Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce

idea of what they could get for each hostage. For Ochoa and his brother, fifteen days passed, and they still had no idea what the guerrillas would ask for their release, so Ochoa decided to push the issue with commander Octavio. The commander had been part of the group who kidnapped him, and Ochoa had watched as Octavio shot their bodyguard with an R-15 rifle. Ochoa recalled the events surrounding his kidnapping in a 2006 court testimony. “I asked Commander Octavio whom we needed to speak to about the kidnapping, about accelerating the process. He was emphatic in telling me that the person who had to make the decision about the negotiations and the demands was Commander Simón Trinidad.”
    Ochoa was relieved and optimistic. “Everyone in Valledupar knew that Ricardo [Palmera] had become a FARC member, and that he was using the name of Simón Trinidad.” Ochoa asked Octavio if Trinidad was still with the Forty-first Front of the FARC, which Ochoa knew was the group of guerrillas controlling the region where he was beingheld. Octavio replied that, yes, he was. To Ochoa, it seemed like a terrific stroke of luck. “I was very happy to get the information that it was Simón Trinidad who had to make the decision, because we had been friends and known each other well when he was my colleague at the university and he was general manager of Banco del Comercio. At that time, my waterworks company had accounts with that bank.” The two men taught in the same department and saw each other quite frequently. “We would meet either at the administrative offices of the bank or at the company, and we would talk on the phone frequently. We did not have a social relationship, because he belonged to a socioeconomic stratum that was much higher than mine.”
    Many would say that it was his social status and former banking career that gave Trinidad inside information into which members of the Valledupar elite were the biggest fish for FARC kidnappers. Colombia’s daily newspaper,
El Tiempo
, reported:
    A few days after Trinidad went to the FARC in 1987, the most wealthy men of Valledupar carried a blank check in their pockets. It was christened “the Simón check.” It was a sort of insurance policy to prevent oneself from becoming a guest at the “Sierra Nevada Hilton” or “Serranía de Perijá Hilton,” tragicomic names with which the people of [the department of] César baptized the FARC camps.
    Trinidad was reported to have stolen thirty million pesos ($125,000) from the Banco del Comercio before he left, along with financial records. The newspaper
El Espectador
quoted the governor of the department of César, Hernando Molina, in a 2003 article: “Extortion and kidnapping appeared like a plague in Valledupar, naturally orchestrated by Palmera.” Molina told
The New York Times
, “Because he knew us, he could say how much each of us had. It was a bill come due, but we never understood why, because we had never done anything to him.” The charges that Trinidad used stolen bank records to kidnap his former friends and colleagues were vehemently denied by Jaime Palmera, Trinidad’s eldest brother: “One didn’t have to be a manager of a bank to know who had money in Valledupar at the end of theeighties and beginning of the nineties.” Jaime was harshly critical of the FARC’s policy of kidnapping, and he had been devastated by his brother’s decision to enter the ranks of the guerrilla group.
    Although public opinion mostly considered a friendship with Trinidad to be a liability, Ochoa still believed that his relationship with his former colleague would help free him. “I asked to speak with him, because I thought that would facilitate the negotiations greatly,” he says. Ochoa asked one of the FARC captors, a man named Dumar, to speak with Trinidad, and Ochoa was close enough to hear the radio transmission. Ochoa believed he