Posted on 02/23/2003 12:39:09 AM PST by HAL9000
BOGOTA, Feb 22 (AFP) - Held for one year by leftist rebels, Colombia's Senator Ingrid Betancourt, 41, has become emblematic of the formidable task the government faces in fulfiling its pledge to root out endemic violence.
Since taking office in August, President Alvaro Uribe has fought powerful leftist guerrillas head on, but still faces a massive challenge in a country known as one of the world's most violent, where four decades of political turmoil killed an estimated 200,000 people.
Betancourt herself was a presidential candidate in the May elections that brought Uribe to power. After she was kidnapped, relatives continued her electoral campaign, carrying a cardboard cut-out of the senator.
While many Colombians admire her courage, the colourful and controversial politician got less than one percent of the vote in the presidential election.
In a country holding the dubious world record in kidnappings -- about 3,000 a year -- Colombians reacted with outrage, but little surprise, when she was snatched by members of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on February 23, 2002.
Ignoring warnings by security forces, Betancourt drove on that fateful day into rebel-controled territory only days after the government withdrew the area's status as a safe-haven of the FARC and broke off peace talks.
France has been actively engaged in efforts to get the insurgents to free the senator, who also holds French nationality, and said a radicalization of positions dashed hopes she would be set free last week.
The leadership of the 17,000-strong FARC rejected on February 11 a government-named committee to negotiate a prisoner-hostage exchange.
"(They) want to establish direct talks with the Colombian government," the senator's daughter Melanie Betancourt said Friday, appealing to the Uribe administration to heed that demand.
Speaking in Brussels, Melanie Betancourt urged the 15-nation European Union to "fight the oblivion and silence" surrounding her mother's continued capture.
The senator's mother, Yolanda Pulecio also appealed to the FARC and the government "to reach a humanitarian accord that would lead to the liberation of hostages and open the way for peace."
"Since her kidnapping, I have received no mail, no photograph, no personal tape from Ingrid," Pulecio told AFP.
In her memoirs published last year, Betancourt, 40, made it clear she was willing to take risks in her struggle to make her embattled homeland a safer, less corrupt place.
"My relation with death is like that of a tightrope walker," she says in the book, titled 'Till death do us apart.'
The daughter of a diplomat, Betancourt spent most of her youth in Europe, studied political sciences in Paris and married a French diplomat.
In 1990, she decided to leave her charmed diplomatic life behind to return to her violence-torn homeland. Her decision followed that year's killing of presidential candidate Louis Carlos Galan, a close friend of her mother, who stood right behind the hopeful when he was shot.
She soon launched a crusade against official graft, and won legislative office in 1994, thanks largely to an unusual campaign during which she handed out condoms in the streets of Bogota to symbolize the need for protection from "the disease" of corruption.
In office, she staged a highly publicized hunger strike to protest the alleged drug links of then president Ernesto Samper.
She soon received death threats and sent her two children to live with their father in New Zealand.
With the help of her second husband, she founded the Green Oxygen party, and won election as a senator in 1998.
FARC claims that it shot the plane down, and holds three American passengers as hostages. One American and a Colombian army sergeant were found shot and killed at the crash site.
FARC claims the Americans were CIA employees. The State Department denies that, and says they are contractors for the U.S. Department of Defense.
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