Ex-hostage’s story a good read for a presidential election year

As allegations and innuendo fly this campaign season, character has raised its flag. What sort of people are the men who want to lead us? What is at their core?

Another presidential candidate comes to mind, someone whose character was tested in the cruelest of ways. Her name is Ingrid Betancourt.

July 2, 2008. Colombia announces the electrifying news that an elite military squad has snatched a group of hostages out of the clutches of FARC, the brutal terrorist guerrilla organization that has been waging war on the people and government of Colombia for years. Among those freed are Colombian presidential candidate Betancourt, whom FARC seized and dragged into the jungle six and a half years ago. Three American hostages also have been freed, U.S. military contractors whose plane had crashed in a remote region.

Who can forget the video of the rescue? Faces in a helicopter cabin, numb, bleak, worn, FARC hostages believing that workers from a do-gooder aid agency are transporting them to a meeting with guerrilla leaders. Then a sudden scuffle and the shout, in Spanish, "We are the Colombian army! You are free!’’

Screams, tears, incredulous laughter, then more tears like hard rain — the reaction of people just plucked out of hell.

Betancourt tells her incredible story in "Even Silence has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle." It’s a book well worth reading as we consider our choices for president.

FARC, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, was born of a 1940s civil war between conservative and liberal parties. In the midst of that savage conflict, peasants armed themselves to protect lives and lands from the depredations of landlords.

The war eventually ended, but the peasant organization morphed into a Communist terrorist guerrilla organization dedicated to taking power in Colombia. It recruited from impoverished kids who thought they had no future. Like ruthless street gangs, the FARC code was once in, never out. Discipline was harsh; traitors died. Its currency was, and is, drugs and hostages.

On. Feb. 23, 2002, Betancourt, a Colombian lawmaker, was the Green Party candidate for Colombia’s president, representing a relatively new party formed to fight government and military corruption. On that day, she and members of her staff traveled to a military zone, an area where there was guerrilla activity, on a campaign trip after being promised protection by the army. At the last moment, however, her military escort was canceled.

FARC guerrillas trapped her vehicle at a roadblock, seized Betancourt and her aides and hauled them off into the jungle, and the start of six and a half years of hell. She and the other captives endured forced marches at gunpoint, beatings, threats of execution, near starvation, malaria and the capricious cruelty of the captors. At times, the hostages were chained at the neck. Betancourt tried several times to escape and suffered vicious reprisals when the guards found her, among them, it is hinted, rape.

Betancourt’s story is difficult to read, and nearly impossible to imagine enduring. Hostage turns upon hostage, in the classic psychological crash known as Stockholm syndrome. Chapter titles introduce The Devil and Monster, guerrilla leaders in whose clutches the hostages find themselves.

Yet Betancourt’s spirit, and the spirit of some fellow hostages, shines through the awful darkness.  Prisoners, starving hungry, deprived of most of life’s necessities, share their scraps. They confront guards and demand medicine for their fellows so ill they are near dying. They talk to each other of freedom to come, of being reunited with their families, healthy and whole.

And so they were. In interviews since her rescue, Betancourt is poised, elegant, sleek and composed, as befits a woman who is French and Colombian and a member of the upper class. Yet interviewers remarked that, months after being freed, Betancourt still carried the scars of the chains. And one gets the sense that inside her is a steel core. She no longer has to ask herself, what am I made of? She knows.

But reading Betancourt’s account of her ordeal can certainly raise the question for the rest of us.

Including this year’s crop of candidates.