For six years and 19 days, Congressman Jorge Eduardo Géchem Turbay was held hostage by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Incredibly abducted mid-flight in 2002, he was one of the most high-profile politicians held hostage by the guerrilla for years, in an attempt to force the Colombian government into a prisoner swap for detained rebels that never took place. The failure of that gambit meant years of suffering for him, his fellow captives and their families.
In October 2010, two years after his release, one of the rebels who carried out his mid-flight abduction and several senior commanders who ordered FARC’s kidnapping policy were sentenced by a local judge to more than 30 years in prison. Sixteen years later, this past February 9, 22 former commanders and mid-level officers from the guerrilla’s Eastern and Southern Blocs were charged by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) – the judicial arm of the transitional justice system stemming from the peace deal with FARC – with the kidnapping of Géchem and hundreds of others.
These two decisions illustrate distinct yet complementary strategies of the Colombian justice system over two decades, seeking to deliver justice in the face of thousands of atrocities committed over a half-century armed conflict. A review of the judicial documents addressing Géchem’s kidnapping reveals differences in scope and emphasis between the two types of justice, but also the way in which they feed one another.
Both focused on a mix of material perpetrators and masterminds linked to the former congressman’s abduction. Whilst in the ordinary justice system they were sentenced in absentia to long prison terms they never came close to serving, in the transitional justice system they are now obliged to acknowledge their responsibility, apologise publicly and redress their victims, as conditions for receiving lighter sentences. The original ruling convicted them solely for Géchem’s abduction, whilst the new indictments address his entire captivity and that of dozens of other victims within a broader macro-case. Both charged them with the offence of hostage-taking: however, whilst the first added the offences of aircraft hijacking and terrorism, the second concluded that they committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, the most serious offences under international law. One merely describes the circumstances of the abduction, whilst the more recent one recounts in detail the humiliating treatment inflicted upon them and their suffering in captivity.
These differences take on greater significance now that the JEP’s Acknowledgment Chamber has, for the first time in its eight-year history, concluded the investigation phase of a macro-case, with the latest two indictments against members of the last two regional blocs of the now-defunct guerrilla. In total, the JEP unveiled eight collective accusations over kidnappings – one of the most emblematic crimes of the Colombian conflict – resulting in 63 former FARC members being charged and seven, those from its final leadership, already convicted.
Of all of them, only 23 had previously been convicted in the ordinary courts and 13 had served time in prison. All have chosen to admit their guilt and apologise to their victims (except for those recently charged, who still have a month to decide).
A kidnapping up in the sky
Géchem Turbay, an economist now aged 74, had been a prominent figure in Colombian politics for two decades. He’d served as a senator for the Liberal Party for three terms and as a member of the House of Representatives for another two. Previously, he’d been a town councillor, a departmental lawmaker and secretary of public works in his native Huila. He is also the third cousin of a former president.
On the morning of 20 February 2002, in the midst of the campaign to secure his sixth term in Congress, the Aires flight carrying him from Neiva to Bogotá was hijacked by FARC. Several rebels from the Teófilo Forero Mobile Column boarded the flight, inexplicably carrying weapons that a faulty metal detector failed to detect. After taking control, they forced the pilot to change course and land on a rural road between Hobo and Gigante. They released the other 19 passengers, the pilot and the flight attendant, but took the congressman with them. “We’ve come for you, Géchem,” they told him.
It wasn’t the first time Géchem’s family experienced the guerrillas’ cruelty first-hand. In 1995, the FARC kidnapped his cousin Rodrigo Turbay, a congressman for the neighbouring department of Caquetá, and abandoned his lifeless body in the Caguán River two years later. Then, in December 2000, in one of the most notorious massacres they perpetrated, they murdered his other cousin, Diego Turbay – who had taken Rodrigo’s place in Congress – and his aunt, Inés Cote, whilst they were travelling by road.
The aerial abduction of Géchem, at the time chairman of the congressional peace commission, had immediate political repercussions. Occurring just three days after the same guerrilla had kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and her running mate Clara Rojas, it led then-President Andrés Pastrana to suspend peace negotiations with FARC that had made almost no progress in four years. He also ended the military clearance of an area the size of Switzerland, which the government ordered to facilitate talks.
Géchem remained a hostage until 28 February 2008, a captivity he described in his book They Diverted the Flight!: The Ordeal of My Kidnapping as “not merely detention (…) in conditions of vulnerability and fragility, but also being removed from one’s reality, one’s family, one’s work, one’s hopes and one’s expectations”.
The ordinary court’s concise and factual account
Two years after Géchem’s release, his case reached a first milestone in the ordinary courts. On 7 October 2010, a judge in Neiva sentenced nine members of FARC. One of the fake passengers, Robinson Matiz, was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Several senior guerrilla leaders, including five who would eventually join its Secretariat, were sentenced to 32 years in prison for the “conception, planning and execution” of the kidnapping. All were ordered to pay him 480 times the minimum monthly wage (around $140,000 at the time).
However, having been convicted in absentia, none of them actually faced justice for their part in the crime. Rodrigo Londoño ‘Timochenko’, Milton Toncel ‘Joaquín Gómez’, Luis Alberto Albán ‘Marcos Calarcá’ and Luciano Marín ‘Iván Márquez’ evaded the authorities until the peace negotiations. Only Londoño, who was the guerrilla’s last commander-in-chief and signed the peace agreement on its behalf, had 38 convictions, 163 ongoing cases, 118 arrest warrants and a criminal case in the US at the time the talks with the Colombian government began in 2012. None of them ever set foot in a prison (and one, Iván Márquez, ended up abandoning the peace deal and his men to take up arms again).
The Prosecutor’s Office had aimed even higher. In its 2007 indictment, it also charged the commander-in-chief ‘Manuel Marulanda’ and senior leaders ‘Raúl Reyes’ and ‘Mono Jojoy’, but the judge had to dismiss the criminal proceedings against the three because, in the intervening three years, they’d all died – one from illness and the others in army operations. Jojoy’s death had occurred just two weeks earlier. Another convicted man, Guillermo León Sáenz or ‘Alfonso Cano’, who was to take Marulanda’s place, would die a year later in another military operation.
In deciding which facts to underscore, the ordinary courts provided a brief, factual account of the operation by which FARC kidnapped Géchem. They described in some detail only how the rebels forced the plane “to land in an area designated and forcibly secured by the organisation”, how their colleagues “set up roadblocks to the north and south, preventing travellers and passers-by from circulating” and how they “cut down trees and, to hinder pursuit from authorities, blew up the Argelino Durán bridge over the Neiva River”.
The judge mentioned his six-year captivity and his release, but only once – when assessing the damages for which the convicted parties should be liable to Géchem – did he emphasise “the psychological and physical harm, and the damage to self-esteem, decorum and human dignity, represented by the six years of captivity in the Colombian jungles endured by the victim”. The ruling said little about what happened during the kidnapping.
The transitional justice’s collective indictment
Sixteen years after that ruling, the JEP revisited the former senator’s kidnapping in two collective indictments unveiled on the same day: one against seven former members of the Southern Bloc (the unit that abducted Géchem) and 15 from the Eastern Bloc (the unit that held him captive for most of the time).
Among them are two who could be considered material perpetrators of his kidnapping. Fabián Ramírez was convicted in the original judgement but never stepped in prison and José Ricaurte Valencia, better known as ‘Jerónimo Gutiérrez’ or ‘Caresanto’, led the 7th Front guard that held Géchem in custody, but hadn’t been charged before. The JEP charged them all as those ultimately responsible for multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as hostage-taking, severe deprivation of liberty and homicide, but also for other offences committed during captivity, such as torture, cruel treatment and slavery.
In addition to them, three others from the original convicted group – Rodrigo Londoño, Milton Toncel and Luis Alberto Albán – were sentenced by the special tribunal in September 2025, having been charged five years earlier with thousands of kidnappings, including that of Géchem.
Although the newly charged individuals have yet to own up to their role and publicly apologise to victims like Géchem, the investigation process has already yielded new admissions. Ángel Alberto García, whose nom de guerre is ‘Hernán Benítez’ and who was also charged in this latest round, admitted before the court that Géchem had no connection with far-right paramilitaries, contrary to what FARC had previously claimed in an attempt to justify his abduction. “We expressly state that the grounds on which he was detained do not fall within the scope of Law 003 [of the guerrilla]. This statement aims to help restore Mr Géchem’s good name and dignity,” he said during the proceedings.
Incentives to go beyond the core offences
Unlike in the ordinary justice system, the JEP’s charges deal extensively with the humiliating treatment that former guerrillas inflicted on their victims during captivity and the suffering they caused their families.
This acknowledgement of the pain they endured is one of the aspects the victims value most. From the outset, they have insisted on the importance of the FARC not only acknowledging their abductions, but also admit to the degrading treatment they inflicted and the years of suffering their families endured during their absence.
The fact that this is now happening within transitional justice may be partly due to the fact that, as Justice Julieta Lemaitre – who presided over the kidnapping case – said in a recent interview with La Silla Vacía, “ordinary justice, which has an overwhelming caseload and is focused on punishment, really had no incentive to document additional behaviours that would not contribute to the sentence. We document it because we understand that it is very important for the victims.”
The “death march”
One of the episodes that left a scar on kidnapping victims is what they dubbed “the death march” and which Géchem refers to in his book as “the journeying prison”. In late 2004, a group of 38 hostages – including himself and a five-month-old baby, the child of fellow hostage Clara Rojas – were forced to walk in chains for 40 days from the Yarí grasslands to the dense Guaviare jungle, deep in the Amazon, to escape military pressure.
That 200-kilometre journey is described by the JEP as part of “the worst conditions of captivity” faced by victims. “The long marches, malnutrition and constant exposure to dampness and insects further deteriorated their physical condition. (…) They were forced to walk in chains for hours through the jungle, negotiating rivers, mud and thick vegetation, which caused them injuries, lacerations and extreme exhaustion,” the indictment against the Eastern Bloc states. “The guards barely gave them time to rest, and if anyone fell ill or could not keep up, they were dragged along or punished with threats.”
The forced march had serious health consequences for many. Géchem’s spine was affected, making it difficult for him to climb into his cabin and exacerbating, in the words of the JEP, “serious heart problems, considered to be pre-heart attacks or severe episodes of angina pectoris”. Another fellow prisoner, Police General Luis Herlindo Mendieta, had to be carried in a hammock. Fellow congress member Alan Jara experienced similar pain in his legs. Géchem, like Gloria Polanco and Orlando Beltrán, had to be given tablets to control his blood pressure. Five-month-old baby, Emmanuel, fell ill with leishmaniasis and was forcibly separated from his mother, Clara Rojas, for three years.
Ill-treatment in captivity
Similarly, the accusations detail the ill-treatment inflicted on them by FARC. Following the escape of two hostages in other parts of the country, their captors stepped up brutal control measures, such as chaining them all together with a single long chain, day and night, which forced them to do everything together for two and a half years. As Sergeant Arbey Delgado, with whom Géchem shared captivity, says, “they subjected us to a punishment that wasn’t even used in the days of slavery”. Consuelo González de Perdomo recounted that a rebel informed her that, in the event of an escape, each hostage had been assigned someone to shoot them, and that he would be her executioner.
All this occurred because, although the Secretariat had instructed that captives be treated ‘well’, in practice this only concerned – in the JEP’s words – ‘the preservation of the captive’s biological life and not their human dignity’. Within this logic, the conditions of captivity “depended entirely on their jailers or direct guards”.
In the Eastern Bloc’s case, which held Géchem hostage, this meant extreme chainings, beatings, humiliations, mock executions, arbitrary prohibitions, insults and threats. These were, in the JEP’s description, “deliberate ill-treatment which, beyond the conditions of war, stemmed from the captors’ cruelty”. The forced isolation to which they were subjected was, according to the accusation, “a form of dehumanisation that sought to break the victims’ resistance and left irreparable physical and psychological scars”. All this explains why several of those responsible for their care, who were not senior commanders, appear among the accused alongside their superiors.
Less obvious consequences
The transitional justice allegations also document less visible, yet equally painful, forms of suffering. In one of their most harrowing sections, they recount how victims were denied the chance to mourn their deceased relatives. Géchem, like Jara, Beltrán and Luis Eladio Pérez, learnt of his mother’s death whilst in the jungle, after years of not having seen her. They were forced, the prosecution states, “to mourn in private and from afar, cut off from any moral and emotional support that might have been provided by their loved ones”.
Furthermore, having been held captive for so many years wreaked havoc on their life plans as public officials elected by citizens. In the more immediate term, they were “forcibly isolated from the political arena for almost two terms of government”, says the JEP, to the extent that several found it difficult to resume their political careers after their release. This caused harm to them, as well as to their constituents, who “also lost the opportunity for these leaders to implement programmes promoting community development”.
This doesn’t mean that the investigations carried out by the JEP solve all their concerns. Géchem, for example, has insisted for years – as have colleagues such as González de Perdomo and Beltrán – that it be clarified why only Liberal congressmen were kidnapped in Huila and whether any political rival was involved, as indeed happened in Caquetá with Géchem’s relatives, in whose crimes a former Conservative congressman – currently awaiting trial at the JEP – participated.
Ultimately, the fact that justice can be served for atrocities such as those experienced by Géchem may come down to the fact that transitional justice – in the form of the JEP – has built its indictments taking into account the work of the ordinary justice system and complementing it. Without that groundwork, Colombia probably wouldn’t have got this far.
