Until Death Do Us Part

My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia

Ingrid Betancourt

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780060008918
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061857201
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

CHAPTER ONE

THE CHILDREN are eating their snack in the kitchen. We hear them laughing. In the adjoining room, I tell Juan Carlos what the man said. His words are precisely engraved on my memory, right down to their rhythm and intonation. In the meantime, they’ve taken on a terrifying, permanent, unforgettable meaning.

“We have to get the children out of here, Ingrid. Immediately.”

“Yes.”

“Call their father in New Zealand and tell him we’re bringing them on the first plane we can get.”

Juan Carlos says out loud what I already know, what I decided during the interminable trip from the Capitol to the French school. He can’t imagine how much it helps me to hear him express what is for me the worst possible horror: they have to leave. They have to leave for a long time, I know it—for years, maybe. To save their lives, I have to make them leave. Juan Carlos says what has to be done, but with his eyes he silently tells me he’ll be there to help me bear this unheard-of burden: their absence, the void, the gulf on the edge of which we’ll have to live from now on. That he’ll be there.

Not for a second does he suggest that I abandon my battle against government corruption. For the time being, this amounts to hardly more than a handful of sand thrown into the monstrous gears of a machine that has ground up the few heedless people who have challenged it. I think of my mother’s close friend, Luis Carlos Galán, who was a candidate for the presidency of Colombia and was assassinated at the beginning of an electoral meeting in 1989. He was forty-six years old, and my mother was at his bedside when he died. I wanted to take up the torch, and Colombians heard me when they elected me to the legislature in 1994 with more votes than any other candidate in the Liberal Party, Galán’s party. I’ll go all the way for the Colombian people, whom our political class has despised and robbed, generation after generation. I won’t give up, whatever price has to be paid. This evening, I’m grateful to Juan Carlos for not doubting my resolve, not challenging this commitment.

 

Fabrice, the father of my children, is French, a diplomat currently posted in Auckland. We separated in 1990, and Colombia played a large part in our separation. But once the effects of the split had dissipated, a strong, special friendship formed between us, and we have recovered the esteem we had for each other.

“Did something happen? Were they threatened?”

“Threatened, yes. Nothing more. They’re fine, they’re right here, don’t worry, but I can’t wait—they have to leave.”

“For good, you mean?”

“For a long time. I can’t explain everything here on the phone. I need your help.”

“All right. Come on the first plane you can get…Ingrid? Are you going to be all right? You’re not all alone?”

“Juan Carlos is here, he’ll be traveling with us.”

Now I have to speak to the children, while Juan Carlos finds us seats on an international flight. It doesn’t matter where it’s going, just as long as we get out of Colombia. We’ll find a way to get to Auckland later.

“Melanie, Loli, listen to me, I’ve got something important to tell you. We’re going to spend Christmas in Auckland.”

“With Papa?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Great!”

“Yes, my darling, it’s great. But we’ve got to leave sooner than planned.”

“Before school is out?”

“Tomorrow morning, in fact.”

“We can’t do that! We left all our stuff.”

“We’ll notify the school, Melanie, don’t worry.”

“So we’re leaving just like that, without saying goodbye or anything? Why?”

“That’s how it is, dear, I can’t explain everything. We’ll talk about it later if you want to, okay? Accept the situation as it is. It’s a little rushed, I know, but it’s good nonetheless, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but…”

“And as far as your show’s concerned, Loli, don’t worry, I’ll call. Okay, now let’s get our bags packed.”

It’s done. We have four seats for Los Angeles tomorrow morning.

That night, Juan Carlos and I hardly sleep. We leave the light on, we listen for any unusual sound. For the first time, I have an imminent fear for my life, and that of my family’s, as my visitor’s message resounds in my mind. Over the past year, while the case against the president of Colombia, Ernesto Samper, was being prepared, I was feeling very much alone, fighting to bring it to its conclusion, to make public the proof of his guilt. Between August 1995 and March 1996, four witnesses for the prosecution were killed, one after another.* I kept the newspapers with the police photos of those dark, closed faces. I’d met some of these witnesses, and I’m still haunted by their deaths. I want to bear testimony for them, too.

Though I’m usually confident in my strength, I feel fragile during these long hours, incredibly vulnerable, because this time I’m not the only one in the line of fire. The dreadful shadow that hangs over my children saps my resources, eats away at my heart.

I’m angry with myself for having chosen this apartment house at the foot of the mountain, at the end of a cul-de-sac. It’s an ideal spot for an ambush: there’s no way out. Not long ago a girl was kidnapped here, apparently without the slightest difficulty. To make things worse, my apartment is on the top floor, and thus accessible from the roof.

 

Auckland is a paradise compared with the black chaos of Bogotá. For a long time Auckland was a British possession, and the city is full of cottages surrounded by lawns. For us Colombians, who are constantly being pushed around and bowled over by the silent war that has been waged in our capital for decades, it’s impossible to believe that a place like this exists, though we know it does.

It’s high summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Fabrice, tanned and in shirtsleeves, is waiting for us at the airport. His face lights up, he holds out his arms, and the children run toward him. Just twenty-four hours ago, when we left home in the back of an armored car, terrified by the twenty minutes’ drive to the airport, New Zealand was only a distant dream. Now Juan Carlos and I hold back to give them plenty of time. It’s over, the children are no longer in danger, they’re saved. We’re numb with fatigue and emotion.

Fabrice has arranged things as best he could; he has moved in with some friends to leave us his house, to let us recover, reenter normal life. The house looks out on a garden full of flowers. It’s spacious, blissfully calm. We spend our first moments there walking from room to room, wanting to laugh and cry at once, incredulous, unable to make any decisions at all. Then we give in to fatigue and sleep.

I haven’t told my parents about our escape; I don’t want to frighten them. For the past twenty years, they’ve both been living in Bogotá, but separately.

I call my mother. I hear myself explaining to her that I’m going to have to live without my children. After a few seconds she says:

“You know what, Ingrid? I’m coming to spend Christmas with you.”

“Would you do that?”

“Of course. It’ll be wonderful, you’ll see.”

We were supposed to celebrate Christmas together in Bogotá—well, too bad for Bogotá, the celebration will take place anyway. My mother, intelligent and generous, as she’s always been, understands without further explanation.

As soon as I hang up, I call my father.

“It’s settled, my dear. Stay were you are. We’ll spend Christmas together; get a room ready for me, and I’ll make a reservation.”

Neither of them makes a single comment regarding my political commitment and the price, suddenly exorbitant, that I’ll have to pay to stick to it. I know they share my suffering, but they tacitly support me. How could they prove that more fully than by making this long journey?

 

In Auckland, the days go by. We lead a family life that had become entirely foreign to us: picnics on the lawn, afternoons at the beach, evenings under the stars in the warm breeze off the Pacific. At night we go to bed without closing the doors or windows. The absence of the keys, fences, surveillance cameras, and bodyguards that constantly accompany me in Colombia contributes to the feeling that everything is unreal. This is not my life. It’s a parenthesis, a precious reprieve of five or six weeks. I know that very well, so well that after a few days I can no longer fall asleep before six in the morning. The fear is there, lurking under my apparent lack of concern. Unable to relax, I sit up in bed and listen to the silence.

One night Juan Carlos finds me sitting up, and we start to talk. After that, until the end of our stay in Auckland, he remains at my side and we tell each other everything—our hopes, our dreams, and our fears—never drifting off to sleep before the first light of dawn.

I use these few magical weeks to construct an accelerated plan for my children’s future. I give it all the attention of a mother who knows that she’s not going to be there for many months. I meet all the teachers, buy books, notebooks, uniforms. Together we arrange their rooms, shop for clothes. Then I imprint places on my memory so I can imagine Melanie and Loli coming and going in this large, well-to-do town where no children sleep on the street, where the police force is there to protect citizens, where there are no sicarios. Their school—and this is an image I want to take away with me—is a charming green house in the middle of a garden. It seems that nothing bad can happen to schoolchildren who spend their time in this Eden.

We’ve said goodbye. Hugging my children at the airport, I suddenly see myself as my own mother, embracing my sister and me one last time before flying off to another continent. At a certain time in her life she also had to go away and leave us in the care of our father. What Melanie and Lorenzo are going to experience now—the discovery of another world and another language, the suffering of distance, departures, returns—my sister and I experienced many years ago. It played a significant role in our initiation into the world.

CHAPTER TWO

MY FIRST MEMORIES go back to Neuilly, France. My father has rented a house on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. I’m looking for lady-bugs in the garden; it’s the early 1960s, and I’m two or three years old. In nursery school I speak French, but at home I hear languages that are spoken all over the world, depending on who my parents’ guests are. My father is the assistant director of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, so there are many international guests at the house.

My elder sister, Astrid, and I are the beloved, pampered children of a refined couple who frequent the Parisian cultural world and whom most foreign artists visit when they’re in town. My father is well past forty; he has already been minister of national education in Colombia, and in the chancelleries it’s rumored that he might one day be president of Colombia. My mother is only twenty-five. She won a number of beauty contests in Bogotá before I was born, but she’s better known in Colombia for her work with street children. Using the minor celebrity her beauty had won her, she forced her way into the ministry of justice and got the government to make available to her an unused prison in Bogotá, where she began housing children who’d been sleeping under bridges.

A shared passion for the welfare of children and young people played an important part in my parents’ coming together. Gabriel Betancourt was a dedicated minister of education and still a bachelor when he met Yolanda Pulecio, whom people talked about because she’d opened the first Albergue (shelter) in the old prison and was now seeking other places she could convert into housing for children. My father also had a story to tell. In 1942, as a student, he had to ask a Colombian corporation for financial help to accomplish his dream of graduating from an American university. Once in the United States, he realized that many of his friends hadn’t had the same opportunity. This is why he initiated a project for creating a student loan system, which, by the way, earned him his master’s degree in public administration. Later, as minister of education, he developed his project and this program inspired more than a hundred countries, including the United States, the country that hosted his dreams.

The education minister had just created the first system of educational credit that allowed young people from all over the country to study abroad. While Yolanda Pulecio was working for the most disadvantaged, Gabriel Betancourt was busy with what was to be his life’s greatest work: giving nonwealthy Colombians the same education opportunities that only a lucky few could afford until then.

My parents married in the late 1950s. Astrid was born in 1960, and I the following year. Just after my birth, we left Bogotá to spend several months in Washington, D.C., where my father joined a team President John F. Kennedy had set up to launch the Alliance for Progress, which was to promote development in Latin America. He was named head of the educational commission. When Kennedy was assassinated, this project came to an end, and my father was deeply saddened by it. But immediately afterward he was appointed to the post at UNESCO, and we went to live in Neuilly. I remember my parents as extremely busy, but determined to escape the whirlwind of their activities in order to find time to take us on their laps, answer our questions, read us a story.

My father listened, smiled, took the time to explain, but did not play with us. “I’m much too old to play, but I can read you a book. Choose a book.” He was big and strong, his forehead wide, his brown hair slicked back. He wore heavy, horn-rimmed glasses. But, the severity of his face immediately disappeared when he smiled. Papa’s smile! All the benevolence in the world shining down on our little heads. My mother was quite willing to play. She was spontaneous, sensitive, active; she has the elegant simplicity of Audrey Hepburn, yet sometimes she reminds me also of Sophia Loren, with her warm Italian beauty. In Mama, there was sunlight, appetite, warmth to spare; she couldn’t hide her Italian origins.

To follow her husband, she must leave the Albergue in the hands of the team she has put together in Bogotá, but she takes advantage of her years in Paris to study the French system of aid to children. She talks to a great many people, and my father’s position helps open doors for her. At this time, France is dealing with a massive influx of pieds-noirs, French colonials born in Algeria who were forced to leave the country after independence, and my mother sees in this a similarity to the arrival in Bogotá of poor peasant families driven out of the countryside by poverty or violence or both. It is the children of these families that she has taken off the streets, half-starved. How does France manage to integrate its pieds-noirs, to house them, educate them, make jobs for them, subsidize them? My mother listens, observes, takes thousands of notes, and draws up plans, while waiting to return to make the Albergue what it is today: the best known children’s aid organization in the Colombian capital.

In 1966, the year I turn five, we go back to Bogotá. We return because the newly elected president of Colombia, Carlos Lleras, wants to make my father minister of education, and thus he becomes a minister for the second time, with the same portfolio. Astrid and I discover Colombia, which we don’t remember at all, and since we speak French as well as Spanish we’re enrolled in the same French school that our own children will attend twenty-five years later. My mother, who has just turned thirty, also begins a new life: she goes into politics.

She chooses the position best suited to help her work with children—assistant for social affairs to Bogotá’s mayor. She’s one of the first women to hold a responsible post in the capital city’s administration. This enhances her image, but Colombians have too often been deceived by their politicians to take them seriously. So they wait to see if this well-off young woman, known for her beauty and her big heart, will now take advantage of her power to enrich herself, as do mo...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Publisher's Note
• Map
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Photographic Insert
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Epilogue
• Editor's Note
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher