Ingrid Betancourt - Hostage in the Jungle

by Read Listen Learn


Colombia, February 2002. There were presidential elections coming up. This time, there was a woman candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, campaigning as an anti-corruption activist. In Colombia, this was a dangerous, even deadly, position to take.

That day, 23rd February, she was going to campaign in a key area of the country: San Vicente de Caguan, the area of Colombia which, just a few years earlier, the president had handed over to the guerrilla movement to run and rule. Now, it was back in government hands, but only just. For propaganda reasons the army had declared it a ‘safe zone’ but, in reality, they were still pacifying large parts of it.

Nonetheless, all the presidential candidates had to go down there, smile for the cameras, show how brave they were and how safe San Vicente now was. The zone, until recently a guerrilla republic the size of Switzerland, was big enough and quite dangerous enough to make an army helicopter and a squad of soldiers a standard courtesy to any politician who visited. For some reason, Ingrid Betancourt’s courtesy helicopter and armed guards were taken away at the last moment and she was left no other choice than to travel by road.

When she and Clara Rojas, her campaign manager, passed through the army checkpoint everything seemed normal. They were among a number of cars travelling down the road and the soldiers had given no special warning.

It seemed like they had not long left the army roadblock and now they were being stopped at another one. Betancourt, slightly irritated, broke off her conversation with her campaign manager to see what they wanted this time. As she looked out of the window, she realised that these weren’t government forces; they were guerrilla fighters of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC as they are known. These were the ones the government had been saying were no longer active in the area.

For Ingrid and Clara, it was the beginning of more than six years in the ‘Green Hell’, the FARC system of prison camps for hostages situated deep in the rain forests or high in the mountains, suffering dengue fever and malaria and freezing nights, by turn.

Ingrid Betancourt was a remarkable woman and an unusual Colombian. She had spent a lot of her childhood and youth in other countries – especially France where her surname and some distant ancestors were from. She was no stranger to politics: both her father and her mother were national politicians in their day; also, the Betancourts were a famous political clan all across northern South America.

Ingrid went to boarding school in England and then took her degree at the famous ‘Sciences Po’ school in Paris. Not long after graduating, she met and then married a French diplomat, Fabrice Delloye. Through the 1980s, she lived in different parts of the world because of her husband’s diplomatic career. They had a couple of children, a boy and a girl. But, by the mid-1990s, the marriage was over and Ingrid had decided to return to her native Colombia.

She decided to go into politics and was inspired by the anti-corruption presidential candidate, Galan, who had been brutally assassinated by a drug gang back in the ‘80s. She could also see that her homeland, Colombia, was in the middle of a terrible socio-political crisis caused by the sudden cocaine boom that had started in the late 1970s. It had turned an already violent country into a war zone in city and countryside alike. The money from drug-trafficking had pushed Colombia’s already rotten public corruption to disgusting levels. Everyone could be bought including, as everyone well understood, the president of the republic – just so long as you had enough money, and Colombia’s drug lords had so much money they didn’t know where to keep it. Many of the criminals left some of their money in police hands, nice and safe.

Ingrid Betancourt had wanted to put a stop to all that. She was serious and brave. There were so many death threats against her and her family that she sent her children away to be with their father in New Zealand.

When she was taken prisoner by the FARC guerrillas, there were immediately questions. Who had cancelled the standard helicopter and squad of soldiers? Why had the army allowed Betancourt to continue up a road they must have known was very dangerous?

Many people felt that the answers lay with Alvaro Uribe, the candidate who went on to win the 2002 election. The army liked him as a candidate and, of course, getting rid of one of his electoral opponents would be a kindness he might appreciate. Anyway, her capture would also give support to Uribe’s message of no negotiation with the FARC and the need to hit them hard; which, of course, would mean giving the army a much bigger budget as soon as he won the election. When he won, the army was quite pleased at his generosity.

The ever- growing army allowed Uribe to stick to his hard line of no negotiation. He wanted to defeat the guerrillas completely by using the army, not words. He failed but tried for the eight years of his presidency. For six and a half of them, Ingrid Betancourt was stuck in a jungle prison camp, waiting. Sometimes, they moved location, marching across the jungle hills to a new camp, to avoid army patrols that were closing in. Rumours would come out that Ingrid was dying or, at least, seriously ill; that she had been tortured, raped etc. In the end, they all proved untrue.

In the meanwhile, Alvaro Uribe had gone on to be elected president a second time. He won two elections but lost his fight against the guerrilla forces. He could not go to election a third time so he selected Juan Manuel Santos to run for president. Uribe saw Santos as a ‘puppet’, who would smile at the cameras while Uribe made the real decisions.

In the middle of 2008, the Colombian press was awaiting the race for the Colombian presidency in 2010. However, some far more exciting and unpredictable news broke first. On 2nd July, reports started coming in that Ingrid Betancourt and more than a dozen other hostages had just been rescued in what Colombian and international reporters were describing as a ‘brilliant military operation’. And, just that day, there were quite a lot of international reporters in Colombia. John McCain, the US presidential candidate, was in Cartagena for a flying visit accompanied by the international media. And so, thanks to this coincidence, the operation received maximum coverage all over the world. It did no harm at all to Juan Manuel’s chances in the election.

Ingrid Betancourt was flown up to Bogota immediately where, giving a thank-you speech, she looked healthy and well-fed. Then, she left for France to receive a hero’s welcome. However, very soon there were many question marks about the operation that had supposedly rescued Betancourt and the others. First, reputable European newspapers reported that a large ransom had been paid to the FARC and that Betancourt and the others were then released, as agreed in secret negotiations. The rescue operation by the Colombian army was just a piece of theatre which had, anyway, attracted intense criticism because they had used a helicopter showing the Red Cross to trick the FARC – which is a serious international war crime.

Be that as it may, Santos went on to win the election in 2010 and immediately let Uribe know that he would keep his own counsel. The guerrillas, who had outlasted Uribe’s eight years, later took part in peace talks with the Santos government in Oslo. Ingrid Betancourt lives in France.