For more than three years, former Colombian President Andres Pastrana had given the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) the benefit of the doubt. He was an optimist. He believed that he could put an end to the almost five-decades-old armed conflict by negotiating with the FARC.
Among his many concessions was allowing the FARC to control a demilitarized zone that was roughly the size of Switzerland. That was, until he realized that peace was the last thing on the rebels’ minds. The killing, the extortion and the kidnapping had not stopped.
On Feb. 20, 2002, Pastrana finally declared war on the leftist rebels and ended the extension of the demilitarized zone, ordering the army in to retake certain civilian areas and to drive the guerrillas out. A presidential campaign was in full swing. Pastrana was nearing the end of his presidency and wanted the world to witness his new, bold attitude toward the rebels.
I was on the presidential aircraft that three days later transported a group of international journalists to the town of San Vicente de Caguan, where the Colombian army had just taken control. We were to make a stopover in the city of Florencia, where we would be transferred to four military helicopters.
During that stop, we learned that one of the presidential candidates had asked Pastrana to be allowed to join the group. He declined the request, arguing that he did not want to turn it into a political event and that it would not be fair to the other presidential hopefuls.
The helicopters took off to San Vicente, and with cameras and microphones in hand, we were able to report on the latest developments in the civil war. It was a risky assignment, but an important event that had to be documented. Little did we know that we were in the midst of yet another development that would later become an international scandal. That was the day that Ingrid Betancourt was kidnapped.
Betancourt was the presidential candidate who had asked Pastrana to be transported by helicopter to San Vicente, where she hoped to spread her message of peace. The trip by land was deemed too dangerous, but, determined to reach her destination, she headed out in a caravan with her campaign staff. Some of them heeded the warnings of the Colombian military about the risks of entering rebel-held territory, but Betancourt and her campaign manager, Clara Rojas, believed that the rebels would not harm them. She had, after all, met face to face with rebel leaders weeks before and had implored them to stop the bloodshed.
“I thought that perhaps we had a common ground. I was mistaken. I didn’t understand that they think completely different,” Betancourt told CNN’s Larry King. In one of the many interviews she gave after the daring rescue mission that freed her and 14 others hostages, she said she never imagined that human beings were capable of treating other humans the way she and other captives were treated. “If you don’t work with them, if you’re not one of the members of that club, you are an enemy,” she said. “I didn’t know I was their enemy, but I was.”
Betancourt ended up being a victim of her own dreams and aspirations, or what some would consider her own political ambitions. After having served in the Colombian congress for almost eight years, she created the Green Oxygen political party and ran a presidential campaign based on an anti-corruption platform. She believed not only that she could stop corruption in her country after a series of political scandals, but that she would be the peace broker in the armed conflict that was ripping her country apart. Betancourt believed she would be the one to persuade the FARC to put down their weapons and take their struggle for social justice into the political arena. She, like Pastrana, was an optimist.
Betancourt now says that shortly after she realized she was a hostage of the FARC, she never imagined that it would last for more than two or three months. After spending six years and five months in captivity, after going through what she describes as a living hell for 2,330 long days, she understands that her optimism led her to underestimate the very people she hoped to persuade. She claims she holds no grudges and that she is willing to forgive, but she can never forget.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www
.mariaesalinas.com)
© 2008 by Maria Elena Salinas
Distributed by King Features Syndicate