Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

Ruin and Recovery 239were as grateful as we were that the madness of the forty-day marchwas over.At the end of those seven days, we took a brief boat trip and thena truck ride into the Macarena Mountains. Along the way, we cameto a decent-size town, Santo Domingo, that consisted of maybe eightybuildings or so, and immediately we all grew incredibly excited. A fewdays before we headed out of the hospital, two guards, Rogelio andCosteño, told us that they’d heard a rumor that a ransom was beingpaid for us and we were going to be released. This information fit inwith what we’d heard on the forty-day march—that the Colombian governmenthad unilaterally released forty-five prisoners. We figured thismight have something to do with us. Why would the Colombians afterall this time let their FARC prisoners go if they weren’t sure that theother side would reciprocate? Now that we were in an actual town, thepieces seemed to be falling into place. Why else would we be near atown, in the population, unless we were being released? Towns meantroads and transportation, telephones and electricity to power their laptops,easier communications with their Front and bloc leaders.Another possibility came from something else we’d heard. TheColombian military had captured two FARC leaders—Simón Trinidadand a woman named Sonia (not our first captor but another womanwith the same name). Trinidad was the son of wealthy traditional landownerswho’d gone bad. His parents were leftists themselves, but Trinidadhad gone really far left. He was captured in Ecuador in January of2004 and had been extradited to Colombia almost immediately. Whilewe’d been with the politcals, we’d heard that the U.S. was hoping toget him extradited to the States to stand trial there. Marc, Tom, and Iagreed that this wouldn’t be a good thing for us—it would piss off theFARC and maybe they’d take their anger out on Americans—but it wasa good thing for our country and the world to have this guy put away.We knew that the U.S. government didn’t negotiate with terrorists.