Law of the Jungle, page 9
CHAPTER 7
THREE GRINGOS
FOR LONG STRETCHES, THE TROOPS OF Vulture and Destroyer companies were punching through the snarled jungle foliage of southern Caquetá state as part of a massive operation to encircle the guerrillas holding the three American hostages. In many ways, it seemed like a death march. On some days land mines, heavy rains, and the undulating piedmont prevented them from advancing for more than a few miles. This was April 2003, and the soldiers were hungry, exhausted, and ill.
They were, however, inching steadily closer. The FARC was a mostly invisible enemy, but signs of rebel activity were everywhere. In an area known as El Coreguaje, the soldiers of Vulture Company discovered a handful of rebel laboratories stocked with piles of green coca leaves and drums of chemicals used to make cocaine. A little farther along, they came upon a hanging bridge fashioned of rope and wood planks that spanned a rain-swollen river. After careful inspection, they saw that it was booby-trapped and removed the explosives. The troops scampered across and their metal detectors began to make the whining sound that meant that rebel ordnance was buried all over this area. Clearly, there was something here the guerrillas were intent on protecting.
Then came a hail of gunfire as the men came under attack from the FARC. Eager to capture the kidnappers, Lieutenant Jorge Sanabria, the rotund, gung ho commander, wanted to press forward. But amid heavy rebel resistance, El Gordo received instructions over the radio to stay put until the seventy-five soldiers of Destroyer Company, bogged down a half mile away, caught up with his men. Sanabria told his troops to advance anyway.
“I got pissed off,” Sanabria said. “I was convinced that if they let me go ahead, we could find the three Americans.”
The FARC reacted by launching powerful homemade bombs fashioned out of cooking gas canisters and packed with nails, glass, bits of metal, and other deadly shrapnel. But the explosives were notoriously inaccurate and fell harmlessly by the wayside. After about two hours of combat, Vulture Company had fought its way to the top of a hill and the shooting suddenly stopped. The rebels had melted away. But Sanabria feared the FARC was trying to suck his men into an ambush. So he halted the advance, set up a security perimeter, and waited for Destroyer Company. While Sanabria was catching hell on the radio for his aggressive tactics, his men searched the area and discovered an abandoned guerrilla encampment, a semipermanent facility that seemed more like a rebel country club than a rustic bivouac. There was a massive kitchen, wooden hooches, and even a volleyball court outfitted with sand hauled up the hill from the nearby Pato River.
Sanabria interrogated a peasant woman who admitted that about 150 FARC rebels had occupied the area and were holding several prisoners who were monos—the local slang for people of light complexion. Sanabria also found a plastic-covered hut with reading material in English and a wooden pole marked with notches, as if someone had been counting the days. Had this been the temporary prison of the Americans?
Sanabria’s troops continued rooting around and stumbled upon a stash of rifles and ammunition as well as plastic drums filled with toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, soap, and skin cream. They also found an underground warehouse packed with camouflage uniforms, rain ponchos, bras, underwear, and flashlights. Finally, the troops had something to smile about. The booty was their first war trophy, their first concrete triumph of the two-month-long operation. Denying the enemy weapons and other provisions was nearly as important as taking rebel prisoners or running up the body count.
The grubby GIs eagerly divvied up the personal hygiene products, then stripped down to their underwear and took turns bathing in the river. Yet as they tried to scrub away the organic stench of mud, mold, and sweat from their bodies, the men fretted about their own supply line. The triple canopy forest, the torrential rains, the sketchy radio communications, the lack of helicopters, and the indifference of their superiors had the men of Vulture and Destroyer companies feeling frustrated and on their own.
It didn’t seem fair. Under pressure from Washington, the Colombian high command had gone all out for the abducted U.S. contractors. Despite critical delays on the day the Grand Caravan went down, helicopters were in the air within twenty minutes and troops were on the ground at the crash site within two hours. But when the Colombian GIs now tracking the Americans were badly in need of food and other supplies, their superior officers scrambled a fleet of…donkeys.
The officers back at battalion headquarters argued over the radio that stormy weather and the thick tree cover made a helicopter resupply effort impossible, and instead they dispatched choppers to the nearest hamlet every ten days or so and sent in the supplies with local farmers on mule trains. But sometimes the peasants were so worried about rebel reprisals that they refused the work. And as the operation dragged on and the troops marched deeper into the wild, the overloaded beasts could no longer reach them. To feed themselves, the soldiers aimed for macaws with their slingshots. They killed borugos, a kind of Amazon rodent that looks like a cross between a squirrel and a rat and is a popular source of jungle protein. They also bagged monkeys, which they would stew for hours before braising over a fire in an attempt to cook away the gamey taste. But the meat was stringy and tough and as they gnawed on the primates’ tiny arms and legs, some of the soldiers felt like they were eating their young. Others couldn’t keep anything down. They were suffering from malaria and dysentery, and dozens of troops had the Hershey squirts and were constantly dashing for the bushes. An army fights on its stomach but their guts were in full-on mutiny.
“It wasn’t normal,” said Corporal Wilson Sarmiento, the nine-year veteran from Destroyer Company. “We were very demoralized. Only an animal lives like that.”
General Carlos Alberto Ospina, the Colombian Army commander at the time, denied that Vulture and Destroyer companies had been left in the lurch. He pointed out that officers who deliberately fail to feed their troops can be court-martialed. He blamed the delays in resupply on bad weather, the shortage of helicopters, and the intrinsic army bureaucracy.
“This happens a lot in the army, but these are professional soldiers who sign up voluntarily. They know what they are getting into and they know it’s not easy,” Ospina said. “As a soldier, I went through many periods where we suffered from hunger and somehow we had to feed ourselves. Sometimes, it wasn’t because the choppers couldn’t reach us. It was because there were no choppers. And as a soldier I’ve seen much worse. Once, we had to evacuate some injured troops and we couldn’t save them because the helicopters developed mechanical problems. While they were being repaired, the soldiers bled to death.”
The battalion commander finally dispatched a chopper to El Coreguaje, but only after an NCO, who was an antiexplosives expert, stepped on a land mine and blew off part of his foot. As the badly injured sergeant screamed in pain, a handful of soldiers rushed to clear a landing pad with chainsaws and machetes. But the pilots had launched so quickly in order to save the soldier that there was no time to pack the helicopter with supplies for the rest of the troops. Once on the ground, the flight crew picked up the injured soldier and the captured guerrilla weapons but refused to evacuate any of the ailing troops. Sanabria was livid.
“We needed food, drugs, and ammunition,” Sanabria recalled. “But they said that the choppers couldn’t get in there. I said it was an outrage, that we had sick people, that we were running out of ammo, that we didn’t have anything. At least get us some food. At least get us one meal per day. I never thought the army would turn its back on us.”
WAS IT THE WATER? OR THE wild monkey? Either way, the improvised Amazon chow was playing havoc with Walter Suárez’s innards. Suárez, the soldier from Mesetas who years earlier had nearly been press-ganged into the FARC, was part of Destroyer Company, which had finally caught up to Sanabria’s men at the abandoned guerrilla encampment. Drifting in the netherworld between sleep and consciousness, Suárez twisted and turned in his hammock until he finally popped awake in the early-morning light. His stomach was about to detonate.
Suárez made his way past his colleagues in search of some privacy. Adding to the indignity of the moment, he’d run out of toilet paper, so he tore off the sleeves of a tattered T-shirt in his backpack. He squatted behind a tree and, to help balance himself, used both hands to drive his machete into the ground, but something didn’t feel right. As the blade pierced the soil, the metal struck something hard that gave off a hollow thud. Intrigued, Suárez finished his business, hitched up his pants, and began rooting around with his hands. The dirt was loose, mixed with leaves, and easy to brush away. After burrowing down about one foot, he discovered the top of a blue plastic five-gallon container. Then, he froze. Whatever the guerrillas had hidden could be booby-trapped. “I got really scared,” Suárez said. “I thought I’d be blown to bits.”
But his curiosity got the best of him. Besides, if he found another rebel arms cache, he’d win points with his superiors. Suárez pried off the lid. Like foam in a beer stein, a white substance topped the thirty-inch-tall barrel. Was it cocaine? Suárez plunged his hands into the powder, which turned out to be ant poison. But instead of finding pistols and grenades underneath the powder, he pulled out block after block of blue-and-white 20,000-peso bills.
Suárez’s heart raced. Each plastic-wrapped packet contained a thousand banknotes, or 20 million pesos—the equivalent of nearly $7,000. His wallet had never held more than petty cash, but now he was stuffing his uniform pockets with thick wads of currency. It wasn’t easy because his whole body quaked with the snap realization that he, Walter Suárez, a $44-a-week anonymous soldier condemned to a mission impossible, had just won a kind of ad hoc lottery.
There was no question that the money was the evil lucre of rebel drug deals, extortion rackets, and ransom payments made by the desperate relatives of hostages. By some estimates, such scams earned the FARC $500 million annually. And since the guerrillas couldn’t very easily open high-interest bank accounts, the rain forest became the FARC’s safety-deposit box.
But knowing that these riches were tainted didn’t stop Suárez.
“I was so happy. I’d never seen so much money,” he said. “It was like the Virgin had appeared before me.”
Divine or otherwise, some transcendental trail guide seemed to be steering the GI. Not only had Suárez survived the grueling trek into the shadowy heart of FARC-land, but the path led him into a tropical emporium where the world suddenly seemed shiny and bright and flush with possibility. In his search for a stopgap latrine, he’d found El Dorado.
Suárez took as much money as he could yet he barely made a dent in the pile. It was like drinking from a fire hydrant. So he hastily covered up the treasure chest with leaves and dirt, then staggered back to camp. Flopping into his hammock, Suárez did the math and came to some quick calculations. He’d never drag the entire contents of the barrel out of the jungle by himself without being caught. If he was going to get rich, he would have to share the wealth.
And why not? His buddies in Destroyer Company could use a boost. None of them earned enough that they even qualified to pay income taxes. Besides, as he rocked back and forth chewing it all over, Suárez was too agitated to keep the incredible news bottled up inside. He had to let the secret out. He needed advice. He needed coconspirators.
But when Suárez told two of his closest friends camped nearby, they barely stirred from their hammocks. Mierda, they said. Bullshit, pure and simple. The equatorial heat, they said, must have poached the man’s brain. Suárez grinned. Then he reached inside his backpack and carefully dropped a cluster bomb of bills into their laps.
THERE WERE APPROXIMATELY 147 VERSIONS OF what happened over the next three days because Suárez, it turned out, was not the only soldier who found the guerrilla riches. And in the fog of war, or perhaps in this case the hallucinogenic haze of an unfolding free-for-all, memories failed, tellers of the tale added and subtracted, molded and twisted. But as the novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien observed, soldiers tend to embellish their accounts with the mundane rather than the fantastic. They do so to establish credibility because in many cases, true war stories simply could not be believed.
“Often,” he wrote, “the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t because the normal stuff is necessary to believe the truly incredible craziness.” So, in the various renditions that emerged from FARC-land, the outlying details sometimes clashed, but the surreal center held.
“Each witness had his own truth. Each had a different story,” said Héctor Alirio Forero, a Bogotá attorney who later represented more than a dozen of the soldiers. “They wouldn’t tell everything that happened, not even to their lawyers.”
Camped down the hill from their brothers in Vulture, multiple soldiers from Destroyer Company began finding their own barrels of cash. And like Suárez, they couldn’t keep the secret. As word of the fantastic riches spread, more and more troops began scouring the jungle floor, hacking at the earth like overcaffeinated grave diggers. Their frantic excavations were aided by a treasure map of sorts. They noticed that the bark of certain trees was etched with symbols—“X,” “Y,” or “+”—indicating the location and position of the plastic drums. The blue barrels bulged with Colombian pesos but they also found yellow containers that were even more intriguing. They were filled with U.S. currency: twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills.
The giddy GIs quickly forgot about the search for Keith, Marc, and Tom. As Suárez later explained, they had already found three gringos: Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Benjamin Franklin.
How much was there? Months later, a report by the office of Colombia’s inspector general, which was in charge of investigating government corruption, estimated that the containers held $14 million in U.S. and Colombian currency. But in the same report, several troops testified that the final haul exceeded $43 million. One government investigator said the figure was much higher—more than $80 million.
“When I got my hands on money, I looked at it. I counted it. And I looked at it again and counted it again because I just couldn’t believe it,” said soldier Fredy Alexander Rojas. Another soldier said all the cash infused him with an overwhelming sense of liberation, “like letting a dog run free.”
Yet almost immediately, the money became a millstone. Rumors of the fantastic riches soon reached the top of the hill where the men of Vulture Company realized they were being shut out. Their true enemy was the FARC, yet now some of the GIs turned on one another, with the have-nots demanding a share from their nouveau riche colleagues.
According to one version of events, Lieutenant Fernando Mojica, commander of Destroyer, contacted Lieutenant Sanabria, the head of Vulture, on the radio and the two met halfway up the rise to devise a way to restore order. As rival officers, the two lieutenants despised each other. But in rebel-dominated patches, they had learned to work together in the name of survival. Now, Mojica realized that another nonaggression pact was in order. His men couldn’t keep all the money or the troops from Vulture would rat them out or worse. So the two officers decided to share the riches, passing out packets of pesos and dollars to all 147 men in the two companies.
Sanabria, however, painted a slightly different scene. He claimed that troops from both Vulture and Destroyer came across the buried treasure. He first suspected that his men were camped above a guerrilla ATM when his troops found a FARC notebook, its pages filled with columns of numbers. Later that evening, a soldier stopped by his hammock and told him, “I’ve got a present for you, Lieutenant.” Then he dropped several million pesos onto Sanabria’s lap. The soldier explained that he was scouring the jungle floor for rebel munitions and food when his metal detector began to whine. As the GI brushed away the dirt to uncover and deactivate the land mine, he found a barrel of cash. He led Sanabria to the spot. Later, the lieutenant gathered ten of his best soldiers and informed them of the find. “If there’s one,” he said, “there must be more.” And there were.
“It was like what Ali Baba says: ‘Open sesame,’” Sanabria said. “There was such happiness. Many of my men had never seen one million pesos (about $350) together at the same time.”
Sharing the riches seemed in order because of the 147 soldiers, many of whom were pulling guard or KP duty, only about 30 GIs actually dug money out of the ground. No one had the vaguest idea yet how much was at stake. Under Colombian law, had the soldiers reported their find, they would have been entitled to keep between ten and thirty percent of the final haul to split among them. But as the tally rose neither Sanabria nor Mojica, the two commanding officers, seriously contemplated doing the right thing.
Under this unique set of circumstances, the right thing could be explosive. They were on their own and out of touch. No one was looking. Euphoria mingled with expectation, tension, and suspicion. Sanabria figured that if they turned in the money, higher-ranking officers would give his soldiers three-day passes, then start filling their own pockets. Wasn’t that what always happened? It was like that scene in the Clint Eastwood flick Kelly’s Heroes, where the preppy American captain warns Big Joe and his exhausted foot soldiers that the punishment for looting is death even as he considers the logistics of loading a German yacht aboard a B-17.
“You know how the story goes,” said Wilson Sarmiento, an NCO from Destroyer Company who found one of the barrels. “If we would have reported the money, much of it would have been ‘lost.’ If the military finds one billion pesos, they report that they found 400 million.”
Sanabria thought about his men, how they all came from poor families and had given everything to the army only to be abandoned. In that light, the cash was karmic payback. He and Mojica also realized that demanding scores of hungry and exhausted yet suddenly elated troops to return what they’d fairly and squarely found in the jungle could spark a backlash. One of them could end up “eating dirt,” Colombian slang for getting fragged.
