Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce Read Free Book Online

leave their cities or towns. Those who remained were brutally killed. Paid assassins committed the crimes. The military and the police looked the other way, and sometimes even acted as accomplices. According to a 2002 United Kingdom Home Office report, between 1985 and 1987, approximately 450 members of the Unión Patriótica were murdered. More recent reports estimate that between 3,500 and 4,000 Unión Patriótica members have been murdered since 1985. While the death squads acted anonymously, later investigations would prove that the social, economic, and political elites of both the Liberal and Conservative parties were behind the massacres.
    Palmera, being an active member of the Unión Patriótica and a left-leaning university professor, also became a target. Death threats came frequently. “They were simple phone calls, or small notes that said ‘Son of a bitch, you leave or you die,’” he recalls. Many of Palmera’s colleagues left the region, and some abandoned the country. A month after the assassination of a close friend, Palmera’s and Margarita’s names appeared on a list of those next in line to be killed, and Palmera’s father suggested the family move to Mexico or Paris for a few years. Margarita left immediately to find what they both hoped would be a temporary home in Mexico. Palmera stayed behind, getting his eight-year-old daughter and his eleven-year-old son ready for the move. He also needed to deal with his business affairs. “I stayed because there was property to be sold. We had to sell the jewelry store and otherthings. I also had to hand in all the university responsibilities and also the management of the Banco del Comercio, where I had been working the last five years.” After the murder of another close friend, Palmera began to question his decision to leave. “I began to wonder whether it would be an act of cowardice to leave running, to hide myself outside of the country,” says Palmera. “I loved Margarita. We had an excellent marriage, and of course my children were most precious and valuable to me. However, to go into exile was to flee, leaving behind a trail of cadavers of people who were friends, valued companions who sacrificed everything, even their lives.”
    The attacks against the Unión Patriótica came to a climax in October 1987 with the assassination of Jaime Pardo Leal, the party’s presidential candidate. Some days prior to the killing, Palmera had traveled to Bogotá to speak with Leal. But instead, he ended up attending Leal’s funeral. While a disillusioned and furious Manuel Marulanda recalled all Unión Patriótica FARC members back to the mountains, a grieving Palmera reached out to a FARC commander he had met during the political campaigning of Unión Patriótica candidates. “I wrote him a letter. I said I would not run away like a dog from my country—that I would stay. He replied. He told me to think about my decision, to think it over. And he recommended I go speak to the members of the FARC Secretariat, Jacobo Arenas and Manuel Marulanda, who had been the promoters of the Unión Patriótica movement.” At the end of November, Palmera went deep into the hills in the department of Meta, in central Colombia, where the FARC Secretariat had their general headquarters. At the time, the Secretariat was made up of five top commanders, who were working on strategies to reorganize the guerrillas after the calamity of their entry into mainstream politics with the Unión Patriótica.
    After arriving in the camp, Palmera personally met with Marulanda and Secretariat members Alfonso Cano, a former leader of the Juventud Comunista (Communist Youth movement), and Jacobo Arenas, who had been at Marulanda’s side since the FARC’s formative years. “I told them that I was not willing to leave, to flee, to go into exile, and I wanted to join the FARC. Jacobo Arenas