DEEP in the Colombian jungle, miles from any town or hospital, Clara Rojas prepared to give birth in a muddy tent surrounded by the heavily armed leftist guerrillas who had taken her hostage in February 2002.

The guerrillas had promised that a doctor would be brought to the camp to help her. But when Rojas went into labour and began to suffer complications, the only person to hand was a guerrilla wielding a kitchen knife.

“I wanted my baby to be born naturally,” Rojas said last week, as she spoke for the first time about an extraordinary six-year hostage ordeal that ended earlier this month. “But I couldn’t dilate normally. There were no doctors there. I left everything in the hands of God.”

The guerrillas had supplies of anaesthetic and Rojas was drugged while one of her captors slit open her abdomen with his knife. Her son Emmanuel was born by amateur caesarean section in April 2004.

He was a true jungle baby and the remarkable story of his conception, birth and turbulent childhood has transfixed Colombia since Rojas was freed after the controversial intervention of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

In a series of interviews Rojas, 44, talked freely about the anguish and fear she suffered as a captive of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the rebel group known as Farc.

She talked of jaguars that lurked in the jungle, deterring escape attempts, and of snakes and tarantulas that she believed were released by her captors near her tent to frighten her into submission.

Yet she did not directly address the one issue that most of Colombia was discussing. Emmanuel was conceived more than a year after she was taken captive. Apart from acknowledging that the child’s father was one of her captors - who may never have known that she became pregnant - Rojas has so far shed little light on what was evidently a unique relationship.

In their early reactions to Rojas’s release, most Colombians have been profoundly touched by her ordeal and apparently ready to allow her time to adjust to her hard-earned freedom. Yet questions are inevitably being asked about the identity of Emmanuel’s father, where he may be now and how the boy eventually turned up in a Bogota orphanage with a different name.

Knowledge of the child’s existence first became public in a 2006 book by a Colombian journalist who had interviewed the rebel leaders. Manuel Marulanda, Farc’s commander, was quoted as saying: “The boy is a little bit of us [the captors] and a little bit of them [the captives].”

Early last year another hostage, a police sergeant named Frank Pinchao, escaped and confirmed Emmanuel’s existence. At the time there was much discussion of the so-called Stockholm syndrome, in which captives try to befriend their captors.

The Bogota media have mostly glossed over the circumstances of Emmanuel’s birth - Cambio magazine ran a feature on “sexual relations between kidnapper and kidnapped” without mentioning Rojas’s name. Yet internet forums have been less discreet and several angry voices have been heard.

“Clara Rojas is now allied to Farc,” claimed Deszo Jivansky in a post to a Bogota newspaper website. “She committed a mortal sin and slept with a guerrilla.”

Others remembered previous speculation that Rojas might have been raped. But in the interviews she has given since her release, she has made no suggestion of coercion. “Did she consent or not? That is Clara’s problem,” noted one contributor calling himself Scorpio.

Others have been more sympathetic. “It’s sad to see the lack of respect and humanity among some people on this subject,” complained Rosario Torres Ruiz.

Another comment, by Thelemus Cassandros, summed up the view of many: “She was in a vulnerable psychological state and we shouldn’t judge her for the decision she took at that dark moment.”

Several Bogota psychologists agreed that judgment of Rojas should not be harsh. Professor Emilio Meluk of the National University wrote a 1999 book on kidnapping, based on the experience of 280 Colombian victims. He found that sexual impulses were invariably governed by anguish and fear.

“If there is a sexual relationship, it tends to be a survival strategy,” Meluk said. “It’s really a relationship between two liars, each with a different objective: one wants to control and the other wants to get out alive.”

Rojas was a pretty, dark-haired lawyer in her late thirties when she teamed up with her friend Ingrid Betancourt, a well-known Colombian politician who was running in the 2002 presidential elections on an environmental ticket. Refused the use of an army helicopter to visit remote districts, the two women headed into the jungle interior by car and were seized by Farc rebels.

At that moment the guerrillas were interested only in kidnapping Betancourt and told Rojas that she could go free. But the two women had known each other for 16 years and Rojas refused to leave her friend. It was, she admitted later, a “fateful” decision that caused both women unimaginable grief.

Despite the threat from jaguars and other jungle predators, the women and several other hostages were bent on early escape. Yet when their chance came after two months of captivity, they made a mess of it. “We didn’t know which way to run,” Rojas said. “One of us was saying this way; the other, that way. We never succeeded in getting our bearings. It got dark and we were caught.”

The setback hurt relations between Rojas and Betancourt, who each blamed the other for their plight. They were chained to trees at first and were later separated for long periods. Betancourt remains a hostage and Rojas has not seen her for three years.

By the time Rojas discovered she was pregnant she had already lost contact with the baby’s father. “I had no way of telling him, he never returned and I don’t know if he is alive or dead,” she said. “It was a very critical moment for me because despite my circumstances I wanted to have the baby.”

She said her fellow hostages never shunned her: “They told me they would support me whatever my decision.”

She asked her captives to get her help from the Red Cross, but the Farc commander decided that she should give birth on her own in a tent about 40 yards from the other hostages.

Rojas was anaesthetised after going into labour and awoke to find a guerrilla sewing up her abdomen. “He said, ‘Be quiet, don’t move. You’ve got a boy and he’s doing well’.”

The captives and their captors joined forces to make baby clothes and shoes from scraps of cloth and animal skin, but Rojas was worried about her child’s health. Emmanuel had apparently broken an arm during the caesarean and he was also suffering from leishmaniasis, an insect-borne skin disease that is also known as “Baghdad boil”.

Rojas asked if the boy could be sent to his grandmother in Bogota and on January 23, 2005, the day she remembers as the worst of her captivity, Emmanuel was taken away by the guerrillas.

It was not until her release this month that Rojas discovered what had happened to her son; he was first given to a rural peasant and then placed in a Bogota orphanage under the name Juan David Gomez.

Mother and son were reunited last Wednesday and are getting to know each other in private in Bogota. But their full story has yet to be told.

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