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

¿Quién Sabe?63Laden had Middle Eastern features. And these young kids didn’t thinkanything of openly referring to one another by these names.When they weren’t calling one another names, the guerrillas wereeating sugar, and lots of it. They each carried a block of brown unrefinedsugar that they called panela. They would break off a bit of it andeat it. They’d also mix Kool-Aid–type drinks from small packets—Royaleand Frutino. Sometimes when we’d stop at a stream, one of themwould take out a big pot they’d been carrying on their back and mix upthe fruit drink. Sometimes they’d add in one, two, or three pounds ofsugar, depending on the availability. That began to explain how theywere able to move so tirelessly through the jungle. Like us, they weren’teating a lot, but their sugar snacks and drinks were like jungle Gatoradeand energy bars.My initial impression of the FARC as a bunch of Halloween trick-ortreaterswas strengthened by this reliance on sugar and the presence ofcandy among them. Candy was a prized possession and those in chargefrequently doled it out as a reward to the underlings. As much as wegrew tired of hearing ¿Quién sabe?, I’m sure that the FARC had towonder why we kept using the words bizarre and surreal. To be marchingthrough the jungle, frequently walking past coca fields that we’dlikely surveyed from the air, with a bunch of sugar-smacking, lollipopsucking,brainwashed terrorists had tapped out our vocabularies, so weresorted to using our old reliables.Even though they were little more than a bunch of teenagers, thisgroup and others like it had wreaked havoc in Colombia, forcing themilitary to use deadly force against them. I was reminded of just howserious this conflict was a day or so after we left the airplane wreckage.We were taking a fifteen-minute break on a hillside. Suddenly twomembers of the rear guard—those at the very end of the line—startedscreaming, “¡Policía! ¡Policía!” They ran past us and off into the jungle.The rest of the guerrillas started to panic and talk really loudly. Sonia