PROFILE INGRID BETANCOURTThe world's best-known hostage, held by Farc since 2002, has fought corruption and sought an end to civil war in her native Colombia, but attempts this week to have her freed will have to be quick if she is to survive her hunger strike.
IF INGRID Betancourt dies in the coming hours, she will be mourned worldwide, but especially in her beloved France, as a brave, beautiful and charismatic woman who fought corruption and strived to end four decades of civil war in her native Colombia.
Luis Eladio Pérez, a hostage who was recently freed by guerrillas, says Betancourt is jaundiced and extremely weak since going on hunger strike in February. After more than six years in the jungle, surviving on beans, rice and lentils, with little sanitation and in chains for much of the time, Betancourt suffers from malaria, hepatitis B and a skin infection. "There is no more time," her son Lorenzo (19) said here on Wednesday. "Either we free mom and the other hostages, or we'll lose them; it's a question of hours."
Betancourt's liberation appears tantalisingly close. After refusing for years to negotiate with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), who hold her, the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe allowed his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez, to mediate for several months last year, resulting in freedom for Clara Rojas, the manager of Betancourt's presidential campaign, and several other hostages.
Betancourt, whose first husband is a French diplomat, holds dual French and Colombian nationality. A huge photograph of her hangs on the facade of the Paris town hall, and the International Federation of Ingrid Betancourt Committees is extremely active here. On the night of his election, president Nicolas Sarkozy swore he'd obtain her release, and he has stepped up pressure on Uribe.
On March 27th, Uribe's government finally accepted the "humanitarian accord" it always rejected: the immediate liberation of some 500 Farc prisoners held by the government in exchange for 39 "high value" hostages, including Betancourt, held by the Farc. France has offered political asylum to Farc guerrillas if they free Betancourt.
There is a catch. On March 1st, the Colombian army killed Raul Reyes, the number two in the Farc and the French government's only contact with the rebels. A Farc statement said "meetings with the French delegation with a view to freeing Ingrid Betancourt" were over, that Reyes's death "was the fatal blow to a humanitarian exchange". The Farc have not yet responded to Uribe's latest offer.
BETANCOURT WAS BORN in Bogotá on Christmas Day 1961. Her father Gabriel's family had emigrated from Normandy to South America in the 18th century. He held degrees from Syracuse University in New York and was a former education minister who later served as a diplomat in Washington and Paris.
Ingrid's kidnapping, on February 23th, 2002, literally killed Gabriel Betancourt, who suffered from heart disease. In a heart-wrenching letter to her mother, published last November, Ingrid told of her grief at learning of her father's death from an old newspaper found in a guerrilla encampment. "Every day for four years I have wept over his death," she wrote. "I always think I'll stop crying, that it has scarred over. But grief comes back and attacks me like a disloyal dog, and I feel my heart bursting again."
Ingrid's first husband, the French diplomat Fabrice Delloye, and her second husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, were pall-bearers at her father's funeral. The family have kept his ashes for her to scatter when she is free. "She loved him with all her heart, as I have never seen anyone love their father," Lecompte told Ingrid's biographer, Sergio Coronado. "He was an example to her, a moral guide."
Betancourt's mother, Yolanda Pulecio, was a beauty queen before her marriage. Ingrid suffered greatly from her parents' separation when she was 12. Gabriel had withdrawn in disgust from Colombian politics, and Yolanda was disappointed at his lack of fighting spirit. She returned from Paris to Bogotá to stand for city councillor, then deputy and senator - just as Ingrid would later. Yolanda is best known in Colombia for founding El Albergue, a refuge for street children.
Throughout Betancourt's captivity, her mother has risen before 5am daily to telephone a radio broadcast for Colombian hostages. In her letter last autumn, Betancourt wrote: "Hearing your voice is my daily hope, feeling your love, your tenderness, your steadfastness, your commitment not to leave me alone . . . Your voice is my umbilical cord with life." If she is freed, Betancourt promised, "I cannot bear the thought of being separated from you again . . . In my plans for life, if Liberty comes one day, I want you to think about living with us, or with me . . . because I know that everyone can live without me, except you."
Her sister Astrid, one year her senior, married the former French ambassador to Bogotá, Daniel Parfait, during Ingrid's captivity. Now the director of the Americas desk at the French foreign ministry, Parfait wrote the two appeals broadcast by Sarkozy to the Farc leader Manuel Marulanda. And Parfait was on the rescue flight that left France for Colombia on Wednesday.
Gabriel Betancourt's position as Colombia's ambassador to Unesco ensured that Astrid and Ingrid enjoyed a privileged childhood, growing up in a 500m2 apartment on Avenue Foch, attending school at the Institut de l'Assomption in Paris's 16th district. The Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda was a frequent guest. A note from "Your uncle, Pablo Neruda" still hangs framed in Betancourt and Lecompte's apartment in Bogotá.
Maria del Rosario, Betancourt's best friend in teenage years, described her as "an excellent student, with an insatiable appetite for life", who struggled to shake free of a strict education. The girls liked to skateboard down the steep hills of Bogotá, and the fearless Ingrid broke a rib.
She was only 18 and a student at Sciences Po in Paris when she met Fabrice Delloye, then a junior civil servant 10 years her senior. She completed her studies, then followed Delloye to posts in Montreal, the Seychelles, Ecuador and Los Angeles. They had two children, Mélanie, now 22, and Lorenzo (19). "If I died today," Betancourt wrote last autumn, "I would be satisfied with life, thanking God for my children." Missing six years of their lives, "all these lost opportunities to be their mama poisons me in moments of infinite solitude, as if someone injected cyanide into my veins, drop by drop". Yet, like her own mother 15 years earlier, Betancourt could not bear the sedate life of a diplomat's wife. In August 1989, Yolanda Pulecio was nearly killed in the assassination of one of her political allies at a rally in Bogotá. Ingrid left her young children with their father in Los Angeles and returned to Colombia to run her mother's campaign for the senate. She worked in the finance and trade ministries, then won a seat in Colombia's congress in 1994. In 1998, after founding her own party, she was elected a senator with the highest number of votes in the country.
In the meantime, events transformed Betancourt from the relatively conventional scion of an upper-class family into a rebel heiress and traitor to the ruling classes. She mercilessly pursued president Ernesto Samper, whom she had supported, when she learned he'd used money from the Cali drug cartel to ensure his election. She received death threats on publishing her first book, Yes, He Knew, and temporarily sent Mélanie and Lorenzo to live with their father in New Zealand.
BETANCOURT MET HER second husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, while horse-riding with friends in 1995. An architect turned public relations executive, Lecompte invented the name Oxygen for her political party, and suggested they wear white surgical masks to symbolise protection from the dirt of corruption. Oxygen joined the international federation of green parties in 1999, but ceased to function after Betancourt was kidnapped.
Betancourt's autobiography, published in English as Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia", sold 300,000 copies in France. She has always been more popular here than in Colombia, where she was reproached for washing the country's dirty linen abroad. Colombia's ambassador to Paris objected to the book and accused Betancourt of organising her own kidnapping.
Ingrid Betancourt has been criticised for taking the road to San Vicente, in the former demilitarised zone between government and rebel forces, on February 23rd, 2002. She told friends that if the Farc kidnapped her, she would negotiate with them.
Three years earlier, Betancourt had met Manuel Marulanda, who founded the Farc in 1964, in the same region. Now close to 80, Marulanda, also known as Tirofijo ("steady shot"), asked about Betancourt's campaign for a referendum on reforms that would have made the president of Colombia criminally liable, cleaned up campaign financing and ensured the independence of the judiciary system. He called her "doctora" and told her: "We're at war because the oligarchs of this country are liars and tricksters."
Nine days before she was kidnapped, Betancourt met again with Farc leaders in San Vicente. In the interim, the government abolished the demilitarised zone. The Colombian air force bombed Farc positions the night before Betancourt's ill-fated trip. Asked why she was determined to make the dangerous journey, she said: "To be with the inhabitants in bad times as well as good. They made great efforts for the peace process. We cannot abandon them, cannot let a dirty war start, with its settling of accounts . . . " It was, Betancourt's critics said, a rash decision. Evidence later emerged that the Farc had been planning to kidnap her for some time. As a famous, crusading politician, she was too valuable a bargaining chip.
Saving Betancourt is now a race against time. In her letter last autumn, she described herself and other hostages as "the living dead". Her legendary strength had left her. "Nearly six years of captivity have shown me that I am no longer as courageous, intelligent and strong as I thought." Death would be a relief, "a sweet option", she told her mother."In a heart-wrenching letter to her mother, Ingrid told of her grief at learning of her father's death from an old newspaper found in a guerrilla encampment