Why was ingrid betancourt kidnapped

After the peace deal, Colombia created a tribunal -- the Special Jurisdiction of Peace JEP -- to try the worst crimes committed by combatants. Daily newsletter Receive essential international news every morning. Take international news everywhere with you! Download the France 24 app. We can say that love is greater, that there is hope, and if there is hope, there is a future. Colombians remain divided over who should be held to account for the decades of violence that only diminished with the peace accord that called for the disarmament of the FARC.

The agreement also established a tribunal that offers perpetrators reduced sentences if they help with investigations and are willing to provide reparations to victims. Betancourt was kidnapped in February while she was campaigning.

It has caused a row in Colombia over what she wrote about fellow captives. In the book, Ms Betancourt recalls how Farc Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia gunmen seized her in southern Colombia as she campaigned for the presidency in February She reveals that it was at times very difficult to keep hopes alive in the hostile jungle.

When I came back from the jungle, I didn't know what I was going to find. That sentence, "When I come back from the jungle", was one it became harder and harder for Betancourt to have faith in. The guards would taunt her by saying that she was too important a prisoner to let go, and if she ever did get out, she would be a grandmother.

Escape, she felt, was the only option. The first time she tried, she got a little way into the jungle before realising she wasn't ready; she was too disgusted to drink muddy water from a puddle and turned back.

After that, she went into training, toughening her responses, doing push-ups and other exercises, drinking from puddles until she knew she could stomach it. Her most daring effort involved making a flotation device from a Styrofoam cooler and floating off down the river, towards possible starvation or death by anaconda.

It's hard to imagine how a person can function in such terrifying circumstances. Two things helped, she says. The first was something a guard had said to her when she'd asked if the jungle frightened him. We don't know when. For me, it could be a tree that falls on my head, it could be an anaconda, it could be a bullet from the enemy. I don't care. I'm not going to live my life frightened because of all the dangers around me.

The second was a psychological trick. You're not able to say, 'I'm not going to be scared. Put the fear aside and do the basics. That's how I feel today. None of the escape attempts worked. When release eventually came, it was even more dramatic: Farc soldiers landed in two helicopters and told the camp commander they had come to take prisoners to a different location. Once the helicopters had taken off, the 15 prisoners, including Betancourt, were informed the soldiers were in fact the Colombian military, who had spent months infiltrating the upper echelons of the Farc.

In the two years since her release, Betancourt has had to adjust to a different world from the one she left. Her father died while she was in captivity — she found out by reading about his funeral on a scrap of newspaper that came into the camp wrapped around a cabbage.

Her children, 13 and 16 when she was kidnapped, grew up. As far as she was aware, her marriage had evaporated. She was surprised to see her husband there with the rest of her family when she got back.

But then his first words to me were not words of love. They were words of… organisation. I'm so horrified I gasp. She shrugs. I cannot judge him. This is a great guy, full of life, who loses his wife and she comes back six years after.

Of course I suffered a lot and it broke my heart, but we can't blame anyone but the situation. I want to be friends with him, because I don't think you can transform a big love into an argument. You have to transform it into something positive. Her relationship with her children is another matter. I imagine that, after her release, they were very clingy.

She shakes her head. Of course, after the emotion of the first days, I came to realise that everyone had their life. And it was a life where I couldn't just barge in. My daughter was living in New York, doing her studies, her master's, she had her apartment, her schedule, her priorities.

My son, he was a man. It was very important for him to make sure that I understood he wasn't a little boy any more. So… so.

The first priority for me was to create a very strong relationship with each of them.