I'll Take the Place of Any Hostage Mia Farrow Doesn't Take the Place of

Categories: Home & Gardening , Outdoors & Nature

I would prefer a place without snakes, even though I imagine Mia Farrow bravely took snakes into consideration when she offered to exchange herself for "Suleiman Jamous, the humanitarian coordinator of the Sudan Liberation Movement." 

This is the first of two entries about the Darien Gap, the 30,000-acre area between Colombia and Panama.  The Gap is what makes it impossible to drive from Alaska to the bottom of Chile.  You can't go from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the Darien Gap either, because of mountains, swamps, rivers, and dense jungle.  Another problem: paramilitary guerrillas, who will kidnap you if they find you, which they will.  The native peoples aren't especially friendly either.

The paramilitary groups include two left-wing groups, the ELN and the FARC; and one right-wing group, the AUC.  You may ask yourself, If I have to be kidnapped by a paramilitary group in or near the Darien Gap, which should I choose?  Two books that could help you decide are Leszli Kalli's Kidnapped: A Diary of My 373 Days in Captivity and The Cloud Garden, by Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder.

Leszli Kalli was not exactly in the Gap when the small plane she was taking with her father Laszlo from Bucaramanga, Colombia, to Bogota, was hijacked.  From Bogota, she planned to fly to Israel to work on a Kibbutz for 6 months.  You might think she was a bit sheltered for an 18 year old, that her father would accompany her on a flight less than 250 miles--but then look what happened.  After the hijacking, the 32 people on the plane were divided into 4 groups, and Leszli ended up in a group with her father and six male plane employees. 

Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, in their 20s, had each been on the road for about two years when they met and decided to cross the Gap together.  Tom was an obsessed orchid-seed collector, while Paul was simply an extreme traveler.  They were within a day or two's walk of Panama when they were kidnapped by the FARC.  The FARC was in it for the money, although Hart Dyke and Winder insisted that their families were actually rather poor.  The kidnappers focused on Winder, a banker, instead of Hart Dyke, who said he was a gardener.  In fact, Hart Dyke's family probably could have come up with some ransom; it's typical of these FARC terrorists that they didn't pick up on Hart Dyke's address, Lullingstone Castle, which suggests some disposable income.

Leszli Kalli's book reads like the diary of a young girl.  The apparent lack of editing is part of its charm.  Leszli recounts her dreams, and her daily decision to take or not to take a bath, and her relationship with a former boyfriend back home.  There are two entirely separate characters named Diego, and you have to figure this out for yourself.  You would think that as a beautiful young woman, she would receive a lot of attention both from the terrorists and from the airline employees, but she ends up disliking her fellow hostages at least as much as she does her captors, and they don't seem all that fond of her either.  She quarrels with her father Laszlo and notes her mother's radio'd suggestion that Leszli, like another former hostage, use her free time to become proficient as a sculptor.

You have to read carefully to get a sense of Leszli's personality.  Until her capture, she's had the nervous habit of pulling out her eyelashes, which she is able to overcome during her 379 days in the jungle.  At one point she impulsively shaves her head.  She and her father are skilled at fermenting panela to make a mildly alcoholic beverage.  Although at one point one of the terrorists comforts her when she's upset that the male hostages won't play parcheesi with her, her closest bonds seem to be with various animals; she plays with a dead snake for a whole afternoon.  She cares for a tarantula under her bed and tries to make the life of a captive duck more comfortable.  She complains that her father cares more about his pet parakeet and a friendly monkey than he does about her. 

She spends a lot of time writing in her diary, watching TV in the TV hut, and listening to the radio, while the male hostages and their captors play soccer together.  Snakes are a major problem, including one Leszli estimates to be 13 feet long.  The whole group suffers a bit from the Stockholm Syndrome; leaving one camp, Laszlo tips several of the terrorists.  Leszli's anger is directed more toward the president of Colombia for the slow pace of the negotiations than toward the terrorists.  Because Leszli and the other captives speak Spanish, the terrorists have their meetings privately, and Leszli learns about the progress of negotiations mostly through the radio.

Tom and Paul do not succumb to the Stockholm Syndrome, although they do play a few games of chess with their captors (who win).  They move camps more often and do not have TV or radio.  They give their captors nicknames: "Loose Teenager," "Nutter," "The Game Player," etc.  They call two other hostages whom they are not allowed to talk to "the Bedfellows" and wave to them when they can.  Paul speaks very little Spanish, and although Tom has recently completed a 7-week intensive course, he pretends to understand little of what the captors are saying.  When they begin saying degollar (to slit someone's throat), a verb not taught at Tom's Spanish school, Tom and Paul plan to escape through a nearby thick field of maize.  By the time they have stolen enough supplies, however, the FARC members have harvested the maize.  Tom plans a beautiful garden in his mind and at one long-term camping spot carefully plants orchids and other plants.  The kidnappers, of course, stomp it to death as they prepare to leave.

The ELN and the FARC, at least as portrayed by Kalli, Hart Dyke, and Winder, have a lot in common.  Neither group seems as interested in ideology as in collecting ransom.  Both groups are obsessed with cleanliness (although you wouldn't catch me bathing in one of those rivers, so I hope I'm sent as a hostage to a dry climate, which might also have fewer snakes) and panela. Tom and Paul observe that Loose Teenager has gained weight over their 9 months of captivity because of all the panela, and Leszli fears the same about herself. The FARC is much larger (12,000 - 18,000 members) and better funded than the ELN (about 3,000 members) although you wouldn't know it from reading these books.  Despite more snakes, I'd have to go to the ELN.

My advice here is that you should probably stay out of The Darien Gap.  Also: if you know Spanish, pretend not to, so you can listen to the captives talk to one another about your future. If Mia Farrow eats too much panela, she will lose her waiflike figure.   Living in huts--even with a TV hut--and moving from encampment to encampment isn't what I would call fun, neither for captors nor for captives.  Still, it is cheaper than a lot of eco-tourism, and if your captors don't kill you, you can write a book later.