The tropical prison lies in a muddy clearing deep in the southern Colombian jungle, surrounded by a barrier of rough-hewn logs and close to a wide, swift river. Scattered around the compound are a dozen simple tents—plastic tarpaulins supported by bamboo poles, with hard wooden pallets on which the prisoners and their guards sleep. There's a volleyball net, a meeting place for Catholic masses and English classes, an outdoor kitchen where rice and beans, river fish, and wild pigs are cooked in cast-iron pots. Outside the barricade, camouflage-clad guerrillas with AK-47s patrol day and night in five concentric circles extending deep into the wilderness.
For the three American hostages serving indeterminate sentences in this equatorial Alcatraz, the day begins at dawn, when guards—all insurgent units of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong Marxist rebel army—unlock the steel shackles that wind around their necks and bind them to one another. The hostages are Tom Howes, a quiet 54-year-old pilot and veteran of Latin American drug wars; Keith Stansell, a rakish 43-year-old ex-Marine mechanic and bear hunter; and Marc Gonsalves, a gung-ho 35-year-old former Air Force intelligence officer. As employees of Northrop Grumman, the giant U.S. defense contractor, they were on a surveillance mission five years ago that went horribly wrong. And in a fate that might not have befallen them had they been part of the U.S. military that trained two of them—and whose aims their surveillance work served—they have become America's longest-held hostages still in captivity, with no end to their ordeal in sight.
In 2001, the Bush administration was ramping up U.S. initiatives in Colombia. But the war on terror quickly supplanted the war on drugs as a White House focus, and these three men got caught up in the shifting priorities. In the White House's view, however, the FARC uses terrorist tactics and therefore its demands are nonnegotiable. Complicating the diplomacy is another hostage whom the guerrillas consider their most valuable bargaining chip: Ingrid Betancourt, 45, a former Colombian presidential candidate and the sole female prisoner in the compound, who was captured during a fact-finding mission into rebel-held territory in early 2002.
Other governments have pushed for a more flexible approach. This spring, one of Nicolas Sarkozy's first official acts as president of France was a phone call to Colombian president álvaro Uribe, in which the French leader urged the hard-line, never-negotiate Colombian head of state to make a release of FARC prisoners. (After all, Betancourt spent the first 20 years of her life in Paris and has dual French-Colombian citizenship.) In August, Venezuelan leftist strongman Hugo Chávez, in another bid to build his international profile, announced his own initiative to get the hostages out. But mostly it's been left to the Colombians themselves to find a way to end the kidnapping epidemic. In its 40-year quest for a Marxist-Leninist state, the FARC has seized thousands of prisoners, and the group is just one of many Colombian factions employing this tactic. On a recent visit to Bogotá, I sat down with Vice President Francisco Santos Calderón, a former newspaper editor who once spent eight months in the 1990s chained to a bed as a hostage of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Asked whether there was any chance that the government would risk sending troops to extract the hostages, Santos said cautiously, "The government cannot close the door on rescue."
