Hell in Paradise: The Lost City Hostages
- Jack Curson
- Mar 3, 2025
- 11 min read
Jack Curson
Looking from the highest terrace of the Lost City out to the surrounding landscape is about as stunning a view as you can get. The archaeological remains of the city built over 1200 years ago by the Tairona people sits on a peak amidst the towering mountains and deep tropical forest of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in northern Colombia. Predating Machu Picchu by around 650 years and rediscovered by a group of local treasure looters in 1972, today the Lost City acts both as a spiritual centre for the 4 local indigenous groups, the Koguis, Wiwas, Arhuacos and Kankuamos, as well as a major attraction for international tourists. For 11 months of the year, the small town of Machete Pelao is the starting point for a 4-day trek of around 45 kilometres, which takes visitors through the surrounding farmer territories and protected indigenous lands to the jaw-dropping Lost City, whilst every September the trail is closed so that members of the native tribes are able to conduct their spiritual rituals in peace. Whether it’s viewed as a sacred relic, an archaeological site, a chance for an Instagram post or a sheer marvel of human ingenuity, the Lost City is undoubtedly an awe-inspiring sight to behold.
However, in September 2003 the Lost City drew the attention of the international media for all the wrong reasons, when a group of 8 backpackers were kidnapped whilst spending the night at the historic ruins. In itself, a kidnapping in Colombia at this time wasn’t particularly noteworthy. In 2003 Colombia was the most violent country in Latin America and the kidnapping capital of the world, with 1400 abductions already having taken place in the first 8 months of 2003. Despite this, the story of the Lost City kidnappings is an interesting one for a number of reasons. Unusually for a Colombian kidnapping of the time, rather than demanding money in exchange for the release of their prisoners, the rebel guerrilla group which abducted the backpackers instead called for an independent investigation into alleged human rights abuses in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region. Even after the crisis was resolved the story continued to evolve, with one hostage forced to pay thousands of euros for her extraction from the tropical jungle and, incredibly, the development of a bizarre kind of post-kidnapping friendship between some of the former hostages and hostage takers. This is the story of the Lost City hostages.
The Kidnapping
Today only the chief shaman (or ‘mamo’) of the Wiwa people and his family live in a couple of humble houses within the confines of the Lost City, which itself can only be accessed either by helicopter or by climbing up 1200 steep stone steps through dense tropical jungle. However this wasn’t the case in 2003, when tourists were also able to stay overnight in some basic accommodation at the 1100 metre altitude archaeological site. It was there, in the early hours of the 12th of September 2003, that a group of tourists were awoken in the dead of night by a group of khaki clad men claiming to be soldiers tasked with guiding them to safety following an alleged paramilitary attack in the vicinity of the Lost City. But as the tourists were ordered to leave the shacks they’d been sleeping in and lined up along one of the upper terraces of the Lost City, it quickly became clear that these were no government soldiers.
The men, who were in reality rebels belonging to a left-wing guerrilla group, selected 8 of the tourists to be taken hostage. What followed was a long and arduous trek eastwards through the dense tropical forest of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The group, made up of 4 Israelis, 2 Brits, a Spaniard and a German, were forced to march up to 18 hours a day for 9 days straight, at which point they finally reached a makeshift camp of a few huts and shelters in which they would be kept in captivity for many weeks, in discomfort and fear. These long days of hard trekking through the tropical jungle were required to evade the pursuing government forces, as the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez responded to the hostage-taking by quickly mobilising 2 battalions of soldiers and a number of helicopters as part of a large-scale man hunt.
However, only 7 of the group would actually make it to the first camp. During the first few days of trekking, and despite the fact that each of the hostages had their own AK-47 armed guard closely attending to them, 19-year old Brit Matthew Scott took advantage of the torrential rain and poor visibility to escape by jumping down a cliff into a river. Reflecting on his escape, Scott said: ‘I saw a chance and ran. I heard the river on the right and I followed the sound. The sides were very deep. I jumped over the edge very quickly. I was lucky not to break my arms or legs.’ After wandering the jungle alone for 2 days, ‘dizzy and vomiting’ and surviving purely on rainwater, Scott stumbled along a group of indigenous locals who fed him some soup, beans and oranges; treated him with a collection of herbal medicines; and took him to a place of refuge from where he was eventually rescued.
For the rest of the group, the experience was far more protracted. It would be months before any of the remaining hostages regained their freedom; their long and bleak days were spent sitting in fearful wait of what was to come next, periodically being forced to move from location to location in order to evade government forces but with no concept of when, of indeed if, their ordeal would come to an end. The hostages quickly divided into 2 sub-groups. Whilst the Europeans chose to be more compliant with their captors in the hope of attaining more food and information, the Israelis opted to resist as much as possible. In fact, 17 days after being taken hostage, the Israelis staged an escape attempt. Having seen an opportunity whilst the guards were distracted during a night of celebrations, the Israelis engineered a hole in the wall of the ramshackle hut in which they were being kept prisoner and made their escape. However, it wasn’t long until the guards realised that there had been an escape attempt and they quickly recaptured the Israelis, who were only able to enjoy around an hour of heady freedom.
The Kidnappers
To truly understand why the tourists were abducted from the Lost City, you first need to understand the highly complex state of Colombian politics and its impact on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region to which the Lost City belongs. From the mid-1960s through to (though to a lesser intensity) the present day, Colombia has been stuck in an internal conflict fought between the Colombian government, far-left guerrilla groups and far-right paramilitary groups which are aligned with criminal organisations involved in the international drug trade. Whether motivated by a desire for maintaining the authority of the government, promoting a communist revolution, combatting the violence and ideology of the guerrillas or simply defending their economic interests, these disparate groups have been battling for control and influence over the Colombian land mass for over 50 years. The conflict has its roots in the 1940s, when competition between liberals and conservatives overflowed into outright political violence. However, following decades of further relentless violence, the 21st century has seen the conflict gradually reduce in intensity, with progress towards peace reaching a zenith in 2016, when the Colombian government signed a ceasefire agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which at the time was the largest guerrilla group in the country.
The conflict has impacted all Colombians and all parts of the country to some extent, whether it be through forced migration, exposure to acts of terrorism or the broader subversion of the country’s democratic process. However, despite the many terrorist attacks which have been committed in the cities of Colombia’s central heartland, the outright conflict and violence has largely been experienced in the country’s peripheral regions and borderlands. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range sits across Colombia’s northernmost departments of Magdalena, Cesar and La Guajira, meaning it is geographically isolated from the country’s political and administrative centre, whilst its extreme topography makes it a difficult area for the government to extend comprehensive control. As such, throughout the country's internal conflict, the area has been home to drug farmers, right-wing paramilitaries and Marxist guerrillas.
One of the Marxist guerrilla groups with a presence in the region, and the group that was responsible for the hostage taking in the Lost City, was the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) or the ELN for short. The ELN was formed in 1964 by a group of Colombian rebels trained in Cuba and it advocates for a Christian communist regime as a means of combatting the endemic socioeconomic problems that afflict Colombia. Alongside extorting money from the illegal drug trade, petroleum companies and from businesses and civilians in its area of operation, the ELN has also traditionally used kidnapping for ransom as a means of financing its operations. However, in the case of the Lost City hostage-taking, the motive wasn’t money or resources. Rather, the ELN demanded that an independent investigation be held into human rights violations in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region, based on their convictions that the police, military and far-right paramilitaries had repeatedly and systematically brutalised innocent citizens in the mountainous area. By abducting foreign tourists, the ELN was able to draw the attention of foreign governments, multinational organisations and the international media to this demand and their broader cause.
A belief in realigning politics to better protect and promote the poorest in Colombian society is a fundamental tenet of the ELN’s underlying philosophy. It’s also certainly true that the local people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region were the real victims of the violence that afflicted the region, whilst the paramilitary groups’ control over all traffic entering and leaving the region led to the disruption of essential supplies into the area and consequently shortages of food and medical supplies. Regardless, there’s a clear contradiction in abducting innocent tourists in the name of promoting human rights. A 2021 report from the International Federation for Human Rights confirmed that in the first decade of the 21st century violent crimes were perpetrated against indigenous groups in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region. However, whilst far-right paramilitaries and the Colombian state are identified as two of the key perpetrators, the report also highlights that the ELN were far from innocent, having engaged in the systematic murder of community leaders and the extra-judicial killing of individuals that were caught committing even small-scale theft. Whilst their overarching principles and values may have been pure and just, the facts show that the ELN themselves contributed to the disempowerment and maltreatment of the local indigenous people.
Freedom and the Aftermath
It was on November 24th 2003, 74 days after they were first abducted from the Lost City, that two of the hostages, German Reinhilt Weigel and Spaniard Asier Huegen Echeverria, were eventually released. It wouldn’t be until just before Christmas, 101 days after they were first taken hostage, that the remaining hostages were finally released. Their release was only possible after weeks of mediation by senior members of the country’s Catholic clergy led to an agreement, with the final hostages freed in exchange for a United Nations investigation into the alleged human rights abuses in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region. As such, the whole ordeal ended with none of the hostages having lost their lives and the ELN having achieved their goals of an independent investigation into human rights violations and international publicity for their cause. However, the testimony of the hostages clearly shows the harm that their abduction had on them. During the first few days of the ordeal Weigel wrote in her diary that, ‘I would like to die most of all, then it would be quiet all at once’, whilst Brit Mark Henderson has spoken about the post-traumatic stress disorder he has experienced since being taken hostage.
In fact, it was for Weigel and Henderson that post-captivity would quickly take a bizarre turn when in November 2004, around a year after their release, one of their previous captors, Antonio, made contact with each of them via email. Shocked but intrigued, both Weigel and Henderson responded to Antonio and ended up spending years exchanging emails with him and his partner Camila. Incredibly, they were even sent an invite when the couple were organising their wedding, although neither Weigel nor Henderson attended. Both Antonio and Camila joined the ELN in their early-20s and had come to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region from Bogotá to further the guerrilla cause, eventually acting as guards over the Lost City hostages once they reached the first camp. Henderson and Weigel have both since said Antonio and Camila stood out as the two guards which seemed to truly believe what they were fighting for and for whom they were able to build up some kind of a bond.
Weigel and Henderson would eventually both feature in the 2010 documentary My Kidnapper, in which they revisited the Lost City, spoke to some of the local indigenous people that had been forced to feed and shelter them during the hostage-taking and then finally met Antonio and Camila for the first time since 2003. The documentary presents the reunion and key parts of the following 7-hour long discussion between the former captors and captives, with initial warm embraces at seeing each other developing into tough conversations around their shared pasts, the legitimacy of the hostage-taking and the subsequent impacts on both Weigel and Henderson. Despite initially presenting the hostage-taking as an ‘experience’ and offering partial justifications, Antonio eventually offered a complete apology and accepted the harmful impacts that the events of 2003 had on the hostages and their families, both at the time and subsequently.
During the hostage crisis Weigel inadvertently prompted a media furore when, just prior to her release, the ELN released a photo of her standing alongside 3 ELN guards and fellow hostage Asier Huegen, wielding one of the guard’s AK-47s. The German tabloid Bild Zeitung published the photo alongside the headline, ‘Excuse me, who’s the hostage here?’, whilst many suggested the photo was evidence that Weigel was experiencing Stockholm syndrome, a term which describes when hostages develop positive emotional relationships with their captors. Weigel has since said that she had sought to develop more amicable relations with her captors not because she’d been entranced by them, but rather as a survival tactic. In a later interview Weigel told a reporter that, ‘I adapted to survive. And in return we get some freedom’. In reference to the photo itself, Weigel said, ‘I asked them to take a photo of me and Rafa [her guard] with Rafa’s gun because that’s the gun that had been pointing onto my head before and I wanted a photo to show the gun to my parents.’
If first being taken hostage and then being the subject of a media circus wasn’t enough, following her return to Germany Weigel was billed €12,640 by the German foreign ministry to cover some of the cost of the helicopter that it procured to extract her from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region. Weigel’s appeal against the decision at a German federal court was rejected, with the courtr agreeing with the foreign ministry's argument that Weigel had negligently put herself in danger by travelling to a region which had a travel warning in place. Whilst she has since admitted that the decision to ask for a photo holding the AK-47 was ‘a bit of an insane thing really’, she remained resolute about the illegitimacy of the debt she was being forced to repay, declaring that ‘as long as I have the financial issue and the government are always on me, how can I possibly be free of it [the hostage-taking]?’
Progress and Stagnation
Today, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region is a much safer place. The tourism economy surrounding the Lost City continues to thrive and whilst this brings with it some fundamental questions surrounding cultural clashes and identity dilution for many amongst the region’s indigenous groups, the combination of economic opportunities and an ever-increasing uptake of government provisions in sectors like education and health suggests a positive future, certainly one detached from the greatest excesses of systematic violent crime and human rights abuses.
However, whilst far less brutal than at its peak, the Colombian conflict continues to rage and violence continues to be wrecked in Colombia’s outer regions. Now it’s the Catatumbo region, which sits along the country's border with Venezuela, which is the epicentre of hostilities. In January 2025 the Colombian government declared a state of emergency as tens of thousands of people fled the region and around 100 were left dead as a result of a surge in the conflict between the ELN and a dissident faction of the FARC. Clearly, whilst peace agreements and economic development has shone a positive light on Colombia, the underlying discord in ideology, interests and visions for the country’s future amongst the various warring factions in the country’s decades long internal conflict mean that total peace and security is at present an intangible, though not impossible, goal.
Comments