Colombia's kidnapping trauma
Posted: Thursday, March 20, 2008 2:26 PM
By Mark Potter, NBC News Correspondent
BOGOTA, Colombia — Returning to this country after a years-long absence, I am simply amazed by all the positive changes here but am also struck by how some very painful things still remain.
On the plus side, the levels of violence that used to keep Colombians in their homes, off the roads and in constant fear have dropped substantially, and you can feel that change wherever you go. People flood the streets and take long vacation trips on mountain highways, something most people would never have considered just five years ago. It helps explain why President Alvaro Uribe, with his crackdown on crime, drugs and terrorism, still enjoys a popularity rating of more than 80 percent — six years into his term.
The sad part, though, is that some of the problems that infected Colombian life many years ago are still front and center. One of them is kidnapping.
In the past 10 years, thousands of Colombians from all walks of life have been kidnapped and held hostage, often in deplorable conditions. They're kept either for ransom, political reasons or the settling of old scores. The hostage takers are usually leftist guerrillas, drug traffickers, right-wing paramilitary groups or criminal gangs that often sell their victims to the others. The problem is so pervasive, there's even a radio program here that tries to send messages out to all the kidnap victims.
While the number of kidnappings has leveled off dramatically in recent years, it is still a national trauma. Caught in the middle are three Americans: Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves and Keith Stansell. These defense contractors were taken hostage by FARC guerrillas five years ago after their plane crashed during a drug surveillance flight.
Kidnapping's many victims
No one understands the horrible effects of kidnapping better than Colombia's vice president, Francisco Santos, a man I have known for more than two decades. He argues the victim is often better off than the families, because at least the hostage knows what's happening and can concentrate on survival. The families are left to agonize over the disappearance of their loved without knowing their condition or how they are being treated. That, Santos says, is the cruelest effect.
When Santos was a crusading editor for his family newspaper, El Tiempo, he was kidnapped in Bogota and held hostage for eight months by Pablo Escobar, the notorious cocaine trafficker. (His ordeal is chronicled in the book, "News of a Kidnapping," by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) After his release, Santos continued to write fiery editorials, this time against kidnapping gangs, which led to death threats that forced him into a two-year exile from Colombia.
Now that he is back and helping to lead the Colombian government's fight against guerrillas and traffickers, Santos has to deal with two harsh realities: the devastating impact of kidnapping on victims and their families, which he feels viscerally, and the hard positions taken by the Colombian and U.S. governments that they will not negotiate directly with the hostage-takers, whom they consider terrorists. To do so would be an invitation to even more kidnappings, he and others believe firmly. It's a position, though, the many relatives of hostages have a hard time understanding. Some families feel their loved ones have been all but forgotten by the outside world.
Horrifying accounts
Saddest of all are some of the personal accounts from former hostages and videotapes that have surfaced recently that clearly show just how cruelly the victims are being held, often in the deepest jungles.
Colombians were horrified by video of former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt looking so painfully thin and forlorn with a chain around her wrist. She has been held for six years now. And the pictures released in November of the three American hostages, along with accounts of their terrible living conditions, were particularly upsetting to their families.
Having lived this nightmare for years, Colombian citizens are fed up with the FARC and showed their outrage recently in massive demonstrations against the guerrillas and kidnapping. Millions of Colombians around the world took part.
Perhaps the best description of how they all felt came from Lynne Stansell, the mother of American hostage Keith Stansell. She shares the Colombian pain and in a recent interview told us, "This is an insane way, an inhuman way, an inhumane way to hold people captive against their will."
Francisco Santos agrees. "This is a scar that never closes. It's a scar that's ever present," he said. "But as a society we're going to have to deal with it."
