By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

BOGOTA, Colombia –– When his turn came to speak, Silvino Cruz clutched his face with his thick rancher's hands. "Love of my life," he choked out, "I'm waiting
for you."

He stopped, blushed crimson and sobbed. Cruz, father, grandfather and husband, has not seen his wife or heard her voice for more than four years. On this night, he
hoped she would hear his.

Cruz is one of hundreds of Colombians who participate each week in "The Voices of Kidnapping" radio show. The show, a call-in program with the occasional
studio guest, gives relatives of the more than 2,500 kidnapped Colombians a way to reach into the jungle encampments where their fathers and mothers, sons and
sisters are captive. The plaintive messages are a brief catharsis for a country that last year accounted for two of every three kidnappings committed worldwide.

Caracol Radio airs the show nationally every Sunday morning from its studio in Bogota, hoping the unknowable size of its audience will steadily diminish. But the
opposite seems to have happened since the show's creation six years ago by a prize-winning journalist, a kidnap victim himself. Local stations have borrowed the
concept, creating regional shows that air daily in places where kidnapping is most common.

Across Colombia, leftist guerrilla groups are expanding their highly profitable kidnapping and extortion ventures to help finance a fight against the government's Plan
Colombia antidrug initiative and its $1.3 billion in mostly military aid from the United States. Colombian kidnapping syndicates have begun to reach into neighboring
countries for new victims. The domestic trade, in which victims are sometimes sold from one group to another, thrives as privately funded paramilitary groups begin
fighting for market share.

The radio show serves as an eloquent protest. "We again ask that your captives be allowed to listen, be given batteries, antennae," said Herbin Hoyos, the show's
creator and host, in opening remarks. And already, despite the midnight hour, the switchboard is full of calls from Medellin, Bucaramanga, Cali, Cucuta. A mother
talks to her soldier son, a small-town mayor to his captive wife.

"Hello, honey, don't worry because everything is fine here," the mayor said. "We are waiting for you, we miss you. A hug to you and your companions in captivity."

Judging by comments from those who have been freed, the messages frequently reach their destinations. About a dozen former captives gathered recently for a
reunion in a small private home. They drank whiskey, sang Colombian ballads and laughed, remembering the lighter side of captivity.

Oscar Ortiz, 39, was among them. He had grown a chest-length beard by the time he was released after nine months by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, the country's largest leftist insurgency. After three months held in a strategic mountain redoubt south of Bogota, Ortiz received his first message
from his wife and sisters.

"Hearing those words was like being in the desert for a month with nothing to eat or drink, and then a huge glass of water appears," said Ortiz, who bribed a young
FARC rebel with cigarettes for use of his radio. To extend the antenna, he unraveled a steel-wool scrub pad used to clean pots.

Hoyos, 31, shared that bit of ingenuity with his listeners. He is a type of activist-journalist not uncommon in Latin America and other developing regions, half impartial
investigator, half crusader. He argues with the guerrillas, the paramilitary militias and the government alike. The government officially acknowledges 2,742 kidnap
victims; Hoyos believes there are at least 1,000 more.

But he pays a price for his very public work, which won him Colombia's most prestigious journalism prize. He has a three-inch-thick steel door with an array of locks
at the small apartment he shares with his wife, Zoraida Mohamed.

Riding through Bogota at night, a Browning pistol tucked between the front seats, Hoyos never takes the same route twice to Caracol. Three times he has had to
leave Colombia because of threats to his life by the guerrilla and paramilitary leaders he frequently denounces by name on his show. A bulletproof vest is part of his
wardrobe.

His own 17-day captivity inspired the program. After declining to meet with the FARC six years ago because of a station policy prohibiting it, Hoyos was visited by
three men who claimed they were delivering an award. He protested, but one grabbed him and whispered: "We're from the FARC and we know everything about
you. So don't make a move."

"Every place they took me I saw people chained to trees, marching, sitting with nothing to do, and there was nothing on the radio for these people," Hoyos said. The
day after his release he conducted his first on-air interview with the family of a kidnap victim.

The red digital study clock glows 1:23 a.m. when the members of the Cruz family begin their messages to Carmenza Suarez de Cruz, a 59-year-old rancher's wife
from the central state of Meta. In July 1996, members of the FARC's 26th Front seized her at her home in Granada, and about six months later called with a ransom
demand of $75,000. The family paid up to Comandante Esteban, a guerrilla leader who has since been killed. But Carmenza was not returned.

Then, last month, a cousin was watching a television news report from inside the demilitarized zone in southern Colombia that the FARC runs like a
quasi-government. There, stitching new guerrilla uniforms with other captives, was Carmenza. The glimpse brought them to Hoyos's studio.

"Please have some compassion," Silvino Cruz says into the microphone. "Do me a great favor and give her back."