BOGOTA -- Police Sgt. Luis Alberto Erazo was packing his tarp and towel at about 6 a.m. Saturday — preparing for another long march as a captive through the jungle — when he felt gunshots graze his neck and face. Without thinking, he sprinted into the brush as his assassin gave chase.
Lying in a hospital bed in Bogotá on Monday, Erazo, 48, said that split-second decision allowed him to escape the FARC guerrillas who had held him hostage for almost 12 years. It was only when he was back in the capital that he was told his four companions — all of whom had been in rebel hands for more than a decade — didn’t survive. The FARC executed them as troops moved in, the government said.
“I thought they were also going to run toward the jungle,” Erazo said of his fellow hostages.
For years, his captors had drilled home the idea that if they heard gunshots they should stay close to camp or risk punishment. “My companions ran towards them [the guerrillas] and they were killed in cold blood,” Erazo said. “I forgot the rules and ran the other direction.”
In his first interviews since escaping, Erazo looked thin as he lay in a hospital bed wearing blue pajamas. His cheek and neck were bandaged. His face was covered in welts.
As Erazo recalled Saturday morning, he said the FARC guerrillas spotted a military patrol closing in from 100 to 200 meters away. That’s when the rebels came back to camp to kill the hostages. He said his would-be executioner shot him from behind a palm tree about 30 feet away.
That’s when he ran.
“I got ahead of him in the brush and, ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ I Could hear the shots behind me,” Erazo said. He finally lost his pursuer and hid in a hollow log. After about five hours he said the jungle fell silent and he began walking until he spotted soldiers clearing a landing zone for a helicopter.
The wounds on Erazo’s neck were from grenade fragments, doctors told The Associated Press.
Erazo said his fellow hostages dreamed of meeting their grown children and starting family businesses. He said it was miracle that he had lived.
“I know that God exists and I know that evil exists,” Erazo said. “And the FARC are evil.”
The death of the four hostages was a grim reminder that the embattled Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC still have the means to deliver powerful psychological blows to this Andean nation. The group is thought to be holding captive 11 military and police officers, many of whom, like Erazo, have been hostages for more than a decade.
Saturday’s incident sparked global outrage, as everyone from the Pope to Amnesty International condemned the murders. It was one of the first mass killing of captives since 2007, when 11 politicians from Valle de Cauca were executed after five years in captivity.
Erazo’s escape came as the government was poised to reveal a new military strategy to step-up pressure on the group, and less than a month after special forces killed FARC top commander Alfonso Cano.
Erazo said news of Cano’s Nov. 4 death reached his camp but didn’t seem to faze the rebels.
“The guerrillas said that Alfonso Cano had died and that his replacement had been named — that one person went to his grave and another will lead the FARC,” he said. Their attitude is “this is war. Today I die, tomorrow you die.”