Faith
Central: Ingrid Betancourt says rescue was a miracle
When Ingrid Betancourt suddenly realised that she was free after six years and
four months in the Colombian jungle, she wept with joy in the rescue
helicopter. But she had suffered so much that something in her brain told
her: “Freedom is not for you. Happiness is not for you. The helicopter will
crash. Of course it will crash.”
As they skimmed over the treetops, Betancourt asked her rescuers how soon they
would land. Three minutes, she was told. “Those were the three longest
minutes of my life.”
Clutching the wooden rosary beads she had made in captivity, she prayed: “Oh
my God help us, let us land. I’m so close to my children and so close to
freedom now. My God help us.” She was still praying as the helicopter
landed. One of the world’s most famous hostages had been successfully
snatched to freedom from Colombia’s Farc guerrillas. The beads were the only
memento she brought with her out of the jungle.
As she repeats her prayer four days later, Betancourt brings her palms
together under her chin. She is sitting in a red velvet armchair in the bar
of the hotel Raphael near the Arc de Triomphe.
Her return to Paris has been celebrated with a huge outpouring of public
affection. President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla greeted her when she
landed, both houses of parliament staged tributes to her and people now stop
her in the street to kiss her.
Betancourt, who has French and Colombian nationality, is radiant. She is
impressively calm and lucid as she recounts her ordeal, even laughing as she
remembers absurd episodes. But she is also thin and drawn, shifting
constantly because of back pain. Her memories of her ordeal are dark.
Betancourt, now 46, was kidnapped while campaigning in southern Colombia as a
presidential election candidate in 2002. Farc has held many hostages over
the years and some of those released before her have said she suffered the
worst treatment of all of them.
Asked about reports that she was beaten and may have suffered yet worse
physical abuse, she pauses for a long moment. She speaks in a low but steady
voice: “There are things I’ve lived through which are very hard for me to
get out. And when I was freed I told myself that I would never talk about
them because if I did it would be even more painful than living them. That
way they will stay in my head, no one will know so I can forget them. But
once they’re out I will be dirtied even more.”
Doesn’t she plan to denounce the crimes committed by her guards? “If I do bear
witness one day it will have to be to teach people something. I want people
to understand that we all, deep down inside us, can be monsters.”
Even herself? “Yes, of course. You can find someone nice and kind and fun to
talk to and then, because of an order or an ideology, they become an
executioner. There are lots of ways of crushing others in everyday life.
When someone speaks to you and you don’t answer them, that’s aggressive, you
are humiliating them. When someone asks for help and you lie to get out of
it, you’re denying their right to ask you for help.”
Surely such examples are a million miles from what she suffered in the jungle?
“I want people who read this to understand that what I lived in the jungle
they can live every day. The difference is that in the jungle you can’t walk
away, you’re 24 hours a day with people who hate you. You have to bear all
the mean tricks they can invent.
“All right, I’ll tell you one which for me is absolutely abominable. I was
tied to a tree after my fifth escape attempt and after some time I asked the
guard to let me go to the loo. He said, ‘If you want to do it, you can do it
here in front of me’. I thought I would die rather than do that. This is a
small thing compared with what I lived through but, you understand, they
decided everything. The chief guard is God and he has the power of life or
death over you and you are a kind of animal in chains.”
She singles out a commander known as Gafas (Glasses) because he wore
spectacles: “A short guy with a creative capacity for horror. I looked at
him and I thought, ‘Now I understand the concentration camps, now I
understand the Nazis. All this orgy of torture and physical cruelty’.”
Doing her best to challenge Gafas, she learnt by heart the Farc’s disciplinary
code, wrote letters to him and demanded to see him. He would finally come to
see her after a month or two and she would quote articles of the code at
him.
What did she protest about? “All these things I don’t want to talk about, one
more atrocious than the other. I’d quote the article about respecting the
spiritual integrity of prisoners.” Did it do any good? “The next day he’d
promote the guard I had complained about. I obtained nothing, but protesting
helped me to preserve my dignity. He and I hated each other.”
She has sympathy, however, for the female teenage guerrillas among her guards.
“They were victims too. I’ve always had a lot of esteem for them, they’re
courageous girls working as much as the men. The girls are tiny but I’ve
seen them carry heavy logs just like the men. They’re slaves.
“There were nasty ones but there were also those who showed me a kind of
solidarity.” When the commander refused to give Betancourt a hairclip, a
female guard dropped one on the ground during a march so that she could pick
it up.
She describes the jungle as “a hostile world where love doesn’t exist”. She
would get pricked by something every time she touched a tree or sat down and
on virtual running marches she would constantly trip up on creepers lying on
the ground. She estimates that she marched some 200 miles a year, or some
1,200 miles in all, carrying her tent and much more on her back.
She was often chained to a tree and for the first three years she was made to
wear a large and heavy metal chain with a big padlock around her neck. “As
you can see, I have prominent bones” — she straightens up to show them — “so
imagine every time I moved when I was trying to sleep it would strike my
bones and make my skin peel.”
A month into her captivity, she grabbed a newspaper that had been used to wrap
up some cabbage, delighted at having something to read; she saw a photograph
of a priest by a coffin and found out from the caption that this was her
father’s funeral. She had not known that he had died a month after she was
kidnapped. Her reaction was almost suicidal.
By contrast, hearing the voice of her mother was a huge source of strength.
Every day at 5am, Betancourt would listen to messages from her mother and
her two children, Melanie and Lorenzo, on an old radio. Her face lights up
remembering this: “Ah yes, mum’s radio, extraordinary! Every day, every day.”
She imitates her mother’s voice: “Ingrid, I cannot believe this is another day
without you.”
“I’d answer her, I’d tell her not to worry, that it would be over soon. She’d
tell me what she was up to that day and all day I’d think about her. I
filled my days with what she and my children told me. I lived vicariously.”
Thanks to the radio she knew about the campaign being waged by her family,
including her mother in Bogota and Melanie and Lorenzo in Paris. A banner
bearing her photograph hung from the Paris city hall and support committees
mushroomed across France. President Jacques Chirac tried to win her freedom
and when Sarkozy took over the presidency last year he vowed to secure her
release.
Has she worked out why so many people mobilised for her? She hesitates: “I
don’t think it’s a question of me having exceptional qualities, I’m a
completely ordinary person. Perhaps that’s the reason: I’m completely
ordinary and everyone knows they could have lived through what I lived
through.”
In reality, she nearly did not live through it. Last August her condition
deteriorated so rapidly that she accepted she was going to die and even
welcomed the idea of death. She suffered from malaria, from amoebiasis (an
intestinal infection) and a host of complications including diarrhoea,
vomiting and a constant fever. Infected with hepatitis B, she was tormented
by problems with her liver. Her weight dropped to 5Å stone.
Corporal William Perez, a Colombian soldier and fellow hostage, came to help
after realising she was no longer getting up to fetch food or to wash
herself in the nearby river. The guards had refused to give her medicine so
he pretended that it was for him and gave it to her. “He’d sit down beside
me and spend three hours giving me food, we had mostly rice and lentils,
with a spoon. When I said I didn’t want any because I would only be sick
again, he’d give it to me as if a child, saying, ‘One for mummy, one for
Melanie, one for Lorenzo’.”
Did she decide to let herself die? “We’d already had a hostage, Major Guevara,
who died in 2005, we think of TB, and I thought I probably had something
serious because it was a whole chain of things. I thought that my heart was
going to give up. I felt a big relief. I wanted to be at peace when I died
so I went through my life and I thought of people who had hurt me and of
people I had not been good to.
“I asked for a pardon and I pardoned others, too, and that made me feel better
about dying. I thought that if I died I would enter a world much better than
this one. I would be with my father, my mother would be at peace and no
longer cry because she would have been liberated, my children would also be
liberated. That would be a liberation for me too. And the Farc would have
nothing to negotiate.”
She adds, her voice a whisper: “It was a good option all in all. I’d lost
hope. I thought I would never get out of this. I thought: these guerrillas
hate me, they’ve decided I should die here so I might as well do it right
now.”
What made her change her mind? “I didn’t change my mind, I just followed my
body. Slowly, slowly I got better. I remember a time I went to wash in the
river after perhaps 10 days and William took my hand and told me to put all
my weight on it. I took it one step at a time.”
Betancourt and her fellow hostages were being held in a remote highland area
where rescue by the Colombian army was made almost impossible by the jungle
canopy and difficult terrain. Last month, however, their hopes of freedom
were at last raised by news from their guards that members of an
international commission would be coming to see them and that this might
help to bring about their release.
Eleven days ago — at 5am on Wednesday July 2, the 2,321st day of captivity —
Betancourt listened to the radio as usual. Her mother, apparently in tears,
said she was going to Italy as part of the campaign for her release. Melanie
was leaving for a holiday in China. “Marvellous,” Betancourt thought wryly.
“Here I am thinking I may get released in a few days and they’re going away.
If I’m freed there won’t be anyone home!”
Her hopes rose briefly when she heard rotor engines and two white helicopters
landed near the guerrilla camp. Any prospect of freedom was shattered,
however, when she saw men dressed in Che Guevara T-shirts emerge and
approach her guards who announced that Betancourt and 14 other hostages
would be flown to a new hideout. She thought indignantly: “What is this? An
international commission which does the Farc’s dirty work and ferries us God
knows where?”
The helicopter had taken off when a still embittered Betancourt saw Gafas
lying on the floor. “I didn’t understand what was happening because I’d been
staring at my boots and because of the noise of the rotor and then I saw
hostages start to punch him and kick him.
“I heard a shout, ‘We are the Colombian army! You are free!’ I myself started
shouting, ‘Aaaaahhh, the Colombian army!’ I didn’t understand how it could
be possible but I understood I was free. The joy of it, the extraordinary
happiness.”
In a military operation of great ingenuity, the army had found the hostages,
then infiltrated the guards to make them believe they must hand them over to
a humanitarian organisation as part of negotiations with the government.
After the helicopter landed, she saw an army general in uniform and asked him:
“Does the world know about this operation?” The general smartly raised his
left arm to check the time on his watch. “Yes, the statement we prepared has
gone out so right now, yes, the world knows you are free.”
“And my mother? Do you have her number? Can we call her?”
Betancourt bursts out laughing when she recounts her call to her mother.
“Mummy, it’s me,” she told Yolanda.
“Is it you, Astrid?” her mother replied, confusing her with her elder sister.
“No, Mummy, it’s me, it’s your daughter Ingrid.”
She has no memory of her first words to her children. Melanie, 22, is studying
cinema in New York and Lorenzo, 19, is a law student in Paris. They were
reunited in Bogota in an Airbus sent by Sarkozy.
“I know I took them in my arms and I ate them up. I covered them in kisses. To
see them all of a sudden, they were the same as I remembered them and they
were different too. I’d dreamt of what they looked like and they were much
more beautiful than I’d imagined.”
She adds with a smile: “I did tell Lorenzo, ‘Hey, you’re badly dressed’. He
laughed and said, ‘No, not at all, it’s the fashion’.” She told them both
that from now on she would be like chewing gum, “stuck to them”.
“I really want to take the time to be with them. All these hours I have spent
with them are hours in which I find out in what way I am necessary to them.”
As a mother? “Yes, as a mother, as a friend, as a brain, because you always
need someone to help you think. Even though I know they’re completely
accomplished and that I have no lessons to teach them. I’m very respectful
of what they’ve become.”
They are extraordinarily respectful of her too. During the interview, Lorenzo
walks up to us and apologises: “I know it’s absolutely not done but can I
interrupt and just say something to my mother?” I can’t help thinking that
he has not seen his mother in more than six years and yet here he is
apologising politely for grabbing a moment with her. He tells her that he’s
going to fetch an acquaintance. It’s a tiny thing but she’s clearly
delighted that he feels the need to let her know directly.
After Lorenzo has gone, I ask her whether she plans to return to Colombia
soon, perhaps to run for the presidency. She had planned to return to Bogota
in time for a demonstration next Sunday to press for the release of the 700
or so remaining hostages: “But yesterday I had a dinner with all my family
and they’re all against me. They don’t want me to go back, they say it’s
dangerous and that the Farc will seek revenge by trying to kill me.
“They said they had the right to take decisions with me because they had
suffered a lot and they don’t want to be finally touching happiness only to
have me assassinated. They’re afraid.” She stops and slowly breathes out. “I
have to be careful about them because they’ve fought for me a lot. I don’t
think I will go back soon.”
Is she herself afraid? “No, I’m not afraid but at the same time I say to
myself I have to be careful now, especially if my family fear for me. I have
a decision to take and I don’t want to do something if it hurts my family.”
She did have a brief moment of terror only the previous day as she was taking
a shower in her hotel room, when Lorenzo mistakenly switched the light out.
“I was in the dark, I couldn’t work out where I was and I thought: my God,
they’ve arrived, the Farc are back. I was in a nightmare.”
Could she stay in Paris and serve from there? “We’ll see. The
first thing is to get the other hostages freed and that can be done from
Colombia or anywhere. If in Colombia I have to always be with bodyguards
then I might be of more use in France. After all, that’s where my family did
an extraordinary job to get me freed.”
She dismisses reports, denied by Colombian authorities, that a ransom of $20m
was paid for her release: “I don’t believe that.”
Health checks since her return have shown that despite the hepatitis her liver
is fine. She says other than that she has only “a few small things of no
importance”.
After having been feted all week in Paris and flying to the Catholic shrine of
Lourdes for the weekend, she will be given the Légion d’honneur by Sarkozy
tomorrow and will attend the Bastille Day parade in the Champs-Elysées.
Does she feel that she has to go back into politics to give a meaning to her
six years in captivity?
“I can understand that my kidnapping may make no sense for many people but for
me it has a meaning. Having lived through this horror means I’m a different
person now. I can be much better than I was before — a better mother, a
better sister, anything. I’m much more sensitive to the suffering of others
and I want to help them. I want to make a difference.”
