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Íngrid Betancourt

The Pasionaria of the Andes

Dina, here is my article with box to follow. I hope you are well.

Today (Monday, February 11), I’m flying from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, where I will land tomorrow (February 12). You will still be able to reach me on my satellite phone, even while I’m navigating my away across Antarctica. I’ll be back in Argentina around February 24 and will then head to Bogotá, where I am scheduled to interview Ingrid Betancourt in early March.

Let me know if you'd be interested.

Catch up soon,

Marco

On an old computer, I found this email that I sent in early February 2002 to inform Dina Nascetti, one of my bosses at L’Espresso , of my movements. I had been in Japan to report on the tomb of Jesus ^[1] and I was preparing to embark on a long journey that would take me far away from home for nearly two months. I was headed for the end of the Earth: Antarctica.

On the way out, I planned to report on the severe economic crisis that was gripping Argentina, and on the way back, I would go via Colombia to interview Ingrid Betancourt Pulecio, the Colombian politician and human rights activist. As it turned out, I arrived in Bogotá a couple of days early, which - for me at any rate - was a stroke of luck. I interviewed Ms Betancourt on February 22, and precisely twenty-four hours later she vanished into thin air while being driven from Florencia to San Vicente del Caguán. She had been kidnapped by FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas and would be held hostage for more than six years.

If I’d arrived in Colombia just a day later, I never would have met her.

*****

She has shoulder-length brown hair and typically Colombian dark eyes. She wears an amber bracelet on her wrist and rarely cracks a smile.

But then, Íngrid Betancourt doesn’t have many reasons to smile. She may look younger than her forty years and have an enviable petite frame, but she is running for the presidency of Colombia, the most violent country in the world, where ten people are kidnapped and seventy people murdered every single day. Where war has raged for four decades, claiming thirty-seven thousand civilian lives in the last twelve years alone. A country that boasts the dubious honour of being the world’s leading producer of cocaine. A country from which over a million people have fled in the last three years.

And yet, it is not so long ago that this same woman sat before me today in a heavily guarded, clandestine apartment in downtown Bogotá, wearing a bulletproof vest and a nervous expression, was smiling serenely as she lay on a beach in the Seychelles, where her handsome and sophisticated French diplomat husband had been posted.

Precisely twenty-four hours after the interview, while being driven from Florencia to San Vicente del Caguán, on the front line of the battle between FARC rebels and government forces, Íngrid Betancourt disappears along with a French photographer and cameraman accompanying her to document an electoral campaign fraught with danger. Everything points to a kidnapping.

A dramatic event which paradoxically, even for a country as pitiless as Colombia, “suddenly increases the likelihood of her winning the election”, Gabriel Marcela, professor at national war college ESDEGUE, knowingly observes.

It was Ms Betancourt's own decision to come back to this hellish place in 1990, aged just thirty and in the prime of her life.

A former member of the Chamber of Representatives she has founded the Oxygen Green Party “in order to bring clean air into the corrupt world of Colombian politics”, she explains solemnly. The party’s slogan reads: “ Íngrid es oxigeno ” [Íngrid is oxygen]. And the campaign poster shows the woman herself with an anti-smog mask and surrounded by coloured balloons. The one hundred and sixty thousand votes she received when she was elected Senator four years ago were the most for any candidate in a Senate election in Colombia. But it could be argued that she wouldn't still be in the headlines without her recently published autobiography, the Italian title of which leaves us in no doubt as to her current frame of mind: They’ll Probably Kill Me Tomorrow .

I put it to her that this might be a shade melodramatic.

“ The French edition was titled La rage au coeur [With Rage in My Heart],” she responds defensively. “But the Italian publishers wanted a stronger title, so that's what we went for. And actually, that’s really how I’m feeling. It's what goes through my head first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I don’t think it’s particularly melodramatic. The prospect of being murdered tomorrow is a very real one for millions of this people in this country.”

The French newspapers are portraying her as some kind of latter-day saint: Paris Match called her “The woman in the firing line”, Libération “A heroine”, Le Figaro “The Pasionaria of the Andes”. Le Nouvel Observateur wrote: “if Simon Bolívar, the liberator of Latin America, could have chosen an heir, he would have chosen her”.

Whereas the Colombian press have had a laugh at her expense. Semana , the country’s leading weekly news magazine, lampooned her on the cover as Joan of Arc, complete with horse, armour and lance. The truth is, her book is far more measured and dry than its title and reviews would suggest. Ms Betancourt makes no attempt to hide her privileged background. As a young girl, she would ride horses every week at a farm owned by friends.

But she is full of ideas and has no difficulty putting them into words. “Conservative estimates suggest that in 1998, Colombia's biggest guerrilla group, FARC, received annual funding of about three hundred million dollars, most of which came from drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion. Today, that figure is close to half a billion dollars, and its membership has increased from fifteen thousand to twenty-one thousand. This situation,” she continues, “is putting the Colombian government at a huge disadvantage in their fight against the rebels. In order to secure a decisive victory, we believe that the government would have to deploy three or four highly trained soldiers for each FARC guerrilla, whereas the most they can currently send out is two. And all this requires an economic outlay that my country simply can’t afford. Since 1990, the cost of suppressing the rebels has increased nearly ten fold. At the beginning, it was costing one per cent of GDP but now it is more than two per cent - one billion US dollars...it's astronomical.”

So is she a hot-headed fanatic, like her enemies claim, or simply a woman who wants to do something for her country, which is how she sees it? The political elite in Bogotá are trying to ignore her candidature, but they are gradually starting to fear her. Omar, her chief bodyguard, pipes up: “In this country, you can pay for honesty with your life.” Ms Betancourt interjects quickly: “I’m not afraid of dying. Fear keeps me on my toes.”

Fighting corruption is at the forefront of her campaign, closely followed by the civil war. “The State should have no qualms about negotiating with the left-wing guerrillas,” she concludes, “unlike the right-wing paramilitary group the AUC, which is responsible for most of the murders that take place in Colombia.”

So how does she live with fear and threats on a daily basis?

“ I think, in a funny kind of way, you get used to it. Not that you should have to. The other day,” she concludes calmly, “I received a photo of a dismembered child in the post. Underneath it was written: ‘Senator, we have already hired a hit man to take care of you. We’re reserving special treatment for your son…’”.

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