Ingrid Betancourt

Ingrid Betancourt Pulecio (born December 25 1961) is a Colombian senator and anti-corruption activist. She is Colombia's most famous hostage. She was kidnapped by the FARC on February 23, 2002 while campaigning for presidency. Betancourt is still being held.

Public office

She was elected to the Senate in 1994. The total number of votes she received was the largest number of any candidate in that year's election for Senate. During her term, she fought against the Samper administration, which was accused of corruption (Galil case) and accepting drug money for the electoral campaign.

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Sometime during this period, she divorced her French husband, and later remarried, to a Colombian man. Death threats from an unknown quarter forced her to flee with her family to New Zealand, thanks to the help of her ex-husband, during her Senatorial term.

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She ran for President in the election which was won by Andrés Pastrana Arango. As part of her strategy she founded a political party, Oxigeno Verde (Green Oxygen Party). Pastrana persuaded her to drop out and endorse him, and she campaigned on his behalf. She claims he later reneged on the promises he made to her when she agreed to drop out.

Related Topics:
Andrés Pastrana Arango - Green

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After the 1998 election, Ingrid wrote a book, a memoir. Initially, it could not be published immediately in Colombia, perhaps because of the polemics against former president Samper and others, so it came out first in France as La rage au coeur (Rage in the Heart). It has since appeared in Spanish, in Colombia and elsewhere, as La rabia en el corazon, and in English as Until Death Do Us Part (2002).

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