Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce Page B

requested, such as cell phones with prepaid cards, batteries, and medicine. But she had no choice other than to make the trip each time they requested her to do so. “The several occasions that I went up, they would ask me for something.Sometimes they would leave a list down below. I even sent medicine for Elías for his high blood pressure, because he suffers from high blood pressure, and that worried me.”
    After several meetings, Octavio told Medina that he had participated in the kidnapping of her husband, that the two Ochoa brothers were being held in a hostage camp, and that they were alive and doing all right. “And that was when he told me that Professor Ricardo [Palmera] was also in that front. That made me very happy. He was my teacher—my professor for four semesters—teaching me Colombian economics and economic history. We had friends in common at the university, and I also knew him as the head of the bank. I knew his family, all his siblings, brothers and sisters, and I knew his wife, Margarita.” Medina felt very strongly that her many connections to Trinidad would help. “I always felt that he was my way out—that he was the person from whom I was going to obtain Elías’s release.” Medina asked Octavio to facilitate a conversation with Trinidad.
    Months later, Medina heard a rumor that her husband and his brother had been killed. After several more fruitless trips, she found herself at the meeting with Octavio in the pouring rain. “I was determined, and he realized that I wasn’t going to budge,” says Medina. When the rain lightened up a bit, Octavio came out of the tent and walked toward Medina. “That’s when he told me he was going to help me; that he was going to ask for authorization from Commander Simón to get the proof of life.” Octavio went back to the tent and began to speak over the radio. He used some code words, and at first Medina didn’t understand, but she moved closer to the tent, where she could hear. Medina heard Octavio call Trinidad by name. “He [Octavio] said that I was insisting on the proof of life, and that I was getting very annoying.” And then she heard the voice of her former professor come through over the radio: “Yeah, tell her that we’ll give it to her in two weeks.”
    Two weeks later, Medina again went to see Octavio and received the proof of life (the exact contents of the proof of life were never reported). “On the same day that I got the proof of life, we were also told that we needed to pay a million dollars. I held my head, and I started crying. I was saying, ‘We don’t have that money.’ And I askedOctavio, ‘Why are you talking about
dollars?
You don’t like Americans.’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s a million dollars.’ After they said it was going to be a million dollars, I anguished because it was unreachable, unobtainable.” For some time, Medina heard nothing more.
    â€œFinally, one day, Octavio called me on the cell phone, and even though I had insisted to talk to Simón Trinidad, I understood that that wasn’t going to be possible, because they were asking me for money—lots of money. They said the agreement was reached; they said it would be one hundred million pesos [seventy thousand dollars]. And I said to him, ‘We don’t have that money,’ and he said, ‘If you don’t have the money, send two coffins, because we’re going to kill him.’ It must have been God that gave me the strength. I said to him, ‘Kill him, eat him, and rot with him, because I don’t have that money.’”
    Again, Medina agonized during a long, deafening silence from the guerrillas, at which time the tragedy touched everyone in her family, even the youngest members. Her six-year-old son was having nightmares, and Medina appealed to País Libre (a Colombian foundation that offers help to the