was always locked, there was another hostage for whom--the guards said--they were demanding millions of pesos in ransom. A stout mulatto with a heavy gold chain around his neck, he was kept handcuffed and in total isolation.

  The large, comfortable house where Diana and Azucena were taken and held for most of their captivity seemed to be the private residence of a high-ranking boss. They ate at the family table, took part in private conversations, listened to the latest CDs, Rocio Durcal and Juan Manuel Serrat among them, according to Azucena's notes. This was the house where Diana saw a television program filmed in her own apartment in Bogota, which reminded her that she had hidden the keys to the armoire but could not recall if they were behind the cassettes or the television in the bedroom. She also realized she had forgotten to lock the safe in the rush to leave on her calamitous trip. "I hope nobody's rummaging around in there," she wrote in a letter to her mother. A few days later, on what seemed an ordinary television program, she received a reassuring reply.

  Life in the house did not seem affected by the presence of the hostages. There were visits from women they did not know who treated them as if they were family and gave them medals and pictures of miracle-working saints in the hope they would help them go free. There were visits from entire families with their children and dogs who scampered through all the rooms. The worst thing was the bad weather. The few times the sun shone they could not go outside to enjoy it because there were always men working. Or, perhaps, they were guards dressed as bricklayers. Diana and Azucena took pictures of each other in bed, and there was no sign yet of any physical changes. In another taken of Diana three months later, she looked very thin and much older.

  On September 19, when she learned of the abductions of Marina Montoya and Francisco Santos, Diana understood--with no access to information from the outside--that her kidnapping was not an isolated act, as she thought at first, but a long-term political operation to force the terms for Escobar's surrender. Don Pacho confirmed this: There was a select list of journalists and celebrities who would be abducted as necessary to further the interests of the abductors. It was then she decided to keep a diary, not so much to narrate her days as to record her states of mind and interpretations of events. She wrote down everything: anecdotes of her captivity, political analyses, human observations, one-sided dialogues with her family or with God, the Virgin, the Holy Infant. Several times she transcribed entire prayers--including the Our Father and Hail Mary--as an original, perhaps more profound way of saying prayers in writing.

  It is obvious that Diana was not thinking about a text for publication but of a political and personal journal that the dynamic of events transformed into a poignant conversation with herself. She wrote in her large, rounded hand, clear-looking but difficult to decipher, that completely filled the spaces between the lines in her copybook. At first she wrote in secret, in the middle of the night, but when the guards discovered what she was doing they gave her enough paper and pencils to keep her busy while they slept.

  She made the first entry on September 27, a week after the kidnapping of Marina and Pacho, and it read: "Since Wednesday the 19th, when the man in charge of this operation came here, so many things have happened that I can hardly catch my breath." She asked herself why their abduction had not been acknowledged by those responsible, and her reply to herself was so that perhaps they could kill them with no public outcry in the event the hostages did not serve their ends. "That's my understanding of it and it fills me with horror," she wrote. She was more concerned with her companions' condition than with her own, and was interested in news from any source that would allow her to draw conclusions about their situation. She had always been a practicing Catholic, like the rest of her family, her mother in particular, and as time passed her devotion would become more intense and profound until it reached mystical states. She prayed to God and the Virgin for everyone who had anything to do with her life, even Pablo Escobar. "He may have more need of your help," she wrote to God in her diary. "May it be your will that he see the good and avoid more grief, and I ask you to help him understand our situation."

  There is no doubt that the most difficult thing for everyone was learning to live with the guards. The four assigned to Maruja and Beatriz were young, uneducated, brutal, and volatile boys who worked in twos for twelve-hour shifts, sitting on the floor, their submachine guns at the ready. All in Tshirts with advertisements printed on them, sneakers, and shorts they had cut themselves with shears. When the shift came in at six in the morning, one could sleep until nine while the other stood guard, but both would almost always fall asleep at the same time. Maruja and Beatriz thought that if a police assault team raided the house early in the morning, the guards would not have time to wake up.

  The boys' common condition was absolute fatalism. They knew they were going to die young, they accepted it, and cared only about living for the moment. They made excuses to themselves for their reprehensible work: It meant helping the family, buying nice clothes, having motorcycles, and ensuring the happiness of their mothers, whom they adored above all else in the world and for whose sakes they were willing to die. They venerated the same Holy Infant and Lady of Mercy worshipped by their captives, and prayed to them every day with perverse devotion, for they implored their protection and forgiveness and made vows and sacrifices so that their crimes would be successful. Second only to the saints, they worshipped Rohypnol, a tranquilizer that allowed them to commit movie exploits in real life. "You mix it with beer and get high right away," explained one guard. "Then somebody lends you a good knife and you steal a car and go for a ride. The fun is how scared they look when they hand you the keys." They despised everything else: politicians, the government, the state, the law, the police, all of society. Life, they said, was shit.

  At first it was impossible to tell them apart because the only thing the women could see was their masks, and all the guards looked the same. In other words,
like only one guard. In time they learned that masks can hide faces but not character. This was how they individualized them. Each mask had a different identity, its own personality, an unmistakable voice. Even more: It had a heart. Without wanting to, they came to share the loneliness of confinement with them. They played cards and dominoes and helped each other solve crosswords and puzzles in old magazines.

  Marina was submissive to her jailers' rules, but she was not impartial. She was fond of some and despised others, gossiped to them about the others as if she were their mother, and sooner or later provoked internal discord that threatened peace in the room. But she obliged them to pray the rosary, and they all did.

  Among the guards on duty during the first month, there was one who suffered from sudden and recurrent fits of rage. They called him Barrabas. He adored Marina and caressed and flirted with her. But from the first day he was Maruja's bitter enemy. With no warning he would go wild, kicking the television and banging his head against the wall.

  The strangest guard was somber, silent, very thin, and almost six and a half feet tall. He wore a second dark-blue sweatshirt hood on top of his mask, like a demented monk. And that's what they called him: Monk. For long periods he would crouch down in a kind of trance. He must have been there a long time because Marina knew him very well and singled him out for special favors. He would bring her gifts when he came back from his time off, including a plastic crucifix that Marina hung around her neck on the ordinary string it had when she received it. She was the only hostage who had seen his face: Before Maruja and Beatriz arrived, none of the guards wore a mask or did anything to hide his identity. Marina had interpreted this as a sign she would not leave her prison alive. She said he was a good-looking teenager with the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen, and Beatriz believed it because his lashes were so long and curly they protruded from the holes in his mask. He was capable of the best and worst actions. It was he who discovered that Beatriz wore a chain with a medal of the Virgin of Miracles.