Mixed Media
A Superlative Rescue
By Sylvia L. Mayuga
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 02:35:00 07/06/2008
Stunning! Incredible! Audacious! Superlatives met news that broke like a ray of sunlight on a troubled world last July 3: the sometime candidate for president of Colombia, Ingrid Betancourt, and 14 other hostages had been rescued after years in the jungle.
The Colombian military had infiltrated and outwitted their captors and, without firing a shot, sprang the prize captives from under the unsuspecting nose of the country’s 44-year old leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a.k.a. FARC.
France, the U.S. and Israel had extended help and were closely watching the enterprise planned and executed by Colombians. It could have failed like rescue attempts in the past, but it succeeded perfectly. And CNN and BBC beamed the landing of two helicopters, one painted white, the other black, live, into a joyous homecoming at the military airport in Bogotá Wednesday morning.
There’s likely to be a feature film or two, perhaps a series of documentaries on this “impeccable” operation that commandos had prepared for with acting lessons. Indeed, marveled Betancourt, “It was just like a movie,” with a script that revealed itself in suspenseful fragments.
She had mistrustfully delayed her own freedom run for a few tense minutes, protesting as they were handcuffed and loaded on waiting helicopters, with the commandos disguised as FARC operatives supposedly flying them to a rebel commander for a possible exchange of prisoners.
More details continue to emerge in a tale so rich the worthiest storyteller to mine its depths and release its facets to a sparkle would be none other than the Colombian Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez – if only he weren’t struggling with cancer at 82. Even told straight, this tale is pure Gabo, with a special place for his magic realism.
Leading off the story would of course be Ingrid Betancourt – born on Christmas Day in 1961 to the Colombian diplomat Gabriel Betancourt and the former Miss Colombia Yolanda Pulecio, who once sat in the legislature. Both comeliness and activist politics seem to run in the family.
Also a beauty queen (defined by the French as “lovely inside out”), Ingrid went to school at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris when her father was ambassador to France. She married a French classmate and took on dual citizenship as her husband became a diplomat just like dad.
The story takes a decisive turn in 1982, when Luis Carlos Galán, campaigning for Colombia’s presidency on an anti-drug trafficking platform, is assassinated by drug lords assisted by a mole disguised as a security guard. In a moment Garcia-Marquez or the Chilean Isabel Allende could have invented, 30-year old Ingrid of the charmed life leaves her husband in his foreign posting and returns to Bogotá, to “do something to help” her fierce and wild birthplace.
Worth a chapter on her return would be how she goes to work for the Colombian Finance Ministry then resigns to run for Congress in 1994– with a twist. She distributes condoms with the slogan: Ingrid Betancourt, “a condom against political AIDS.” That goes over big in Bogotá, where they still remembered her mother, Yolanda the Beauty, who once served in government.
Ingrid hit the ground running after she won the most votes in that election. Keeping her campaign promise, she pointed a finger at the Samper administration for accepting drug money for its electoral campaign. Few were on this courageous path, but she was not alone in recognizing the growing cancer of narco politics seeping through Colombia’s political and military establishment.
She had come home precisely because Galán had paid with his life for a candidacy that coincided with the birth and growth of large-scale drug-trafficking in the country, with newly wealthy drug lords laundering their profits by buying millions of acres to plant to coca in northern Colombia, meanwhile assembling private armies to fight guerillas kidnapping and extorting rich ranchers.
Here Gabo Marquez might pause to sing a song of coca– the medicinal, highly nutritious plant known to the tribes of the southern Andes for 5000 years as a doorway to mystical harmony with Nature. Today the coca plant yields cocaine, the fine white powder to which many entertainers and creatives are addicted for its velvet dreams (crack, lower-grade crystals from coca, is for the masses).
And coca has become the source of hundreds of millions of dollars for Colombia’s drug cartel network. The wider and greater the addiction to chemically produced crack and cocaine, the more overweening is the power of drug lords in Colombia.
In the thick of struggle with the Samper government and the cartels in the ‘90s, “death threats from an unknown quarter” forced Ingrid Betancourt, who had risen to senator, to flee with her two kids to New Zealand with her husband’s help, says the free-Ingrid- Betancourt website. Here we also learn: In that difficult period, she divorced the Frenchman and remarried a Colombian.
Politics and love of country are addictions too. There was no stopping Ingrid from next running for president in 1998, but she was defeated by Andrés Pastrana-Arango, son of a former president, also a magazine editor and TV presenter, who had become a specialist and crusader against drugs.
Colombia’s struggle with coca has also been generational. The careers of Betancourt and Pastrana-Arango’s generation of politicians coincided with the evolution of a modus vivendi between the Marxist FARC and the drug cartels, to which it began giving armed protection while taxing drug crops and profits in the ‘90s.
Drug war analysts and U.S. and Colombian authorities claim that in that decade, FARC control of the farming, production and export of cocaine grew in areas under its influence – an old song in the Philippine Cordilleras with the communist NPA farming, processing and trading in marijuana.
There’s more in the book Betancourt wrote after losing the 1998 presidential election. But 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,” we also read in the Betancourt website.
Ingrid was a lovely, vibrant 40 when she was kidnapped on the trail of her second campaign for the presidency in 2001 and going on 47 when she emerged from captivity thin and gaunt but in one piece, with a jungle flower in her hair and a “PhD on FARC” that should prove useful to Colombia’s struggle for “total peace” under President Alvaro Uribe.
Meanwhile, “quixotic” has been the adjective for her continued dream to be president of her country in the boiler plate of New York Times reporting, but Gabriel Garcia-Marquez may agree with me: “mythic” in France and Colombia and “emblematic” of our times would be more like it.
What the full story still surfacing at this writing will finally tell us – about nature and culture in Colombia, about modern distortion of a beneficent drug, about leftist politics and fresh hope in a new generation of Latin American politicians and military officers – is something to look forward to in only one world. There could just be another Gabriel Garcia-Marquez out there.
Respond to: slmayuga@yahoo.com
|
