Read Online Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce - Free Book Online Page A

instigated by their old friends from Valledupar society. “It came to the point where the old man was prevented from entering the Valledupar Club,” he says.
    In 1996, Trinidad’s sister, Leonor Palmera, was kidnapped for seven months by AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño in a show of force and retaliation against the FARC and against Trinidad. After gaining her freedom, for her own security and for the security of her family, Leonor left Colombia for Paraguay with her two children and her parents, doña Alix and don Ovidio. By then, don Ovidio was succumbing to the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. He died in 2003, as Trinidad says, “far from the land of his birth and from his homeland.”

5
Contractor
    W hen Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves, and Thomas Howes were captured by FARC guerrillas, they were working as military contractors for a small company called California Microwave Systems (CMS), a subsidiary of contractor giant Northrop Grumman. The work that CMS was doing was part of an eight-million-dollar contract to gather information on drug production and trafficking. There were a handful of employees tasked for the job—pilots, systems analysts who operated the surveillance equipment, and mechanics who maintained the company’s two Cessnas. The company rented a small office and hangar space from an American army veteran who had created a successful business catering to the many North American contractors working under Plan Colombia—the half-billion-dollar-a-year Colombian component of the U.S.-funded war on drugs.
    While Plan Colombia was certainly the most expensive program in the history of U.S. relations with Colombia, a deep interest in this strategic nation runs back nearly a century. In 1903, the Colombian government refused to sign a treaty that would hand over “all rights, power and authority” of the Panama Canal to the United States in perpetuity (Panama had been a state within Colombia since the Bolivarian revolution, with varying levels of cooperation with the central government in Bogotá). With control of the canal in doubt, the United States seized the opportunity to back Panamanian separatists to fight against Colombian troops heading toward Panama City. Panama gained independence in a military junta (partially financed by the French company building the canal) on November 6, 1903. Panama’s ambassador to the United States quickly signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, granting the United States the right to build and indefinitely control the canal. The United States and Colombia repaired relations with a reconciliatory treaty in 1921, and for the rest of the century, the United States would sit squarely on the side of the Colombian government in South American political disputes, especially when it came to matters of the burgeoning communism that had made its way to the western hemisphere.

    Colombian antinarcotics police patrol a coca field while an American contractor spray plane fumigates coca crops near Tumaco, Nariño, southwest of Bogotá. September 12, 2000. Photo: APImages/Scott Dalton
.
    In April 1948, the ninth Pan-American Conference (an annual meeting of U.S. and Latin American leaders) was being presided over by the U.S. secretary of state, George C. Marshall, in Bogotá. Theconference—attended by representatives from more than a dozen countries—had two goals: to put a stop to a perceived Soviet-inspired Communist movement throughout Latin America and to form the Organization of American States (OAS), which would widen the U.S. government’s economic and political influence in South America. On the third day of the conference, popular presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was shot and killed in central Bogotá. Members of Gaitán’s Liberal party took to the streets, rioting and looting shops for weapons. The assassin