Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce Read Free Book Online Page A

said the idea was not to have people leaving the city to go to the mountains; that was crazy. He toldme, ‘Stay here for a couple of days. Get to know this life. It’s very difficult. Get to know some of the members. And while you’re here, give us some classes on Colombian economics.’” The didactic professor eagerly accepted the position. The economic struggle of poor Colombians was proof that the armed conflict had a legitimate cause, and Palmera’s lessons, taught mostly to uneducated guerrilla recruits, consisted of the basics: The wealth and the land of Colombia is in the hands of few. Capitalism is bad. Socialism and communism are good. We are here in the mountains because the corrupt oligarchy won’t let us into the political arena. If they let us, then we can change the economic situation of the country and wealth can be shared among the majority.
    Days after Palmera’s arrival, seven members of the Juventud Comunista in Medellín were assassinated at the headquarters of the Unión Patriótica. Apparently, the news was enough to change the mind of Jacobo Arenas with regard to Palmera. “He told me, ‘If you want to continue alive and in the struggle, come to the FARC,’” Palmera says. Although he accepted the invitation, Palmera still believed that it would not be long before he was reunited with Margarita and his two children. “The FARC, at that time, were in the peace process with President Betancur. And the FARC, despite all the assassinations, the threats and [having] some of its members in exile, still believed in the peace process, and I believed in it, too.” At thirty-seven, Palmera took the nom de guerre Simón Trinidad, a name he felt gave respect to his idol, Simón Bolívar, and joined the revolutionary army. (The practice of taking a nom de guerre was both to protect a recruit’s family and to signify the radical life change of becoming a guerrilla fighter.) He was assigned to the Nineteenth Front on the northern coast of the country for basic training. Jacobo Arenas and Alfonso Cano told him that although he would be assigned a teaching position, he would have to comply with all the duties and obligations of any guerrilla member. He was given the job of training young uneducated guerrillas in politics and ideology. Later, he was put in charge of a FARC radio station that broadcast from the mountains, and finally he was made the second in command of over one hundred guerrillas in the FARC’s Forty-first Front in northern Colombia. His territory covered a vast area of the Serranía de Perijá,the northernmost part of the Eastern Cordillera, which extends along the border between Colombia and Venezuela.
    Some guerrillas would say that Trinidad was forced to appear very militant to gain respect within the organization. “He had a certain complex because of his bourgeois origin, and that always forced him to take more radical positions,” said one high-ranking guerrilla who knew him well. “He seemed to scream, ‘Believe me, I am a revolutionary!’” And although Trinidad would spend many hard years in the jungle and mountains, he never lost the distinguished air of a college professor. His mother, though heartbroken when her son joined the guerrillas, sent him camouflage fatigues made by the same tailor who had sewn his aristocratic banker’s suits. It would not only be his manner of dress, elocution, and education that would separate Trinidad from the vast majority of his comrades. Nearly all FARC guerrillas felt an intense level of detachment from the victims of the oligarchy and aristocracy whom they kidnapped or murdered. For Trinidad, those he once called friends were now terrorized by the organization to which he so fervently belonged. It was a circumstance of his dual life that he would never fully escape.

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Friends and Neighbors
    C old and exhausted, Carmen Alicia Medina hiked alone in the