After Six Years of Captivity in Colombia, Ingrid Betancourt....... From Today's WSJ

After Six Years of Captivity in Colombia, Ingrid Betancourt
Is a Global Celebrity -- and Too Valuable for Rebels to Release
By JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA in Bogotá , Colombia
June 7, 2008; Page A1

Ingrid Betancourt spends some of her days in captivity chained by the neck to a tree. Her rebel captors hate her for her stiff resistance, which includes at least five escape attempts, a hunger strike and a sharp tongue.

See images of the international outpouring of support for Ms. Betancourt.

She has a volcanic personality, she is rude and provocative with the guerrillas assigned to guard her," rebel leader Raúl Reyes complained in a February email to the seven-man ruling body of the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC.

Ms. Betancourt, a minor presidential candidate when she was abducted in 2002, is one of about 700 hostages held by the FARC, Latin America's oldest and largest insurgency. The FARC, estimated to number about 9,000 fighters, funds itself largely through drug trafficking and kidnapping. All but about 40 of its hostages are held for ransom. The rest include Ms. Betancourt, three U.S. defense contractors abducted in 2001, and Colombian policemen, soldiers and politicians whom the rebels consider prizes of war to be deployed to strategic advantage.

Ms. Betancourt, who holds dual Colombian and French citizenship, has become the face of Colombia's captives and their heart-breaking suffering. In Europe, she is a cause célèbre, so famous that she is simply known as "Ingrid." Her portrait hangs on the facade of the Paris city hall and in Milan's main piazza. France stages marches to demand her release, and Italy holds midnight vigils. Across the world, more than 1,000 cities and towns have declared her an honorary citizen.

But in becoming so famous, the 46-year-old Ms. Betancourt has also become more valuable to the FARC, which has suffered a string of major setbacks in the past few months. Only days after he complained about Ms. Betancourt in the email, Mr. Reyes, the rebels' second-in-command, was killed in an airstrike by the Colombian military on his camp in neighboring Ecuador. Weeks later, the group lost its legendary leader Manuel Marulanda, who apparently died of a heart attack.

After the attack on Mr. Reyes, the Colombian police recovered several of his laptop computers, gaining an unprecedented look inside the secretive rebel group. It is clear from messages, many viewed by The Wall Street Journal, that the hostages -- Ms. Betancourt in particular -- are pawns in a complex political game played out by the FARC and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez against Colombia's President �?lvaro Uribe.

Numerous emails reveal that the FARC and Mr. Chávez agreed to use the selective release of hostages, a handful of whom were let go earlier this year, to better the international image of the FARC, which is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union. Mr. Chávez then planned to exert diplomatic pressure to get governments allied with him, such as Ecuador and Nicaragua, to grant the group diplomatic recognition -- a move that, if followed by other countries in the region, would undermine the Colombian government's offensive against the FARC.

"It would be an international blow that would demolish the Uribe regime," FARC commander Iván Márquez, the guerrillas' liaison to Mr. Chávez, exulted in a November report to the FARC's ruling Secretariat after a meeting with Mr. Chávez.

Equally clear from the emails is that if there is any hostage release, Ms. Betancourt -- and the three Americans -- will be the last ones let out of the jungle. "We told Chávez that if we released her, we would have no other cards to play," Mr. Márquez wrote to the Secretariat in December.

Mr. Chávez said he is only involved with the guerrillas to get the hostages released and bring peace to Colombia, a humanitarian mission scuttled when Mr. Reyes was killed. He has repeatedly said that the information from Mr. Reyes' computers was faked by the Colombian government.

Some analysts now hope the death of Mr. Marulanda, the FARC's iconic founder, and the devastating military strikes against the guerrillas, may make the FARC more amenable to releasing the hostages. Indeed, Mr. Uribe said last week that some guerrilla commanders have contacted him with offers to surrender with hostages. Most analysts say such hopes are premature.

It could not be a more surreal situation for Ms. Betancourt, once a vivacious beauty who was the toast of Paris and Bogotá. A video from October shows a gaunt and infinitely sad woman sitting on a rustic wooden bench, looking at the jungle floor. The so-called proof-of-life video and the despairing and eloquent letter that accompanied it shocked Colombia and the world.

"I am, Mamita, tired, tired of suffering," she wrote in the 12-page letter addressed to her family. "I have been or have tried to be strong. These almost six years of captivity have shown me that I am not as resistant, or as brave or as intelligent as I thought. I have fought many battles. I have tried to escape various times. I've tried to keep my head above water. But Mamita, I have given up....your daily suffering, and the suffering of everyone, makes death seem like a sweet option."

Ms. Betancourt is believed to suffer from a handful of debilitating illnesses, including hepatitis. Periodically, rumors emerge that put her near death. At times, she has been so sick that when her captors have moved her from jungle camp to jungle camp to avoid detection, they have had to carry her on a hammock, making sure, former captives say, that the ride is as bumpy and painful as possible.

Until John Pinchao, a Colombian police sergeant, managed a daring escape in April 2007, no one was quite sure Ms. Betancourt was even alive. An earlier video, released by the FARC in 2003, had been the last the world had heard from her. But Mr. Pinchao's testimony, as well as that of recently freed hostages and the captured FARC commander who had been in charge of her imprisonment, provide a vivid profile of what life is like for Ms. Betancourt and the other hostages.

Reuters
Juan Carlos Lecompte, Ingrid Betancourt's husband, and Yolanda Pulecio, her mother, hold a cutout of the captive politician three months after she was kidnapped in 2002.
They survive on a monotonous daily diet of spaghetti, rice and lentils. Once a year, they eat an egg. Twice a year, they get a piece of meat.

To pass the time, Ms. Betancourt taught French to Mr. Pinchao, a captive since his police unit was overrun in 1998. "She was like a mother to me," he said.

The pair argued about the Bible. Deeply religious, Ms. Betancourt would say she believed the incidents in the Holy Book were literal; he would insist they were symbolic. "She had a pact with her mother that every Saturday at noon, they would both pray," said Mr. Pinchao, who has written a book about his experiences.

One of Ms. Betancourt's worst moments during captivity was the death of her father. Gabriel Betancourt, who gained renown in Colombia for helping to make education affordable for the poor, died of a heart attack just one month after her kidnapping. In her letter, Ms. Betancourt said she longs, "to be with my papito, whose mourning I have not been able to complete, because every day, for the last four years, I have cried over his death."

Reuters
Betancourt hands out Viagra as she campaigns for president a month before her capture by communist rebels.
Former hostages said Ms. Betancourt misses her two children, Melanie, 22, and Lorenzo, 19, terribly. On their birthdays, she makes them a makeshift cake from the day's ration of rice and beans, and sings "Happy Birthday" to them. "For years I couldn't think about them because of the terrible pain that their absence produced in me," she wrote in her letter last year. "Today I can hear them and feel more joy than pain. I look for them in my memories and I nourish myself in the images I guard in my memory of each of their different ages."

Her life in captivity couldn't be more different from her past. The daughter of a beauty-queen and a distinguished diplomat, Ms. Betancourt lived a charmed life in an apartment on Paris's luxurious Avenue Foch, where her parents entertained such friends and luminaries as the painter Fernando Botero and the Nobel-prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez. She studied at the elite Institut d'Études Politiques there and married French career diplomat Fabrice Delloye. She followed him to postings in Ecuador, the Seychelles Islands and Los Angeles, where, bored with the diplomatic life, she mulled getting a real-estate license.

After Colombian drug dealers assassinated Luis Carlos Galán, a charismatic presidential candidate with whom her mother was close, Ms. Betancourt returned to Bogotá in 1990 with the idea of launching a political career, which she did in 1994. She divorced from Mr. Delloye and later married Juan Carlos Lecompte, a Bogotá publicist.

At home, she discovered she had a flair for the dramatic gesture. During her first campaign, for the House of Representatives from Bogotá, she attracted media attention when she handed out hundreds of prophylactics, saying that she would act as a "condom against corruption, the AIDS of our society." She easily won election. In the congress, she joined a group of legislators who called themselves "the four Musketeers," and made cleaning up Colombia's notoriously dirty politics their crusade.

With her colleagues, she went on a hunger strike in Congress, from which she was carried out two weeks later on a stretcher. In a famous 1996 speech, she became a national figure after making the case for bringing charges against then-President Ernesto Samper, who had won election with the help of a $6 million contribution from the Cali cocaine cartel.

Ms. Betancourt was elected to the Senate in 1998 with more votes than any other legislator in the country. "She felt she was on track for the presidency," said Eduardo Chávez, who worked on her campaigns.

In 2001, Ms. Betancourt published her autobiography in France titled "Rage in the Heart." She portrayed herself as a lonely crusader risking death to take on a country of drug-dealing congressmen and corrupt officials. She was hailed in Paris as the "Warrior of the Andes" in one newspaper and "Alice in the Land of Nightmares" in another.

The book, however, bombed in Bogotá. Locals were angered by her blanket accusations, with many seeing her as a self-promoting, messianic and calculating political dilettante. As Semana, the country's most respected magazine put it, Ms. Betancourt was as much "Joan of Arc as Juana la Loca," a mad medieval Spanish queen.

Sure of herself even though polls showed less than 1% of voters supported her presidential bid, Ms. Betancourt, who had created her own political party, Green Oxygen, set out to renew her political fortunes. That journey would take her to a stretch of dangerous jungle road in a FARC stronghold in southern Colombia.

It was a critical and dangerous time in Colombia. Three years earlier, President Andrés Pastrana had ceded control to the FARC of a huge swath of land around San Vicente del Caguán to hold peace negotiations. Those talks had gone nowhere. After three years, Mr. Pastrana ordered the army to take back the area.

San Vicente's mayor was the only elected official belonging to Green Oxygen in the whole country, and Ms. Betancourt felt that she had to go there, despite warnings from the army that it was dangerous.

"She was obsessed with this idea of going to San Vicente del Caguán," said Alain Keler, a French photographer who traveled there with her. "There were moments when we could have turned back, but she ignored all the red flags."

On Feb. 23, 2002, her car was pulled over by uniformed men on the road to San Vicente. Initially, Ms. Betancourt thought it was an army checkpoint. The guerrilla in charge of the roadblock had been ordered to detain all politicians of national stature. "Her face changed color," Nolberto Uni, the guerrilla commander, who is now in prison, told reporters earlier this year.

The guerrillas say they are ready to negotiate the freedom of Ms. Betancourt and the other hostages in exchange for FARC fighters the government holds, but only if the Colombian government agrees to give them control of a Manhattan-size area of land to hold the negotiations. But Mr. Uribe, the president, remembers how Mr. Pastrana's effort to give a Switzerland-size area to the guerrillas from 1999 to 2002 backfired. He has refused.

Mr. Uribe's government feels no pressure to give in. Since taking power in 2002, Mr. Uribe has become wildly popular by using the army to drive the FARC back from the edges of Bogotá to remote jungles.

In the jungle, Ms. Betancourt feels abandoned by her government. "For a long time we have been like lepers who spoil the party," she wrote in her October letter.

Trying to win her daughter's freedom, Yolanda Pulecio, Ms. Betancourt's mother, has traveled often to Caracas to meet with Mr. Chávez and appeal for her daughter's release. She has also appeared on television with the Venezuelan president, whom many Colombians despise because of his close ties with the FARC.

In her elegant apartment overlooking Bogotá, Ms. Pulecio said she believes Mr. Chávez has her daughter's best interests at heart. "I haven't been fooled by him," she said. "Once I was next to him when he made a public call in front of many journalists for [FARC chief] Marulanda not to leave Ingrid in the condition she is."

Up every morning before dawn, Ms. Pulecio dials and redials the telephone number of a Bogotá radio station that broadcasts messages to kidnap victims -- the line is clogged with calls -- until she gets through. She then reads a letter she writes Ms. Betancourt every night. "I tell her about my day," she said. "I will tell her I saw you."

Ms. Pulecio worries constantly that the government will try to rescue Ms. Betancourt and the other captives, leading guerrillas to kill them. Last year, the guerrillas, mistaking another approaching FARC unit for a rival band of guerrillas, turned their guns on their captives, killing 11 kidnapped state congressmen. She smolders with anger at Mr. Uribe's government over its refusal to negotiate.

"Ingrid is caught between two inhumane forces: the guerrillas and Uribe," she said. Ms. Pulecio -- who became renowned in Colombia for her work with street kids -- is still furious that the Colombian attorney general hasn't given her the original proof-of-life letter captured from FARC couriers last November. "It's my letter, written by hand by my daughter," she said, her eyes tearing up. "They gave me a faded Xerox copy, and kept the original."

An attorney general's spokesman said Colombian law requires the office retain the letter since it is evidence in a kidnapping case. At a summit in Peru last month, Mr. Uribe ticked off a litany of attempts by his government to free the hostages, including unilaterally releasing 127 guerrillas it held and offering $100 million in rewards to rebels who defect and bring hostages with them.

The government that has tried hardest to win Ms. Betancourt's release has been France. In 2003, then-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, a college mentor to Ms. Betancourt and family friend, launched Operation July 14th, named after Bastille Day. He sent a C-130 transport plane and a French secret-service team to Brazil, close to the Colombian border, in hopes Ms. Betancourt would be freed. But France apparently didn't notify the Brazilian government. The French were briefly detained and later released.

Reuters
Pulecia, left, and daughter Astrid Betancourt met with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez seeking his help with the rebels.
The latest effort took place in April, when President Nicolas Sarkozy sent a medical jet to Bogotá after reports emerged from the jungle that Ms. Betancourt was dying. The French mission was dismissed by the FARC, saying it was a "mockery," and that the FARC never acted under the pressure of "blackmail or media campaigns." The jet left Bogotá after spending a few days parked at the airport.

Ironically, many in Colombia say the attention makes Ms. Betancourt's release more difficult. "Any time another small town in France or Belgium gives her honorary citizenship, it just raises her price for the FARC," said Francisco Santos, Colombia's vice president.

Some relatives of other Colombians long held hostage by the FARC resent the attention paid Ms. Betancourt, saying there should not be first-class and second-class hostages. Some in the government say that Ms. Betancourt's family -- and the French government -- mistakenly blame Mr. Uribe's regime and not the FARC for the hardships of the kidnapped hostages.

Meanwhile, Ms. Betancourt endures the jungle. Life for her became much harder after her fifth failed escape attempt -- one she made in July 2005 with Luis Eladio Pérez, a former Colombian senator who was taken hostage in 2001.

Mr. Pérez, who was freed in February, recounted how Ms. Betancourt planned their escape for half a year, squirreling away food and supplies. The plan was to float downriver at night until reaching nearby Brazil -- Ms. Betancourt had figured out they were close to the border after peeking at a guerrilla's satellite-navigation device. They sneaked away one night, their escape hidden by the roar of a tropical downpour. For six days, they kept to the plan.

But Mr. Pérez, a diabetic, got sick, and Ms. Betancourt would not abandon him, allowing the guerrillas to catch up. "The plan was a success. I was the failure," he said. "It saddens me because I know that Ingrid would have escaped if it wasn't for me."

When she was brought back to camp, the guerrillas wrestled her to the ground, locked a heavy iron chain around her neck and shackled her, kicking and screaming, to a tree.

Ms. Betancourt remains in the jungle today -- a prize, a pawn, a cause. A year before her kidnapping, she foresaw perhaps better than anyone the attraction she'd hold as a captive, generating untold attention for the rebels. "It would be," she said in a French TV documentary, "what they call the ultimate catch."

By tejasmarcos on Jun 7, 2008, 07:16 in Friendly Talkzone.

goin_south says on Jun 7, 2008, 11:54:

that's a lil arrogancia: 'the ultimate catch'...
uh hem!
(if I'm reading it right and she said that about herself.)

cara_de_mono says: REMEMBER THE FEEBLE FEW PWT!!!!!!!! The Feeble Few flageth, and the Moderators taketh away ... remember, cdm.

0 funny, 0 helpful.

sanandressi says on Jun 8, 2008, 07:50:

She was told by military authorities that her safety was at risk if she went out to FARC country. Why did she go? Was she a fool? I feel no more sympathy for her then the other 700 or so Colombians and or foreigners being held in Colombia. Equal sympathy for all FARC rehenes. The gringos too!

Pastrana gave the FARC that land and the FARC continued to kill and kidnap.....who did Ingrid think she was?

If she ever gets freed she will be president one day?

0 funny, 0 helpful.