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families of kidnapped victims) to give the boy psychological counseling. Medina was tormented by the fact she had baited Octavio to kill her husband, but felt she hadn’t had any other choice. “I think that was the way to make them understand that we didn’t have that kind of money. Besides, Simón Trinidad knew it.” She continued to communicate with Octavio and was finally given another demand—twice as high as the last. “They were asking for two hundred million pesos [$140,000] to free them.” With no option, Medina did everything she could think of to secure the amount. “My mother-in-law sold her house. I quit my job in order to get the severance pay. We got a mortgage on our house. We took loans from friends to gather the money. And I went to pay that amount in cash. And they told me on that day that the two would be freed.”
    In the camp where Elías and Eliécer Ochoa were being held, the two men heard an order given over the radio to “bring in the hostages.” Medina had received word that her husband and his brother would be released and was told to go to a location where the guerrillas would deliver the two men. Along with several family members, Medina traveled to an area in the mountains. “We went there early in the morning.That night, they released Eliécer. When I saw that it was only Eliécer who was freed, it was very hard for me. I tried not to make him feel bad when I did not see Elías. Eliécer was crying, telling me that he didn’t want to leave him, but they forced him to leave and leave Elías.”
    Medina was enraged. “I wanted to go out looking for Octavio to confront him with the fact that he had lied to me, because he said that they would turn both of them over, and they did not. The next day, I went back to the area where we had been meeting, looking for Octavio, but he wasn’t there. He didn’t want to face me.” Instead, Medina spoke to the guerrilla in charge. “I complained to him that after I had been asked to provide so many provisions such as food, meat, rice, et cetera—all things that they had asked me for, that Eliécer had told me that all they had been fed was rice and spaghetti and
cacharina
[a cracker made of flour and water].” Medina implored the guerrilla: “How could that be? How could they do that?” And then she asked the question that was most important to her: What were they to do about freeing Elías? “He told me that if I wanted Elías, I’d have to pay an additional one hundred million pesos.” Perhaps Simón Trinidad had changed his mind about the additional ransom for Ochoa, or maybe it was another high commander, because five days after Eliécer’s release and seven months after the two had been kidnapped, Elías Ochoa was set free.
    Whether the kidnapping of the Ochoas or other members of the Valledupar elite bothered Trinidad’s conscience was impossible to determine. But he would later write about the painful consequences that his decision to enter the FARC had for his family. “The disloyalty to my dad hurt a lot,” Trinidad wrote. “He proposed my departure into exile thinking about the well-being of the whole family. So I wrote him a letter explaining why I made the decision to join the FARC. I didn’t imagine that my decision was going to affect them so much. His house was raided several times by the military, and he received multiple death threats.”
    Trinidad’s abandonment of his social position to join the FARC turned the Palmeras into pariahs in Valledupar—the same city that a few years earlier had bestowed his father with the title of “Legal Conscience of the Department of César” and had considered this family one of the most prominent and respected in the region. According to theeldest son, Jaime, many of the attacks that his father and mother had to put up with were