way into the station just yesterday morning.’
I push myself up in my seat. ‘Wait, where was this?’
‘Here.’ She gives me a flat look. ‘He was here for Beck Chambers.’
The Rescuer
Tobias Kender
(Originally published in K&R Today )
They were building a road, a swathe of asphalt that cut through the blasted desert lands of northern Colombia. Night had begun to creep closer, the searing blue sky staining crimson as the sun began to set over the plains. They should have finished by now. It was always a good idea to be out of the way by the time evening came, to head back to the bare-scrubbed hosteria with its paper-thin walls, preternaturally narrow beds. But on that day there had been a delay, a problem with the materials. And so they were stuck there, on the plains of La Guajira, as the sun began to set.
You have to wonder if they were twitchy. If they were looking over their shoulders, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Colombia’s reputation as the kidnap capital of the world is hard earned, with more than 3,500 recorded cases in the year 2000. Things have settled down a little since then, though, and with the peace accord between the government and FARC, kidnappings dropped to a somewhat less terrifying level of 299 in 2013.
Not that those statistics helped. Not on that day. As the sun began to sink behind Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the workers of Baeliss Construction noticed a dust storm approaching from the north. Only it wasn’t a dust storm. It was a convoy. Three pick-ups. Innumerable men with guns. They tumbled out on to the dusty plain, waving their AK-47s in the air, shouts staccato and unintelligible to the foreign workers who only wanted to build a road.
They took five in the end. Five men, all but one UK nationals. Loaded them on to the pick-ups and took off into the setting sun.
There was a time when a Colombian kidnapping was a long-term arrangement. When a victim, often a well-targeted wealthy businessman, would be picked up going about his usual day, would be taken into some remote jungle setting and held, for weeks, months, sometimes years. The trend, however, has shifted. With the reduced role of FARC, the Colombians are seeing more and more kidnaps by organised criminal gangs. They want money and they want it quickly. Secuestro exprés is a thing now – express kidnappings that happen in a flash and are over just as quickly, leaving their victims a couple of million pesos worse off.
But this wasn’t that. There was no quick trip to the bank for these five men, no hurried payment of their life savings for a speedy release. They were simply gone.
What came next was what comes next in many of these cases. A flush of barely organised chaos. A flurry of calls to the UK, insurance companies scrambling, negotiators hitting the ground with barely a second to figure out what country they are in.
If you ask anyone, they will tell you that there was a plan. That there was always a plan. If you’re going to do business in one of the kidnapping hotspots of the world, you need a plan, right?
The first step involved a company called the Cole Group, a boutique kidnap and ransom consultancy firm with a powerhouse reputation. Its founders, Ed and Selena Cole, have built quite a name for themselves throughout the industry.
And so the call was made, and within thirty-six hours of the kidnapping, Selena Cole, a psychologist specialising in kidnap and negotiation psychology, was on the ground in La Guajira. She doesn’t look like someone who belongs in the murky world of K&R. You could more see her teaching on a university campus, or tending to your tonsillitis in her GP surgery, than sitting in a windowless office in Baeliss Construction’s Colombian HQ running a negotiation.
‘It’s always a tense time when you begin a negotiation with a kidnapper that you have never dealt with before. You don’t know them. They don’t know you. So in the beginning, it’s all about putting them at ease,
I push myself up in my seat. ‘Wait, where was this?’
‘Here.’ She gives me a flat look. ‘He was here for Beck Chambers.’
The Rescuer
Tobias Kender
(Originally published in K&R Today )
They were building a road, a swathe of asphalt that cut through the blasted desert lands of northern Colombia. Night had begun to creep closer, the searing blue sky staining crimson as the sun began to set over the plains. They should have finished by now. It was always a good idea to be out of the way by the time evening came, to head back to the bare-scrubbed hosteria with its paper-thin walls, preternaturally narrow beds. But on that day there had been a delay, a problem with the materials. And so they were stuck there, on the plains of La Guajira, as the sun began to set.
You have to wonder if they were twitchy. If they were looking over their shoulders, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Colombia’s reputation as the kidnap capital of the world is hard earned, with more than 3,500 recorded cases in the year 2000. Things have settled down a little since then, though, and with the peace accord between the government and FARC, kidnappings dropped to a somewhat less terrifying level of 299 in 2013.
Not that those statistics helped. Not on that day. As the sun began to sink behind Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the workers of Baeliss Construction noticed a dust storm approaching from the north. Only it wasn’t a dust storm. It was a convoy. Three pick-ups. Innumerable men with guns. They tumbled out on to the dusty plain, waving their AK-47s in the air, shouts staccato and unintelligible to the foreign workers who only wanted to build a road.
They took five in the end. Five men, all but one UK nationals. Loaded them on to the pick-ups and took off into the setting sun.
There was a time when a Colombian kidnapping was a long-term arrangement. When a victim, often a well-targeted wealthy businessman, would be picked up going about his usual day, would be taken into some remote jungle setting and held, for weeks, months, sometimes years. The trend, however, has shifted. With the reduced role of FARC, the Colombians are seeing more and more kidnaps by organised criminal gangs. They want money and they want it quickly. Secuestro exprés is a thing now – express kidnappings that happen in a flash and are over just as quickly, leaving their victims a couple of million pesos worse off.
But this wasn’t that. There was no quick trip to the bank for these five men, no hurried payment of their life savings for a speedy release. They were simply gone.
What came next was what comes next in many of these cases. A flush of barely organised chaos. A flurry of calls to the UK, insurance companies scrambling, negotiators hitting the ground with barely a second to figure out what country they are in.
If you ask anyone, they will tell you that there was a plan. That there was always a plan. If you’re going to do business in one of the kidnapping hotspots of the world, you need a plan, right?
The first step involved a company called the Cole Group, a boutique kidnap and ransom consultancy firm with a powerhouse reputation. Its founders, Ed and Selena Cole, have built quite a name for themselves throughout the industry.
And so the call was made, and within thirty-six hours of the kidnapping, Selena Cole, a psychologist specialising in kidnap and negotiation psychology, was on the ground in La Guajira. She doesn’t look like someone who belongs in the murky world of K&R. You could more see her teaching on a university campus, or tending to your tonsillitis in her GP surgery, than sitting in a windowless office in Baeliss Construction’s Colombian HQ running a negotiation.
‘It’s always a tense time when you begin a negotiation with a kidnapper that you have never dealt with before. You don’t know them. They don’t know you. So in the beginning, it’s all about putting them at ease,
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