 "Photo: Charlie DeBoyace")
Images of kidnapped prisoners, blindfolded and in chains, flashed across the screen in a small conference room in Van Munching Hall.
Some of the victims were captured as children and had been held in the jungles of Colombia for as many as 11 years. Their faces were dirty, their expressions weary. And as a dozen students and professors looked at them yesterday afternoon, some members of the audience cried.
It was exactly the reaction Carl-Henri Prophète was hoping for.
“I know people can help put pressure on the Colombian government and the militias,” said Prophète, a public policy graduate student who invited Adopt-A-Hostage, a program designed to raise awareness to the plight of Colombian captives, to the campus yesterday.
Colombian college students started the program in 2008. Today, it allows people from across the world to communicate with kidnapped prisoners through pre-recorded messages that the agency broadcasts over Colombian radio.
This lets captives know that people are campaigning on their behalf, said Fernando De Villena, a public policy school alumnus who currently works with Adopt-A-Hostage.
“We want to stop the indifference of the world and show solidarity to victims and their family,” said De Villena. “To give personal stories to those statistics.”
About 2,000 hostages are currently up for “adoption” on the agency’s website www.adoptaunsecuestrado.org.
Though nobody knows for sure how many Colombians have been kidnapped, one Colombian agency estimates the number is higher than 2,500. Some captives are taken for political reasons. Some are held hostage for ransom. Others are used for prostitution and drug trafficking.
Kidnapping has dogged Colombia for more than 40 years.
The School of Public Policy chose to highlight this problem last night as a part of its monthly development circle, which invites speakers to lecture on international policy problems that impoverished countries are facing.
A few of the videos shown last night included proof-of-life videos where the captives thanked the students and their adoptive parents for sending them messages. The radio is one of the few ways that outside messages can reach the captives, De Villena said.
“What we can do is use the freedom we enjoy to help those who aren’t free,” De Villena said. “People around the world are needed to raise their voice on behalf of those who can’t be heard yelling in the jungles.”
Three weeks ago, De Villena adopted his own hostage, a former captain of the Colombian army who has been held captive for 11 years. The captain has an 11-year-old son who was born three months before the kidnapping, and the captain is periodically allowed to send videos to his son, De Villena said.
Once an adoption takes place, the “adoptive parents” will receive information about the life of their adoptee before their captivity and about the current life of the hostage’s family after the kidnapping.
The intiative has a one adoption per person limit, in order to create a better attachment between parent and adoptee, De Villena said.
desmarattes@umdbk.com
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