It was the Monday of a long weekend when I got the email. “this IS AN EMERGENCY,” it said. “Many lives are at risk… THIS IS NOT A JOKE.” It was a message from my younger brother. He wanted my phone number. I gave it to him.

The phone rang about half an hour later. My brother was in Colombia, in a small mountain town, and had gone to his Colombian girlfriend’s farm for a couple of days, an idyll interrupted when three men showed up claiming to be FARC and demanding fifty million pesos ($25,000) to let them leave town alive.

I had known my brother was travelling in South America and had intended to come to Colombia, but I didn’t know when he was going to arrive.

He was very insistent I tell no one, and that we find a way to convince my father to pay the ransom money. After we hung up my first call was to my girlfriend here in Cali. I told her I couldn’t talk over the phone — my brother was convinced all our phone calls were being tapped — so I asked her to get dressed and come over right away. It was already late.

What do I do, I asked her? Well, she said, there’s risks either way. Many times you pay the FARC a ransom and they kill the hostage anyway. Sometimes you pay the ransom and they sell the hostage to a different guerrilla group, who also demands a ransom. Simply giving them what they wanted was not necessarily the best solution to the problem.

What would you do if you were me, I asked her. I’d call GAULA, she said. GAULA, she explained, was the Colombia anti-kidnapping and extortion squad. There were more kidnappings in Colombia than anywhere else in the world, so GAULA, she argued, were some of the best people in the world to handle this sort of situation.

So we called GAULA. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where my brother was. He had called me from a land line, but I didn’t have caller ID, so it was impossible to know where he was calling from. I did have the IP address from his email but, as we were to discover later, that didn’t help much at all. Come into the office in Cali tomorrow between 7am and 7:30am, said the man on the phone.

I didn’t sleep too well that night. My brother and I are not exactly close — we’d seen each other in Buenos Aires last year for the first time in more than a dozen years — and I hadn’t had a single email from him since. Still, he was my younger brother, and I was responsible for him. My father didn’t know Colombia as I do nor does he speak Spanish, putting the onus squarely on me to get him out, alive.

The next morning my girlfriend and I rocked up to the police station and made it past several sentries to the GAULA office. The office itself, far from suggesting burly men with guns who rescue hostages, was replete with blue cubicles punctuated by the occasional meeting table. It could have been the head office of a grocery store in Boise.

Two men eventually greeted us and sat down. What was my brother’s financial situation, they wanted to know. What did he do for a living. Well, he was a poor backpacker who I thought had done some English teaching work in BA. They looked at each other significantly. Are you sure this isn’t a hoax? We deal with a lot of fake kidnappings, self-kidnappings, stuff like that. You say you don’t know your brother really well. Is it possible this is some sort of a joke?

I think about this. The thought had, in fact, crossed my mind. Was it simply a ruse to burn my dad for twenty-five grand? But then, the kid was definitely scared. No one can act that well. He was definitely afraid for his life.

No, I said. It is possible, yes, but I consider it highly unlikely. I gave them my USB key, which contained a downloaded copy of my brother’s email, with all the routing headers showing. This was passed off to a Colombian geek to process. Meanwhile, we stared at the opposite cubicle wall, and my girlfriend and I gossipped about the various boob jobs and outfits on the women in the office.

Finally the word comes back: the email was sent from an email cafe so remote that it was routed through a satellite link. Only one company offered that service in Colombia. They were a private company based in Bogota, and it would take eight days for them to process the government’s request.

My brother had been told he had only five days left to live. (more…)