COLOMBIA:A letter from hostage Ingrid Betancourt reveals her desolation but also tiny sparks of hope, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
The Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt's letter to her mother is a wrenching cry of love and desperation. After it was divulged by the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo on December 1st, Betancourt's family authorised its publication worldwide.
When Colombian authorities captured three suspected members of the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla group last week, they found letters from seven hostages and five videos. The images also show three American captives, a Colombian senator and several soldiers and policemen.
Betancourt was kidnapped on February 23rd, 2002, while campaigning as the Green party candidate for the presidency of Colombia. The letter and video, believed to have been recorded on October 24th, are the first proof in 4½ years that she is alive.
"Here we live like dead people," Betancourt writes, speaking for several thousands of Colombians held by armed groups. The video shows her pale, emaciated and manacled.
In her letter, Betancourt, who will turn 46 on Christmas day, recounts the misery of almost six years in the jungle, how her only defence is wanting nothing, her only consolation daily radio messages from her mother. She speaks of her aspirations for Colombia, and her love of France.
"This is a very hard moment for me," Betancourt writes. "They suddenly ask for proof that I am living, and I write to you with my soul stretched out on this paper. I am very poor physically. I eat little; I have no appetite. My hair falls out in bunches. I want nothing. I think that is the only good thing; I want nothing, for here, in this jungle, the only answer is 'no'. So it's better not to want anything, to at least be free of desires."
Betancourt's captors have not given her the dictionary she requested "to read something, learn something, keep my intellectual curiosity alive".
She asks her children to send three radio messages a week. "I need nothing more, but I need to be in contact with them." Life in the jungle is "a lugubrious waste of time", she continues. "I live or survive in a hammock stretched between two pikes, covered with a mosquito net and with a tent for a roof. I have a rucksack with my clothes and the Bible that is my only luxury. Everything is ready for me to leave, running.
"Here nothing belongs to you; nothing lasts . . . At any moment, they can give the order [ to leave] and everyone sleeps anywhere, in any hollow, like any animal . . . the marches are a torment because my gear is very heavy . . . I lose my things, or they take them away from me."
Betancourt alludes to her campaign manager Clara Rojas and her baby, from whom she has been separated. She is held with an otherwise all-male group.
"The presence of a woman in the middle of so many male prisoners who have been in this situation for eight to 10 years is a problem."
She used to bathe in the river, but no longer has the strength.
"Every day, I am in communication with God, Jesus and the Virgin," Betancourt writes. "Here, everything has two faces; joy comes and then pain. Joy is sad. Love calms and opens new wounds . . . It is living and dying again. For years I could not think of the children, and the pain of the death of my papa required all the strength of my resistance. I wept when I thought of them; I felt suffocated."
Betancourt sings happy birthday to her children Melanie, now 22, and Lorenzo (19) every year.
"If I died today, I would be satisfied with life, thanking God for my children." She encourages Melanie to continue her masters programme in New York, and to go on to a doctorate.
"Melanie, I always told you you were . . . a sort of better version of what I would have wanted to be."
She calls Lorenzo her "Loli Pop, my angel of light, my king with blue eyes, my musician who sings to me and enchants me, the master of my heart".
Since her son's birth, she writes, "he has been my source of joys".
After Betancourt's captors confiscated her photographs of her children, she clung to a magazine advertisement for men's cologne, because the model resembled Lorenzo.
The hostage videos and letters appear to have been the result of mediation by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in late August. The right-wing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe ended Chávez's mediation on November 21st. Betancourt alludes to Uribe's hardline stance: "We, the sequestered ones, are not 'politically correct'. It sounds better to say you have to stand up to the guerrillas, even if it means sacrificing human lives."
She wants Colombia "to think . . . of who we are and where we want to go. I want us to have the thirst for greatness that makes people rise from nothingness to reach the sun. When we defend life and our people's freedom unconditionally, that is to say when we become less individualistic . . . less indifferent . . . less intolerant and more compassionate, then we shall be the great nation that all of us want to be."
Betancourt holds dual French and Colombian nationality. "My heart also belongs to France," she writes.
"When the night was darkest, France was the beacon. When it was frowned upon to demand our freedom, France was not silent . . . I don't think I could believe that it is possible to free oneself one day from here if I didn't know the history of France and her people.
"I asked God to give me the same strength that France had," she continues, "to feel myself more worthy of counting myself among her children. I love France with all my soul . . . I love France with my heart, for I admire the motivation of people who, as Camus said, know that living is to commit oneself. All these years have been terrible, but I don't think I could still be alive without their commitment to all of us who live here like dead people."
Agencies add:Colombia will ask France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to take part in the next round of talks with left-wing rebels, who have been holding dozens of hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt, a senior politician in Bogota said yesterday.
Mauricio Lizcano said that Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced the move to him and other members of a Colombian commission negotiating for the release of the hostages.
Anne O'Connell, the president of the Dublin chapter of the international federation of Ingrid Betancourt support committees, can be reached at annber@eircom.net