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

Running on Empty 305of cultivated fields. That meant more coca-planting areas. We startedspending many nights sleeping in temporarily abandoned drug labs.As the crop came in from one area, the FARC moved to that zone togather and process, leaving behind the fields they had just harvested.While we didn’t see anyone doing the actual processing, the equipmentand the sites were there.Witnessing all of this firsthand simply reinforced much of what we’dbeen able to gather and deduce from the skies. We took as much satisfactionas we could from knowing that we had discovered what in ourprevious lives we called “ground truth.” That the round piles of wastewe had witnessed from the air and in our photographs and video wereindeed by-products of cocaine production. In addition, we could seethat the identification process we used to mark young coca plants bytheir color—a nearly lime-green color, different from any other vegetation—wasspot on. As we walked by these fields we could tell instantlythat these plants had recently been put in the ground. They were thriving,but I hoped that someone had them in their target pack. I hopedthat it was only a matter of time before they were pinpointed and removed.Hope, it seemed, was still there. I just needed more groundtruth to make it real.TOMFor months, we’d been playing an unbelievably long game of chess withthe Colombian Army, moving all around the board but with few piecesbeing taken. As much as I wanted to believe that a checkmate was imminent,I had only my optimism to support that belief. As far as I wasconcerned, our erratic and unpredictable marching had switched frombeing the result of Milton’s incompetence to a deliberate strategy ofdelay. I hadn’t been able to see this at the beginning of the game, but asthe moves took on a pattern, I could detect, if not the logic to it, then atleast how those moves fit into a larger overall strategy. To me, delay was