In 1993 Colombia and the USA surprised each other The story of thirteen-year-old ‘Guillermo Rosales’, who survived as a stowaway on the landing gear of a cargo plane.
It reached the United States in the first days of June of the same year and managed to withstand temperatures as low as -28 degrees Celsius at an altitude of 10,675 meters above sea level.
The case was documented by EL TIEMPO and other media outlets around the world. This was unusual.
This newspaper reported in its pages that Rosales had arrived in Miami on a cargo plane belonging to Colombian Arca airline carrying flowers from Bogota.
When the young man reached his destination at two o’clock in the morning, he collapsed to the ground and went cold like a snowball. “He definitely should have died. The wheels going up could have crushed him; there’s very little oxygen at that altitude and the temperature must have been minus 28 to minus 24 degrees.” commented mechanic Richard Ungerer.
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Rosales was sent to the Pan-American Hospital and was released shortly afterward as she felt quite well.
The story became known recently, experts were not surprised; Some were even skeptical. “There is no vacuum or oxygen where he came from, the temperature goes up to 20 degrees below zero and there is no pressure. He is miraculously alive,” said several flight engineers and employees of the Arca company the boy was traveling with. According to the information EL TIEMPO received at the time.
Young Guillermo’s incredible ‘success’ made people recognize him as a hero. He admired and inspired those who could not leave the country.
The first version the young man gave when asked about his origins was that his name was Guillermo and he was attending ICET school in Cali, where he started his second year of high school. In addition, He stated that his mother and father died, so he stayed on the street. Wandering around, he said that he befriended the repairmen and traders around the Cali cargo terminal.
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He also said that he decided to take a desperate flight to escape Colombia. He traveled first on one of the Aviancas, and then, not knowing where he was going, he “thrown” at the next, who passed by.
The stowaway case became so popular that some Washington residents (Ruth Withney and her husband) even offered to adopt her.
Thirty years ago, EL TIEMPO explained: the young man was applauded and treated like a hero For the children, women and men who knew her somewhere in Miami.
For example, when he walked into a McDonald’s on Coral Way a few days after arriving in the United States, a little girl ran up to him to give him a keychain. As if that weren’t enough, a woman from Cali, who has lived in the country for over a decade, embraced her and several men hailed her as a true hero who had just achieved great success.
The huge interest in the incredible survival story of young Rosales triggered another event that no one else expected: An alleged Colombian relative of the young man, who identified himself as his aunt, contacted a radio station and revealed that several people had died. What the young man said was a lie.
The woman began by saying He said his name was Juan Carlos Guzmán, not Guillermo Rosales, and that he was 16, not the age he was talking about.
While the young man’s true identity was being investigated, the United States Department of Immigration and Naturalization sought him accommodation and extended his leave.
It was finally confirmed that his name was Juan Carlos, not Guillermo. He also stated that he was seventeen, not thirteen or fourteen, and that he was not an orphan of parents.For this reason, the young man was deported and sent back to the country.
The face of the Colombian stowaway”When he encountered Guillermo Rosales’ Miami press, he changed his initial expression of happiness to an expression of visibly saddened.upset that he was cheated on by a teenager.
When he finds himself surrounded by journalists who ask him questions about the true reasons for his journey, Juan Carlos Guzman Betancourt She burst into tears in front of the camera.
“I know this I lied when I said I was an orphan and also kept my real name and real agebut I did all this to avoid deportation the day I arrived in the United States,” said the young stowaway, who arrived in a new cloth suit.
On the night of Wednesday, 14 July 1993, A group of journalists greeted the Colombian from Miami at El Dorado Airport in Bogota. He was the same mythomaniac who had traveled from Cali a month earlier, crouching on the landing gear of an airplane, cold as a chicken 3,000 feet above sea level. Now he was returning to his hometown, deported by the Immigration Service; one of the attendants had taken off his handcuffs during the flight a few minutes earlier.
Juan Carlos Guzmán Betancourt descended the stairs wearing Walkman headphones and the solemnity of his new cloth suit. And he released his tongue. He said he was bored, sad and depressed about returning to Colombia..
He described living there like a dream teller, a rich man with two houses, a car, and a yacht. And without looking into the eyes of his interrogators, he destroyed the slogan of the then President Gaviria: “There is no future here.”
As documented by EL TIEMPO, in Colombia, Guzmán was accepted by immigration officials from the endangered Department of Administrative Security (DAS), who announced that the boy was only released because he was deported and not a person claimed by the authorities.
At the time, Guzmán also said that he would try to return to the United States, but would now take legal action.
He also said he returned to Colombia with only $200, but in North America he had more than $5,000 that “some Texan ladies” gave him.
“I dream of going back there because I don’t have anything good here,” said the young stowaway. insisted that at least one thing in his story was true: “I got on the landing gear.”
At the beginning of 2005, police arrested a man on a street in London (England) after a string of robberies in luxury hotels and scams in select department stores. His story splashed on the pages of the newspapers of that country.
The London press described it this way:
“This is a Twenty-nine-year-old handsome man named by Interpol by at least fifteen identities, speaks four languages, often rents Bentley cars with chauffeur, acts gracefully, wears designer clothes and travels the world with fake passports. To deceive his victims, he sometimes claims to be the son of diplomats, sometimes claims to be an orphan from a gypsy ethnic group in Spain, and even goes so far as to present himself as an Arab millionaire.
The American swindler Frank William Abagnale Jr., who inspired the movie ‘Catch me if you can’ by the New York Post newspaper. The person being compared to was again Juan Carlos Guzmán Betancourt.
Already in 1999, he was caught trying to use a stolen credit card in Japan in the British capital. Since then, authorities in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Oman, Mexico, Thailand, Japan, England, France, Italy, Russia, Spain, Hong Kong, Dubai and other parts of the world have reported cases of theft and fraud to Interpol. It belongs to Guzman.
Judge Michael Peart, who sent Guzmán to Kent prison, said: “He has no trouble impersonating at will and is able to change his name and travel in Europe, using fake passports or other identification information to hide his true identity.” He fled in 2006, while the extradition process to France was underway. After escaping from there, Interpol had lost track of it.
Years later, accidentally crossing the border Canada and the United States, Colombia caught again. Paradoxically, despite his long international history, Guzmán in Colombia has no criminal record.
On October 1, 2009, the notorious thief and swindler wanted by authorities in at least fifteen countries was finally revealed. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in the state of Vermont (United States).
journalist in December 2010 Andres Pachon He managed to interview Guzmán, who describes his life as a ‘con artist’ in the book Alias.
Over the years, he has become a skilled thief of wealthy people in luxury hotels around the world, says the journalist from Cali Andrés Pachón, who has been tracking him for several years.
This is how the book ‘Substitute’, published in 2011, came about. About this enigmatic man, considered “the world’s most wanted Colombian swindler”, He wrote that the journalist wrote based on a meticulous investigation that led him to speak with relatives and detectives in the United States, as well as with detectives in the London Police, who were again in pursuit of Guzmán.
*Information is taken from the book ‘Magical Neorealism – The most extraordinary news published in EL TIEMPO’. Also from the Archive pages of this medium.
DANIELA LARRRTE ASAAD and ALEJANDRA TORRES
DIGITAL SCOPE WRITING
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I am Bret Jackson, a professional journalist and author for Gadget Onus, where I specialize in writing about the gaming industry. With over 6 years of experience in my field, I have built up an extensive portfolio that ranges from reviews to interviews with top figures within the industry. My work has been featured on various news sites, providing readers with insightful analysis regarding the current state of gaming culture.
