Face to face with his kidnapper

We round a ridge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the remnants of an ancient civilisation are revealed in the dense forest below. Mark Henderson strains his neck to peer through the helicopter’s porthole. 'I’d forgotten how beautiful it is,’ he says.

Moments later we are touching down on a grassy plateau of Ciudad Perdida, Colombia’s Lost City. The archaeological site, rediscovered in 1972 and the spiritual home of the Kogi Indians, is thought to predate Peru’s Machu Picchu by more than six centuries. It is July 2009 and we are here to make a documentary together. Henderson never imagined he would see this place again.

It is six years since he was last here. Then, he and six other tourists had spent three days hiking through the hills to get here. The site is inaccessible and remote – which is why it appeals to the most determined travellers.

Henderson’s first South American trip had been a way of marking a new chapter in his life. Not long before, Henderson, a television producer-director from Lincoln, then aged 31, had ended an eight-year relationship. He had spent nearly four months travelling, but was due to finish his adventure in Colombia where his cousin Kirsty was teaching. He wasn’t put off by the country’s reputation – Colombia was in the throes of civil war, with right-wing paramilitaries battling left-wing guerrillas fighting for control of land that produces 80 per cent of the world’s cocaine. Vast swaths of the country were off-limits to tourists. Kirsty warned Henderson against certain potentially dangerous expeditions, but she recommended a trip to Ciudad Perdida.

He reached the Lost City on September 11 2003 and spent the day wandering around the site, meeting up with a second group of tourists. That night he retired to bed, a mattress on the floor of a wooden hut, set on stilts on the mountainside.

At about 4.30 the next morning he was awoken by voices. At first he thought that some local children had climbed inside the hut. 'Then I felt the muzzle of a gun being pressed into my ribs,’ he says.

The tourists from Henderson’s hut were herded outside, and joined by a group from a second hut. 'I thought we were being lined up to be shot,’ he says. The gunmen, about a dozen of them, dressed in military uniform, divided the party into two. 'They left the unfit ones behind. It was like a reverse case of survival of the fittest.’ Henderson, along with seven others (six men – a Spaniard, four Israelis, another Briton – and a German woman), were forced to start walking, with no idea who the gunmen were or where they were being taken.

Henderson didn’t put up a fight, but not everyone was so compliant. His fellow British hostage was Matthew Scott, a gap-year traveller from south London. After a few hours of marching through the jungle Scott, 19, seized his opportunity to escape, tumbling down a mountainside into dense undergrowth. The gunmen did not bother looking for him. 'We’re not going to get him,’ they told the others. 'The tigers will.’ (Scott finally made his way to safety after surviving 12 days alone in the jungle.)

By the end of the first day, the group had been walking for 15 hours. Confused and scared, Henderson, in broken Spanish (the captors spoke no English), constantly asked where they were going and why he was being held. The only answer he was given at that stage was 'plata o plomo’ – cash or a bullet.

Days passed and became weeks. The hostages were constantly on the move. They slept under plastic sheeting and survived on rice, panela (sugar-cane extract), scraps of burnt meat and coffee. Henderson found himself gravitating towards two of the Israelis – Ido Guy, 27, a software engineer with IBM, and Erez Eltawil, a 24-year-old student. He also grew close to the German woman, Reini Weigel, a 31-year-old physiotherapist. She looked fit but suffered from a blood-sugar disorder that caused fits and blackouts. 'I felt very protective towards her,’ he says.

A month into their captivity, one of the kidnappers explained the true situation: that they were being held by members of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (the ELN, or National Liberation Army), a Marxist guerrilla group that has been at war with the Colombian government for more than 40 years. (The ELN has been overshadowed by the larger and more notorious United Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Farc, though at the time of the kidnapping was a formidable force.) The tourists were told that they were not being held to ransom, but to put pressure on international governments to investigate human-rights abuses in the Sierra region. The ELN believed that government-backed right-wing paramilitaries were carrying out attacks against peasants living in the mountains.

As the group struggled to come to terms with their new lives as political hostages, two new guards arrived at a makeshift camp: Antonio and Camila. 'They weren’t guerrilla foot soldiers,’ Henderson recalls. 'Camila was the camp commander’s secretary and Antonio was effectively in charge of training new recruits, teaching them about the ELN’s Marxist doctrines. I got the impression that, out of all our guards, Antonio was the one who really believed in what he was fighting for.’

Henderson was struck by the couple’s initial acts of kindness – tiny gestures such as handing them a few chunks of pineapple – which took on great significance under the circumstances. 'They were the first people to show the group humanity,’ Henderson says. 'The others had been cruel, but they stood out.’

Antonio and Camila remained with the group, on and off, and the bond between Henderson and Antonio grew stronger. 'Antonio took an interest in us,’ Henderson says. 'He wanted to know what was happening in Europe and I remember thinking he had more in common with me than with his fellow kidnappers.’ Antonio talked about his family and his university studies. The men also discovered that they shared the same taste in films and music – they would spend hours chatting about their favourite movie scenes. Antonio wrote a list of films that he encouraged Henderson to see when he was free.

During the early stages of their captivity the group heard, via their captors’ transistor radios, that their kidnapping was headline news, and that members of the Catholic Church were attempting to negotiate their release. Behind the scenes a priest, Monseñor Hector Fabio Henao, visited jailed ELN leaders and asked them to communicate with commanders in the Sierra.

The ELN made the priest an offer: if an international delegation could go into the mountains and expose the human-rights violations, the hostages would go free. With the backing of the UN, Henao persuaded the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, to suspend military incursions in the area to allow him – along with representatives of the Catholic charity Caritas and a Colombian human-rights agency, Defensoría del Pueblo – to venture into the Sierra and investigate the ELN’s claims.

After 101 days in captivity, on December 22 2003 the hostages were released. 'It was unbelievable,’ Henderson says. 'We were at breaking point and I just couldn’t believe that I was suddenly free.’

On returning home, Henderson was elated. 'Initially I was overcome by a feeling of invincibility, that if I can survive that, then I can survive anything,’ he remembers. 'But it didn’t last.’ In the weeks that followed he moved into his parents’ house in Yorkshire. 'About five months after the kidnapping I felt like my world was collapsing around me.’ A psychologist diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. 'As soon as she had given it a name I started to feel much better,’ he says.

'I spent six hours talking to her at one stretch and, it’s strange, but when I came out I felt like, that’s it, I’ve exorcised those demons.’ Henderson returned to London and to work in television. Then, on November 6 2004, just over 10 months after his release, he received an unexpected email.

'Dear Mark,’ it read. 'I hope that you are well in mind and body. We watched your return home to England on the TV and it seems that you’ve turned into stars in the media. I hope that we carry on writing to one another and that we can develop a friendship. But Mark, please don’t let anyone else know that you’re speaking to me.’

The email was from Antonio.

The kidnapper had been given Mark Henderson’s details by Monseñor Henao, who worked with former paramilitaries and guerrillas on reconciliation programmes. He was helping Antonio and Camila to start a new life. 'He believed in second chances,’ Henderson says. 'Clearly he wanted Antonio to have an opportunity to talk through how the ordeal had affected us. It was that simple.’

The first email hinted that Antonio had left the ELN, and was sent while he and Camila were on the run. 'Life is very difficult for us,’ he wrote, 'and we need to find a safe place to settle down. There are dangers for us and our families.’ The couple had effectively became fugitives, both from the Colombian authorities and their former comrades.

Henderson didn’t know how to react – 'I was surprised and confused’ – and was unsure of what to do next. 'Should I be passing the email on to the authorities? Could I be in trouble for withholding information? Most importantly, what did he want from me?’

What Antonio wanted soon became clear. 'It’s only an idea,’ Antonio wrote, 'and if you can’t, don’t worry – but you don’t know of a girlfriend who could marry me so that I could get my European papers?’ Henderson was taken aback. 'He had been holding me hostage and now he wanted me to sort out his life.’

I met Mark Henderson soon after Antonio’s emails started to arrive. I was researching material for a novel, a love story set against a kidnapping in Colombia. I had read extracts from Henderson’s diaries in The Daily Telegraph and wanted to hear his story first-hand. He was half-way through recounting his kidnapping experience when he told me he had received some emails from Antonio and asked for my help translating them. I agreed.

The emails came every two weeks. On the whole, they were rants about the political situation in Colombia, full of statistics about displaced people there, with video links to atrocities carried out by paramilitaries. At no point did Antonio offer an apology. 'In truth, all of his emails were a way of justifying what he’d done,’ Henderson says. 'I kept writing back because I was intrigued to know what had motivated this apparently normal guy to become involved in a kidnapping.’

Henderson and I became friends. Sharing a passion for Latin America, we would meet up to go and see Hispanic films and art exhibitions. Over the next two years we often discussed the possibility of making a documentary film about him going back to Colombia, and perhaps even to meet his former captor, though we knew it could take years to secure the funding for such a project.

In May 2008 Antonio and Camila sent Hender­son – and Reini Weigel – an invitation to their wedding in the country where they were now settled (Henderson agreed not to disclose their location). They were no longer on the run, and were studying for university degrees. Henderson declined the invitation, but his desire to meet Antonio was growing stronger. 'There were still so many questions I had about what happened, and Antonio was out there with the answers,’ he says. 'I wanted to save the important questions for him face to face.’

We approached Channel 4’s Britdoc Foundation, and soon had an investment of money to get started on making the film. Henderson immediately contacted Weigel, Ido Guy and Erez Eltawil, who had all kept in touch via Facebook. All expressed an interest in returning to Colombia, though each had different reasons. The Israeli pair said they wanted to go back for 'closure’. Guy wanted to have new memories and have 'a safe, positive experience in the Sierra’.

The person who was most keen to go back was the one who had been the most damaged by the experience: Reini Weigel. She still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and recurring nightmares; the gruelling living conditions during the kidnapping had left her with back problems. She had also paid a high price financially: although she had been living in Switzerland for years, it was the German government that had arranged to fly her to safety. She had then become locked in a battle with the German authorities, which had demanded she repay the costs of the rescue. In May 2009, two months before returning to Colombia with Henderson, she had lost her legal fight, with the court ruling that Germans abducted abroad have to pay towards the costs of their release. Weigel had also been ordered to pay all legal expenses, a total of €18,000. 'I feel very raw about the whole situation,’ she said after the court ruling. 'Camila sent me some photos of their wedding day, and they made me angry. I thought, they have a life, a chance to start a family, but I haven’t had that because of all this stress. I am still trapped in a nightmare.’

As we make the final preparations for his return to Colombia, Henderson admits he is scared. 'I’m not worried about our safety because we’re going in with the army this time,’ he says. 'But I’m terrified of what this all might drag up.’ Once we reach Ciudad Perdida he leads us from the helicopter landing site to the wooden hut, 500 yards away, where the group’s ordeal began. All four have agreed to spend the night here once again. As they settle down for the night Weigel breaks down in tears; Henderson tries to console her. 'It all comes flooding back,’ she says. 'I had a life before this mattress, this bit of floor, and now I have a worse life after. I just want that old life back.’

The next morning the group emerges for a wash in the mountain stream. 'I didn’t sleep a wink,’ Henderson says. 'I saw hands coming at me all night.’ As they bathe in the cool water they talk about how much they enjoyed isolated moments such as these, when they could let their guard down. 'These were the good times when we would joke around,’ Eltawil recalls, 'but a lot of the time all we used to do was argue like hell among ourselves.’

The Israelis and the Europeans had serious disagreements over the best way to respond to their situation. Early into the ordeal Henderson noted in his diary, 'A divide has formed within the group. The Europeans have decided to collaborate, hoping this will get us more food and more information about the kidnapping… the Israelis want confrontation.’

Eltawil would provoke the guards while Weigel and Henderson went out of their way to seek their sympathy. Weigel collapsed several times from lack of food. 'As I was being carried by this one guard, Rafa, I kept thinking that I needed to make him fall in love with me,’ she says. 'I thought, then he can’t hurt me and he’ll protect me.’

We spend a week hiking through the jungle. It’s not hard to understand why the government search parties never found the hostages under the thick jungle canopy. Even as willing participants this time around, it is tough going; one day we are wading at chest-height across a river while negotiating camera equipment and food provisions; the next we are scaling a slippery rock face, and braving the rains that fall each day at 3pm, all the while battling foot blisters and hands swollen from thorns.

The more time the former hostages spend together on this return journey, the more old wounds seem to come to the surface. Eltawil and Henderson still argue about why they were held.

'It was all just bullshit,’ Eltawil says. 'You were just a part of their war; you’re actually a nobody.’ For Henderson, it was when he was told why he had been kidnapped that things began to make sense, and became easier to accept. 'When I realised that they were fighting for a cause, that changed everything,’ he says. 'I mean, what had I ever believed in?’ Weigel agrees, and says it helped her to endure the kidnapping. 'I saw their suffering,’ she says.

'I even thought that if I had to stay longer to help them, I wouldn’t mind. I didn’t want to leave until I had completed this “task”, almost.’

The Israelis were not prepared to accept their fate. Eltawil became distressed and emotional, polarising the factions further. 'He used to go to bed crying and wake up crying and while I felt sorry for him I have to say that it took its toll on all of us,’ Henderson says.

Sixteen days into their ordeal, the Israelis mounted a desperate escape attempt, which ended with a chase through the jungle, the armed guerrillas shooting randomly into the night. Even though the escape lasted only an hour and ended in failure, Eltawil recalls it as 'the best hour of our kidnapping. We weren’t afraid, even when they fired shots at us. It was just about taking back that control, to smell freedom.’

As we plough on through the jungle, Guy and Eltawil remind Henderson that he too wasn’t immune to feelings of despair. 'Don’t forget,’ Guy tells him, 'you almost became one of us. You almost became an Israeli.’ Two months into the kidnapping the Israelis hatched a plan to murder their captors. 'As they had all done military training they didn’t share my phobia of guns and started to instruct me in how to use one,’ Henderson recalls. 'It was agreed that they would make an attempt to overcome their guards and escape, any dead or wounded would be left behind. It was planned down to the last detail. We called it “the solution”.’

The real solution – their release – came just in time, on the very day their plan was due to be put into action.

As we near the end of our week’s hike, there is one stop-off that the four former hostages are keen to make. In the lower foothills of the Sierra lies the village of Ciénaga, home to more than 6,000 of Colombia’s estimated three million displaced people. Many of the residents here come from towns that had been caught between the guerrillas and the government-backed paramilitaries. These were the people to whose plight the kidnappers had claimed to be drawing the world’s attention. Henderson and the others wanted to know if life had improved for them in recent years, since Monseñor Henao’s humanitarian commission was sent in to investigate human-rights abuses.

'Nothing has changed here,’ says Dominica, a mother of six, whose husband, mother and siblings were all killed by the paramilitaries. Not that this made her sympathetic towards the ELN, who were, she says with a shrug, 'just as bad’.

Henderson is talking to a group of people when he realises that he has met one of them before: a peasant woman who had lost her husband to the civil war. 'You came to my farm and I fed you,’ she tells him. 'I knew you were hostages. I am so sorry, but we felt powerless, just like you. Many people were brought to my farm, not just you. It was very painful, not being able to help or say anything because it would have cost us our lives.’

It is an inconclusive end to this part of the journey. Whatever resolution the group had been looking for, they appear not to have found it. They seem disillusioned by what they have found, disappointed at how little has changed.

Eltawil and Guy are heading home to Israel. But Henderson and Weigel, with me and the film crew still in tow, are catching a flight to a neighbouring South American country to meet Antonio and Camila. Their former kidnappers have refused to meet the Israelis. Henderson explains that they are worried that Eltawil and Guy would tell the authorities where they are. Eltawil acknowledges that if he saw Antonio he would probably punch him. 'I don’t think they are sorry,’ he says.

As we ride in a taxi on our way to meet Antonio and Camila, Henderson and Weigel are still unsure about how exactly they should greet the couple. We have agreed to meet them, at their request, in a large park near their home. Finally, our taxi pulls up opposite Antonio and Camila’s car. The tension dissolves, and it looks for all the world like a natural reunion, like old friends meeting up. All four quickly move to embrace each other. Moments later they are all laughing at how much weight they have put on. Henderson offers Antonio the books, CDs and DVDs that he had promised to bring, including five hefty tomes on Colombian politics and a Massive Attack album.

The women are soon reminiscing about their time together, Camila recalling how she used to secretly supply Weigel with shampoo – 'gold dust’ in the jungle – and how they would complain about the constant walking and the meagre food rations. It doesn’t take long for Camila to acknowledge that she felt a deep guilt at what she and the guerrillas had put the hostages through. 'I saw your suffering and I know that it was wrong,’ she says, 'but we were kind to you. We didn’t abuse you.’

By nightfall, the lighter memories are replaced by a more intense questioning. We persuade Antonio to let us film him, with only his lips showing to mask his identity. Henderson gets down to business immediately. 'Do you think you are a terrorist or a freedom fighter?’ he asks. Antonio answers slowly, choosing his words carefully: 'Obviously, I was someone fighting for freedom. For a more equal, self-ruling country. Terrorism is a term that’s been so abused. Your kidnapping was never supposed to inspire fear, it was about putting pressure on people to improve a situation. We didn’t abuse all your human rights, but we abused the most important one: your right to freedom.’

The conversation – an interrogation almost – continues into the early hours. As time passes, Antonio drops his guard. He eventually acknowledges that his fight may have been in vain. He admits that he and Camila had deserted the ELN in the dead of night, walking for miles through the Sierra Nevada, and turned themselves in at a military base. Threats to their families and mounting pressure to reveal names of other guerrillas forced them to seek ways to leave Colombia in search of a new life. They didn’t tell the authorities that they had been part of a kidnapping, a crime that carries a sentence of up to 40 years in Colombia.

'While politically [the kidnapping] had been a success,’ Antonio says, 'and the press in Europe and Colombia had been focused on the Sierra Nevada, in real terms it was a total failure. It was the beginning of the end of the ELN there. We were never prepared for the military attacks.’

After the hostages were released, the government had subjected the Sierra to a barrage of attacks in an attempt to drive the ELN guerrillas out of the region. As a result of these and other operations, the ELN has diminished in size and influence, from about 4,000 active members at the height of its power in the 1990s to about 1,500 today. Antonio admits that things have not improved in the mountains. 'It is extremely sad that nothing changed, but we really tried,’ he says. 'We believed, in that moment, that it would.’

Antonio explains that he was initially wary of contacting Henderson and Weigel, having no idea how they would react. 'But maybe now, one day, we’ll be able to come to your house and meet your family,’ he tells them, 'though it might seem the strangest thing in the world. We can show your parents that we aren’t monsters.’ He takes a deep breath. 'I wanted to meet you because I thought you deserved an explanation about what happened, for you and your families. About why we felt justified to act as we did. You have to understand that there is a war in Colombia and, in a war, the unusual becomes the norm. But there is never, never any justification for a kidnapping.’

After they have said goodbye to Antonio and Camila, Weigel and Henderson continue to talk. Henderson says it is difficult to equate these people with the couple who had held them hostage. 'In the mountains they were in control of our lives,’ he says, 'and now, with one phone call, we could have them arrested and hauled back to Colombia.’ Weigel says she now feels more peaceful about what happened. 'I got the answers I wanted,’ she says.

Since the reunion, Antonio continues to write to Henderson and Weigel – and also to me – every month or so. He wrote recently with news of the birth of his and Camila’s son, Antonio Jr. 'I’ve realised now what this was all about,’ Henderson says now. 'Yes, he is interested in our lives, in seeing that we are OK, but that’s not why he met us. He did it because it was his way of saying sorry. It was his atonement. That’s good enough for me.’

'My Kidnapper’ will be shown in selected cinemas across Britain next year, followed by a broadcast on More4 (mykidnapper.com)

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