{"id":1907,"date":"2004-01-06T00:21:41","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T04:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/kidnapped\/"},"modified":"2004-01-06T00:21:41","modified_gmt":"2004-01-06T04:21:41","slug":"kidnapped","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/kidnapped\/","title":{"rendered":"Kidnapped"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

HOW I SPENT MY CHRISTMAS VACATION<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n I first suspected that something was seriously wrong when I saw the ski masks.
\n Since we were in the middle of the desert, almost directly on the equator,
\n I realized the chances of snow were slim. I considered the possibility that
\n I was
\n dreaming, but a million tiny details told me this was real. The air on the
\n ancient bus was fetid; too many people crammed into a space too small for
\n far too long.
\n It was 3 a.m. and the rustles, snores and tiny private groans of people trying
\n to sleep filled the close confines.<\/p>\n

I glanced over at my eight-year-old son, sleeping peacefully on the seat beside
\n me. Joey had always slept well on moving vehicles. He clutched his battery-powered,
\n glow-in-the-dark He-Man sword tightly to his chest, lost in some martial dreamland.
\n When I looked back into the aisle the five shadowy figures in ski masks had
\n removed from below their ponchos dark, heavy objects, looking suspiciously
\n like automatic
\n weapons. The weak yellow glow of the few unbroken ceiling lights gleamed off
\n of dull metal surfaces.<\/p>\n

We were on our way home. The First (and last) Annual International Conference
\n on Teaching English as a Second Language at the National University in Trujillo,
\n Peru had ended a week earlier. After the conference we spent a delightful week
\n of rest and recreation on a nearby beach. Now, ten hours into the hot and dusty
\n fifteen-hour trek to the Ecuadorian border, something was seriously amiss.
\n Joey and I, along with my Harvard colleague Allan Hislop, who seemed to be
\n asleep
\n two rows back, were the only Gringos on the midnight Border Express. The bus,
\n as usual, was crammed with humanity and its accompanying flotsam and jetsam;
\n woven bags and vinyl suitcases; cardboard boxes and wooden crates; straps and
\n ropes hanging from packages jammed into overhead racks too small to hold them;
\n industrial machinery and automotive spare parts ostensibly hidden under seats
\n and oily blankets; four dogs and a trio of brilliantly colored Amazonian birds,
\n one of which was capable of speech and kept repeating a nasty sounding phrase
\n in a language with which I was completely unfamiliar, but which invariably
\n caused the passengers in its immediate vicinity to errupt in raucous laughter.
\n In the
\n rear seat (also known as "Gringo seating") a hog-tied goat munched on the accumulated
\n refuse of ten hours of in-seat snacking.<\/p>\n

After checking to make sure that I wasn’t asleep, I debated awakening my traveling
\n companions. No, I decided, if this is what I think it is, they’ll find out
\n soon enough. I lay my head back and pretended to sleep, as the venerable and
\n vulnerable
\n re-cycled Greyhound punched a hole in the thick South American night.<\/p>\n

After ten interminable minutes the gunman I had tentatively identified as the
\n leader stepped to the door between the driver’s and passengers’ compartments
\n and addressed the sleeping multitude.<\/p>\n

"Attention!", he barked. "We are from the M.R.T.A. Nobody move!" The
\n M.R.T.A. is the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the second-largest of Peru’s
\n indigenous terrorist armies. "At least they’re not from Sendero," I
\n thought. A few hours before departure we had heard the news that the previous
\n day guerillas from Sendero Luminoso, the number one local band of bloodthirsty
\n fanatics, had stopped a bus up in the highlands, pulled off two French tourists,
\n and immediately shot them each once through the back of the head. They left
\n the bloody bodies by the side of the road.<\/p>\n

But that was Sendero, Maoist madmen from mountain redoubts so isolated they
\n hadn? yet seen the dawn of the 19th century. Sendero killed you first, interrogated
\n you later. This was the MRTA. The MRTA were supposedly educated, from the cosmopolitan
\n coast. Maybe
\n they could be reasoned with.<\/p>\n

"If nobody tries anything funny, we won’t have to kill anyone." The
\nleader was short and stocky, and vibrated with a vicious energy which did not
\nbode
\n well for our immediate future.<\/p>\n

"Whaa?", little Joey started up, still groggy with sleep.<\/p>\n

"We’re getting taken for a ride. Don’t worry. Go back to sleep." I
\ntried to keep the worry out of my voice.<\/p>\n

"Where are we going?" he asked as his slowly widening eyes took in
\nthe tense tableau.<\/p>\n

"I don’t know. Please be quiet. Go back to sleep." Fat chance. I really
\n didn’t want to draw any attention. Joey lay back down, but I could see that
\n he was now
\n wide awake.<\/p>\n

I looked back at Allan. All of the yelling had woken him up, but his eyes held
\n a confused, sleep-laden look that told me he wasn’t entirely aware of what
\n was going on around him, which all things considered was probably for the best.<\/p>\n

The bus continued its voyage northward into the desert night, the hijackers
\n now firmly in control. Through the glass cabin window between the cockpit and
\n the
\n passengers, we could see another gunman with a pistol pointed at the driver’s
\n head. A disconcerting and dangerous feeling of unreality began developing around
\n me as the silent minutes began to accumulate, piling one upon another.<\/p>\n

This can’t really be happening, I thought to myself. I knew that the legendary
\n Pan American highway, supposedly sweeping from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego,
\n was little more than a joke in that part of Peru, having been reduced to a
\n sand-swept
\n path through the desert by the devastating El Nino flooding five years earlier.<\/p>\n

But the Panamerican was still the main north-south route on the Pacific coast
\n of South America, which was shy it was our route to the border. Someone, or
\n something, was bound to come along soon; another bus, a long-haul trucker,
\n a city, a town,
\n a lonely pit stop of a Peruvian restaurant. Maybe even a couple of cops or
\n a military patrol. But I knew they were afraid of the dark out here in the
\n sticks,
\n and were probably holed up with a bottle or a woman or both. <\/p>\n

Just as I thought that, I felt the bus slowing down. With a sickening lurch,
\n following the terrorists’ direction, the bus swung ponderously off of the shattered
\n remnants of the Panamerican Highway, skirted a gigantic sand dune, and set
\n off into the pitch darkness of the trackless, empty desert.<\/p>\n

We drove straight into the empty waste land for about twenty minutes, at which
\n point the bus swung into a small clearing surrounded by enormous sand dunes,
\n and came to a sudden stop. The inside lights came up as the leader addressed
\n the passengers once again.<\/p>\n

"We are collecting a war tax. We don’t want to hurt anyone but if you don’t
\ndo exactly as we say, you are all going to die." <\/p>\n

A fat woman at the rear
\n of the bus had begun to sob. People around me were surreptitiously stuffing
\n valuables
\n between seats and bosoms, under cushions and into dirty diapers. With the lights
\n on I could get a better look at our captors. With the exception of the leader,
\n who as about my age, the gunmen were all in their teens or early twenties;
\n old enough to handle a gun, and young enough to handle it recklessly. They
\n were all
\n heavily armed. I saw shotguns, semi-automatic rifles and an Uzi submachine
\n gun, as well as several pistols and revolvers. Observing this arsenal, I realized
\n that at this point discretion was the better part of valor.<\/p>\n

The hijackers began ordering the passengers to get off the bus one by one,
\n beginning with the forward seats. As each passenger debarked he or she was
\n thoroughly frisked
\n or strip searched, depending on the likelihood of his or her possessing hidden
\n valuables.
\n Joey, who had been quiet a seemingly calm up to this point, began to panic
\n as we were separated and I was motioned off the bus. "Dad, I want to go
\n with you", he called in English as I stood before a masked gunman.<\/p>\n

"Shut up and move," the gunman growled in guttural Spanish, motioning
\nwith the muzzle of his machine gun.<\/p>\n

"Please don’t hurt my son!" was all I could manage, in my gringo Spanish,as
\nI
\nwas hustled towards the door. Descending into the darkened stairwell, I slipped
\nour
\nAmerican
\n passports from my document holder into my underwear. Only later did I consider
\n the possible consequences had they been found there. <\/p>\n

Luckily I was given a somewhat cursory hand-search by a sullen-faced teenager
\n who was at least as nervous as I. He emptied my pockets but I was not forced
\n to undress. However, it was at this point that the hijackers noticed that they
\n had several Gringos among their hostages, and they motioned me off slightly
\n to one side of the slowly exiting Peruvian captives. After being searched we
\n were
\n all told to lie face down in the sand with our hands behind our heads.<\/p>\n

Joey was the next one off the bus, and he was searched more thoroughly than
\n I. It seems that hiding valuables on young children is a time-tested Peruvian
\n tactic
\n for eluding confiscation by terrorists or highwaymen. Obviously, less than
\n effective. When the searchers found nothing, he was allowed to assume the position
\n at my
\n side.<\/p>\n

"Dad, what’s going on?" he rasped, trying his best to keep his voice
\ndown.<\/p>\n

"No talking!" shouted a particularly nervous looking and heavily armed
\nindividual, kicking sand in our direction. Off to one side, in front of the bus,
\nI noticed
\n our driver being guarded by a kid in a mask who looked to be about 13 years
\nold. The barrel of his gun, however, was as steady as Manhattan bedrock. The
\nbus driver,
\n illuminated in the headlights of the bus, was bruised and bleeding from a cut
\n on his forehead and was clutching his side. He squinted in the light, looking
\n like a suspect in a police line-up, accused of "resisting arrest."<\/p>\n

The hijackers had not chosen our bus at random. It was full of independent
\n businesspeople, also know as "black marketers", on their way to buy cheap manufactured
\n goods (appliances, clothes, etc.) at the Ecuadorian border for resale inside
\n of Peru. This was extremely good business at that time, given that legal importation
\n of these goods carried a heavy Peruvian tax of at least 100%, and in stores they
\n cost about three times their price in New York, Miami or, for that matter, in
\n Ecuador. The resulting hefty profit margin for smuggled goods provided plenty
\n of incentive to these "independent businesspeople" as well as sufficient
\n capital to payoff "legitimate" authorities. Going north, these busses
\n were cash-heavy and fat pickings for assorted bands of bandits and would-be
\n revolutionary heroes.<\/p>\n

The MRTA guys were going over the bus and its occupants with a fine-toothed
\n comb, collecting an impressive pile of currency and small bundles. As the majority
\n of the miscreants continued to search the interior of the bus, the leader and
\n his nervous, excitable lieutenant began to interrogate selected passengers.
\n As
\n they approached us I realized it was going to be a long night.<\/p>\n

As I lay there in the Peruvian desert, kissing sand, hundreds of miles from
\n the nearest human habitation, thousands of miles from home and loved ones,
\n held prisoner
\n at machine gun point by a band of vicious, unpredictable revolutionaries, who
\n for all I knew had recently sworn a blood oath to rid the earth of running
\n dog pig capitalists like myself, beneath a million stars suspended from a soft
\n velvet
\n sky, my mind began to wander.<\/p>\n

No, my life was not passing before my eyes in some Technicolor synopsis of
\n my sins. Instead, it was scenes of the recently terminated ESL conference and
\n the
\n subsequent week on the beach that swam before my tightly shut eyes. I always
\n did have a short memory.<\/p>\n

That is as far as I got when I originally penned these
\n notes, 15 years ago, shortlyy after the incident. I never finished it. If
\n anyone is interested in how it comes out (obviously we survived ( Joey is
\n now 22
\n an
\n lives in
\n the Peruvian highlands! ) please let me know and I will finish the story. <\/em><\/p>\n

By Popular Demand<\/font><\/p>\n

\n Here is the conclusion of the story…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HOW I SPENT MY CHRISTMAS VACATION I first suspected that something was seriously wrong when I saw the ski masks. Since we were in the middle of the desert, almost directly on the equator, I realized the chances of snow … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1907","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}