Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [48]
Asencio, meanwhile, was already a man who did not want for confidence. In this situation, he recognized that he had a skill the terrorists needed. In his role on the committee, he became more comfortable. He began to joke with the other hostages and his captors. As the days wore on, he even got into animated debates with the guerrillas about U.S. foreign policy. One day, when he and the other diplomats learned about a long diatribe that the terrorists were planning on issuing at their next negotiating session with government officials, they told the terrorists that their strategy was flawed. They wrote up a more nuanced draft of their own, and the terrorists used it, Asencio says.
Pabón does not remember the hostages actually writing any documents. But he does remember that they were helpful. “They taught us how to read between the lines of the messages that the government sent us. When things got really confusing and somber, they helped us to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they showed us how to stay positive.”
The siege of the Dominican embassy would last sixty-one days. When it finally ended, it happened very differently from how Asencio or Pabón would have predicted that first, bloody day. The Colombian government agreed to allow international observers to monitor prison conditions and trials. And the terrorists eventually gave up their demand for prisoner releases. They did receive $1 million in ransom (supposedly from private donors, but Pabón believes the ransom may have been paid by the government). And they were permitted to fly to Cuba with twelve of their hostages (including Asencio), whom they then released.
For students of disasters, the story of the Dominican embassy siege was astonishing. It proved that hostages can in fact be very useful actors. They do not automatically melt down into helpless victims. Nor do they necessarily fall prey to the so-called Stockholm syndrome, whereby hostages become perversely loyal to their captors. The Stockholm syndrome, named after a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm in which the hostages ended up defending their captors, rarely happens in real life, Asencio believes. But belief in the Stockholm syndrome made his countrymen discount his input when he was being held hostage, he says. The memory of that sense of helplessness remains bitter for him. “My requests were being either ignored or very distinctly opposed,” he says. After his release, Asencio was honored at the State Department, and he continued to rise through the ranks of professional diplomacy. But he still argues with his colleagues about the existence of the Stockholm syndrome. “I have had many conversations with counterterrorism experts at the State Department about this. And I haven’t had any luck,” he says. The experts, as is so often the case, underestimate the victims.
Asencio now lives in Mexico City, where he works as a contractor to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Dominican embassy has been torn down, and an apartment building constructed in its place.
In Cuba, Pabón and his fellow rebels did not retire to the hills. They repeatedly returned to Colombia to carry out more operations. In 1981, Pabón was captured by the Ecuadorian military as he attempted to cross back into Colombia. “We committed thousands of mistakes,” he says now. Ecuador sent Pabón back to Colombia, where he spent twenty-two months in prison. Luckily for him, Colombians adore their rebels. Over the past century, the country has negotiated eighty-eight peace deals with different insurgent groups. In 1982, the new president, Belisario Betancour, declared an unconditional amnesty for political crimes. That