WASHINGTON -- As an Army officer in the Vietnam War, Thomas R. Hargrove worked to win hearts and minds by introducing high-yield crops to the remote Chuong Thien province. His visibility made him an obvious target for the Viet Cong, but they spared him.
"I didn't kill you because of the new rice seeds," a rebel leader told him long afterward.
In another strife-ridden land a quarter-century later, Mr. Hargrove, now 50, was still spreading the green revolution. But his luck didn't hold. On Sept. 23, armed kidnappers seized him at a roadblock near a sugar mill near Cali, Colombia, that had drawn guerrilla attacks. They left his identify papers on the seat of his Nissan. Nothing has been heard of him since.
That he may now be held by guerrillas with the same Marxist ideology as the Viet Cong who once spared him is just one irony in the plight of Mr. Hargrove, who is one of seven American hostages being held in Colombia. Another is that each, in some way, was working to improve the lot of Colombia's poor.
Largely unnoticed
Finally, there's the reaction in the United States. Whereas in the late 1970s and 1980s, the seizure of American hostages in Iran and Lebanon kept Washington on edge and rocked the Carter and Reagan presidencies, the captivity of seven Americans in Colombia has passed largely unnoticed by the public.
A State Department official said, "We're doing everything we can to get these people back," but he refused to say more because of a long-standing government policy against disclosing specifics. "We're doing it in a way and in a place" that doesn't excite press interest like the hostage crises in the Middle East, the official said.
Long one of the most violent countries in the hemisphere, Colombia supplies much of the cocaine that has flooded America's inner cities for a decade.
Source of the term "narco-terrorism," which refers to a wave of violence inspired by drug lords, it is also home to two major insurgent groups -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Army of National Liberation (ELN) -- which last year mounted a monthlong offensive against the government.
Insurgents have regularly struck foreign-owned pipelines. Civilian targets, including shopping centers, buses and tourist hotels, have been bombed by rebel and drug-related terrorists. Kidnapping, particularly of the rich, is common.
Three missionaries
The longest-held American captives are three missionaries -- Mark Rich, 25, of Sanford, Fla.; David Mankins, 45, of Susanville, Calif., and Rick Tenenoff, 38, of St. Petersburg, Fla. -- who were seized at a New Tribes Mission camp in Panama, near the Colombian border and are believed to be held by FARC inside Colombia.
New Tribes, a 52-year-old evangelical organization based in Florida, sends missionaries and their families to live with indigenous peoples, immersing themselves in the local culture, so they can put the native tongue into writing and eventually translate the Bible.
They also teach villagers how to read and write.
The three men were working with the Kuna ethnic group in rural Panama the night of Jan. 31, 1993, when a force of about 75 guerrillas entered the village and captured them, along with food, radios and other equipment.
At first, New Tribes was in contact with the men and their captors by radio and courier. The guerrillas demanded $5 million ransom. New Tribes rejected the demand, both as a matter of policy to prevent other missionaries from becoming targets but also because, "We don't have that kind of money to start with," according to Mel Wyma, the group's foreign secretary.
In the early morning of Jan. 16, 1994, a second group of FARC guerrillas entered a school for missionaries, Villa Vicencia, in the eastern Andes, rounded up children and adults and brought them into the school's handball court.
They announced they were taking two New Tribes members -- Timothy Van Dyke, 42, of New Albany, Pa., and Stephen Welsh, 42 of North Platte, Neb. -- "to make a point with the government so it would listen," Mr. Wyma said.
Ray Rising, a radio technician and community relations man for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, was returning to the institute's center, Loma Linda, near Porto Lleras, Colombia, on March 31 when kidnappers forced him to abandon his motorcycle.
In the months since, the Dallas-based institute, which translates the Bible into Indian languages, has received letters from Mr. Rising asking for medicine and clothing and saying he's been treated well.
"The captors have not identified themselves conclusively," says Don Johnson, the institute's international relations director. "FARC is one of the likely suspects, but it's not been completely confirmed."
Political motive assumed
The group assumes that the motive is "a political thing," Mr. Johnson said.
Mr. Rising, who is in his early 50s, has lived in Colombia for 20 years. One son is a Colombian-based pilot. A second is in college. Mr. Rising's wife returned to the United States after his abduction.
Another of the institute's 200 Colombia staff members was abducted in 1981. "There's kidnapping all the time," Mr. Johnson says.
Of all the hostages, Mr. Hargrove has gained the most attention inside Colombia. He cultivated the local media as public relations man for the nonprofit International Center for Tropical Agriculture. As a published author of two books and scientific articles, he is viewed by journalists as one of them.
"In Colombia, there's an unwritten agreement between guerrillas and the press that they don't target the press," says colleague Nathan Russell. "They emphasize his journalistic credentials to pressure them. There's no guarantee it will work. In the end, he's still a gringo."
News accounts blame his abduction on FARC, which has been particularly active recently around Cali, home base for the nation's most powerful drug cartel. Mr. Russell speculated that the guerrillas may be keeping him to exert leverage on the new government of President Ernesto Samper Pizano.
But neither the center nor the U.S. State Department knows for sure who has him. His wife, Susan, remains in Cali with two sons who left college in the United States to be with her.
Assuming he's safe, the Texas A&M; graduate, who has advanced degrees from the University of Iowa, is probably the kind of person best equipped to handle life with guerrilla captors, Mr. Russell says.
"I like to think of him as boring them to tears with Aggie jokes," he said. "He's charming, unusual, loves people, loves to talk. I hope it's making life a little easier for him."
After spending years in the Philippines after the Vietnam War, he joined CIAT in Colombia to be closer to the United States. But his life's mission has been the same since Vietnam days: to boost food production among Third World populations.
Recently, he had studied the huge agricultural potential of the South American savannahs, which he compared with the old American West.
Confederate plant life
He also became fascinated by varieties of plant life found in the Amazon Basin that appeared to originate with American Confederate colonizers who settled in Brazil after the Civil War. lTC This inspired correspondence with Eugene Harter, a retired Foreign Service officer living in Chestertown, Md., who is both a descendant and historian of the colonists.
"It seems that if he'd been kidnapped in the Middle East it would be front-page news," says Mr. Harter, who was been trying to draw attention to the case.
Despite the general lack of awareness in the United States to the hostages' plight, neither Mr. Hargrove's brother, Raford, nor associates of the others had any complaint about Colombian or U.S. efforts to secure their release.
"They told me it could take months for this to unravel," Raford Hargrove, who lives in Rotan, Texas, said of State Department officials who call him regularly. A New Tribes spokesman said, "We think the State Department is doing everything they can."
Since the Reagan administration became embroiled in an arms-for-hostages trade with Iran in the mid-1980s, the United States has refused to pay ransom to or negotiate with hostage takers, and avoids drawing heavy attention to new incidents. This is both to avoid jeopardizing hostages' safety and to reduce the value of kidnapping in the eyes of terrorists generally.