SAA 6 "INGRID BETANCOURT "

Hi everyone!

This amazing assignment was done by Michelle and she chose to talk about the heroine Ingrid Betancourt.

A LITTLE ABOUT INGRID BETANCOURT AND HER SOME BITTER LESSONS IN LIFE

Ingrid Betancourt was born in Colombia on December 25, 1961 and grew up in Paris, France. She returned toColombia in 1989 and became a Senator in 1998. She was kidnapped by the rebel group FARC (Revolutionary

Armed Forces of Colombia) in February 2002, while campaigning to become president. She was rescued six and a half years later in July 2008 with other 14 hostages.

In July 2008, I read about her rescue in Epoca magazine and I was very impressed about her suffering and courage to support all the torture during those years and the doubt of not knowing when it would end. Since then, I started to read everything that was published about her.

So, I read that she wrote a book called “Even Silence has an end”, in Portuguese “Não Há silêncio que não termine”. In this book, she recounts how she was repeatedly beaten, humiliated and threatened with death while being kept prisoner in Colombia's jungle.

I heard an interview in BBC website that she talks about it and she started with:

“The first and most important of all is that we are all captives of something in our free life. We always justify what we do or how we behave because we’ve had this problem or this other. I came to the conclusion that you can be deprived of all kinds of freedom – the freedom to eat, or to drink or to speak to somebody or to move or even to choose to go pee or not to pee, very basic things... But they cannot deprive you from the freedom of being and of choosing who you want to be.”

In this interview, she recounts about the difficult process of writing the book:

“And then, once I was confronted to the blank paper, and I just unleashed the memory, I was there in the jungle again. It was emotionally very, very stressing”.

But, I also found some bad things about her. Some of her fellow hostages wrote unflattering accounts of being held captive with her. Three US military contractors say in their book that she was selfish and one of them says that she was even worse that the FARC guards. Mr. Stansell accuses her of telling their Farc guards that the Americans were CIA agents and they were almost killed because of this.

Mr Gonsalves says Ms Betancourt put pressure on Farc commanders to keep the Americans out of her shelter. However, he wrote that his opinion of her changed after she agreed to share her radio with him. "Maybe she was not the person we thought she was. Maybe Ingrid has a far more complicated and multi-dimensional person than she'd allowed us to believe." Mr. Gonsalves developed a close friendship with Ms Betancourt, he says, and came to admire the former Colombian presidential candidate. "She's a tough woman. She used to give those guerrillas a hard time."

She ends the interview saying: “I think we are in a world where we tend to strive for stupid things… in that striving for stupid things – money, fame, all those kind of glittering stupid things – we forget the essential. We are so frightened to feel pain that we don’t want to look to the pain of others. And we are like the world, we want to forget that there are people suffering”.

I read a comment and I have to agree with this: Ingrid Betancourt remains as an enigma. But, I will read the book and try to discover the mystery because I think she is a strong woman and must be heard or, in this case, read.

Links:

Interview with Ingrid Betancourt: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9015000/9015751.stm

Comments from three fellow hostages: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7914287.stm

Interview at Oprah part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS42aH3q-d8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjert3Q7lpU&NR=1

by Michelle- Executive Assistant