Colombia kidnappers raise Capitol Hill ire

Insight on the News, Nov 24, 1997 by Jamie Dettmer

Guerrillas and other paramilitary units seize thousands of hostages every year -- frequently choosing American and European targets. Congressional Republicans say it's time the United States took notice.

We can only hope the Americans are still alive but...." The Colombian police colonel trailed off. His eyes remained fixed on the meager page of intelligence in his hand concerning six people being held hostage by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Latin America's longest-running insurgency and a smaller leftist group, the National Liberation Army, or ELN.

"Any information you can get would help," added Col. Hector Garcia-Guzman. "We don't know where they're being held or in what conditions, or if...." Again he stopped himself.

In the 1980s, extensive press coverage was generated by the kidnappings of Americans in Lebanon. Mideast hostage-taking was a major political issue. But for Protestant missionaries David Mankins, Mark Rich and Rick Tenenoff, who were abducted by FARC on Jan. 31, 1993, while working on the Panamanian-Colombia border, there's been scant media coverage of their plight and almost no U.S. efforts to secure their release. The same for three other kidnapped Americans, who Insight has been asked not to name to avoid upsetting ongoing release negotiations with the guerrillas.

Twenty-three Americans have been taken hostage in Colombia since 1994 -- 12 were released following ransom payments, five were murdered and three escaped or eventually were released without a ransom payment.

Neglected for years, hostage-taking by Colombian guerrillas now is set to hit the political big time. GOP members of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, outraged by what they describe as the "lack of attention" to the problem by the Clinton administration and the press, are planning to hold hearings about the plight of Mankins, Rich, Tenenoff and three other Americans held by Colombian guerrillas. It is a bid, panel staffers say, to embarrass the administration into exploring ways to secure the Americans' freedom. Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, the committee chairman, also is calling on Central and South American leaders to provide assistance -- and he's asked the Vatican, the Red Cross and Amnesty International for help too.

As part of an extensive report on Colombia and the growing strength of FARC in the Andean nation (see special section, p. 36), Insight has learned from Colombian police chiefs and private security experts that the kidnapping crisis in the country likely is to worsen and that Americans as well as Europeans increasingly are being targeted by hostage-taking leftist guerrillas and common criminals.

According to a House International Relations Committee staff report written after an October fact-finding trip to Colombia, a lack of firm U.S. response to guerrilla hostage-taking may have worsened the dangers for Americans working in Bogota and elsewhere in that South American country. The report claims that FARC, which receives an estimated 40 percent of its billion-dollar annual income from ran Freedom: Europe embark from a after their ransoms and ELN may have been emboldened by the lack of an outcry from Washington to the murders of three American hostages -- Steve Welsh, Tim Van Dyke and Frank Pescatori. "The lack of a strong public response by the U.S. government may have placed American officials and private citizens in Colombia at greater risk," says the report.

Rich, Tenenoff and Mankins, the longest-held U.S. captives, were working for the Florida-based New Tribes Mission in Panama when abducted. All three were engaged in translating the Bible into local Indian languages. Recent reports from Colombia indicate the three still may be alive. Costa Rican diplomats who've been in contact with FARC were reassured a few weeks ago that the missionaries were "well."

The conditions under which the missionaries are being held are unlikely to be good. According to Colombia's Kidnapping Industry, a book by Bogota academic Lia Posada, hostages get no medical treatment -- even when seriously ill, are chained to trees, sleep on coarse beds made from branches called "ramadas" and generally are fed only a cup of broth in the morning and a cup of rice at night. Depending on the FARC squad holding them, they can be "psychologically maltreated," beaten and face constant leering threats of execution. Ransoms run anything from $100,000 to $1 million.

Kidnapping numbers have increased rapidly during the last decade. In 1987, 259 kidnappings were reported to Colombian authorities and 1,717 in 1991. Between 1990 and 1995, 7,771 people were officially reported kidnapped -- of these, 804 were executed by their abductors and 2,745 still are missing. Colombian academics and journalists, though, argue the official figures are way off and the numbers should be multiplied by 10.

FARC, which has been known to buy kidnapped victims from common urban criminals, has specialized units in hostage-taking. Most of their kidnapped victims are held deep in the Amazon rain forests and, according to Garcia-Guzman, close to FARC-run drug labs. Obtaining intelligence on the whereabouts of hostages is difficult, he says. "They move them around regularly."