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One message, sent by Martha for Valentine's Day in 2002, read "These are days that my heart beats for you. Every day I miss you more than the day before." It pained him to be reminded of the distance between them.
"How sad it is when I wake up alone," he wrote back to Martha in a poem, which was included in a "proof of life" package that the rebels sent to the media. "And I see dawn asleep/And my heart bleeds for what I have lost/Oh, while I wait for the Goddess-like voice of my love."
After the abduction of three American contractors in 2003, the government stepped up its offensive, and the guerrillas abandoned their jungle hideaways. To elude aircraft and snitches in jungle villages, they marched Lizcano in wide-ranging circles through thick brush, over steep mountains, and across treacherous rivers. The monotony of Lizcano's environment became almost too much to bear: Every leaf, tree, and stream looked identical; every day brought the same. On a good day, the group ate lentils and rice or monkey soup, which Lizcano could swallow only by pinching his nose. Sometimes he'd even resort to drinking water with salt to fight dehydration. "There was one guerrilla who at night would put a cooked mouse in my boot and I would eat it," says Lizcano.
He was often ill, plagued by dehydration, malnutrition, and urinary and digestive tract infections. Without mosquito netting, he had contracted malaria, which gave him chills, aches, nightmares, and chronic fatigue. He moved slowly and with pain. For every distance the rebels walked in two hours, it took him six. Sometimes they waited for him while he rested; when their patience ran out, they would drag him in a hammock. In another proof-of-life package, he wrote to his wife, "You need more courage to suffer than to die."
The walks grew longer, Lizcano grew weaker, and the rebels finally demanded that he lighten his load by discarding the books they had given him—among them Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey and poetry by Pablo Neruda. Desperate, Lizcano tore out his favorite passages and stuffed them into plastic bags to carry in his pockets.
At night, he would sometimes prepare notes for academic lectures, then jam sticks into the ground and crown them with signs bearing the names of his former students. "Carlos," "Juan," and the others were an obedient and attentive audience as Lizcano gave talks on geography, history, and world leaders like Mahatma Gandhi. When Lizcano grew overly animated, his guards assumed he'd gone mad.
By the middle of 2006, the guerrillas had lost substantial ground in their four-decade war against the government. The military had killed or captured several mid-level rebel commanders, and kidnappings had dropped almost tenfold. After Lizcano's son Mauricio won his father's seat in Congress, rebels kidnapped his brother, Juan Carlos. But government pursuit proved so dogged, they set him free soon after.
A deserter from the rebel unit that held Lizcano divulged his location to the government, and the military fanned out to cut off rebel supply lines. Aircraft buzzed overhead searching the forest, and intelligence specialists monitored the airwaves. Under siege, the guerrillas marched around the clock. They would no longer carry Lizcano. If an attack came, he was informed, they would kill him. But Isaza had a different plan: Lizcano, he grew convinced, would be his exit strategy.
A $400,000 reward had been offered for Lizcano's rescue—enough for any rebel's fresh start. Isaza, stocky and dark-skinned and with 12 years of experience in the rebel army, had grown increasingly disenchanted with the guerrillas; he missed his family and girlfriend and was unhappy with the course of action the rebels were taking with Lizcano.
Isaza had dared not object, however, and indeed often played the role of harsh disciplinarian, barking out orders and refusing Lizcano permission to wash his clothes. But at night, when he wasn't observed, Isaza often struck up conversation with him. Over several weeks, a bond grew between the two as they swapped stories about the coffee-growing region where they'd both grown up. Isaza's mother had spoken highly to him of the congressman's work, and this had stuck with him.
He began to keep an eye on Lizcano during marches and advised him to stay close for protection if the air force bombed. As the military closed in, Isaza's own choice was becoming clear: die with his comrades or flee with the captive.
Now he asked his prisoner over the chessboard, "Are you tough enough?"
At first, Lizcano thought it was a trick. "Yes, I'm tough enough," he responded hesitantly.
"It's now or never, old-timer."
At nine o'clock that night, Isaza led Lizcano through the jungle and toward a river. Isaza calculated that they would have about three hours before the rebels discovered them missing. At the river, he instructed Lizcano to walk across on dry rocks so that no one could track their path. As Lizcano stepped forward, he slipped into the water. "You're okay," Isaza whispered as he hauled him out. Dogs barked in the distance. Lizcano swore under his breath.
They ducked under a barbed wire fence. Lizcano tore his shirt, and Isaza grabbed the piece of cloth hanging on the wire—he knew their trackers wouldn't miss it. They made their way up a steep hill. Lizcano fell so often that Isaza found him a walking stick and finally used it to pull the professor toward the summit.
They couldn't travel by day, because local sympathizers might radio their position to the rebels. Just before dawn on the second day, the two men descended into a valley. They carved out the soft center of a nearby palm tree to eat. Then Lizcano rested in a ditch, while Isaza scaled a tree with his rifle to keep watch.
As the two set off the second night, Isaza studied his former prisoner. His feet were swollen, and his body was covered in scratches.
"Old-timer, are you gonna make it?" Isaza asked.
"I'm gonna make it."
But at the end of the night's trek, Lizcano burrowed into a ditch and labored to breathe.
"Quiet!" Isaza hissed suddenly at Lizcano's side. "Keep it down! They're coming!" Two or three dozen guerrillas took quick, purposeful steps down the path, eyes probing the landscape. But they moved past the two men and disappeared out of sight.
Late that night, Isaza led Lizcano along a small stream and up the side of a mountain. He told Lizcano to step in his footprints to confuse their trackers. Soon Lizcano was covered in sweat and exhausted. "I'm very thirsty," he said. "Let me rest."
Isaza fixed him with a hard look. "What do you prefer? Lose your life here while you rest or keep going?" Lizcano silently trudged on. At a watering hole, Isaza pulled a leaf off a tree, shaped it like a cone, and added some powdered lemonade he'd been saving. "Does it bother you if I stir it with my fingers, old-timer?" They shared a smile and drank the lemonade.
On the third day, they reached a ridge and spotted a road that ran along a river. Their destination, a military base, was discernible on the far shore. Isaza pointed to it, and Lizcano fell to the ground, then lurched up and hugged his new comrade. "Friends forever!" he cried. "You saved my life."
Seeing a group of soldiers across the river, Lizcano started waving and called out, "I'm a kidnap victim!" But he was unsteady on his feet, and the soldiers assumed he was crazy or drunk. Isaza lifted his rifle in the air to get their attention. Startled, but realizing it was not an attack, the soldiers mounted a canoe and paddled toward Lizcano.
Isaza remembered the stories he'd been told of the Colombian military torturing and killing rebel deserters. "Old-timer, don't abandon me," he said as he shrank into the foliage.
"I won't," said Lizcano before he struggled onto the boat and the soldiers took him away.
"Please understand that if I am incoherent, it is from being out of the habit of speaking," Lizcano told reporters the day of his rescue. In halting tones, he begged the authorities to remember the remaining hostages who were "rotting in the jungle."
Lizcano is now retired from politics and the university. He writes poetry and spends his time with Martha and his sons. He led the campaign to secure the $400,000 reward for Isaza and for his release from military custody. And he helped Isaza and his ex-guerrilla girlfriend, Lilia Isabel Buñol, to relocate abroad.
"I'm off to France," Isaza told reporters on December 9, with Buñol at his side. "We have to see what the future holds for us."
Former hostage Ingrid Betancourt traveled with the couple from Bogotá to Paris—an emotional end to her tour of eight Latin American countries, during which she hoped to persuade their leaders to negotiate with the rebels. Isaza's good fortune, she told reporters, would serve as a strong incentive for other rebels to release their hostages.
Asked after his rescue if he had any words for other kidnap victims, Lizcano replied, "I was going on my ninth year. If I could [get out] ... then by God, I know you will too. You will enjoy freedom." Despite the wretched circumstances of his captivity, Lizcano says that he kept his dignity and will intact. "Mentally I'm well," he says, "and I feel very strong spiritually too."
Every day he gives thanks to "the person who had the courage, the valor, to leave with me." Their lives are now inextricably linked. After crossing the river on the last day of his escape, Lizcano collapsed. He told the soldiers his name, then pointed across the water to Isaza, who had reappeared on the shore. "I can't abandon him."
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