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

38 OUT OF CAPTIVITYthere was no guarantee that the FARC hadn’t found something. If wewere being brought to one of the FARC’s high commanders, thingsdidn’t look so good for the home team. We’d likely be interrogated, andwho knew what kind of torture methods they’d employ. Mono JoJoy wasalready down for three American deaths; what would three more meanto somebody who’d spent most of his life rising through the ranks of aterrorist organization?As if the thought of Mono JoJoy weren’t enough, I was also troubledby the questions our captors kept asking us, mainly “Why are youworking against us?”We’d reply that we weren’t working against them; we were workingagainst the drugs. I wasn’t just splitting hairs with them. We had nomission specifically against the FARC. We were there to do drug interdictionwork. We never took any direct action against the FARC. WhenI asked them if they were involved in any way in the drug traffickinggoing on, some would say yes.“Well,” I’d tell them, “if you’re working the drugs, we’re workingagainst you. No drugs, no touch you.”Then, one of the smarter, or maybe one of the more brainwashed,among them would say, “We don’t do anything with drugs. We just tax.We tax the people in the drug business.”The more they delivered answers like this, the clearer the extentof their indoctrination became. It was like running into a wall, andI was too exhausted to call them out on the obvious lies. A couple ofthe guerrillas with us were wearing Che T-shirts, and my mind keptreturning to the biography of Che I’d been reading on the plane. Tothem, he was just a face emblazoned on a shirt, a revolutionary imageto reinforce their cause. They knew little about who he was and whathe actually represented. How they could honestly believe that they werecarrying on the ideals of Che Guevara was baffling to me. This was agroup that resorted to trafficking drugs, using land mines, recruitingkids, attacking and killing civilians, taking hostages, and demanding