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paid ranged from several hundred to several million dollars.
    In 2003, when Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves were captured, the FARC was estimated to number between fifteen and twenty thousand troops. The rank and file came mostly from poor rural villages, where schools were ill-equipped or simply didn’t exist. FARC soldiers, mostly in their teens and early twenties, both male and female, strolled freely through villages where for decades there had been no Colombian government presence. Impoverished children were in awe of the guerrillas, with their clean uniforms, military caps, and glistening rifles. Given the extreme poverty, the idea of joining the guerrillas held great allure. Most believed life in the FARC would be better than at home. Food was much better and always plentiful; teenage guerrilla soldiers were taught to read and write. FARC soldiers received no monetary compensation, but often, deep familial bonds formed between commanders and the young guerrillas.
    The FARC’s official minimum age for recruits is fifteen, but some are as young as thirteen, and journalists have reported seeing guerrillas as young as ten. Secretariat member Iván Ríos defended the recruitment of children in the book
El Orden de la Guerra
, arguing that with the horrors of Colombia and the realities of an endless civil war, the FARC is more of a salvation for children than a death sentence. Paramilitaries come into villages and massacre entire families they feel are aligned with the FARC. The constant battles among paramilitaries, the Colombian military, and the guerrillas have displaced more than four million people. And with the government unable to provide for the massive population of internal refugees, thousands of children are left with few options; they join the guerrillas or find their way to the major cities to beg, become child prostitutes, or spend days in dumps looking for food and desperately sniffing rags soaked with gasoline to stave off hunger. “The children love the guerrillas because here there is love, warmth for them,” says Ríos. “We will not lie and say that there are no children in the organization. There are children in the organization, but they are particular cases and practically obligatory cases.”
    Upon entrée into the FARC, the youngest soldiers are made to prepare food, plant crops, tidy the encampments, and pass messages among commanders. They clean the large rifles but are given small pistols because the weight of the Russian-built AK-47s is too much for their small frames. For four hours a day, they are taught FARC ideology: The Colombian government is corrupt; the American government is imperialistic; FARC is the people’s army; the FARC and the poor are persecuted by the state. With the FARC’s form of limited Marxism having changed little in forty years, there is hardly more rhetoric to absorb. At sundown, they collapse onto plank beds. Above them, a black plastic tarp shields them from the ceaseless rain, and netting dissuades ravenous mosquitoes.
    While nearly all FARC guerrillas—including those in commanding positions—entered the ranks from lives of destitute poverty, a handful of guerrillas came into the FARC from middle-or upper-class families, having university educations and deep ties to the oligarchy. And it was one of those few who in 2004 would become permanently entangled in the hostage drama of Howes, Stansell, and Gonsalves.
    Simón Trinidad was born in Bogotá in 1950 as Ricardo Palmera, the pampered child of an upper-class family from Valledupar, a city of 350,000 in northeastern Colombia. Palmera was the seventh child of eleven sired by his father with five women. “It was a comfortable life financewise,” Palmera says. “This allowed me to have a happy and pleasant childhood, go to school, to travel the country.” There was a long tradition of political involvement in both his parents’ families. His