proof of life

Alice Bowman (Meg Ryan) contacts Terry Thorne (Russell Crowe) after her husband Peter (David Morse) is kidnapped by South American rebels.

Thorne is an ex-military "K&R" (kidnap and ransom) expert whose inappropriate attraction to Alice drives him to rescue her husband in a twisted tale of romance amid the trauma of a kidnap situation.

[edit] Tecala

The Republic of Tecala, where Proof of Life is set, is a fictional South American country, based loosely on a mix of several Andean countries.

Tecala has an internal conflict between government forces and the Liberation Army of Tecala (ELT). The ELT was originally a Marxist guerrilla group supported by the Soviet Union, but after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ELT began kidnapping people for ransom to fund their operations. The ELT was soon powerful enough to seize the cocaine trade in Tecala, supposedly the second-largest producer after Colombia (in real life, Bolivia is the second-largest cocaine producer).

The ELT is still at war with the government, participating in military skirmishes and carrying out terrorist bombings in the capital city of Tecala. Maps show Tecala to be landlocked, although which countries surround it is unclear (a map shows that the southern border of Tecala resembles the Ecuador-Peru border).

Tecala also has oil wealth, which the U.S. hopes will overtake cocaine as the primary industry in Tecala. The population of Tecala are known as the Tecalefto people.