When it all goes pear shaped
Colombia's best known international figure lives in an unknown place in the jungle. She hasn't been seen for six years, and reports say she's lost her appetite, has hepatitis B, a tropical skin disease and is dying. So famous is she that when there was possibly more news about her whereabouts, the unprecedented occured, and radio's football comment hour was cancelled.
Ingrid Betancourt was born in Bogotá on Christmas Day, 1961, but grew up in Paris. In 1989 as the violence in Colombia heightened, she decided to return to her country and make a difference. The daughter of an ex-Miss Colombia and having a missionary zeal she became the most popularly elected Senator in 1998. She had founded the Green Oxygen party and her first notable achievement was the distribution of condoms, and the second was to say that she was going to be like a condom against corruption. Radical stuff in a corrupt and Catholic society. By 2002 she had become a presidential candidate.
But then it all went badly wrong. While on a mission to negotiate with FARC guerillas she was kidnapped. Her political career was apparently finished and the Green Oxygens were no more. Yet for most of the country her gaunt, sad figure has made FARC and the guerillas more odious and the cause of peace more desirable than all the politicians' rhetoric. She has made a difference.
It is a strange but hard providence that those who want to make a difference, like Old Testament Joseph, Jesus and Paul find that through the blackest of events great good can come.
Photo: Ingrid Betancourt, unknown location, Colombian jungle, November 2007
Ingrid Betancourt was born in Bogotá on Christmas Day, 1961, but grew up in Paris. In 1989 as the violence in Colombia heightened, she decided to return to her country and make a difference. The daughter of an ex-Miss Colombia and having a missionary zeal she became the most popularly elected Senator in 1998. She had founded the Green Oxygen party and her first notable achievement was the distribution of condoms, and the second was to say that she was going to be like a condom against corruption. Radical stuff in a corrupt and Catholic society. By 2002 she had become a presidential candidate.
But then it all went badly wrong. While on a mission to negotiate with FARC guerillas she was kidnapped. Her political career was apparently finished and the Green Oxygens were no more. Yet for most of the country her gaunt, sad figure has made FARC and the guerillas more odious and the cause of peace more desirable than all the politicians' rhetoric. She has made a difference.
It is a strange but hard providence that those who want to make a difference, like Old Testament Joseph, Jesus and Paul find that through the blackest of events great good can come.
Photo: Ingrid Betancourt, unknown location, Colombian jungle, November 2007
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