Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

Caribe 169hair trailing after her, bustled up with a group of maybe five or sixothers in her wake. We followed Sombra through the main gate andsaw that the woman and the group with her were in another smaller,fenced-off enclosure.Just as we were about to be let into this smaller space, we heard thewoman say to one of the men in Spanish, “There is no room in here.What are we going to do? We can’t take them in here. This isn’t goingto work. We have to tell them.”“Ingrid, we do for them what we did for you. We welcome them in,”the man responded.We didn’t need to hear her name spoken to know that the womanwho didn’t want us in her part of the camp was Ingrid Betancourt.Almost a year and a week before the day that we had crashed, Betancourthad been captured by the FARC. Keith had told me once thatthe day after she was taken, as a favor to our host nation, he had beenthe mission commander on a flight over the spot where she’d beenkidnapped. They didn’t expect to find her, but they did an aerial reconnaissanceof the area. Keith remembered finding it odd at the timethat a U.S. subcontractor had been tapped to do the search and not theColombian military.I’d heard the news of her being taken while I was still in the States.Since I was applying for jobs in Colombia at almost the same timeshe was taken, anything that had to do with Colombia interested me.Later, when I was first living in Bogotá, I saw an enormous billboardwith a photo of her with the slogan, FREE INGRID beneath it while drivingthrough the city. When you see someone’s likeness on a billboard, it iskind of hard to forget that face.Ingrid Betancourt was a French-Colombian politician, who had beena Colombian senator and was a candidate for president in 2002 for theOxygen Green Party she had founded. Shortly after the Colombian governmentrevoked the FARC’s DMZ, Betancourt went on a campaigntrip to that area, despite the government’s and the military’s insistence