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

Changes in Altitude37they still would not have had the sense of the land that the FARC clearlydid. I tried not to think of the advantage that any guerrilla operation hasover their enemy—local knowledge of the terrain and hideouts.As we marched we heard several references to someone whosename sent a chill up our spines. I knew that one of our targets thatday had been a lab that the FARC used to take the raw coca leavesand process them into the paste that would eventually become rock orpowder cocaine. We also knew that the lab was under the control of ahigh-ranking member of the FARC whose nom de guerre was MonoJoJoy. Mono JoJoy, whose real name was Victor Julio Suárez Rojas, akaJorge Briceño Suárez, commanded the FARC’s Eastern Bloc. Each ofthe members of the FARC had adopted an alias, and they also hadnicknames they used with one another, on top of the code names weassigned them. If it weren’t for the nature of the work we were doing,we wouldn’t have known what Mono JoJoy’s real name was, and withmost of the low-ranking guerrillas we’d come into contact with so far,all we knew them by was their alias.The Eastern Bloc was one of seven major geographic divisions theFARC used to organize their forces. The secretariat or secretariado was aseven-member leadership group immediately beneath the commanderin chief, Manuel Marulanda. Also a member of the secretariado, MonoJoJoy was primarily responsible for their military operations. Since 1999,he’d been under indictment in the United States on charges of killingthree Americans as well as for terrorism and narcotics trafficking—inaddition to a laundry list of other charges. Basically, he was a bad dude,someone who had joined the FARC at age twelve and was in his fortiesat the time of our capture. In that time he must have swallowed so manytons of the radical indoctrination that the Marxist rebel crap spouted outof him at both ends.The thought that we were potentially being taken to him, combinedwith the fact that his name was mentioned on our target sheets, put ascare into us. Though Marc had done his best to destroy our papers,