Giant dunes reach down to the Caribbean Sea on the Colombian side and into the Gulf of Venezuela on the neighboring coast. Heading south along this same political boundary, a huge mountain range rises. The northernmost extension of the Andes, it is called the Serranía de Perijá, and it was in this region that Simón Trinidad began his career as a guerrilla. On one side of the wild virgin mountains is the Venezuelan state of Zulia. On the other side is the region that the family of Simón Trinidad was from—the department of César. “It’s impossible, really impossible, unless you’re an expert or you have a GPS, to know whether you are in Venezuelan territory or Colombian territory,” says Botero, for whom the mountains had become a more and more common destination. His target each time was the camp of FARC Secretariat member and Caribbean Bloc commander Iván Márquez. Traveling to see Márquez was difficult, but less so than the trip to see Raúl Reyes near the Ecuadorian border or the weeks-long trek to the hostage camps in the jungle.
