28
Jun

Thrillday: Hijacked in Ecuador

Written by Rick Henrikson on June 28th, 2012 Posted in Personal, Thrilldays, Travel

If you don’t know me very well, you’d probably be a bit surprised to hear about some of the things I’ve seen and done.  I certainly look unassuming enough, with my engineer’s glasses, my student’s scruff, and my geek’s sense of humor.  If you know me a bit better, you might’ve heard about some of the crazy situations I’ve fallen into over the years.  If you’ve done much traveling with me, you’d know I suffer from a healthy bit of wanderlust, mixed with a perhaps unhealthy tolerance for danger.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things that scare me.  Among the things I’d reveal, large drops rank somewhere high on the list.  But still, I tend to gravitate towards places and people that I find intriguing.  And sometimes this leads to…interesting encounters.

If you’ve spent much time at all with me, you’ve probably heard a few of these stories.  But talking with a friend recently, he recommended I put them all in one place on my site.  So I suppose I’ll gradually relay these stories as best I can.  In addition to breaking my long radio silence, injecting a short story here and there should liven this blog up a bit (I hope).  I’m thinking of doing this on Thursdays.  Let’s just call them Thrilldays.  Prepare to be thrilled, gentle internet-goer.

So, without any further ado, I present to you: “The time I was hijacked by armed Colombian guerrillas in Ecuador”.

In order to get from the Puente de Cuyabeno (Bridge of Cuyabeno) to Papallacta we would have to first take a 3 hour bus to Lago Agrio, followed by a 5 or 6 hour bus to Papallacta (which is then only about an hour and a half to two hours away from Quito). The 3 hour leg of our trip was uneventful.

We arrived in Lago Agrio expecting to have to take a cab to the terminal terrestre (almost every city here has a major bus terminal called the ‘terminal terrestre’) where we would catch our next bus towards Papallacta and Quito. However, as we were about to get into our cab the Trans Baños bus came by and the yeller/money collector for that bus started yelling “Quito! Quito!” We apologized to the cab driver and threw our bags into the bottom storage compartment for the bus. We were on our way to Papallacta, the best hot baths in Ecuador (consisting of a few dozen pools of different temperatures heated by volcano).

We fell asleep.

What we have later determined to be sometime around 6pm, things got ugly.

I opened my eyes as people were screaming and a man with a gun was yelling for us to put our hands in the air. “La Plata! La Plata!!” (“The Money! The Money!!”) My mind stopped. Everything was a reflex to a reflex to a hint of an action. The first thing I did was take my camera out of my pocket and shove it into the side of the seat. I then took my watch off and shoved it into the side of the seat. Azalea shoved her credit cards into the side of the seat. The men were shouting and making their way towards us. Luckily we had time to do something because we were in the back of the bus. However, we were the only three foreigners on this entire bus. What would they do with us?

“Cierra las ojos!!!”(“Close your eyes!!!”) I was pressed up against the window. I was a part of the window. Azalea leaned into my side. There was no hiding. He was right beside us. “La plata! La plata!” I handed him my wallet and Azalea handed him her little money bag. My wallet only had a few dollars in it, as well as a credit card, my MIT ID (so much for breaking in as a creepy old alum), and my REI member card. The real prize was around my neck. I was wearing one of those secret passport cases wrapped across my shoulder like a carrier bag. Contained in this sleeve was about $70, my passport, my ATM debit card, my list of contact numbers, a 2GB USB thumb drive, a 1GB SD memory card, and a memory card reader. The sleeve was hugging my ribs on the left side of my body. I was only wearing a tshirt over it. This would not work.

In the moments before a gun was in my face, I considered popping the memory card out of my camera and sticking it in my passport holder. For some reason that had always seemed like a good plan to me. In the actual situation, I was afraid it would reveal that I was wearing a secret stash. Should I shove the camera down my pants? Should I leave it? I just dumped the camera in the side of the seat with everything else. However, when I saw they were moving everyone off the bus I didn’t know what to do. For some reason I thought they were going to ditch us in the jungle (they had been driving us deep into the jungle for a while now). It seemed like they could just leave us somewhere and drive off with the bus. I had no time to think it through. I grabbed my camera at the last instant and shoved it back in my cargo pants pocket. I was pulled off the bus.

You’ve seen it a million times in movies, but you never expect to live it. I stepped off the bus and before me on the dirt road were all of the 20 or 30 passengers of the bus lying in the dirt in a row, side by side, faces down. This could’ve been a road to someone’s house…or to a church…or to some exotic resort in the rainforest. But right now, it was our prison. At the end of the line was another man with a gun. I was the last one off the bus.

I was forced to the ground, my face in the dirt. I didn’t feel anything. But I felt that I should feel something. I should be afraid. I should be going into fight or flight. I felt nothing, only reflex. I imitated feeling. I pushed my face deeper into the dirt. Did this make me look more pitiful? More desperate? I shook. Did this make me look afraid? Would this make them more afraid of what they were doing? Would this make it more real for them?

Shots are fired.

They start yelling at Azalea for money. She has already given her money to them. They keep yelling. She frantically explains that the other man has her bag. They keep yelling and make her stand up. They make her go to get her bag from the man standing at the other end of the line with a gun. She runs over.

Shots are fired.

I hear Azalea crying as she runs back to her spot in the dirt, to my left. She is trembling. She has real feeling.

Brett has been taken back onto the bus because his wallet didn’t have enough money in it. They held a gun to him and made him get his bag. Then they had him press his head into a seat while they searched through his backpack. They got his camera. His dues were paid.

I was the last to be searched. I had brought my small daypack off the bus with me. He violently rifled through my daypack, throwing everything that was worthless at my head as I lay in the dirt. He hit me with my jacket, a couple of books, some snack food for our long bus ride.

I considered saying a prayer out loud. These people were religious, weren’t they? Could they step outside of the situation to see what was happening? I couldn’t think of the words to the Our Father in spanish. I said the prayer silently to myself, in english.

The man searched down my body and rolled me over. His search was thorough, and I realized it would’ve been useless to just put the camera down my pants. He found it in my cargo pants pocket easily. However, in his search he did not find my passport case. I am a walking commercial for the company that makes those cases.

I was lying on my back, looking up at him as he fumbled with my camera case to see his prize. I did something stupid. Looking up at him, I pitifully asked if I could have my memory card. Please.

“Hijo de puta!! Cierra los ojos!!!” (“Son of a bitch!! Close your eyes!!!”)

Shots are fired, right above my head.

“Policía!! Policía!!!”

There was a large commotion. Our captors started running into the jungle, firing shots into the air as they went. One of them was wearing my backpack, which was now being used to transport their loot.

I had no concept of time during this…it could’ve been 10 minutes or 2 hours and I wouldn’t have known which was more accurate. Some time after they ran into the jungle, another man came and shook me. He was trying to get me up. Were they back for more?

No. It was the bus driver. I quickly gathered my loose belongings in the dirt before me. A pair of wool socks dropped to the ground. I looked at it for a moment. What was I looking at? I left it and ran onto the bus with the rest of the passengers.

We drove back out of the jungle. I looked through my possessions. They didn’t take my cell phone, which was a relief. They also didn’t take my wallet. I checked it and everything was still in there, they hadn’t even bothered to take the $3. I was relieved. Eventually we stopped on a main road where a police officer took down our reports of what had happened. I listened.

Apparently a man riding the bus had asked the driver to stop somewhere to let him off. We were near Cascales, Ecuador. We were maybe 30 or 40km away from the Colombian border. When he was starting to get off, two men ran out of the jungle with pistols in their hands. They handed a pistol to the first man who was getting off and then the three of them boarded. I don’t recognize accents, but the Ecuadorian passengers could tell these men were Colombian by their accents. Also, they were not men. They were boys. Maybe in their late teens. What had brought them to this? I wanted to know. The driver mentioned that they might have been the same people who hijacked the bus a week before. What??? This would’ve been useful information before getting on their bus.

I went back to my seat having reported my lost possessions. When I got back, my wallet was gone. Another passenger had stolen my wallet. We searched the floors but it never showed up. I was in shock.

The remainder of the bus ride we were a little jumpy. Any time the bus stopped, people would yell “Cierra la puerta!”(Close the door!)” We did not want to stop anywhere else.

Eventually we made it to Papallacta and were left off in front of a hostel. We were alive.

My total losses:
Camera: $300
2GB Memory card: $95, 6 days of photos in the jungle (I had luckily burned a CD of my photos in Quito before leaving for the jungle, so I didn’t lose everything)
Wallet: Credit Card, MIT ID
Leatherman Pocket Knife: $60
Daypack: $15

Tips for being hijacked near Colombia
1. Pack most stuff underneath the bus.
2. Hide things on bus if you have time.
3. Don’t carry valuables on you, aside from a wallet with at least $20 or $30 in it to appease them (if there is any less, they will try to scare more out of you).
4. Do what they say.

Note: This story was excerpted from my original post in a travel journal I kept during a backpacking trip across South America in 2006.  The original article can be find on the Travelpod blog here (which apparently has over 27,000 views! whoa!): http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rickwastaken/south-2006/1154664720/tpod.html#ixzz1z52Pi0ZS

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