Cannot open my trunk

I got it opened as follows: Crawling into the back seat, I very gently popped up the shelf retaining clips on the left and right sides of the package shelf with a flat screw driver. Then, using a couple of wide-blade clean putty knives, and starting at the passenger (right) side of the shelf at the forward edge, I very carefully (to prevent tearing the seat upholstery) inserted one of the putty knives between the seat back and the forward edge of the shelf and began prying the shelf upward. Once I could see the shelf edge, I inserted the second putty knife into that gap and pried upward again. I kept repeating this process until the entire forward edge of the shelf was free. Then I simply pulled the shelf out. After that I popped out the plastic retaining clips on the black fiberboard cover over the locking mechanism on the trunk lid, saw that the latching rod had become disconnected from the lock (just as I thought it was), yanked up the rod, and voila! - the trunk lid opened.

To hopefully prevent this from happening again, I used a piece of 12 gauge copper wire and wrapped it tightly around the rod and rod retainer. The little black plastic rod retainer apparently does not hold the rod tight enough to prevent it from coming loose.

Correction: I tossed the copper wire idea, threw away the rod and the little plastic rod retainers on each end of the rod, and fabricated a new rod out of heavy duty coat hanger wire that is bent 90 degrees at the ends with enough excess sticking through (and then bent another 90 degrees to close it up) so that it will never work loose again, and does not depend on any cheap plastic retainers that get brittle with age.