Three US military contractors are still alive after being kidnapped by leftwing Columbian rebels years ago.

That word came from a Columbian policeman who had been held hostage by the FARC in the jungle for eight years.

Jhon Frank Pinchao said he had been with the three Americans for years.   At night he was connected to one of them by a wire wrapped around his neck.

Pinchao said the Americans were alive but suffering.

They are: Keith Stansell of Georgia, who is now 43 years old.  Tom Howes of Merritt Island, Florida, now 54 and Marc Gonsalves of Bristol, Connecticut.

All are husbands, fathers and sons and have been pretty much forgotten by the US press.

Their drug surveillance plane, a single engine Cessna “Caravan,” crashed in the remote Columbian mountains in February of 2003.

There were five men aboard and all survived the crash. They were then captured by FARC rebels.

The pilot, an American named Tom Janis, was executed, as was a Columbian intelligence officer who was also on the plane. The other three Americans were led off into the jungle.

The men are Department of Defense contractors, employed by a subsidiary of Northrop-Grumman, and working under the military’s Southern Command on drug interdiction, looking specifically for coca plant fields.

The men are Keith Stansell, Mark Gonsalves and Tom Howes. They have effectively been forgotten by all but their loved ones.  When was the last time you ever heard the US government talking about them?

The sad thing is that three weeks after they were captured another single engine Cessna with three Americans on board was flying low looking for them when it crashed into a tree. All three men were killed. They were Jim Oliver, Tommy Schmidt and Ralph Ponticelli, also names now lost to history, no matter how recent that history was.

The policeman who escaped the FARC, Jhon Pinchao, had been taken hostage eight years ago in a FARC attack on the small southeast town of Mitu.

After his recent escape, he ran, crawled and swam in the remote Amazon jungle for almost three weeks before he was rescued. I once spent almost a month with my wife exploring the Amazon River and its tributaries by canoe, sleeping in Indian villages at night.  There is no more potentially dangerous nor inhospitable area in the world. At least not one that I have ever seen.   The Amazon basin foliage is almost impenetrable and it is busy with poisonous snakes and aggressive insects that bite and sting.

At the time, in 1983, my two young sons and I swam across (a narrow section of) the mud-brown Amazon River –maybe 1500 feet.  It was quite a thrilling but shuddery experience, which was the point. The river teems with threatening meat-eating fish, alligators, electric eels and other large and small exotica.  Jhon Pinchao is very fortunate to have survived 17 days of wandering through that jungle and wading or swimming those waterways.

Pinchao burst into tears at a news conference saying he was concerned that the three Americans, his companions for four years, would suffer because of his escape.

“I ask God to protect them,” he said of his friends at the news gathering in the presidential palace in Bogotá.

Former Columbian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt is also a hostage.    Pinchao said he had been held hostage in the same camp with Betancourt, who is now 46 years old and has been a prisoner since February of 2002.

Ingrid Betancourt Pulecio was campaigning for the presidency when she was grabbed at gun-point by the FARC.  She was traveling in a very dangerous area at the time, the (formerly) demilitarized zone at San Vincente del Caguan, and had been repeatedly warned by authorities of the possibility of an attack or a kidnapping.

Betancourt is from an interesting and accomplished family.  Her mother Yolanda is a former Miss Columbia beauty queen who served in the Columbian congress representing part of Bogota.  Her father was a cabinet minister and diplomat.  He was ambassador to France when Ingrid was young and she grew up in Paris. She married a French diplomat and they have two daughters. They lived abroad for years and Ingrid only returned to Columbia in 1989 where she took a job in the Foreign Ministry and then entered the world of Columbian politics, as an anti-corruption candidate. She divorced her husband. married a Columbian citizen and won a senate seat.  She had so many death threats she sent her daughters to live in New Zealand with their father, her ex-husband  She is the author of a book about her life and adventures called “Rage in the Heart”.

She has been held captive for five and one half years.

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