News of a Kidnapping (6 page)

There was one bathroom for three prisoners and four guards. The women could close the bathroom door but not lock it, and were permitted no more than ten minutes in the shower even when they had to wash their clothes. They were allowed to smoke as much as
they wanted, which for Maruja was over a pack a day, and even more for Marina. The room had a television set and a portable radio, so the captives could hear the news and the guards could listen to music. The morning news programs were played at very low volume, as if in secret, while the guards played their raucous music at a volume dictated only by their mood.

The television was turned on at
nine, and they watched educational programs, then the soap operas and two or three other shows until the midday newscast. It played the longest from four in the afternoon until eleven at night. The television stayed on, as if it were in a child’s room, but no one watched it. Yet the hostages scrutinized the newscasts with microscopic care, trying to discover coded messages from their families. They
never knew, of course, how many they missed or how many innocent phrases were mistaken for messages of hope.

Alberto Villamizar appeared on various news shows eight times in the first two days, certain that the victims would hear his voice on at least one of them. And almost all of Maruja’s children worked in the media. Some had regularly scheduled television programs and used them to maintain
communication that they assumed was unilateral, and perhaps useless, but they persisted.

The first one the prisoners saw, on the following Wednesday, was the program aired by Alexandra on her return from La Guajira.
Jaime Gaviria, a psychiatrist, a colleague of Beatriz’s husband, and an old friend of the family, broadcast a series of instructions for maintaining one’s spirit in confined spaces.
Maruja and Beatriz knew Dr. Gaviria, understood the purpose of the program, and took careful note of his instructions.

This was the first in an eight-program series produced by Alexandra and based on a long conversation with Dr. Gaviria on the psychology of hostages. Her primary consideration was to select topics that Maruja and Beatriz would find interesting and to conceal personal messages
that only they would understand. Then Alexandra decided that each week she would have a guest who was prepared to answer preselected questions that would stimulate immediate associations in the captives. The surprise was that many viewers who knew nothing about her plan could at least tell that something else was hidden behind the apparent innocence of the questions.

Not far away—in the same
city—Francisco Santos lived in his captive’s room under conditions as miserable as Maruja’s and Beatriz’s, but not as harsh. One explanation is that in addition to the political usefulness of their abduction, there may also have been a desire for revenge as far as the women were concerned. And it is almost certain that their guards and Pacho’s belonged to two different crews. Though it may have been
only for reasons of security, the crews acted on their own and did not communicate with each other. But even so, there were incomprehensible differences. Pacho’s guards were more informal, more autonomous and accommodating, and less concerned with hiding their identities. The worst difficulty for Pacho was having to sleep shackled to the bars of the bed with a metal chain that was wrapped to prevent
skin abrasions. The worst for Maruja and Beatriz was not even having a bed to be chained to.

From the very beginning of his captivity, Pacho was given
newspapers every day. In general, the press reports on his kidnapping were so inaccurate and fanciful they made his captors double over with laughter. His schedule had already been established when Maruja and Beatriz were abducted. He would stay
awake all night and go to sleep at about eleven in the morning. He watched television, alone or with his guards, or chatted with them about the news of the day, soccer games in particular. He read until he got bored, yet still had enough nervous energy to play cards or chess. His bed was comfortable, and he slept well from the first night until he developed a painful rash and a burning in his eyes,
which cleared up when the cotton blankets were washed and the room given a thorough cleaning. They never worried about anyone seeing the light from the outside because the windows were boarded over.

In October an unexpected hope presented itself: Pacho was ordered to send proof to his family that he was alive. He had to make a supreme effort to maintain his self-control. He asked for black coffee
and two packs of cigarettes, and began to compose a message straight from the heart, not changing a comma. He recorded it onto a minicassette, which couriers preferred over full-size tapes because they were easier to conceal. Pacho spoke as slowly as he could and tried to keep his voice calm and to adopt an attitude that would not reveal the dark shadows in his spirit. He concluded by reading
aloud the headlines in that day’s
El Tiempo
as proof of the date on which he taped the message. He felt satisfied, above all with the first sentence: “Everyone who knows me knows how difficult this message is for me.” Yet when the heat of the moment had passed and he read it in published form, Pacho had the impression that with the last sentence he had put the noose around his own neck: He asked
the president to do everything he could to free the journalists. “But,” he warned, “what matters is not to ignore the laws and precepts of the Constitution, for these benefit not only the nation but the freedom of the press, which is now being held hostage.” His depression deepened a few days later
when Maruja and Beatriz were abducted, because he interpreted their kidnapping as a sign that matters
would be drawn out and complicated. This was the moment of conception for an escape plan that would become his irresistible obsession.

Conditions for Diana and her crew—five hundred kilometers north of Bogotá, and three months after their capture—were different from those of the other hostages, since holding two women and four men at the same time presented complex logistical and security problems.
In Maruja’s and Beatriz’s prison, the surprising element was the total absence of leniency. In the case of Pacho Santos, it was the informal, easy behavior of the guards, who were all his age. In Diana’s group, an improvisatory atmosphere kept captives and captors alike in a state of alarmed uncertainty; the instability infected everything and grated on everyone’s nerves.

Diana’s captivity was
notable too for its migratory nature. During their long imprisonment the hostages were moved, with no explanation, at least twenty times, in Medellín and near it, to houses of differing styles and quality, and varying conditions. Perhaps this mobility was possible because their abductors, unlike those in Bogotá, were in their natural environment, over which they had complete control, and maintained
direct contact with their superiors.

The hostages were not all together in the same house except on two occasions, and for only a few hours. At first they were divided into two groups: Richard, Orlando, and Hero Buss in one house, Diana, Azucena, and Juan Vitta in another not far away. Some of the moves came without warning—sudden, unplanned, no time to gather up their possessions because a police
raid was imminent, almost always on foot down steep hillsides, slogging through mud in endless downpours. Diana was a strong, resilient woman, but those merciless, humiliating flights, in the physical
and moral conditions of captivity, undermined her endurance. Other moves were heartstopping escapes through the streets of Medellín, in ordinary cabs, eluding checkpoints and street patrols. The
hardest thing for all of them during the first few weeks was that they were prisoners and no one knew it. They watched television, listened to the radio, read the papers, but there was no report of their disappearance until September 14, when the news program “Criptón” announced, without citing sources, that they were not on assignment with the guerrillas but had been kidnapped by the Extraditables.
And several more weeks had to go by before the Extraditables issued a formal acknowledgment of their abduction.

The person in charge of Diana’s crew was an intelligent, easygoing Medellinese whom they all called don Pacho, with no last name or any other clue to his identity. He was about thirty but had the settled look of someone older. His mere presence had the immediate effect of solving the
problems of daily living and sowing hope for the future. He brought the hostages gifts, books, candy, music cassettes, and kept them up-to-date on the war and other national news.

His appearances were infrequent, however, and he did not delegate authority well. The guards and couriers tended to be undisciplined, they were never masked and used nicknames taken from comic strips, and they carried
oral or written messages—from one house to the other—that at least brought the hostages some comfort. During the first week the guards bought them the regulation sweatsuits, as well as toilet articles and local newspapers. Diana and Azucena played Parcheesi with them and often helped to prepare shopping lists. One of the guards made a remark that a stunned Azucena recorded in her notes: “Don’t
worry about money, that’s one thing there’s plenty of.” At first the guards lived a chaotic life, playing music at top volume, not eating at regular hours, wandering through the house in their underwear. But Diana assumed a certain authority and imposed order. She obliged
them to wear decent clothes, to lower the volume of the music that kept them awake, and even made one of them leave the room
when he tried to sleep on a mattress next to her bed.

Azucena, at the age of twenty-eight, was a serene romantic who could not live without her husband after spending four years learning to live with him. She suffered attacks of imaginary jealousy and wrote him love letters knowing he would never receive them. During the first week of captivity she began to take daily notes that were very bold
and quite useful in writing her book. She had worked on Diana’s newscast for some years, and their relationship had never been more than professional, but they identified with each other in their misfortune. They read the papers together, talked all night, and tried to sleep until it was time for lunch. Diana was a compulsive conversationalist, and from her Azucena learned lessons about life that
never would have been taught in school.

The members of her crew recall Diana as an intelligent, cheerful, animated companion, and an astute political analyst. When she felt discouraged, she confessed her sense of guilt for having involved them in this unforeseen adventure. “I don’t care what happens to me,” she said, “but if anything happens to you, I’ll never have a moment’s peace again.” She
was uneasy about Juan Vitta’s health. An old friend, he had opposed the trip with great vehemence and even better arguments, and yet he had gone with her soon after his stay in the hospital because of a serious heart ailment. Diana could never forget it. On the first Sunday of their captivity, she came into his room in tears and asked if he didn’t hate her for not having listened to him. Juan Vitta
replied with absolute honesty. Yes, he had hated her with all his soul when they were told they were in the hands of the Extraditables, but he had come to accept captivity as a fate that could not be avoided. His initial rancor had also turned into guilt over his inability to talk her out of it.

For the moment, Hero Buss, Richard Becerra, and Orlando
Acevedo, who were in a nearby house, had fewer
reasons for alarm. In the closets they had found an astonishing quantity of men’s clothing still in the original packaging, with leading European designers’ labels. The guards said that Pablo Escobar kept emergency wardrobes in various safe houses. “Go on, guys, ask for anything you want,” they joked. “Transportation takes a little while, but in twelve hours we can satisfy any request.” At first
the amount of food and drink carried in by mule seemed the work of madmen. Hero Buss told them that no German could live without beer, and on the next trip they brought him three cases. “It was a carefree atmosphere,” Hero Buss has said in his perfect Spanish. It was during this time that he persuaded a guard to take a picture of the three hostages peeling potatoes for lunch. Later, when photographs
were forbidden in another house, he managed to hide an automatic camera on top of a closet and took a nice series of color slides of himself and Juan Vitta.

The guards played cards, dominoes, chess, but the hostages were no match for their irrational bets and sleight-of-hand cheating. They were all young. The youngest might have been fifteen and was proud of having won grand prize in a contest
for the most police killed—two million pesos apiece. They were so contemptuous of money that Richard Becerra sold them sunglasses and his cameraman’s jackets for a sum that would have purchased five new ones.

Sometimes, on cold nights, the guards smoked marijuana and played with their weapons. Twice they fired off shots by accident. One bullet went through the bathroom door and wounded a guard
in the knee. When they heard on the radio that Pope John Paul II had called for the release of the hostages, one of the guards shouted:

“What the hell is that son of a bitch sticking his nose in for?”

Another guard jumped to his feet, offended by the insult, and the hostages had to intervene to keep them from pulling out their guns and shooting each other. Except for that incident, Hero Buss
and Richard took everything as a joke to avoid bad feelings. Orlando, for his part, thought he was odd man out, that his name headed the list of those who would be executed.

At this time the captives had been divided into three groups in three different houses: Richard and Orlando in one, Hero Buss and Juan Vitta in another, and Diana and Azucena in a third. The first two groups were transported
by taxi in plain view through snarled midtown traffic, while every security agency in Medellín was hunting for them. They were put in a house that was still under construction, into one two-by-two-meter room that was more like a cell, with a filthy unlit bathroom, and four men guarding them. They slept on two mattresses on the floor. In an adjoining room that was always locked, there was another
hostage for whom—the guards said—they were demanding millions of pesos in ransom. A stout mulatto with a heavy gold chain around his neck, he was kept handcuffed and in total isolation.