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.”

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