Launching the article into cyberspace on the first anniversary of my freedom was an act of friendship. I also thank Rod Amis for letting others sample Ann's excellent, and sincere, writing.
Both Ann and Rod encouraged me to write a companion piece to "Sugar Cane." I started such an article, but a year and a half later, still haven't finished it. Writing about my year as a hostage is hard--partly because so much was terribly boring, lonely, depressing. Being locked for days in a dark cell is neither exciting nor particularly colorful. Nor is being chained, and able to walk exactly 22 steps, for weeks, then months.
My kidnappers were FARC, the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, also known as the narco-guerrillas. Some people have romantic images of South American guerrillasóas idealistic leftist intellectuals who have left the university to fight for the rights of the oppressed. Don't kid yourself. FARC has no idealism, and the guerrillas have no understanding of politics. They're cruel, crude, and uneducated, with IQs about like that of my Basset Hound. Dangerous too, especially when stoned on cocaine too bad for export, or heroin, the opiate with which the Colombian guerrillas and drug cartels are now flooding the United States and Europe.
This article includes many excerpts from my diary. People often comment: I'm surprised that FARC allowed you to keep a diary, and even more, let you take it out.
FARC didn't know about my diary. I started writing, on my Texas checkbook, the day that FARC kidnapped me. I managed to write and smuggle it out only because Juaco, the first comandante of the group that held me, stoned for almost 24 hours on a deadly combination of bad cocaine, brandy, and anguish, went insane in a terrible mountain camp that I named The Valley of Death.
Juaco now lies in a shallow, muddy, and unmarked grave high in the Andes, by the skeleton of a cow. I didn't kill Juaco, but I'm glad he's dead. It could have been me. Easily. I explain this in the following article.
Random House published my diary in November, 1995, as a Ballantine hard-cover: Long March to Freedom: Tom Hargrove's Own Story Of His Kidnapping By Colombian Narco-Guerrillas (ISBN 0-345-40508-0). The diary quotes in the article are all in Long March. The only "text" in Long March, other than diary, are the first and last chapters, which I wrote to tell why I was in Colombia in the first place, and about walking home.
RH had earlier published my second book, also based on a diaryóone that I kept in Vietnam. The mass-market paperback A Dragon Lives Forever: War and Rice in Vietnam's Mekong Delta was released a few months before my kidnap. I never got to return to the States and play author, and wondered how the book was selling throughout my year of captivity.
Owen Lock, my RH editor for Dragon, had become a personal friend during the book's publication. When Owen learned that I got out of Colombia alive--with a diary--he flew to Texas.
Owen took my original diary -- written on two checkbooks, two children's notebooks, and a few scraps of paper -- back to New York. But my writing was so tiny, the text was almost impossible to read. With so little paper and ink, and faced with the necessity of smuggling what I'd written out--if I ever came out -- I crammed as much writing as possible onto every piece of paper. So Owen had the pages enlarged, and hired a small army of RH typists and proofreaders to transcribe the diary.
That's why I don't consider Long March a real book. It's my unedited diary, what I wrote verbatim.
I knew, from the beginning, that if I got out alive, I'd write a book. And that the diary would be resource material if, by some miracle, I could smuggle it out.
But I never thought that the diary itself would be the book.
Following is a draft article that I may work into a long feature story. It gives information about the kidnap that is not included in Long March (after all, I wrote the diary for me, not for you).
Or maybe this story is the start of a fourth book. But my first three books have been non-fiction adventure; maybe it's time to start writing fiction.
Parts of the above are also in the following draft article. Sorry if this confuses or bores you.
I welcome questions or suggestions. Contact me at: tomhargrove@ibm.net And check out our web site.
Regards from deep in the heart of Texas,
Tom Hargrove
_____________________________________________
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
A year as a kidnapped hostage of
Colombia's narco-guerrillas
On 21 August 1996 I wrote:
A year ago today--21 August 1995--I heard the most significant words of my life:
"Le toca de salir."
That started my long march from chains and starvation to freedom, so good food seems the best way to celebrate the first anniversary. I drive to a Texas steakhouse, order a 16-ounce T-bone, and think back to 6:30 a.m. a year ago today.
"What did you say?" I asked in Spanish, rising from my bunk of damp leaves. Two guerrillas in camoflague fatigues and high rubber boots stood before my tent of black plastic.
"It's your time to leave," the guerrilla repeated, there on the slopes of an extinct volcano crater at 9,000 feet in the northern Andes. One cradled an AK-47 and the other, a Galil assault rifle.
"To where?" I don't trust these bastards. The guerrillas said I'd leave before...six or seven times; then marched me to other miserable camps, still a hostage and badly treated.
"To Cali, to your family."
"When?" I held my breath.
"Now."
"Gracias a Dios." I never meant Thanks to God more. We were hiding, trapped by the Colombian Army. Supply routes were cut, and rations no longer came in. My chances of survival seemed dismal.
Almost a year kidnapped by Colombian narco-guerrillas had cost me 60 pounds. My mange of hair and beard had been a natural age-50ish gray when I was taken, but was now a garish orange...hair like you've seen on starving children when CNN documents a famine in Africa. Malnutrition does that.
But the loneliness was crueler than the hunger. Think about it. What's the longest time you've ever spent with no friend to talk with? Not long. Nor had I.
Yet FARC--the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia--had kept me so isolated over the past 11 months that I'd never seen a wheel--of any kind--nor a road, a window with glass, a door knob, or a fork. Obviously, I'd never used the English language. Thinking was my only entertainment, and that could be dangerous.
American prisoners of war held in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War may have suffered more. But the POWs had one thing I didn't: one another. God, how I wished that FARC would bring another hostage, so I'd have a friend.
Maybe I should explain how I got to the Valley of the Volcano.
My family and I knew, when we arrived in 1992, that Colombia was the world's kidnapping capital, but we didn't realize how serious the situation really was There were 1,822 kidnaps in Colombia in 1997óup 13% from 1996óaccording to a recent National Police Report. Thirty-three of the victims were foreigners. But experts stress that only half of the abductions are reported. Unofficial estimates range from 3,000 to 4,000 kidnaps yearly in Colombia--more than all other countries combined. (Mexico passed Brazil as number two in 1995, with 1,500 reported kidnaps. The real number may approach 3,000. Brazil is number 3, with 1,200 kidnaps. The rest of Latin America is number 4, Russia is number 5, then come Indonesia and the Philippines.)
But my colleagues and I were immune to terrorism. That's what we thought.
Our profession was the Green Revolution -- applying science to agriculture to improve the lives of the world's poorest farmers. Thus, we were safe, even when working in dangerous places. The Communist guerrillas, responsible for most kidnaps in Colombia, claim a similar mission: to help the impoverished and oppressed. We're totally nonpolitical. Besides, why kidnap an agricultural scientist? We're not in petroleum or international business. We don't earn big bucks.
Third World dangers weren't new to me. War had led to my profession of international agricultural development.
In 1969-70, I served as an infantry first lieutenant on a U.S. Army advisory team to the South Vietnamese Army and government in Chuong Thien, one of Vietnam's most war-torn provinces, deep in the Mekong Delta.
The legendary John Paul Vann, immortalized in the Pulitzer-winning A Bright Shining Lie, placed me in that position. He reviewed my records and saw that I was a West Texas farm boy with advanced degrees in both agriculture and journalism from Texas A&M and Iowa State Universities. Vann assigned me to Chuong Thien to advise local agricultural officials, plus handle regular duties of a junior-grade officer.
The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations had started the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines in 1962. IRRI released IR8, its first high-yielding rice variety, in 1967. Its seeds were reaching Vietnam when I arrived. The modern rice varieties were one of the world's greatest weapons for peace, but I learned about them in the heart of carnage.
I helped spread IR8 seeds across Chuong Thien, traveling mostly by sampan on brown-water canals and rivers with Vietnamese agricultural cadre and soldiers. The improved rice variety doubled and tripled yields overnight in fields where production had stagnated for centuries. The Western press called IR8 the "miracle rice." Its official Vietnamese name was Lua Than Nong, or "Rice of the Farming God." But Vietnamese farmers quickly dubbed IR8 Lua Honda--because one good crop bought a new motorbike.
Those rice seeds were the only good thing I saw in the Mekong Delta.
I worked for a couple of years as an agricultural science editor at Iowa State University for a couple of years after the Army. I then returned to Vietnam on a consultancy for the Veterinary Medicine College of the University of Minnesota through a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contract.
I joined IRRI, the source of those seeds that had impressed me so deeply, in 1972. My family and I moved to the Philippines where I worked with rice, humanity's most important food crop, for almost two decades. More than 90% of the world's rice is grown and consumed in Asia, where more than half of the world's people live. The increased production from the improved rices alone feed at least one in seven of the earth's people today.
By 1991 I'd worked with rice in Asia for most of my adult life. It was time for a change. What about Africa, Latin America?
In 1992 I accepted the position of head of the Communications Unit at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, known as CIAT, its Spanish acronym (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical), based near Cali, Colombia. CIAT was patterned after IRRI, the third of what is now a world network of 16 International Agricultural Research Centers sponsored by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. The CGIAR is a consortium of about 30 nations and development organizations that fund modern research to support sustainable agricultural development in the world's poorest countries.
Colombia didn't have its current problems back in 1967, when the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations started CIAT. Nearby Cali was known for its beautiful climate and hospitable people, not as home of the Cali Cartel, which controls most of Colombia's cocaine exports and is rapidly shifting to heroin.
CIAT scientists develop improved varieties and technologies for four crops that feed hundreds of millions. It has a global mandate for beans, cassava, and tropical pastures, plus rice in Latin America.
CIAT scientists had the same idealism and work ethic as those at IRRI. I liked being on the CIAT team.
In a way, I blame author Robert Fulghum for what happened the morning of 23 September 1994. I was driving to work at the CIAT research center near Palmira, about 50 minutes from our home in southern Cali. I reached an intersection, and had to decide which of two routes to drive. One meant fighting Cali's heavy traffic. The other route took 10 minutes longer, but was through the beautiful Colombian countryside.
I was late for work, but remembered one of Robert Fulgham's rules for a better life: "Always take the scenic route."
+++ VALLEY Part Two (Non-Framed) +++ Road Part 2 +++
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