Inside Colombia's War on Kidnapping
The State Department is helping train elite police units to go after kidnappers and rescue hostages
BOGOTÁ—Fernando Araujo has a unique view of the vast strides Colombia has made to improve its security situation. He was a captive of left-wing rebels for six years, held deep in the jungle after being kidnapped while serving as the country's development minister. When he was seized in 2000, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC, was quite comfortable—and very well supplied. "My first two years, they gave me water bottles, fresh fruit, juices," Araujo says. "There was no presence of police." Over time, as the military moved into FARC territory, food supplies dried up and Araujo was cut back to only two daily servings of thin soup, seasoned with a little salt and rice. Finally, after six years, he escaped during a rescue operation, walking for a week through the jungle to a Colombian military camp.
Today, Araujo serves as foreign minister and one of the chief salesmen for Colombia's successful battle against the kidnapping epidemic that paralyzed the country only a few years ago. Once the most visible symbol of Colombia's troubles and a key revenue source for the nation's guerrillas, kidnappings have plummeted from a high of 3,572 victims in 2000 to 521 in 2007, according to the Ministry of Defense. The sharp drop has been driven by several factors, including much larger security forces that have put the guerrillas on the run. "In the past, there were some areas with no police presence, so FARC, the prime kidnappers, had areas where they could keep 20 people at a time, like a hotel," says Col. Umberto Guatibonza, the commander of the police wing of the elite antikidnapping forces known as GAULA. "We occupied those areas."
Colombian officials also credit an important but little-known program, run by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, that has trained more than 600 GAULA members. (GAULA is the Spanish acronym for Unified Action Groups for Personal Liberty.) The DS training, offered under its Anti-Terrorism Assistance program, has focused in particular on rescuing hostages. "Before, there was the will and the people, but you want to turn it into something professional, especially for how you do a careful rescue," says Colombian Vice Defense Minister Sergio Jaramillo. "When it gets to the nitty-gritty, you need expertise."
The $3.4 million ATA effort is only a tiny part of the broader Plan Colombia, the U.S. aid program that has funneled some $5 billion in aid to Colombia since 2000 under the aegis of the U.S. war on drugs. Plan Colombia, the bulk of which goes toward the Colombian military, has a decidedly mixed record when it comes to fighting drugs (overall production has remained relatively steady). "For the United States, it was always about narcotics," says Arlene Tickner, who teaches at the National University of Colombia. "For the Colombian government, the interest was born out of a need to combat an insurgency."
And indeed, the aid effort has helped the Colombians turn the tide against the FARC guerrillas. U.S. officials estimate that FARC, which numbered some 40,000 fighters at its peak, has dwindled to about 9,000. What only recently looked more like an intractable civil war now seems, perhaps, manageable. "The Colombia of 2008 might as well be a different country on a different planet in a different galaxy," says William Brownfield, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia.
" Like a sniffing dog. " While much of the U.S. counterdrug effort remains controversial—particularly aerial spraying to eradicate Colombia's vast coca crops—the more tightly focused ATA program is praised by Colombian officials, as well as by some government critics. What started as an anti-kidnapping effort expanded dramatically after September 11 into specialized counterterrorism training including dignitary protection and computer forensics.
In Colombia, the main training effort has been quite tactical. "Before, we were like a sniffing dog trying to find the person, but when you found the hostage, you didn't know what to do," says Sgt. Carlos Humberto, a senior GAULA trainer. "Now, we plan more." The six-week course starts with weapons training and moves on to specialized instruction for snipers and breachers (who break through doors and windows). The breachers practice on all kinds of doors—metal doors with metal hinges, wooden doors with metal hinges, roll-down metal doors—using both explosives and brute force.
Then, the instructors turn to operational planning and tactics. "We have to tactically train them to walk for days, set up camp secretly, get close enough to do surveillance, and breach," says Mark Hunter, DS's assistant director for training. Rescues are carefully scripted, with each officer assigned a specific role, and drills are run repeatedly. "In basic training, you have to discriminate whether the person is armed, as well as different faces," says Tulio Francisco, a GAULA officer who heads the Colombian instructors. "If a person doesn't have a weapon, we have to learn to control our shooting."
The centerpiece of the effort is a U.S.-built "shoothouse" on a police base in Sibate, just outside Bogotá. The custom building is a maze of eight rooms, with a catwalk above where instructors watch GAULA units train on different rescue scenarios below. The thick walls that separate the rooms are filled with sand to stop the live ammunition used during the final exercises. "When the team hits, they use close combat, speed, the factor of surprise, and violence," says Capt. Giovanny Hernandez Palacios, a GAULA unit leader. "The most important thing is the safety of the hostage."
Handover. So far, 21 of the 32 GAULA units—some 600 soldiers and police officers—have completed the course, and the 22nd team is just finishing up. U.S. officials proudly point out that Colombia is taking over responsibility for running the ATA programs itself, a transition that began late last year. By 2009, Colombia is expected to fund the entire tactical portion of the training. "One reason why it's been such a success is that the Colombians have taken everything we've given them in almost a personal manner," says Victor DeWindt, a DS and U.S. Secret Service veteran who serves as the ATA program manager in Colombia. "They want to be brought up to the current standards."
The results have been dramatic. None of the ATA-trained units have lost a hostage during rescue operations. Colombian forces rescued 136 hostages last year, and only one hostage was killed during an operation conducted by a GAULA unit that had not yet undergone training. Guatibonza describes one recent case in which a 16-year-old boy was kidnapped from his Bogotá home. Fortunately, the boy was able to hide a cellphone in his underwear and managed to send a text message to his family. A GAULA unit was able to track the signal, along with several intercepted ransom calls, and was able to locate the house where he was being held. But before staging a rescue, the GAULA team found a nearby house with a similar layout and ran some practice drills. Fifteen days after the kidnapping, the rescue went off without a hitch, and four kidnappers were arrested. "We had," says Guatibonza, "a happy ending."
Colombian trainers have already taken over all of the teaching duties from U.S. instructors (who were all former law enforcement officers). As the Colombians send the remainder of the GAULA units through the program, they also plan to offer training to some of their Latin American counterparts, including Brazil. But Colombian officials are disappointed that U.S. officials are not replacing the anti-kidnapping training with other specialized efforts. Diplomatic security officials note that they remain involved, helping GAULA units design and install a new case management system to centralize all the data on kidnapping and suspects for the first time.
Places to hide. Kidnapping remains a problem. A number of hostages—U.S. intelligence agencies estimate some 750—remain in captivity. Many are middle-class Colombians, but there are also several dozen high-profile captives, like Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian woman and former Colombian presidential candidate. The guerrillas can still find places to hide in Colombia's jungle, which is almost the size of France. "That's the part of the territory the bad guys still know more about than us," says Colombia's Vice President Francisco Santos. "They have been there for 45 years, and we have been there systematically only for five."
Still, with kidnappings having fallen dramatically, the overall security picture in Colombia is much brighter. "An inherent part of security is the ability of the ordinary Colombian citizen to feel secure in their ability to walk the streets without being kidnapped," says Ambassador Brownfield. "Without that sense of security, they are not going to cooperate on counternarcotics efforts or cooperate with the government on fighting guerrillas." In the past two years, many Colombians who fled abroad have returned, and the cities are once again very lively at night. "Security allowed us to regain the trust of our investors," says Araujo, the foreign minister. "That causes economic growth, and the economic growth results in further resources for the nation."
He may be overstating the case slightly. FARC remains a potent organization, and Colombia has been widely criticized by human-rights groups for the tactics it is using to enforce security, particularly a spate of alleged extrajudicial executions. The country also remains very poor and handicapped by narcotics trafficking.
Even critics of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe concede that he is taking on the FARC and right-wing paramilitaries more successfully than his predecessors. But Luis Eduardo Celis, a consultant for the Corporación Nuevo Argo Iris, a nonprofit that advocates for a negotiated solution with the guerrillas, says that Uribe is ignoring deepening economic gaps in Colombia that could eventually give new life to the guerrillas. "There is a serious social conflict," he says, "that has not been resolved."
advertisement
