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U.S., because [the kidnapping] causes people to ask questions about the policy in Colombia and the role of contractors in general,” he said. The men’s role as contractors, rather than as active military personnel, also helped push the story from the headlines. Myles Frechette, the former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, had put it bluntly to the
St. Petersburg Times
in 2000: “It’s very handy to have an outfit not part of the U.S. armed forces, obviously … if somebody gets killed or whatever, you can say it’s not a member of the armed forces. Nobody wants to see American military men killed.”

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The Elegant Guerrilla
    O n December 31, 2004, nearly two years after the guerrillas marched Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves off into mountains, a stocky middle-aged man, bald and bespectacled, sat handcuffed and shackled aboard a U.S. government Gulfstream jet, bound for the United States. He wore the clothing of a prisoner from the Cómbita maximum-security prison outside of Bogotá. He was flanked by six agents of the North American government: five FBI agents and one DEA agent. Before boarding the jet, fifty-four-year-old FARC commander Simón Trinidad, the highest-ranking FARC member ever to be captured, raised his fist in defiance and repeatedly yelled out to reporters,
“¡Viva las FARC! ¡Viva Manuel Marulanda! ¡Viva Simón Bolívar!”
    The 150 years of violence that prompted Simón Trinidad to join the FARC can be traced back to Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan revolutionary who helped liberate South America from the Spanish. In 1821 Bolívar created Gran Colombia, an area encompassing present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. “The Liberator” named himself president and appointed one of his military generals, Francisco de Paula Santander, as vice president. The two men soon became bitter political rivals. Their followers split into two factions, which, by the late 1840s, became the Partido Liberal, whose adherents included those in the oligarchy who were aligned with Santander, and the Partido Conservador, whose members included the oligarchs who sided with Bolívar. While the parties took the names Liberal and Conservative, the titles did not correlate at all to the ideological meaning of the words
liberal
and
conservative
in the North American political vernacular. The Conservative party wanted a more centralized government, something that had never been achieved in Colombia due to a weak military, the country’s treacherous geography, and a lack of cohesion among the country’s departments (states). The Liberal party was more inclined toward decentralization. And although clergy members aligned with the Conservative party because of its platform to give more power to the Church, there were no great ideological, economic, or policy differences between the two parties. Within each party, there were those who leaned politically to the Left, those who were centrists, and those who were politically on the Right.

    FARC founder Manuel Marulanda in the early years of the guerrilla organization. Marulanda earned the nickname “Tirofijo” (“Sureshot”) for his excellent aim with a rifle. Photo: Cuadernos de Campaña
.
    Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one party would holdpower for several four-year terms before losing the presidential election to the other party. The elected party would reap all the perks of incumbency, while members of the opposition party would be stripped of most ruling-class benefits. Periods of lasting violence were commonplace between Liberals and Conservatives from the parties’ beginnings, with thousands killed in eleven major clashes before the dawn of the twentieth century. A civil war began in 1899, when Liberals declared war against the Conservative government after accusing the Conservative party of maintaining power through fraudulent elections. The Thousand Days’