Ingrid Betancourt, former hostage of the FARC guerrilla for six years, announced that she will be a candidate for the presidency of her country, and will enter the dispute in the primaries of the so-called “Coalition of Hope”, made up of candidates from the center.
“I am here to announce that I am going to participate in the consultation on March 13, that I am going to be part of this center-hope coalition as a candidate for the Presidency and I am going to work tirelessly from this moment on, from dawn to dusk, to be its president,” the leader announced in Bogotá on Tuesday.
On March 13, the legislative elections will be held and at the same time the interparty or primary consultations to choose the candidates who will contest the presidential elections in May from a total of three movements: the “coalition of hope” (center), the ” coalition of experience” (right) and the “historic pact” (left).
So that Betancourt will enter the deck of candidates for the “collation of hope” together with former minister Alejandro Gaviria; former governors Sergio Fajardo and Carlos Amaya; former senators Juan Fernando Cristo and Juan Manuel Galán; and the left-wing legislator Jorge Robledo.
“Today I am here to finish what I started,” she added, referring to her 2002 presidential candidacy, before she was kidnapped by the FARC.
Ingrid Betancourt, this Tuesday, in a meeting in Bogotá with leaders of the Coalition of Hope. Photo: EFE
From kidnapping in the jungle to life in France
Betancourt was a legislator in the 1990s and in 2001 she resigned her seat to be a candidate for the Oxygen Green Party, whose legal status she recently regained, but during the end of the failed peace process of then President Andrés Pastrana with the FARC she was kidnapped on 23 February 2002.
She remained in the hands of that guerrilla group until July 2, 2008, when the Army released her along with a group of hostages, in a military operation without shooting.
During that time, her kidnapping became a regular topic in the global press, given her status as a woman, a presidential candidate, and a Colombian-French citizen.
Upon regaining his freedom, he returned to France, received several awards, including the Prince of Asturias of Concord in 2008, and studied for a doctorate in theology at Oxford.
Returning to the country since last year, Betancourt confronted the former FARC combatants in the courts created in the peace agreement, agreed upon five years ago, and laid bare the atrocities committed against her and her fellow captives.
against corruption
Despite her personal tragedy, Betancourt was a staunch defender of the peace agreement, without losing her status as a victim and her critical sense of both the agreement and the former guerrilla leaders, with whom she has been face to face.
In the announcement of his candidacy, Betancourt assured that the current “enemy” of the country is “corruption” and the “plagues entrenched in the administration”, so that if he were to succeed Iván Duque he would dedicate himself to “cleaning up the administration and the institutions”.
Ingrid Betancourt, on July 2, 2008, after being released from captivity. Photo: AFP
“They accused me of having been ungrateful, opportunistic, greedy, for having asked for the rights that Colombian law had established to protect victims of terrorism to be recognized. But the system of corruption that prevails in our country only recognizes rights to the bandits,” he lamented during a press conference.
“I want to be the president of Colombians to ensure that the wealth of the country will go to those children, to those young people, to those adults from whom our war, our violence and our corruption took away all the possibilities of being what they they wanted to be,” he argued.
On the reasons for becoming a presidential candidate for the second time, despite reiterating for years that she was withdrawing from political life, she assured that it was time to “help” and hope that the coalition to which she belongs has a chance of coming to power. .
“At some point one has to think: I keep looking at things from the sidelines or I roll up my sleeves and put myself where I can help the most,” explained the now-candidate, who announced that she will seek to get in touch with her compatriots both in the public square as in open conversations on social networks, around a beer.
“At this time, the coalition needed the presence of a woman and needed the presence of a person who could speak in another way,” he argued, after arguing that his life story resembles that of thousands of Colombians charged with “pain.” , but also of “hope and faith”.
It is “a difficult path, one of pain, but also a path of hope and faith; it is the path of thousands of people who, like me, have not given up,” he said.
By Oscar Escamilla, ANSA agency
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