Adriana V. Lopez

Lunching with Ingrid Betancourt

Back in 2002, I had lunch with Ingrid Betancourt. Then a few months later she was kidnapped. Whisked out of sight by the FARC guerrillas and into the jungle. Six years ago, nobody outside of Colombia knew who she was. I got my chance to meet Betancourt when she was in the States that year as a Colombian presidential candidate for her own independent party and promoting the English-language version of her book, Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia (Harper Ecco, in Spanish: Rabia en el corazón, Random House Mondadori, Grijalbo, 2002). I was going to write about it for Publisher’s Weekly.

As we sat down to eat in that Park Avenue restaurant dedicated to nouveau Latino cuisine, fittingly called Patria, I remember having the train of thought, that for a presidential candidate in a rough-and-tumble macho country like Colombia, I thought she was too much of a lady.

She reminded me of my Colombian aunts, polite, well-quaffed, soft-spoken, and unbelievably empathetic to my every movement. I remember it was heaven to be in that big brown-eyed gaze of hers. She’s also tragically beautiful if you have noticed. She has a  beauty mark on her right cheek that looks like a tear drop. Her long fingers and Modigliani-like nose, only added to her pointed criticism on Colombia’s history of violence. Every word out her mouth was gentle, never pedantic, or thought out and open for discussion. Even while she was giving our waiter her food order.

When I came out of my initial stupor upon meeting her, I got down to asking her questions. One was about how she faced her every day life. The 20 body guards, the death threats to her children and family, her hunger strikes for answers from former President Ernesto Samper, her fearless finger-pointing at the bad guys. I remember her saying to me, “I am ready to die if I have to.” Most of the details of that lunch are fuzzy, but the feelings are still strong. But that morbid quote of hers stuck. Saying goodbye to her that day, I felt an unexplainable sadness. She survived 2,323 humiliating and debilitating days in the jungle as a hostage. She kept her lady-like composure the entire time. But on the inside, we all know now, she’s built like a Mack truck.

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Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on July 3, 2008 | Comments (1)