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'We live like the dead'
01/12/2007 23:01 - (SA)
Paris - After nearly six years of captivity
in the depths of the jungle, Ingrid Betancourt and her fellow
rebel hostages "live like the dead", the Colombian-French
politician said in a letter released on Saturday by supporters.
In a letter to her mother laced with love, sadness and pain,
Betancourt describes her harsh living conditions in rebel camps
in Colombia, the daily struggle to keep hope and the joy offered
by family messages and gifts received via intermediaries.
The document was part of a haul of letters and grainy video
seized from captured leftist guerrillas that showed for the
first time since 2003 that Betancourt, three US contract
workers and a dozen kidnapped Colombians were still alive.
Betancourt, a former presidential candidate kidnapped by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 2002, tells how she
sleeps under a mosquito net in a hammock, washes in rivers and
says she has tried to escape.
"All these years have been terrible, but I don't think I
would still be alive without the commitment they have brought to
all of us here, who live like the dead," she wrote.
In the pictures released by the Colombian authorities,
Betancourt appeared thin, her features etched with fatigue.
"In all these years, I thought that as long as I was alive,
as long as I continued to breathe, I must continue to hope.
"I don't have the same strength any more, it's very
difficult for me to continue to hope, but I would like them to
feel that what they have done for us has made the difference,"
she said of supporters. "We felt like human beings."
Living like animals
The group holding Betancourt, known as FARC, have kept the
captives constantly on the move to avoid detection by government
forces. The FARC, Latin America's longest-running insurgency,
wants to swap the captives for jailed comrades.
"At any moment they can order us to pack everything, and
everyone has to sleep in any hollow, or stretch out anywhere
like any animal," Betancourt wrote.
She said she was struggling physically and had lost her
appetite, feeding instead on daily "miracles" like hearing
relatives on her ageing, battered radio. She said her hair
"falls out in clumps".
The Bible was her only luxury, the guerrillas often
confiscated prized personal possessions and had refused repeated
requests for reading material like an encyclopaedia: "I want
nothing, for in this jungle 'no' is the answer to everything."
Betancourt said her status as the only female hostage was a
concern: "The presence of a woman among so many male hostages
who have been in this situation for eight to 10 years, is a
problem."
The letter was part of evidence released a week after Bogota
suspended efforts by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to broker
a deal with FARC to free its hostages.
Negotiations over a hostage deal have been stymied by rebel
demands for a demilitarised zone, which the government refuses.
In a phone call with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on
Saturday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged the FARC to
free the hostages and pledged to "redouble efforts" to end their
ordeal, according to a statement from Sarkozy's office.
In her letter, Betancourt urged her daughter Melanie - "a
sort of better version of what I would have liked to have been"
- to study for a doctorate and said he was proud of her family.
"If I were to die today I would leave this life satisfied,
thanking God for my children," she wrote.
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