Tuesday, 10th November, Cali: FARC kidnap victim
We got a call around 11am from the assistant to Sigifredo Lopez, saying that we should go to his house immediately for an interview with him and his wife, Patricia.
Elation.
I’m very aware that this blog doesn’t – can’t – convey what we do in between driving and interviewing. It makes for dull reading, but it’s very very hard work. I mentioned briefly that in Bogota, Mike had found the name of a Colombian charity which works with kidnap victims. He wrote them a long email in Spanish, we then went to their offices to try and get a meeting with their head of marketing. Once she’s listened patiently to our story, she tentatively suggested that Sigifredo Lopez might be interested in participating, as he is familiar with the media and he is arguably Colombia’s most famous FARC kidnap victim. We left her on a high, but then heard nothing back, she phoned three days later to ask if we were with the BBC (always dubious… though we tried to pitch the idea of our film to the BBC, they weren’t interested in commissioning it – they did say come back with the finished thing, but this far from means that we are “from the BBC”), then nothing: emails bounced, phones weren’t answered, and then she was out of the office. So we went to Sigifredo’s site: www.sigifredolopez.org, on there was the name of the press contact, so we tried her, further stalling, then the 11am phonecall.
So we got an interview.
Sigifredo Lopez is from Cali, a town around 400km southwest of Bogota. He background is in law, and in 2002, he was working as a legislator for the government. It was a regular day at work when suddenly, men in army uniform ran into the building telling everyone that there was a bomb, and they needed to evacuate the place. So people filed out of the building onto a waiting bus. When the doors of the bus were closed, the “army” officers identified themselves as FARC soldiers and informed their passengers that they were being kidnapped. And so the nightmare began.
12 men were driven deep into the forest (outside its towns, Colombia is basically virtually impenetrable forest). They stayed in no one place for longer than 2 or 3 days, moving from camp to camp, intent on never being discovered by the outside world. The goverment doesn’t even know where to start in their search.
Sigifredo was a loud and disruptive captive. He made trouble for the guards, and so they took him away from the rest of the group and placed him solitary confinement: an area away from everyone else, but within the same camp. It was during this time that one of the guards heard a noise in the undergrowth, and the guards became nervous. This fear drove them to shoot the group of 11 captives. All 11 died. Sigifredo, kept away from the rest, heard the loud gunfire, but it was only weeks later that he found out that the rest of the group were no longer alive, by long-wave radio.
He was taken prisoner in 2002, and released 7 years later in February 2009. The images of his release are images of the power of human hope, and are some of the most moving and powerful I have ever seen. His two sons, who he had last seen aged 12 and 14, had grown into men in his long absence and who now hugged their father with pure joy. He has become a symbol of the fight for peace in Colombia, and now wants to run for government to take his message to the largest audience. He is also writing a book about his experience.
He still lives in Cali, with his mother, Nelly, his wife, Patricia, and his two sons, Sergio and Lucas. But now he has 3 bodyguards who go with him everywhere. We arrive at his house and are greeted by his mother. We sit and wait for something to happen. We’d been told to get there for midday, but it’s just us and his mother for 20 minutes, until his wife, Patricia arrives. 15 minutes later, Sigifredo returns. The thing that strikes me immediately is that he is just a guy. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, not least because we’d been so excited to get this interview, but he’s a guy with a warm smile, a kind air and a tendency to sit comfortably in his chair. It was a pretty powerful way to feel at the beginning of the interview. This wasn’t a Terry Waite-style strong, silent sage who has God, this was just a man, the kind of guy who it would be great to get a beer with. He’s funny, he laughs, he’s a very interesting conversationalist. It makes me feel that this could happen to anyone.
He comes in, has a lot of energy. By his own admission, he’s just excited to be alive. Deadlines, stress, nothing matters all that much to him now – he has survived hell and nothing can compare to that. We explain our project, and he starts talking, excited. He had was allowed few books in the jungle, but one of them was an English dictionary which he read in minute detail. He has a very impressive vocabulary as a result, but laments not being able to create sentences, and his accent, never having learnt to speak it.
There is some confusion on our part about lunch. Sigifredo has evidently come home for lunch, and frying sounds and smells from the kitchen make it seem like lunch is on its way. So we decide that we will wait until after lunch to do the interview. We have a great chat with Sigifredo, who talks about everything on his mind – and we’re acutely aware that we need him to save this for the actual interview.
The best way to get a great interview, we have found, is to arrive and start rapidly. People are much more candid with total strangers, bizarrely, and the energy of the act of meeting buoys the entire interview. Introductions are always filled with laughter (because of the folly of traversing the entire length of the Americas on a motorbike, voluntary MRIs, the polygamists and the porn stars that we have met, etc) which is easy to carry on into the interview. If we’re going to have a meal, we tend to have it afterwards, if at all.
Well, lunch is being prepared. Do we get 15 mins of interview, then continue after lunch, thus interrupting the flow? Or do we hold out, make small talk over lunch then do the whole thing afterwards, even though Sigifredo has to leave fairly soon after lunch? It’s a difficult one to call, but we decide to go for the latter. We have a delicious lunch with the entire family (minus one son) and the bodyguards and some friends who have wandered in, Mike and I try to keep the conversation going without exhausting interview questions, and then eventually, an hour later, we sit down to interview.
Our sadness is that the energy has changed. Everyone is in the post-lunch torpor, not helped by the intense heat of the afternoon and the broken A/C. Sigifredo’s eyes are half on the clock, and we know that we don’t have as much time as we’d like.
That said, we did get a good interview with him. Sigifredo and Patricia’s situation has to be the most intense imposed upon a couple by external factors that we have seen on this trip, if not recent global history. Patricia, over the entire 7 year period of Sigifredo’s absence, received 3 notifications that he was still alive. 2 towards the beginning, 1 later. As she recalls the time while he was away and she was left to raise her two sons, praying that he was still alive, and largely forgotten by the state, she cries.
It’s very rare that couples where one member has endured a kidnapping remain together after release. Ingrid Betancourt is no longer with her spouse, the 3 US men who were with her are no longer with their wives.
As Patricia puts it: “I’m not the same Patricia, he’s not the same Sigifredo”. They are having to get to know each other all over again. An act which takes immense patience and love. What a case study in the power of love to heal, to restore, to be worth waiting for. We leave amazed by the human spirit.
