More than seven
hundred pages to tell about 2321 days of anguish: that is what Ingrid Betancourt tries to do in the book published in late September, Even silence has an end. Former Colombian politician for the first time tells about her six years of captivity in the hands of FARC guerrillas. In the book she says how she was repeatedly beaten and humiliated during her imprisonment. And she tries to tell her truth.
Far from family
and friends, Ingrid was able to survive despite the forced
cohabitation with other prisoners and the inevitable misunderstanding,
loneliness, fear.
"We were handed the heaviest sentence a human being can be given, that of not knowing when it would end," Betancourt writes in the book.
Today, after two years, Ingrid has yet to overcome her imprisonment. She still wakes up in the middle of the night prey to nightmares, she continues to relive the jungle in her head. Writing has helped her to overcome that silence, to tell her mother and her sons what had happened: writing this book, she says, it was a "therapy".
During the night
she still wakes up convinced to be in the
hands of the guerrillas, before realizing that she is not chained to her
companions in misfortune. Those same friends who have already wrote about captivity in two other books and have not made a nice portrait of ms. Betancourt. But she says: "You know what it means to live 24 hours a day in the same way we were? Chained to each other? Forced to make our needs in front of everyone? The FARC have made us bring out the worst of ourselves. "
In seven hundred pages, however, she did not write all of those six and a half years, because "there are things that happened in the jungle that should stay there". She means not only things about the FARC but also about the prisoners. First of all, about Clara Rojas, her assistant, with whom she is not anymore in contact after the liberation. In the book ms. Betancourt writes about Rojas decision to get pregnant by a FARC man.
According to the story of Betancourt, Rojas wanted to have a baby and
she knew to have only a few years ahead to realize this dream. The former Colombian politician argues that Rojas doesn't even know who is the father, but her former assistant has defined "infamous" this statement and will probably prosecute Ms. Betancourt.
What really happened in the jungle only Ingrid and Clara know, but it is certain that the former
Colombian politician has failed to shake off an image of cold, selfish
woman, like her former colleagues have described. Then, a few days before the book was published came the news of Betancourt's claim against the Colombian government, guilty of having abandoned to her fate. The claim of compensation was for 6.8 million dollars.
She recalls that in Colombia, where she has not yet come back, there is a compensation for the victims of terrorism. But many in the country were outraged
because, as the Colombian writer Mario Torres said, the government warned her 32 times about the risk Ms. Betancourt was running.
Marianna Lepore
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Comments