Felix Against the Barbarians

Felix Batista ’77 was a master at negotiating the release of kidnap victims,right up to the moment he disappeared.

By Jay Heinrichs ’77 and Bill Thickstun ’77
Illustrations by Riki Blanco

This story originally appeared in the Spring 2013 issue.

I. K&R Man

This story is not about — not just about — the kidnapping and probable murder of our classmate, Felix Batista ’77. But to know his full story, we must start here.

On December 10, 2008, Felix was having an early dinner in Saltillo, capital of the Mexican state of Coahuila, about three hours south of the Texas border. Americans know Saltillo best for the traditional clay tiles it exports to high-end kitchen designers and interior decorators; but the biggest employers, General Motors and Chrysler, operate a pair of automobile assembly plants. They have made the region relatively prosperous, fostering the growth of an upper-middle class, stirring patronage in the better eating establishments, and creating a boom in another industry: hostage taking.

One of the town’s best restaurants, El Mesón Principal del Norte, specializes in spit-roasted meat. Felix had ordered the goat. An American citizen born in Cuba and based in Miami, he was a consultant whose work took him to Mexico at least 20 times a year. He was dining with three associates, speaking fluent Spanish — the sort of scene our world-friendly college likes to imagine — when one of his two cell phones rang. The call came from a friend named Pilar Valdez, head of security for the Saltillo Industrial Group. He was being held by Los Zetas, the most vicious drug cartel in a nation dominated by cartels.

While the Zetas and other Mexican gangs have grown rich from smuggling narcotics and marijuana into the United States, in the past decade or so, kidnapping has provided a growing alternative revenue stream. Almost half of all Mexicans say they have been affected by kidnapping — having been taken themselves, having had a relative or friend abducted, or having received scam calls saying a loved one is being held. Relatives of victims often receive a finger or an ear to hurry negotiations along. The kidnappers go where the money is, focusing on the nation’s business class. Which is why Felix was in Mexico. A security expert, he had given a pair of lectures to local businessmen, telling them how to respond in the event of a kidnapping. Keep calm, he told them. Don’t offer too much money. Felix knew what he was talking about; he had been instrumental in the release of some 100 hostages, according to the Houston-based firm he worked with, ASI Global. A “response consultant” with more than two decades’ experience, Felix was at the top of a growing profession called K&R, kidnapping and ransom.

Soon after Pilar Valdez called him, the man’s son came into the restaurant and sat at another table. Felix talked to the young man, then left the restaurant briefly and returned looking shaken. After a visit to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face, Felix rejoined his dinner companions. He handed over his laptop, shoulder bag, and a cell phone — the one he used to call his family. “If I’m not back soon,” he said, “call these numbers.” He left a card with the contact information for ASI and for his wife, Lourdes. Then he stood out on the curb for half an hour.

Shortly after seven o’clock, two vehicles drove up. Pilar Valdez sat in one of them, a white Jeep Cherokee. He had been badly beaten. One of the men inside the SUV came out and put his arm around Felix. They talked briefly, and Felix got into the car. An hour later, Valdez was dropped off with a few pesos for transportation. Felix has not been seen since.

There is more to Felix’s story, entailing the usual corrupt officials, American diplomats, the FBI, the toxic outward flow of drugs to the States and the reverse flow of guns; Felix’s wife; their five grown children; his music and friendship and the scholarship in his name that reflects the best of the College.

But as you shall see, Felix himself provided the moral of the story. He once wrote to friends that his work in kidnapping and ransom was to fight “barbarism.” At a time when the purpose of the liberal arts is under challenge, Felix gives us an answer: a liberal education should nurture civilized souls like Felix Batista who can cross boundaries and carry a light into a barbarous world.

II. Patriot

Felix Isidoro Batista was as American as they come, brought at age seven from Cuba by his parents in 1962. Felix’s mother, Onelia, was a Salgado whose family came to Cuba from the Basque region of Spain. (Many years later, “Isidoro Salgado” became Felix’s alias when he worked incognito in Mexico.) His father, Joaquin Batista, emigrated to New York in 1959, days before the Cuban revolution, with $5 in his pocket. He took a job at a Cuban-Chinese restaurant, leaving behind his pregnant wife; a girl was born back in Cuba a few months later. After three years, Joaquin earned enough to bring his family to America, and they lived in an apartment in Spanish Harlem. Another daughter, Jacqueline, came along a year later. Jackie says that when the children were young the apartment always seemed to be full of new Cuban refugees sponsored by Joaquin and Onelia.

Felix attended Our Lady of Lourdes elementary school in Harlem. He showed ambition from the start, not always in ways that pleased his parents. Working to speak the majority language of his new country without an accent, he picked up English so well that he lost some of the Spanish spoken at home. One day he wanted a pork chop, a chuleta, but mistakenly asked his mother for lechuga. She fried him up a meal of lettuce. His diligence in English and his other subjects paid off, however, winning him grades that earned a scholarship at New York’s Jesuit-run Xavier High School. He joined the rifle team and became its captain.

Meanwhile his father had found new employment. Joaquin had been working two jobs, at the restaurant and at a Chevrolet plant. Now he received an offer as a building superintendent in Rego Park, Queens. Not only did he move his family to a better neighborhood, but Felix also found another attraction: the outgoing superintendent had a daughter, Lourdes, a 14-year-old with dark hair and enormous green eyes. A few months younger than Felix and a year behind him in school, she loved him on sight: “He was so handsome and smart.” A year later — in 1969, the year of the Summer of Love, the year of Woodstock — they began dating in old-school fashion. An aunt or a grandmother would chaperone, sitting between them at the movies. Felix told a cousin of Lourdes that she was a hard woman to date. “She’s the kind of girl you marry,” he said.

He left for college when she was a senior in high school. A Jesuit teacher who had been to the Language Schools at Middlebury had encouraged him to apply; Felix was admitted with an ROTC scholarship. Soon after he arrived, he got himself elected to an at-large seat on the Student Forum. He had the mixed luck of spending his freshman year living in the first-floor, half-basement of Stewart Hall known as the Pits. Felix, an accomplished guitarist with a rich baritone voice, collaborated with classmate Chuck Andres in writing “The Pits Song”:

When you’re feeling bad and rotten and miserable
And about to call it quits
It’s good to know that
You can’t get as low
As the guys down in the Pits.

Maybe because they bonded in adversity, the Class of 1977 Pits crew has attended reunions out of all proportion to their numbers. Sophomore year they decided to take over a waning fraternity, Zeta Psi, only to find that a very different crowd from Hepburn Hall had gotten the same idea. Felix joined nonetheless, living there for a term and remaining a social member throughout his four years at Middlebury. The Student Course Guide occupied much of the rest of his limited free time that year. He served as editor in chief, overseeing occasionally blunt assessments of faculty and classes, and pulled an all-nighter with Bill Thickstun and Aaron Abend ’77 putting the publication to bed.

Felix became an American studies major. In the fall of our senior year, he held a party in Milliken, where he was the dorm resident: he had been nominated for a Watson Fellowship. The friends partied like the wonks they were, staying up to watch the Carter-Ford election returns on the lounge TV.

After graduation, Felix deferred his military commitment for 16 months to travel around Latin America on his Watson Fellowship, studying attitudes toward the United States. Lourdes, who he continued to date all through college, eventually joined him, working on a literature project, and they married in the Panama Canal Zone. His letters offer sharply focused snapshots of each country he visited. Costa Rica: “friendly ‘ticos,’ not a trace of racism.” Canal Zone: “Not worth fighting for.” Peru: a “poorly run corporatist state.” He was surprised to be looked upon as a gringo. (“What a riot!”) At Middlebury, we had called him Cubano. The pair spent two summers at the Middlebury Spanish School; Lourdes acted the lead role in the Spanish play.

Felix got his start in security in the Army, where he served four years. He attended the Army Intelligence Center and School, at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and spent the balance of his service in military intelligence at Fort Carson, Colorado. He rose to the rank of captain, eventually becoming a major in the reserves. The couple had their first child, Adam, in 1980. Four girls followed — Adrielle, Amari, Alysandra, and Andrea. Why the alliterative names? “Felix liked the letter A,” Lourdes explains.

III. La Eminencia Gris

Felix left the Army in 1983 to work for a private security firm in Miami. Both of their families had left New York to join the large Cuban community in the Miami area, and the city made an excellent base for the kidnapping and ransom business. Five years later he went independent, with a business card that offered “Security Program Assessment and Development, Executive Protection, Kidnap/Ransom Negotiations, Crisis Management, Investigations.” He ran seminars for corporations operating in Latin America, training executives and other employees to avoid getting kidnapped and to know what to do if they were. He helped companies develop security plans, analyzed existing operations for vulnerabilities, and occasionally conducted international criminal investigations. When things went wrong despite all precautions, he led negotiations to get the victims back. In the course of his career, he worked with Kroll Security, AIG, Henderson Risk Limited, St. Paul Travelers, Lloyd’s, and ASI Global.

Felix and Lourdes bought a house — a compound, really — in Miami’s exclusive Pinecrest neighborhood, a palm-fronded enclave known for its professional athletes and for its good public schools. Lourdes supplied an additional income as a teacher. She had earned her MA in Spanish from Middlebury in 1981 and taught Spanish and English to speakers of other languages in grades K–8. In 2005, her school named her Teacher of the Year.

With five kids and a big mortgage, money was an issue. Felix sold life insurance for less than a year, hoping it would keep him at home more. He hated it. And he kept getting calls from people in trouble. “He wanted to do something for humanity, for the other person,” Lourdes says. Eventually he became a consultant for ASI Global, whose website boasts “the very best minds” in the K&R business. The firm helps recover ships and crews from pirates, and handles airplane hijackings as well as kidnapping.

Associates called him La Eminencia Gris, the Gray Eminence. Many knew him only as Isidoro Salgado. (His family dubbed him “Double-Oh Seven.”) He mostly operated “NOE,” as he put it — or nap of the earth, a military term for flying under the radar. And he clearly excelled at K&R. He helped win the release of hostages from the notorious Daniel Arizmendi, the “Ear Hacker,” a Mexican kidnapper who used scissors to cut ears off victims. Felix also worked in Colombia, where the left-wing FARC insurgency has targeted upper-class citizens. He once smuggled money in a hubcap into Colombia, where hostage payments are illegal.

But most of his work entailed advising, telling the families what to tell their loved ones’ kidnappers. Lourdes can recall only a couple of cases that turned out badly. The family of one hostage, a young Ecuadoran woman, insisted on turning over the case to someone else. Felix complied, offering detailed advice to the new negotiator. The woman was later found at the bottom of a well. “Felix cried over her,” Lourdes says.

He would live with the families, often cooking for them, until the victims’ release. He became a virtual member of each family, Lourdes says. She and Felix once attended an elaborate wedding as guests of a family with holdings in Grupo Modelo, makers of Corona Beer. Felix had helped free a family member. The Batista home today is filled with artwork given them by grateful relatives of victims. “He would have withdrawal when he got home,” sometimes after trips as long as three months. “And when he was home, we’d never know when he’d have to leave.”

At home, Felix would get out his guitar and sing to the children at night — “Solamente una vez” and “La llorona” as well as “Guantanamera” and the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” On Sundays he cooked brunch: Spanish tortillas, salads, and mimosas. Still, his children remember a strict disciplinarian who made lists before he left and expected them to be completed on his return. Each kid got a checklist of what to do before a storm. He wrote each a contract she had to sign, full of expectations. He was a process man, a list maker, who tried to stack the cards in his favor.

Toward the end, there were signs he was ready to ease up a bit. He dreamed of moving away to “some nice, quiet place with a mountain-lake view, proximity to a college town for cultural and social amenities . . . no phones and no airline service.” His mother had died recently, and he wrote to say that he might miss the holidays with his family. He was in Tijuana on a tough case, day 27 of a kidnapping in a family that owned four gas stations and had little cash. “Sad situation, but still manageable.”

The kids had grown up, gone to college, and found jobs. During Felix’s last summer, he had to fly home when his youngest was hit by a car. He sang to her while she lay in a coma. (Now fully recovered, she’s attending nursing school.) “It softened him,” Lourdes says of the accident. Felix talked to her about recruiting younger people into K&R and managing things from Miami.

And he began doing something he hadn’t done before: He stopped flying NOE. “Now more engaged in the marketing, promotional, and management side,” he wrote in a letter in 2006. “Giving interviews at CNN en Español, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, etc.” He had been going public for more than a year by then. “I hope to begin a new stage in my career to reach a wider audience and in that way contribute my little bit to the fight against barbarism,” he wrote to the Yahoo “cubanstories” group.

In retrospect, reaching a wider audience may have been his biggest mistake.

He participated in a roundtable directed by Andres Oppenheimer, a reporter with the Miami Herald. He appeared on TV Azteca, a CNN affiliate based in Mexico City. Among American reporters he became a go-to source for quotes on Mexico’s drug problem. He went on NBC News in the summer of 2008, reporting on the devastation being suffered by the middle class in Mexico, the chief victims of the kidnapping epidemic. Soon after, he appeared on the Spanish-language television program Complete Safety by Ana Maria Salazar, a Mexican American who had served as a drug official in the Clinton administration. He talked about the violent nature of Mexican kidnappings. “Mexico unfortunately suffers a much higher incidence of problems in the negotiations,” Felix told Salazar. “Something happens to the victim. They kill them; they maim them; they rape them.” The program was aired throughout Mexico and in much of Latin America.

“This crusading journalist Salazar does this big interview,” Lourdes says. “And suddenly he was part of the journalism world, which is maybe more dangerous than hostage negotiator.” Indeed, according to the international Committee to Protect Journalists, Mexico is even more dangerous for reporters than the war in Afghanistan, with at least 42 killed by drug gangs since 2006. Felix was not counted in that total.

IV. Gentleman

“We were walking together the last time, and talking about how much things had changed,” Lourdes remembers. “I nudged him and said, ‘Be careful.’” She drove him to the airport and stroked his neck before he went through security.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’m not going to do anything dangerous.”

We know some of what happened in Saltillo because a video camera inside the restaurant captured the interior scene, and a government camera outside shows Felix getting into the car. Mexican officials immediately absolved themselves of blame while refusing to devote resources to the case; they labeled it a “disappearance” rather than a kidnapping. After all, they said, Felix entered the car willingly.

Lourdes confirms this part. “He was trading places,” she says — himself for Pilar Valdez. Classified U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 fill in more of the story. “They’re going to bring me a message,” Felix told one of his dinner companions, according to one of the leaked cables. But his tight expression seemed to show he knew he was in for more than a message.

A month after the abduction, U.S. consular officials met with the governor of Coahuila State, Humberto Moreira. According to the leaked cables, the Mexican officials told the Americans that the Zetas killed Felix several days after they abducted him, and they “cooked” the body to eliminate the evidence. The murder had been ordered by the local Zeta boss known as Tatanka. The man had been arrested earlier for drug trafficking and later released.

The governor brought in Attorney General Jesus Torres Charles and repeated his “determination to solve the case.” But Torres’s presence was not a good sign. Felix had told Lourdes that he didn’t trust the prosecutor. Hours after the meeting with the U.S. officials, the governor reshuffled his cabinet and promoted Torres. One of Felix’s allies in the Coahuila government — the secretary of public security, who had provided the Americans with the videotapes — was reassigned to the State Commission on Water and Sewage. The Coahuila officials promised the Americans some imminent arrests, but three years later no arrests have been made.

The American government may know more than it’s saying; the family had to learn the details through WikiLeaks rather than their own contacts. One theory: the cartel targeted Felix after an erroneous report in the local media identified him as a retired FBI agent. Time magazine speculated that Felix was killed as a warning, “one of the more chilling messages that Mexico’s ubiquitous police-linked kidnapping industry has ever sent.” The message: “We will no longer tolerate anyone who makes our work more difficult.” Or maybe it was Felix’s new status as a favorite journalist’s source. At any rate, one colleague told the Washington Post that the kidnappers clearly “did not fear being caught.” This, the colleague said, “is the most disturbing element.”

Because of its disposition as a “disappearance,” Lourdes had to obtain a death certificate so she could collect insurance and sell the house in Miami. Rick Novak ’77 provided a pro bono attorney from the Miami branch of his law firm, speeding the process to two years — down from the usual five to seven. It took another two years to sell their house in one of the nation’s worst real-estate markets. She now lives in a tiny concrete bungalow 10 miles away, on an acre lot with fruit trees, serenaded by the persistent crowing of a neighbor’s rooster. Her mother occupies the sole bedroom, and Lourdes sleeps on a cot beside the kitchen. She hopes to build a three-bedroom house on the site. “Our lives have been frozen,” she says. “I feel cheated. We worked so hard and had gotten to a sweet place in life. I feel cheated. And in a way what happened to him . . . I try not to think about it. The carpet was pulled from under me. I can’t imagine the rest of my life without him.” This is the only time, during a six-hour visit, that Lourdes cries.

She has boxes of his things that she is still just getting to. Felix didn’t just write them checklists and contracts. Each child had an inbox, which he would fill with clippings keyed to each one’s interests. And he would write them inspiring notes. “If you are going to do something do it BIG,” he wrote in his nearly illegible scrawl, with a big circle over the I.

The advice continued even after the children grew up and moved away. Not long before his last trip, Felix gave Adrielle, an arts student, a copy of Michel de Montaigne’s How to Live. Montaigne’s remarkable essays portray the life of a nobleman during the late 16th century — a scary time in France, when unemployed soldiers roamed the countryside, kidnapping noblemen for ransom. Montaigne claims he himself was abducted; he says he talked his captors into releasing him. But there’s more than an eerie coincidence to the gift. Montaigne, like Felix, lived to fight barbarism, and to fight it unarmed. While other nobles were hiring mercenaries and turning their estates into armed compounds, Montaigne left his unguarded. “I am all in the open and in full view,” he wrote.

Both men make us ask the question: How do we fight barbarism? With helicopters and zero tolerance, with an endless supply of weaponry? Perhaps. Felix was a military man, “an officer and a gentleman,” as Lourdes puts it. But he knew that the only lasting antidote to barbarism is its opposite, civilization. Of all the books he read, his favorite was Don Quixote, the chivalrous soul in an unchivalrous modern world. The gentleman in ungentle times.

Jay Heinrichs ’77 wrote to us at 8:30 in the morning on the Monday following his 25th reunion, expressing his interest in writing about his classmate, the late Felix Batista. “It’s not just a story about a remarkable person. It’s also about the role of education in fostering courageous ventures like Felix’s. What would happen if we all thought of using our Middlebury background, the liberal arts, courageously?” Jay worked with Bill Thickstun ’77 to write a story that is tragic, yes, but also a tribute to one man who dared to combat evil in the name of civility and reason.