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

Fat Camp 401half pound of gold. I wasn’t about to kiss Enrique’s ass, but I did say,“That’s great.”Enrique looked at Tom and smiled. “And one for you.” From behindhis back he pulled out a tiny little green radio that looked like somethingyou’d give your toddler so he could pretend he was listening tosomething. It was cube-shaped and had a little foldout solar panel torecharge the batteries. Tom didn’t rise to Enrique’s bait. Instead of gettingon him for what was clearly a slap in the face, he simply flippedthe switch on the radio. Some Christian ministry or another must havehad them made, because only two stations came in. In place of a dial,it had a little button you pushed to change between the two frequencies.Both stations played religious programming twenty-four hoursa day. At the first word out of that radio, Tom smiled a big toothy grinat Enrique. Unbeknownst to Enrique, on our recent march, Marc hadtraded cigarettes to get a radio. Now, with Tom’s and my new radios,that brought our count up to three. We no longer had to rely on otherpeople for news.Through much of April, we’d only had spotty radio reception, butone of the things we learned immediately was that the FARC weretaking their lumps and so was Chávez. The Colombian intelligenceagency or the military had seized and then analyzed the contents of thelaptops that Raúl Reyes had with him when he was killed. According toColombia’s top police official, the computers showed evidence that theVenezuelans had offered $300 million to the FARC. The official alsoaccused Chávez of accepting financial support from the FARC for theprevious fifteen years, going all the way back to when Chávez was inprison following an attempted coup d’état. To answer accusations thatUribe had planted evidence on the laptop, the Colombians had Interpolexamine the computers, and they determined that the Colombian governmenthadn’t tampered with them.Everyone knew that $300 million wasn’t lunch money for the guerrillas;Chávez must have been expecting something in return for it. Ingrid