The Saga of Emmanuel

My first morning here in Bogotá I awoke to a frenzy of talk radio chatter surrounding the identity of a child legally named Juan David Gómez Tapiero who, under the custody of the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, ICBF), was being submitted to a series of mitochondrial DNA tests. The question: Is he or is he not Emmanuel, son of Clara Rojas, the currently kidnapped aide to former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt? The young boy’s identity has been the subject of incessant talk all over Colombia, in living rooms and on the street as much as on the radio and in the papers, and is but one part of a much larger and very theatrical political battle between the ideologically at-odds presidents of Colombia (Álvaro Uribe) and Venezuela (Hugo Chávez). For days it was hard—and to a lesser degree still is—to spend an hour here without hearing the word “Emmanuel” coming from someone or somewhere. A somewhat reductive backstory: 

Clara Rojas and Ingrid Betancourt were kidnapped by FARC in February of 2002, during the latter’s campaign for the presidency. Both are still captive. 

Sometime around 2004, Rojas gave birth to Emmanuel, the child of a guerrilla fighter.

Last December, Hugo Chávez pulled his weight as a leftist and former rebel leader to initiate talks with FARC about ”Operation Emmanuel,” i.e., the highly publicized release of Rojas, Emmanuel, and former Colombian congresswoman Consuelo Gonzáles (who was kidnapped in 2001). His intentions, of course, were as much political as humanitarian; if successful, Operation Emmanuel would theoretically signify Chavez’s ideological superiority over Uribe, a staunch right-winger and steadfast G. W. Bush ally,  in assuaging the turmoil of Colombia’s decades-long civil war—and, in general, in spreading his brand of politics across Latin America.

Everything seemed to be going swimmingly for Chávez. FARC agreed to release the three captives in an undisclosed location late in December, and starting on the 26th, a large group of international delegates (including Argentine ex-president Nestor Kirchner and, a little dubiously in my opinion, American filmmaker Oliver Stone) stood around the Colombian plains neighboring the Venezuelan border awaiting this  historical landmark in humanitarian progress.

For days, nothing happened.

Then, on the 31st, as the delegation grew increasingly peeved with FARC’s absence (which they explained as due to “heavy military activity” in the area) and prepared to give up on the matter entirely, Uribe went live with a hypothesis regarding the no-show: FARC didn’t have the child Emmanuel. He grounded this theory on the finding of a boy abandoned to the ICBF two years prior, now in Bogotá, who matched various descriptions of Rojas’ son.

The delegation went its various separate ways; Chávez returned to Caracas defeated, tail-between-legs, etc; Uribe returned to Bogotá outwardly bemoaning the failed mission, inwardly (I’m sure) gloating at Chávez’s red-faced exeunt. This is where I came in, with Colombia in a furor over the ambiguous identity of the boy in Bogotá, abandoned and malnourished.

To summarize the situation so far: the mitochondrial DNA tests, performed with samples from known relatives of Rojas’, came back 80% positive.  Soon enough FARC acknowledged that the boy is, indeed, Emmanuel, and that soon after his birth they abandoned him to an ICBF branch from which he was eventually transferred to the capital. Their acknowledgment, of course, was framed as an allegation that the boy was no less than “kidnapped” by Uribe’s “narco-paramilitary regime and its masters in Washington,” and that their attempts to recover him before effectuating Operation Emmanuel were stunted by the ICBF’s (evil) bureaucracy. 

If this whole charade seems a little on the ridiculous end (one writer I spoke to likened it to a cross between García Márquez, Tom Clancy and Ionesco), that’s because it is. What should have been a breakthrough in rational, peace-oriented progress in a country whose sense of moral and political principle has been worn paper thin by fifty years of violent conflict—one, moreovoer, in which the stance of any single party involved stopped seeming justifiable or even substantial decades ago—proved instead to be little more than an aggrandized round in a battle of tail-feather posturing between equally hollow ideologies and their desperately selfish, chest-thumping proponents.

Nothing new in Latin America, but disheartening nonetheless.