Ingrid Betancourt, in Bogotá in June 2021. Camilo Rozo
Ingrid Betancourt returns to Colombia, returns to politics and will fight to be the next president of the country. The announcement of his candidacy, this Tuesday, in a hotel in Bogotá, seals a return that began timidly a few months ago. The politician, who spent more than six years kidnapped by the FARC, had not returned to live in her country since she was released in 2008, but her presence had become common in recent times, in the run-up to the elections that were will be held on May 29. Betancourt, with a strong speech against corruption, now aspires to lead the political center in the appointment with the polls: “20 years ago I was kidnapped as a presidential candidate fighting corruption. I'm here today to finish what I started."
Her landing in the electoral race could give a new impetus to the Esperanza Center Coalition, not only because she is one of the best-known politicians in the country, but also because her presence breaks a completely masculine scenario. A gender imbalance that had been as much criticized from the outside as assumed from within. “We recognize the low presence of women in our coalition. That is something unacceptable, but we are correcting it and surprises will come in this matter,” said Humberto de la Calle, who heads the Senate list for the Coalition, on Monday. A few words that today sound prescient.
In order for his candidacy to become official, Betancourt will have to win the consultation of the coalition of the center in March against other pre-candidates such as Sergio Fajardo, Juan Manuel Galán or Alejandro Gaviria. His figure was already key at the end of November, when he achieved the union of all of them. It was not easy. The lack of understanding strained the agreements to the limit. When one seemed to pull for his side, a decision recognized by all as political suicide in the face of the polls, Betancourt assumed the leadership of a meeting in which the agreement was reached to attend united under the candidate who prevails in the next referendum. . Politics has always been very close to Sergio Fajardo, who is currently leading the polls to prevail in the coalition,so we will have to wait to see how the polls move with her emergence as a candidate.
Betancourt (Bogotá, 60 years old) returns to the presidential race 20 years after the first time. Colombia has changed as much in this time as it has itself. So, he launched his candidacy after having stood out in Congress for his tough fight against political corruption, for his direct speeches, which sounded irreverent in a landscape dominated by male political elites and little done to the presence of young women. In February 2002, on a trip during the electoral campaign, she was kidnapped by the FARC and taken to the jungle, where she spent the next six years of her life.
Captivity went around the world. While in her country a wide sector accused her of being responsible for her own kidnapping for traveling to such a dangerous area, her face crossed the country's borders and became a world symbol of the war in Colombia. After her release, in 2008, the Franco-Colombian went to live in France and abandoned politics, although in an interview last September she acknowledged that politics had never abandoned her: "It's in my DNA." From France, he followed the peace process of the Government of Juan Manuel Santos with the FARC, which was signed in 2016 to end a war that lasted more than half a century.
When her visits to Colombia had already become intermittent, a ruling by the Constitutional Court last December allowed the party that she had led 20 years ago, Verde Oxígeno, to recover its acronym. That's where the decision to make the leap began to take shape. Until then, in several conversations with this newspaper, she herself had diluted her role as the protagonist, although her momentum increased over the months. In an interview in September, she assured that she had "no personal ambition" beyond giving her support to the center, but in November, from France in a virtual conversation, she maintained that she would not feel "comfortable that she would sit idly by if she had the opportunity to help change the destiny of the country.”
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