Out of Captivity by Marc Gonsalves

Author:Marc Gonsalves
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061868627
Publisher: HarperCollins

NINE

Ruin and Recovery

September 2004–May 2005

TOM

If President Uribe’s objective with his Plan Patriota was to flush out the FARC and get them on the run in order to wipe them out, then his efforts nearly did the same to us. On September 28, 2004, after eleven months with the politicals, we fled Camp Caribe.

None of us was comfortable knowing that our fate was so closely linked with the FARC’s. The inside perspective of the politicals helped us see that a new phase in the FARC-Colombian conflict was beginning. Uribe’s government had lost all patience with the guerrillas, demanding action on a new scale. Uribe no longer believed in the FARC’s ability to negotiate fairly and honorably, and now he would make the FARC pay a price for their misguided overestimation of themselves and their power.

How the FARC treated us was often a reflection of how they were being treated themselves, and our hasty departure from Camp Caribe didn’t bode well. We knew that based on all the activity around us, we had to leave the area, but the speed with which we left came as a surprise. We were given little information about what was going on, and while that itself was not a strange thing, it was odd given the scope of the moving required. All they told us was to pack up and get ready to leave. Everyone was heading out—all the politicals, all the military guys, the three of us, and all the FARC, even Sombra. They wouldn’t say how long we’d be gone or whether we’d return.

The brutality of the forty days we marched after we abandoned Camp Caribe rivaled anything we’d been through before. For the first several months at the camp, we had done a good job of getting ourselves into decent physical condition, but since June 2004 when Plan Patriota was first announced, the FARC fed us so little that we were weak even before we started the march. Existing on what we called cow-guts soup—because of its foul smell and the disgusting bits of cow that floated on the thickly congealed fat layer—and a few spoonfuls of rice or beans had taken its toll on us.

In addition, the three of us were marching with many more possessions than we’d carried back in October of 2003. We had all accumulated so many things that we couldn’t possibly take it all. Though we left a lot behind, we took what we considered necessary. I attached my mattress to my equipo. I thought that having a comfortable place to sleep made all the difference in my attitude and ability to manage. I was wrong. Trying to maneuver through the jungle with that large roll on my back required me to do hundreds of squats as I bent under vines and downed trees. I soon abandoned it and quite a few other things to lighten my carriage. Everyone else did the same, and the longer we marched, the more we reduced our loads to the essentials.

If we

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