Woman who survived the Farc wants to lead Colombia ‘to finish what I started in 2002’

Former Senator Íngrid Betancourt, imprisoned by the Farc for six years, is running for president in Colombia. In May, as a center candidate, she hopes to defeat both the right-wing establishment and left-wing challenger Gustavo Petro.

“I never turn down an ice cream,” said Íngrid Betancourt in 2010. Two years earlier, she had been liberated by the Colombian army from the hands of Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement Farc, after a six-year kidnapping. She spoke to the British newspaper The Guardian about the book she had written about that period. Between the big and small lessons she had learned in the jungle, there was that ice cream that she would never deny herself again.

On Tuesday, Betancourt, 60, stepped back into the political arena, twenty years after she first ran for the presidency. The campaign at the time, for the green party Oxígeno, was brutally disrupted by her kidnapping. The nightmare that marked her life made her world famous at the same time. Heads of state worldwide pushed for her release. In the years following her kidnapping, she became a living symbol of the armed conflict that deeply wounded Colombia for half a century.

anti-corruption

Now she’s back “to finish what I started in 2002.” In May, as a center candidate, she hopes to beat both the right-wing establishment and left-wing challenger Gustavo Petro, who is leading the polls. Just like two decades ago, she is pushing for an end to corruption and a greener Colombia. She is one of at least twenty candidates and has yet to win the primaries of the center coalition in March, but the mere announcement of her candidacy caused a small media storm in the South American country.

Born to a family of politicians in Bogotá, Betancourt attended a prestigious French school and left for Paris as a young adult with her father, who became a UNESCO ambassador there. She studied political science, married a Frenchman, acquired French nationality and had two children. In the late 1980s, she returned to Colombia with son and daughter, and divorced a year later.

In her thirties she followed her mother into politics and soon made a name for herself as an anti-corruption fighter who dared to call man and horse. She even went head-to-head with then-President Ernesto Samper, who was suspected of taking drug money. “I thought I was brave then,” she said in a Ted talk five years ago. “That I could handle any temperature.” In a furious literary account in 2001 she pilloried a long list of corrupt politicians.

stupid bad luck

Her confrontational style received a lot of support. Never before has a parliamentary candidate received as many votes as she did in 1998. At the same time, she received death threats and sent her children to their father in France as a precaution. When she ran for president in 2002, she was surrounded by six bodyguards every day. Still, by sheer luck, she stumbled upon the guerrillas, who put a rough end to her presidential ambitions.

On her way to a town in the tropical southern province of Caquetá, her car was stopped by men in uniform. “They were wearing rubber boots. That’s how I knew they were guerrillas.’ For six years, the Farc dragged her from camp to camp, deep in the jungle. For six years she resisted the beatings, started a discussion, refused to respond to a number instead of her name and made at least five escape attempts. She had to pay for those efforts with corporal punishment, for example she was chained to a tree with a chain around her neck.

American fellow inmates later wrote an angry book about her, she is said to have put people in danger. She herself describes how the Farc played the hostages against each other. It worked. “You can’t be aggressive to the man with the gun, but you can take your frustrations out on the person next to you.” Finally, the army managed to free her by helicopter in the spectacular ‘Operation Chess’.

Structural inequality

Afterwards, she pleaded for peace with the Farc and became an acclaimed champion of fraternization. Colombian love for Betancourt faded when she sued the state in 2010 – which had failed to protect her in 2002 – and demanded hefty damages. She went abroad, lived in France and England, and only returned last year.

“The big problem is corruption,” Betancourt said in an interview with the Colombian newspaper this week El Tiempoas if time had stood still. The question is how far she will get with that spearhead. The peace with the Farc opened up space for other armed groups, as well as for public protest. Colombians have dared to express their dissatisfaction en masse on the streets in recent years. Those protests were not aimed at the symptom of corruption, but at structural inequality.

The left-wing Petro, who is running against exactly that, is currently scoring well. As a center candidate, Betancourt will have a hard time overtaking him.