A Piece of Boyhood Is Stolen

SOGAMOSO, Colombia —  The guerrilla swung the boy up on his shoulders in the cold mountain air.

“Come on,” he said, looking up at the child. “There’s a big animal in the woods that gives presents to children.”

Then the guerrilla and 3-year-old Oscar Ricaurte disappeared into the fog.

The boy’s mother, Leticia, could not speak. She could not move. Her arms hung limp. When will I next hold my son? she thought.

A female guerrilla commander barked an order: “It’s time to go. Move it.” Leticia climbed in the back of a four-wheel-drive jeep. As it rattled down the dirt road, she sobbed uncontrollably.

For months, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country’s largest rebel group, had held Leticia and Oscar for ransom. When negotiations bogged down, the guerrillas sent Leticia home in hopes she would push to speed things up. They kept Oscar.

As months passed after her March release, Leticia fought to hold on to that last vision of her son, like a dream that shifts and fades after waking. Every few weeks, the guerrillas called her and her husband, Gonzalo. They asked for as much as $100,000 in ransom, an impossible sum for a family making $12,000 a year.

Twice the couple reached a deal with the guerrillas. Two times they paid the price agreed on. And two times the guerrillas kept the boy anyway, demanding more.

“You had better save the money you have,” the callers told them once last spring. “You can use it to pay for the suit your boy will wear at his funeral when we send him back to you in a bag.”

Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, who have been battling to seize power for nearly four decades, have made kidnapping into a lucrative business. They are believed responsible for at least two-thirds of the nation’s estimated 3,000 annual abductions -- half the reported kidnappings in the world. Police believe the groups make $150 million a year from ransom money.

In the last few years, the rebels have increasingly targeted children. In 1997, fewer than 100 children were kidnapped. In 2002, the last year for which complete statistics are available, the number was nearly 400.

Kids are easier to snatch than businessmen surrounded by bodyguards. They pose little risk of escape. Families want the kidnappings ended quickly. And parents will pay nearly any price for their children.

Most parents pay and get their children back. But not all. Many children have been held for years, forgetting that they ever had another family. Some have been killed.

Leticia and Gonzalo fought to keep up hope, even when Oscar’s birthday came and went. Even when the calls stopped after the army launched an attack in the area where the guerrillas were holding the boy. Even when spring turned to summer and summer to fall.

They focused on Christmas. It would be nearly a year since the kidnapping. They hoped the guerrillas would free the boy for the holiday.

“You cannot imagine what this is like,” Gonzalo said earlier this year. “To have a child and not know where he is. To have someone threatening to kill him. To have someone threatening to kill us. How do you go on with your life?”

*

Oscar’s kidnapping began in an unusual way: First, rebels abducted his father.

They seized 66-year-old Gonzalo Ricaurte on Dec. 18, 2002, as he went to tend a dozen cattle he owns on a small ranch outside of his hometown, Sogamoso, where he works as a professor at a technical college. They forced his car to stop, beat him, and took him to their camp in the Andes foothills near a town called Sacama, 60 miles northeast of Sogamoso.

Gonzalo was mystified by the abduction. Besides his modest salary, the family assets amounted to their home in a middle-class neighborhood, a small vacation house, an empty lot and the cattle.

He spent three weeks in a clearing under soaring trees. He bathed in a stream. He relieved himself in a ditch. He spent his nights in pain, trying to find a comfortable position on a bed of leaves beneath a blue plastic tarp.

Soon, the rebels realized that kidnapping Gonzalo was a bad idea. His age and injuries made movement difficult. Worse, he was the sole owner of his family’s bank accounts and property. Nothing could be done without his signature.

One day in early January, a guerrilla commander named Julian told him that he would be freed to come up with $100,000. Julian told Gonzalo that his wife and son would take his place as collateral.

“Kill me here,” Gonzalo said.

On Jan. 9, the guerrillas woke him and marched him to a nearby road. There, standing in the headlights, were Leticia and Oscar. The couple had no option but to agree to the swap. Earlier, Julian had called Leticia and threatened to kill Gonzalo if she refused. And now, Gonzalo realized that Leticia would be killed if he refused.

They exchanged frantic words, then prepared to part. Oscar raced over and grabbed his father’s leg. The two had always been close. But now, Oscar seemed to clutch him fiercer than Gonzalo had ever remembered.

“No, Daddy, I want to go with you,” Oscar cried.

Gonzalo gently pushed the boy away.

“It was the worst day of my life ever,” Gonzalo said, tears welling behind his gold-rimmed glasses. “I will never forget it.”

*

Leticia spent the days before the exchange in a surreal quandary: What do you bring to a kidnapping?

She stuffed a large suitcase with powdered milk, vitamins, sweets, a notebook and pencil, diapers, toy cars and insect repellent. She had three changes of clothes for each of them. And she had sent her daughter, Luisa Amanda, now 5, to live with relatives.

“I had to be prepared for any terrible thing,” said Leticia, 27.

She packed for 15 days. The rebels would hold her for 70.

She passed the monotony busying herself with Oscar. She invented stories with his favorite cartoon characters: Tom and Jerry or the Powerpuff Girls. They drew pictures of castles in the sand. They pretended the stream was a pool.

As the days passed, Leticia began rationing. She would give Oscar one candy a day to counter the monotony of the thin soup they ate morning, noon and night. She put diapers on him only at night. She stopped using bug repellent, saving it for Oscar.

She was bored and tired and scared. She lived in constant fear of rape by her guards, teenage boys with guns who would stare when she bathed in the stream.

The nights were hardest.

“After Oscar would fall asleep, I would cry and cry and cry,” she said. “It was like there was something always pressing on my chest. I felt like I was drowning.”

One night in mid-March, helicopters passed by and strafed near the camp. The next day, the rebels fled with their captives to a camp high in the frigid Andes. Julian, who came and went, showed up a few days later.

Gonzalo was being stubborn in bargaining, he said. She would be released to put more pressure on him. The boy would stay.

Leticia dropped to her knees. She put her hands together in prayer. For the first time in her life, she really begged. “Do anything but that,” she cried.

“I’m not asking whether you want to go,” Julian said. “I’m giving you an order.”

That night she moved as in a nightmare. She debated refusing to go but decided that it was better to leave her son motherless for a while than an orphan forever.

She showed a 20-year-old guerrilla named Speck how to change a diaper. How to prepare formula. How many vitamins to give Oscar. Through tears, she explained to her son that the guerrillas wanted money and she had to go get it. Oscar’s tiny face suddenly grew serious.

“Don’t cry, Mommy, I’ll stay,” he said. “Don’t cry.” He made her promise one thing: When she returned, she would bring a toy car like the one driven by Juan Pablo Montoya, a famous Colombian Formula 1 racer.

The next morning, March 19, a four-wheel drive showed up. Speck scooped Oscar up on his shoulders and vanished into the woods.

As the two walked out of sight, Leticia felt a pain like none other.

“It was like something had been taken out of my heart,” she said, tears streaming down her face as she recalled the moment.

*

The months that followed were a dark prison.

Gonzalo’s family by his first wife suspected that Leticia had orchestrated the entire kidnapping as an elaborate show to gain control of Gonzalo’s money.

Neighbors and family friends whispered questions: What sort of mother would leave her own child with guerrillas?

Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries, an illegal army dedicated to battling the guerrillas, learned about the negotiations. They threatened to kill the family if Gonzalo paid too much money to their enemies.

The family refused to cooperate with the police, afraid that doing so would result in a rescue attempt that could end in Oscar’s death.

And always, the angry, threatening voice of Julian rasped from the phone.

“I don’t care if you get the money,” Julian said one day. “I’m going to make a little man out of the boy and send him to the war.”

Toward the end of June, as Oscar’s fourth birthday approached, Gonzalo sent about $5,000 to the guerrillas through an intermediary, the price agreed upon with Julian. Julian said he wanted $7,000 more.

They managed to come up with the new sum. Three weeks later, Leticia, who had prepared their home for Oscar’s return, personally delivered the payment. But Julian refused to hand over the boy.

When Leticia got home, she threw away the cake she had baked. She put away the presents she had bought. She had painted Oscar’s room. She had organized his closets. She had put a canopy over his bed. For what?

“It was a trick, a total show,” she said bitterly.

Over the next months, the Colombian army invaded the region around Sacama, forcing the FARC to flee and cutting off all communication with the family. It was a tense time for Leticia and Gonzalo. Why had Leticia left the boy? Why couldn’t Gonzalo come up with more money?

“She suffered inside and I did the same,” Gonzalo said. “We didn’t want to live it, even though we were living it all the time.”

In November, a family friend finally made contact with another guerrilla commander who outranked Julian. The commander gave his personal guarantee that if the family paid more money, the child would be released.

Gonzalo and Leticia decided they had no choice. Though Colombian law forbids relatives of kidnap victims to sell property to raise ransom funds, Gonzalo came up with the money -- he would not say how much -- by selling some property.

On Dec. 18, exactly a year after Gonzalo was seized, Leticia stuffed her shirt and boots with bills -- so many that they cut off the circulation in her feet. She took a nine-hour bus ride to the rendezvous, a deserted stretch of dirt road outside Sacama.

After a while, a white SUV raced up.

“If one cent is missing, we keep the boy,” said the rebel who took the money and drove away. A little while later, two white SUVs roared into sight, stopping 100 yards from where she stood.

Leticia could not breathe. She could not look. She would not let herself believe.

Then suddenly, there he was.

She ran and knelt in front of Oscar. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“You’re my mother, Teticia,” he said, mispronouncing her name.

She pulled him toward her. Her round-faced 3-year-old was now a tan, lean 4-year-old. He had lost weight. He felt to her like the shell of an egg, something brittle and hard. He was wearing the same long-sleeved shirt and jeans that she had last seen him in nine months ago. He was filthy. He smelled.

“Why did you wait until now to come and get me?” he asked.

It was like a blow to her chest. She tried to explain how it had taken so long to get the money. How the guerrillas had squeezed the family for all they could get. But she knew it was not enough.

She was holding her son again. But in many ways, she was holding a different boy.

*

Oscar’s kidnapping had changed him.

He has a mark on the bridge of his nose that he said came from being burned by a candle. He has more scars on his cheek. He has big knots on the back of his head. He told his mother that Julian hit him there.

In some ways, he knows less than other 4-year-olds. He eats with his hands. He points at things around him to find out their names: the toilet, the television remote control, carrots, the refrigerator.

In other ways, he knows more than he should. After nine months with rebels as caretakers, he does not speak like a child. Instead of saying, “I have to go potty,” he uses a much cruder expression. He talked once about seeing bones in a grave.

Another time, he woke from a nightmare, telling his mother that men were slitting his stomach and choking him.

His face is a stage on which heartbreaking emotions play out. Sometimes he looks lost, a boy alone. Other moments he seems sad, his gaze downcast. Other times, terror bolts across his face, like a child who wakes from a bad dream confused by what he has seen.

He has not spoken much of his time alone, nor have his parents encouraged him. They fear that making him recall memories will make them permanent.

“We think it best to let him forget,” Gonzalo said. “The sooner, the better.”

The kidnapping has altered Leticia and Gonzalo as well. Leticia is hesitant to walk outside by herself. Fearing rebels may target the family again, she is unsure if they will be able to continue living in their home.

Gonzalo is bitter and angry -- at the rebels supposedly fighting for social justice who tormented a middle-class family. At the government that could not help him. At friends who did not support him.

“We were all alone,” he said. “You cannot imagine the solitude.”

The family left for a relative’s ranch in southwestern Colombia the day after Oscar’s return.

They had Christmas Eve dinner there. Oscar got nearly everything he had asked for, including the toy race car like Juan Pablo Montoya’s.

Gonzalo and Leticia got what they wanted, too: an end to the nightmare.