he evening began at an exclusive restaurant, continued for several boozy hours at two swank bars and ended with a hot dog on a lively Bogotá street. In other words, it was a pretty standard Saturday night for Alexander, 28, and his friend, a 26-year-old insurance executive. They left the hot-dog stand and were driving in the friend's Jeep Grand Cherokee through an upscale neighborhood in north Bogota when a sedan with five men inside zipped up from behind and cut them off. They were merely a block away from one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city, in front of a major hospital, around the corner from an international hotel and office complex. But at that moment on that particular morning -- April 15, 2000 -- they were very much alone.

Before Alexander and his friend could react, three of the men leaped out of the sedan and forced them at gunpoint into the back seat of the Jeep. One attacker got in and shoved their heads between their knees. Another slid behind the wheel and began driving.

Alexander's thoughts raced to his sprawling family, a hardworking middle-class clan. (The family agreed to cooperate for this article on the condition that their last name not be used.) He thought about his own portfolio of small commercial enterprises -- the nightclub, the upscale used-car dealership, the commercial-property company, the pig-and-chicken farm. Inevitably, his thoughts turned to his oldest brother, Hernando, and his father, also named Hernando. His father was fatally shot during a suspected kidnapping in 1994. In 1981, his brother was nabbed by the M-19 guerrilla group, which is now defunct, and killed in crossfire between rival factions fighting over the ransom.

These were not reassuring thoughts, and Alexander understandably feared the worst. "I thought they were going to kill us," he says.

The men said not to worry, they were only after the car. But as one hour gave way to another, Alexander began to suspect that this was more than a robbery. And his suspicion was correct: it would be eight months, much of it spent in freezing captivity high in the Andes, before he would set foot again in Bogotá.

They drove through the night along rugged unpaved roads, stopping only once, to refuel. At 9 a.m., seven hours after the attack, the car pulled up to a small house in the countryside. The attackers led Alexander and his friend up a hill into a pasture, where they waited. The air was damp and thin and very cold. Alexander assumed that they had been driven over the notorious "Camino del Secuestro," or Kidnap Trail, which leads into the mountains of Sumapaz, a rebel stronghold south of Bogotá. That lengthy night of carousing seemed of another time, long ago.

About an hour later, five men wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying automatic rifles came up the hill. One introduced himself and announced: "We're from the FARC. You've been kidnapped." The rebel asked for their shoe sizes and took off in the Jeep.

On hearing that, Alexander felt oddly relieved. The FARC, short for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, is the country's largest rebel army. In the last several years, the insurgents have developed kidnapping into a sophisticated, profitable business enterprise. Alexander knew it was usually better to be taken by the FARC than by one of the scores of gangs that also included kidnapping in their criminal portfolios. While the FARC has the resources and experience to treat hostages comparatively well, common criminals are known for tying up their victims and stashing them in a closet or bathroom.

In fact, as he sat in the pasture guarded by two rebels, Alexander was surprised by his own sense of calm. He was highly rational in his response to this crisis. He was a businessman dealing with businessmen. He knew that the FARC -- though eminently capable of brutalizing their captives, if it serves their purposes -- were professionals. He was valuable chattel they wouldn't want to squander. "I live in a country where this happens a lot, so you learn about a lot of cases," he says. "I knew that one day I would be freed." The question was when.

idnapping has been a weapon in the Colombian criminal arsenal for decades. But during the 90's, armed conflict among the government, left-wing guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitaries led to a breakdown in social order, allowing kidnapping to evolve into a far-flung, sophisticated industry. There were a record 3,706 kidnappings reported to the government last year, more than triple the number five years ago but still well below the actual number of kidnappings. (Officials acknowledge that many incidents go unreported because people want to handle their cases quietly.) Colombia is now far and away the world leader in kidnappings, with Mexico and Brazil lagging behind.

The government attributes 60 percent of last year's kidnappings to the country's various leftist rebel armies; the overwhelming majority were credited to the FARC and the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (E.L.N.), the country's second-largest rebel group. Most of the rest are the work of criminal gangs. A relative few are pulled off by right-wing paramilitary groups.

Though the rebels sometimes kidnap for political reasons -- to force politicians to abandon candidacies, say, or to influence legislation -- their principal objective is to raise money to support their insurgencies, sometimes charging millions of dollars for a captive's freedom. Col. Jesus Antonio Bohórquez, national director of the Colombian armed forces' antikidnapping squads, estimates that the FARC and the E.L.N. collected about $250 million in ransom payments last year but admits that is only a guess.

n a recent Sunday morning, a Farc commander, Simón Trinidad, arrives promptly for a scheduled meeting in San Vicente del Caguán, the de facto capital of a FARC-controlled zone in southern Colombia, 180 miles southeast of Bogotá. Dressed in clean camouflage army trousers and rubber boots, he lays his Kalashnikov on the cement floor, loosens his shoulder harness draped with extra rifle clips and a Baretta pistol and slides behind a wooden desk beneath the portraits of Lenin, Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar. I want to talk to him about Alexander's case and about the FARC's excellence in the art of kidnapping.

"We don't kidnap," Trinidad says. "We retain." The insurgency, he explains, "retains in order to obtain resources needed for our struggle." Trinidad opens a recent issue of Resistencia, a FARC periodical, and pounds his index finger on a page containing the full text of "Law 002." Issued last spring, the directive demands a payment -- the tax for peace" -- from individuals and corporations with assets of more than $1 million. "Those who don't obey the summons will be detained," the order warns. "Their liberation will depend on payment."

Though he says he doesn't know how many people have been retained or how much money the FARC has raised, Trinidad contends that many people and corporations are voluntarily paying up. "Building a revolutionary army within the capitalist system costs a lot," he notes.

osts to the capitalist system are far higher than just the ransom money. Spend half an hour in any major Colombian city, and you'll see the evidence: speeding convoys of bulletproof S.U.V.'s and motorcycle chase teams; soldiers patrolling outside government offices and luxury apartment buildings; homes and corporate headquarters ringed by steel fences, with high-tech surveillance equipment and armed guards on prominent display.

Before national holidays, newspapers publish maps showing which roads carry the highest risk of kidnappings and helpful reminders about the telltale signs of a guerrilla roadblock. ("If for five minutes you see no cars approaching from the other direction, it's possible that you're close to a guerrilla roadblock. Stop your vehicle and return the way you came, or wait until a car comes along and find out.")

According to Ministry of National Defense statistics, the number of security companies has increased to more than 600 from 380 in the past six years, and the number of watchmen and security guards has risen to about 140,000 from 93,500. And the population of legal bodyguards has leaped sevenfold, to nearly 21,800.

The threats have stimulated another response that isn't as easy to see but has inflicted even deeper costs: a stunning exodus of citizens seeking safe haven in other countries. Most of the estimated 1.1 million Colombians who have fled in the past five years are from the middle and upper classes and have taken with them enormous financial and professional capital.

Despite Trinidad's insistence that the FARC's policy authorizes the "retention" of only Colombia's wealthiest, the government contends that the majority of victims are middle and upper-middle class, with assets that rarely approach $1 million, Alexander among them. "I don't know his case," says Trinidad, who was a university economics professor and bank manager before joining the FARC. "It's possible it was an error."

Whether his kidnapping was a mistake or not mattered little to Alexander as he shivered in the high-Andean pasture last April. He sensed that he wasn't going home anytime soon. He had entered the famously well-oiled kidnapping machine of the FARC.

he guerrillas returned in the Jeep at about 6 p.m. with boots for the captives. They then set off on a day-and-a-half-long march through dense forest and over unforgiving mountains. They stopped twice along the way: at a simple brick house, where they were allowed to sleep for a few hours, and at a small country store, where they were handed over to a new group of FARC guerrillas, who led them through the night to a rebel encampment. It was hidden in the forest 50 yards from an infamous farmhouse known as La Casa de la O -- O" stood for the owner, Omar. There the FARC imprisoned kidnapping victims and received families who would trek out from Bogota to negotiate releases and deliver ransoms.

Wet and cold, the friends slept for a few more hours before being awoken by two guerrillas, who led them up a nearby mountain slope. At the top stood a short, thin guerrilla with a foul temper who barked at Alexander and his friend to sit down. He then questioned them individually about their available assets and their lives. Alexander told the rebel he had recently worked as a bartender and owned a small parcel of virtually worthless land in the countryside -- both lies.

The commander then handed Alexander a cellular phone and told him to call his family and say that he had been kidnapped by common criminals -- undoubtedly because he knew that would scare them more. Alexander quickly got his brother Jhon on the phone.

"Jhon was saying: 'Take it easy. You'll be alright,"'Alexander says. "He was asking if I was O.K., if my friend was still with me. The guerrilla was standing right next to me, so all I could say was yes or no."

Then the rebel commander grabbed the phone and began screaming at Jhon, calling him "a son of a bitch" and telling him that his brother's freedom was going to cost a lot of money. He gave an exact figure -- equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and said, "If you don't get the money, we'll kill him and put him in the sewer." Jhon insisted that the family didn't have the money, that they had gotten the wrong guy. "I'll call you tomorrow," the guerrilla said and hung up.

s terrifying as the call was for Alexander's family, it was just business as usual in the kidnapping trade -- foul language, murder threats and an astronomically high ransom demand.

Though the FARC doesn't speak about its kidnapping procedures -- war secrets," Trinidad says -- Juan Francisco Mesa does. At 34, as the director of the Fund for the Defense of Personal Liberty, a government office, he is something of a scholar of kidnapping. "Their kidnapping enterprise functions like a company," says Mesa, known more generally as Colombia's antikidnapping czar. "It's organized like a company. It's executed like a company. You need to be well organized to kidnap, and for this reason it's easy for the rebels, because they're already well organized."

Like corporations, the rebels' kidnapping enterprises are organized along strict divisions of labor. Some members are responsible for research and surveillance of possible targets, while others plan the kidnapping, commit the crime, guard the victims or conduct negotiations.

Government authorities and private-security experts say rebels have even infiltrated confidential state and private databases. This enables them to assess the ransom potential of prospective victims by evaluating banking records, property holdings and other investments. Some victims have even told of being taken to rebel camps where a commander sits down across a table from them, flips open a laptop and, like an investment adviser, begins a detailed discussion of their financial positions. But Mesa and others -- Trinidad included -- contend that the laptop routine is nothing more than a negotiating bluff. "We're just having fun with that one," Trinidad says with barely concealed glee. Nevertheless, the guerrillas do count on high-tech communications equipment and all manner of transportation to conduct their heists.

Of the kidnappings not committed by one of the rebel armies, the government attributes the majority to criminal groups of varying levels of sophistication. As most gangs lack the experience or resources to hold people for more than a few days, they like to unload them quickly, like a bank selling off a mortgage to a securities firm. While Trinidad admits that such transactions may happen, he insists that they shouldn't. "If they aren't our guerrillas doing it, it's wrong," he says.

fter Jhon received Alexander's first call, the family gathered to review their options. They had already started receiving solicitations from strangers and friends of acquaintances, offering their services as negotiators, trauma counselors and go-betweens with the guerrillas.

The rise in kidnapping has spurred a service industry of crisis-management professionals ranging from homegrown bottom-feeders -- like the people who jumped in to offer their services to Alexander's family -- to high-flying international companies. The worst, says Alfonso Manrique, the director of a group to help the families of kidnapping victims, are the local freelancers. "They appear like Jesus Christ," he grumbles. "But they're snake charmers, vultures."

The wealthiest kidnapping targets in Colombia often carry kidnapping and ransom insurance, in case their best-laid security plans fail. Colombian law forbids such insurance, on the theory that deep-pocketed companies and elite kidnapping consultants make the problem worse. "They have an inflationary effect on ransoms," Mesa, the antikidnapping czar, contends. Nevertheless, companies and wealthy individuals frequently secure insurance policies in foreign countries, making sure the coverage extends to Colombia.

But Alexander had no kidnapping insurance -- he had never thought of himself as a prime target -- so the family was left with the contents of their personal bank accounts. They discussed hiring a consultant to handle the negotiations. But that's what their father had done for his brother's kidnapping, leaving the rest of the family out of the process and making them feel useless. Instead, they appointed Jhon -- who manages a family-owned real-estate company -- as their negotiator and agreed to share all information.

he same venomous rebel called Jhon once a day for the rest of the week. The police traced the cell-phone signals to the Sumapaz area, a reassuring indication that Alexander was in FARC hands. But they conceded that there was nothing the state's security forces could do in rebel-dominated Sumapaz. "Try to negotiate," a task force official suggested weakly.

This turned out to be an interminable and nerve-racking process. The conversation was basically the same each time: the rebel would curse at Jhon and threaten to kill Alexander. Jhon would respond as evenly as possible, saying that his family didn't have much money but that he was doing his best to come up with a few pesos here and a few pesos there. Then they would toss numbers back and forth. Jhon would begin at the last figure he had offered -- he started the negotiations in the low four figures, in dollar terms -- and slowly work upward. The rebel would start at his latest astronomically high demand -- he began in the upper hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and slowly work down.

"We were learning as we went along," Jhon says. "My older brother's kidnapping hadn't prepared us, since my father had kept the negotiations secret. Anyway, no one knew about negotiations 20 years ago. Kidnappers today are much more experienced."

Over the next few months, Jhon carried his cell phone everywhere; he lived for the next call. Sometimes the rebel negotiator would call once a day, sometimes not for two weeks. Sometimes he would say he would call in two days and wouldn't call for three or four. The rebel once lied and said that Alexander was dying of malaria. Jhon tried to resist this psychological manipulation. "It's a business deal like any other," he says. "If you don't get that into your head from the first call, you lose." During one early conversation, the guerrillas threatened to chop off one of Alexander's fingers. "If you send me a finger, don't ever call me again," Jhon responded coldly. "I won't buy damaged goods."

Jhon played the game well. "You gotta show you're making a huge effort to get small amounts," he says. "I'd say: 'Hey man, I pulled together another thousand dollars -- I sold an old car. Give me a few days and I'll look for a guy who can lend me some money."' Away from the phone, though, he was falling apart. He started to drink more than usual to unwind at the end of every day. He put on weight. His real-estate business suffered.

ollowing the first phone call from the mountaintop near the Casa de la O, Alexander and his friend were moved to another, frigid camp on the other side of the mountain peak. They remained there for a month and a half, with no heat and only cold food. Alexander was told that there were other captives in the camp, but he never saw them.

The friends, along with two other captives, were then shifted farther down the mountain to a farmhouse the rebels used to stash kidnapping victims for the long term. Their treatment improved drastically. "The guerrillas were extremely respectful," he recalls. "They gave us blankets, hot food. They took care of us like an investment. The commander said: 'If you feel sick, if someone lacks respect, I'm here to help. The only thing you have to have is patience."'

In time, Alexander befriended a low-level guerrilla who lent him a forbidden radio. This enabled him to tune into the several national weekly programs that broadcast personal messages of support from family and friends to kidnapping victims. He received morale-boosting nuggets of family news from his five siblings and mother and once heard messages on the same day from his girlfriend and an ex-girlfriend. Another time, he was devastated to hear his mother's muffled sobs.

In early August, nearly four months after the kidnapping, Alexander's friend was freed -- his family had negotiated his release with the help of a consultant. At the same time, and for no apparent reason, the FARC cut off contact with Jhon. Alexander's family was desperate: his mother had never recovered the body of her oldest son and was now wondering if she had seen her youngest for the last time too.

In September, the Colombian Army began an offensive in Sumapaz in an effort to wrest back control of the region. Under pressure, the guerrillas moved Alexander and the other captives -- the group had grown to 19 by this time -- deeper into the bush. The rebels further loosened their rules, and the captives were able to talk among themselves, play Parcheesi and cards and openly listen to the radio. Within three weeks, all but 6 of the 19 had been released; it appeared to Alexander that the front commander wanted to rid himself of the unwieldy group.

One departing hostage carried out a note from Alexander telling his family that he was trying to work out a deal by himself. He got word by radio to go ahead, and in early October he put in a request to meet a rebel commander. Then, of course, he waited.

Finally, in early December, he was taken to a camp an hour's hike away. "The commander greeted me cordially and said, 'Sorry for keeping you so long,"' Alexander recalls. "The negotiation happened very quickly." They sat down and worked out a ransom payment, a minuscule fraction of the initial demand. "I started out very, very low," says Alexander, who had done his own calculations to figure out what he could afford. "I think they got the message that we weren't willing to pay very much." The deal took about half an hour.

The following day, the rebels called Alexander's brother and agreed on a location for the ransom delivery. The transaction would take place Dec. 9. On the appointed day, an employee of a family business, accompanied by a distant relative of Alexander's, drove to the designated drop -- a one-room schoolhouse high in the chilly mountains of Sumapaz. It was a four-hour drive south of Bogota, along the same pitted roads Alexander traveled with his captors eight long months before. The employee handed over the cash, then drove back to Bogota. Alexander's release would follow.

Alexander arrived at the rustic schoolhouse on Dec. 18 only to hear that his family would have to pay more. The rebels told him that they had already worked it out with Jhon and that if he wanted to discuss it further, they could head back across the mountain range to see the commander.

That afternoon, Alexander was playing soccer on the school's playground with a uniformed guerrilla and several schoolchildren -- his relations with the guerrillas had relaxed quite a bit -- when the family employee walked up. Alexander, several guerrillas and the employee went inside the schoolhouse, drank a cup of coffee and counted the second payment. "You can't speak with the police, you can't say anything to the media," one rebel told Alexander in what sounded like a set speech. "Watch yourself. We know where you live." With no apparent irony, they invited him to come back and visit sometime. Then they told Alexander he was free to go.

As Alexander and the employee walked back toward the car, a 15-minute hike away, Alexander kept looking over his shoulder. He couldn't quite believe that the FARC would let him go. Why not kidnap him again and demand a third ransom? It wasn't until he was finally able to make cell-phone contact with his brother two hours later that he realized he was free. And he relaxed enough to cry.

Kirk Semple is a writer based in Bogotá.

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