The following is an article from Time (dated 28/04/2008), highlights the unacceptable silence which surrounds the three US hostages held by the FARC in Colombia:
America's Forgotten Hostages
The Cessna's single engine could not have failed over a worse patch of Colombian jungle. On Feb. 13, 2003, four U.S. defense contractors and a Colombian police officer, on a routine surveillance flight looking for rural cocaine laboratories, made an emergency landing in southern Colombia. The area is a stronghold of the fierce Marxist guerrillas known as the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC. Rebel soldiers swarmed over the shattered plane, shooting and killing its U.S. pilot, Thomas Janis, and the Colombian officer, Luis Cruz. They stripped the remaining Americans —Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves — of their clothes and belongings, put the men in chains and led them toward the mountainous rain forest.
It was a march into a tropical dungeon. When the Americans' bloody foot sores made it impossible to walk, says John Pinchao, a Colombian police officer who had been held with them until he escaped last spring, their captors gave them boots so small it made their steps only more agonizing. (The rebels finally hacked off the toes of the boots with machetes to lessen the pain.) Pinchao says the men trekked for days until they reached a FARC camp in the Sierra de la Macarena, where they were initially penned together in a slung cage whose low, barbed-wire ceiling prevented them from standing up. "Despite being held together like that, [FARC guards] forbade them from talking to each other," Pinchao said in a recent deposition obtained by TIME.
Today, Stansell, 43, a former Marine, Howes, 54, a former State Department counternarcotics pilot, and Gonsalves, 35, a former Air Force intelligence officer, live in slightly better conditions, says Pinchao. Still, a video that police seized last fall from FARC operatives in the capital, Bogota, shows the men looking weak and depressed. They have now been in captivity for five years — one of the longest hostage episodes in U.S. history. Yet few Americans know about it. President George W. Bush has mentioned the hostages publicly only once, when he visited Colombia last year. "It's amazing and discouraging to think that these three guys, former U.S. servicemen, could be left behind and forgotten this way," says Lynne Stansell, Keith's stepmother, of Bradenton, Fla. "The Bush Administration has all but ignored them."
Now she and other exasperated relatives of the hostages have turned to New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations who has extensive experience negotiating the release of U.S. prisoners around the world. They convinced Richardson to fly south over the weekend and explore the possibilities of exchanging Stansell, Howes and Gonsalves for captured rebels. After conferring in Bogota with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and then in Caracas with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez — a FARC sympathizer who has helped broker freedom for other guerrilla captives — Richardson urged patience. "While I believe this initial trip was successful," he told reporters, "the process of freeing the hostages won't happen quickly."
But while the State Department helped coordinate Richardson's trip, the effort still stands in sharp contrast to the crusade that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is waging for the release of another FARC hostage, former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who has dual French-Colombian citizenship and has often been held alongside the Americans. Sarkozy has sent a humanitarian mission to Colombia to gain access to the ill and emaciated Betancourt, 46, who was abducted in 2002. She "is in danger of imminent death," Sarkozy warned in a French TV broadcast aired in Colombia. "You who lead the FARC, you have a rendezvous with history... Free Ingrid Betancourt." He has promised asylum for scores of imprisoned rebels whom Uribe now says he'll release in exchange for Betancourt. But since Uribe — a key U.S. ally whose father was killed by the FARC in 1983 — sent his army across the Ecuadorian border last month to kill the group's No. 2 comandante, Raul Reyes, the rebels appear deaf to the appeals. Reyes' death "provided the fatal blow to a humanitarian exchange," wrote Ivan Marques, an FARC leader, in a March 22 communique. That posture may bode ill for the U.S. hostages as well.
Stansell, Howes and Gonsalves were monitoring the jungle as part of a U.S. aid project called Plan Colombia. Begun in 2000, the plan has cost more than $5 billion, making Colombia the fourth largest recipient of U.S. aid, after Iraq, Israel and Egypt. The plan is designed to combat both cocaine production and groups like the FARC that profit from the trade. Although Colombia has failed to stem cocaine production, the cash has at the very least helped rebuild Colombia's military, which in turn has knocked the FARC back on its heels. The rebels have seen their ranks of almost 20,000 fighters halved in the past five years, according to U.S. military intelligence, while their morale, territorial control and command structure are waning. "Each day the FARC is a less viable force," says Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos. "They have scant popular support." Indeed, while Uribe enjoys an 84% approval rating, tens of thousands of Colombians have staged marches this year condemning the guerrillas.
In that climate, there has been guarded hope that the FARC wants to discuss the release of the Americans and its more than 700 Colombian military, police and civilian hostages. U.S. Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who is involved with the campaign to free the Americans, says, "The FARC seems engaged on this issue for the first time ever." Since the start of the year, the group has handed six hostages — including a Colombian congresswoman and a former vice-presidential candidate — over to Chavez. But Colombia now accuses Chavez of supporting the FARC financially. (He denies it).
Amidst those muddled Andean politics, some suggest a better hope for the Americans may be sitting inside U.S. jails. In 2004 and 2005, Colombia extradited to the U.S. two FARC leaders, Ricardo Palmera, a.k.a. Simon Trinidad, and Omaira Rojas, a.k.a. Sonia. Sonia was convicted last year on drug charges and given 17 years in prison; Trinidad, convicted for conspiracy in the Americans' capture, was sentenced to 60 years in January. The FARC has made the pair's release a condition for the U.S. hostages' freedom. The U.S. has designated the FARC a terrorist group and can't negotiate with it. But U.S. sources say they're hearing signals the FARC might accept significantly reduced sentences for Sonia and Trinidad, which the two could win during their appeals. Says Alfredo Rangel, director of the Security and Democracy Foundation in Bogota: "If a U.S. appellate judge cuts Trinidad's sentence to, say, below 20 years, it puts the ball in the FARC's court." Another possibility: the pair's transfer to, and lighter sentences in, prisons in France as part of the possible Betancourt exchange. "We aren't discounting [either] scenario," says a U.S. official familiar with the case.
U.S. sources stress they have as yet heard nothing concrete from the FARC. Meanwhile, the American hostages follow a dismal routine, say Pinchao and other recently released hostages. They are forced into days-long marches to new camps when the FARC fears the military is close. Their rice-and-bean meals are varied only when they're near a river or an area where wild pigs roam, and they often fight illnesses like hepatitis with only poorly trained nurses to treat them. (The FARC refuses visits by Red Cross medical teams.) Pinchao, 37, says Stansell taught him how to swim during river-bathing sessions — a skill that later helped him escape. Stansell also tries to keep the hostages' spirits up. "Keith even learned how to tell jokes in Spanish," he recalls. Like Stansell, Gonsalves and Howes have children in the U.S. Howes, from Massachusetts, has eased his depression by adopting a stray dog. Gonsalves, of Connecticut, spends his days lifting makeshift weights and reading a Spanish Bible. The men cannot receive letters but do hear news of their families broadcast on Colombian radio.
At the time of their capture, all three men had been working for Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor, which continues to pay the families their salaries. Former Grumman pilots have criticized the company for using single-engine planes over such dangerous turf. In March 2003, three Grumman employees died in a single-engine-plane crash during a search for the hostages. (The U.S. now requires that twin-engine aircraft be used there.) But the hostages' families ask why the Bush Administration didn't provide more military backup on the contractors' Colombian missions. "Did they really never think this sort of thing could happen?" asks Gonsalves' mother Jo Rosano, of Bristol, Conn. "They sent civilians into a place they knew the rebels would be, and we get the impression they don't care." Rosano and others credit the new U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, with bringing urgency to the case. "We need to remind Americans," Brownfield says, "that three of their own are being held in abominable conditions that violate every conceivable standard of international human-rights law."
The Americans' captivity is part of the broader haggling between the Colombian government and the FARC over how to revive peace talks in a four-decade-old civil war that has left some 40,000 dead and millions more displaced. Racked by social inequities, Colombia has endured internecine violence for much of the past 100 years. "The FARC are like fish born in a tank that remains their entire world," says Colombia's Foreign Minister Fernando Araujo, who was a hostage for six years before escaping in 2006. "They're convinced they have the right to violently terrorize others." But the same is often said of his country's military, long accused of killing innocent rural civilians and fostering right-wing, cocaine-trafficking paramilitary armies, vicious groups the government has only recently begun to dismantle. As a result, some in the U.S. Congress are balking at a free-trade pact with Colombia.
Since taking office in 2002, Uribe has made impressive progress with Colombia's security and economy. But there is scant contact between him and the FARC, which is far from vanquished. "I'm killing myself every day wondering why dialogue is so impossible for all sides in this tragedy," says Betancourt's mother Yolanda Pulecio. At least Betancourt is a cause celebre in France. In their jungle encampments, America's hostages in Colombia are not just out of sight; to all but their families and supporters, they seem to be out of mind too.
With reporting by Sibylla Brodzinsky/Bogota and Bruce Crumley/Paris
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Photo: Jorge Enrique Botero/AP
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