Ingrid Betancourt

2.5 stars

[a:Ingrid Betancourt|27818|Ingrid Betancourt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1283019977p2/27818.jpg], a politician who was kidnapped by FARC and held for over 6 years, wrote this novel about a young woman, Julia, living in Argentina in the 1970s, during the Dirty War. She and her boyfriend join the radical Montoneros opposed to the military dictatorship of the country and are eventually kidnapped and tortured.

There are two timelines – one following Julia as a young woman when she meets and falls in love with Theo and his political leanings, leading into their kidnapping; and a second taking place roughly 30 years later, when she and Theo are married and she suspects him of having an affair.

Julia has the gift of premonition, and this promise of magical realism was one of the main reasons I read the book. This premonitory aspect, though threading together certain events, was not a big part of the story. I'm just disappointed that the publisher's description made this out to be something that it wasn't.

I loved the first two chapters, but then Betancourt starts to lay the foundation for the political upheaval, and she lost me. The writing style became very dry and there was too much information overall, but not enough of the kind I needed – the kind specific to the main characters. I disliked how she wove real historical figures into her characters' lives with detail – rather than portraying their lives objectively to simply set the scene. After Julia is kidnapped and tortured, I started to get more interested in the story. Her imprisonment was the best part of this book, undoubtedly informed by the author's own time as a prisoner.

Most of the book is written from Julia's perspective but over halfway in, we're shown things from Theo's perspective all of a sudden, and then it bounces back between the two. I didn't like this shift at all.

The dialogue was somewhat stilted and unrealistic, as were some other parts of the writing – I'm not sure how much of this was the author's doing and how much happened in translation, as this was originally written in French.

Though I enjoyed some of the book, it was disjointed and I'm not sure how much of the story I'll actually retain because of that.… (altro)

#ntimo, terrible, intensamente personal, este testimonio de su propia aventura no se parece a ning#n otro. He aqu# un viaje al coraz#n de las emociones extremas, una meditaci#n sobre la vida, sobre la condici#n del r#probo y sobre lo que significa ser humano.

"Encadenada del cuello a un árbol, desposeída de toda libertad, la de moverse, sentarse o pararse, hablar o callar, la de comer o beber y aun la más elemental de todas, la de aliviarse el cuerpo... entendí - pero me costó muchos años hacerlo - que uno guarda a pesar de todo la más valiosa de las libertades, la que nadie puede arrebatar a uno: aquella de decidir quién uno quiere ser."

Ingrid Betancourt… (altro)

The author, Ingrid betancourt, was from an elite family, half french, half colombian. She identified more with the French side of her, and was married to a French man. For that reason, and besides the fact that she was a politician, the farc hated her.
This book was really long. When it comes to memoirs, especially one as long as this one, with as much detail as there was, I have a hard time believing that the author can actually remember every little thing that they write. When I look back at my life, and think about writing my memoir, I can only remember the major parts of it, the most painful, and some of the most happy, but definitely not every little bit in between. But, then, the author is much younger than I am. She was in her 30s when this happened to her.

The first escape attempt we read about in the author's book, when she tells us a bit about herself, explains their disgust with her:
"they'd been told that I had run for president of colombia. I belonged, therefore, to the group of political hostages whose crime, according to farc, was that they voted to fund the war against farc. As such, we politicians had an appalling reputation. We were all parasites, prolonging the war in order to profit from it. Most of these young people did not really understand the meaning of the word 'political'. They were taught that politics was an activity for those who managed to deceive and then amass wealth by stealing taxes."

"In the 1940s, Colombia was plunged into a civil war between the conservative party and the liberal party, a conflict so merciless that those years were called la Violencia -- 'the violence.' It was a power struggle that spread from the capital of Bogotá and brought bloodshed to the countryside. Peasants identified as liberals were massacred by conservative partisans and vice versa. The Farc was born spontaneously as The peasants' effort to protect themselves against that violence and to safeguard their land from being confiscated by the liberal or conservative landlords. The two parties reached an agreement to share power in government and end the civil war, but the farc was not a part of it."
"*The official initials are f a r c - EP, which in Spanish stands for Colombian revolutionary armed forces - people's army."

On the day before the author's daughter was to turn 17, she asked the commander if she could bake a cake to honor her daughter. She was granted this request, and the guerillas spontaneously made a party:
"FOr a few hours, these young people changed as if my magic. They were no longer guards, or terrorists, or killers. They were young people, my daughter's age, having fun. They danced divinely, as if they'd never done anything else their entire life. They were perfectly synchronized with one another, dancing in that Shack as if it were a ballroom, whirling around with elegant self-awareness. You couldn't help but watch. Jessica, with her long, curly black hair, knew that she was beautiful. She moved her hips and shoulders, just enough to reveal the contours of her curves. El mico was a rather ugly boy, but that night he was transformed. The world was his. I wanted so much to have my children there! It was the first time I thought this. I would have liked for them to know these young people, to discover this strange way of life, so different and yet so close to theirs, because all adolescents in the world are alike. These young people could have been my children. I had known them to be cruel, despotic, humiliating. I could only Wonder as I watched them dance whether my children, under the same conditions, would not have acted the same way."

The guerillas are cruel towards the animals in the jungle:
"The guards had seen them, too. Through the bushes I watched as they grew excited and gave the order to load their guns. I couldn't see anything anymore, I could only hear their voices and the monkey's cries. And then a first detonation, and a second, and yet another, the sharp sound of branches cracking and the thuds on the carpet of leaves. I counted three. Had they killed the mothers to capture the babies? Their perverse satisfaction in killing disgusted me. They always had good excuses to give themselves a clean conscience. We were hungry, we hadn't eaten a real meal for weeks. All that was true, but it wasn't a good enough reason. I found hunting difficult to tolerate. Had I always felt like this? I was no longer sure. I'd been profoundly upset by the business with the guacamaya that Andres had killed for pleasure, and by the death of Cristina's mother. She had fallen from her tree, and the bullet had gone through her stomach. She put her finger in her wound and looked at the blood coming out. 'she was crying, I'm sure she was crying,' William had said to me with a laugh. 'She showed me the blood on her finger, as if she wanted me to do something about it, and then she put her fingers back in the wound and showed me again. She did that a few times, and then she died. Those animals are just like humans,' he concluded. How could you kill a creature that had looked you in the eye, with whom you've established contact, for whom you exist, who has identified you? Of course, none of that mattered anymore when you had already killed a human being. Could I kill? Oh, yes, I could! I had every reason to think I had the right. I was filled with hatred for those who humiliated me and took so much pleasure in my pain. With every word, every order, every affront, I stabbed them with my silence. Oh, yes -- i, too, could kill! And I would feel a pleasure in seeing them put their fingers in their wounds and look at their blood as they became aware of their imminent death, waiting for me to do something. And I wouldn't move. I would watch them die."

Another kidnapping victim, lucho, a fellow senator of the author's, was a diabetic. There was no insulin for him in the Guerilla's camp. Occasionally he would fall sick, and there was danger of him falling into a coma. When the farc was angry with the prisoners, they would refuse to give them the medication they needed:
"Gira, the nurse, came through the prison door. She was doing her rounds among her patients to say that there was no more medication.
'Reprisals.' said pinChao behind me, almost imperceptibly. 'They're going to tighten the screw.'
She walked right by me, staring at me, her gaze full of reproach.
'Yes, look at me carefully,' I said to her. 'Don't ever forget what you see. As a woman you should be ashamed to be part of this.'
She went pale. I could see she was trembling with rage. But she continued her rounds, without saying a word, and went out.
Of course I should have kept my mouth shut. Humility begins with holding one's tongue. I had a great deal to learn. If God didn't want me to be free, I had to accept that I wasn't ready for freedom. This notion became a lifebuoy."

One thing I enjoyed reading about in this book was the fauna of the jungle, the Amazon basin. The author was constantly attacked by insects, some of them so tiny that you couldn't see them, yet they would dig under your skin. She was attacked by many different kinds of animalitos.
BetanCourt was a fastidious observer of the Dynamics constantly going on between herself, the other hostages, and the guerillas, and which were constantly changing.
As an aside, I got sick of the author's always talking about God's plan for her to be kidnapped and held in captivity for more than 6 years. I can't believe anyone would believe that b*******.… (altro)