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

Getting Healthy 263given us back at the original birdcage. They all seemed to be happy tobelieve that the thick six-gauge wire we had running around our beds,out the roof of our hooch, and around our little “yard” was really justclothesline—red, insulated copper-wire clothesline.Milton’s official number two was Rogelio, who was also disliked bythe other guards and whom the three of us decided was just nuts. Oneof the more volatile personalities we had to contend with, Rogelio wasthe racionista, so if you wanted anything, you had to ask him for it.There was no pattern to his behavior and no reliable pattern of logic forwhich requests he would grant and which he would deny. One weekyou might ask him if it was possible to have more noodles at dinnerand you’d be met with the response: “No. Starve. I don’t care.” The nextday a cow might have been slaughtered, and before lunchtime, Rogeliowould bring you big steaks that he’d cooked himself.If the fact that he acted bat-shit crazy most of the time wasn’tenough, he was also hard to communicate with in general. He talkedabout 250 words a minute in the most garbled Spanish any of us hadever heard and he had the annoying habit of sucking his teeth all thetime. Combine the three—talking way too fast, being a mush mouth,and sucking his teeth—and you’ve got somebody who’s hard to talk toin any language. Throw into that mix eyes like a windup toy dog and ahigh-pitched screech of a laugh and you’ve got one seriously messedupdude to deal with.Marc and Tom would split every time Rogelio came around, so it wasleft to me to deal with him. I figured the guy was the number two, hewas the one who provided us with whatever it was we needed, so it wasworth putting up with him. In a lot of ways, it was like being nice to theweird kid in school and letting him sit at your lunch table one time.In the aftermath of his crackdown on the guards for talking to us,Milton instituted a policy whereby a guard had to escort us to whereverwe wanted to go outside of our enclosure—including to the bathroomtrenches. Nobody liked the policy, including the FARC. It meant that