Former FARC hostage Betancourt recounts ordeal in new book

Former Colombian Presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt has written for the first time about her six-year jungle ordeal being tied up, beaten, humiliated and threatened with death by FARC rebels.

The Franco-Colombian ex-hostage withdrew from the world for 18 months to write the 700-page account of her personal hell in the book, Even Silence Has An End, to be published this week in France, Colombia and the US.

She recalls the day in February 2002 when gunmen stopped her car and she became a captive of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), after, according to Ms Betancourt, the Colombian Presidency withdrew her military escort.

Then her nightmare begins, in the hostile jungle where boredom competes with distress. The conditions of detention are appalling, it’s difficult to keep hope alive.

“We were handed the heaviest sentence a human being can be given, that of not knowing when it would end,” she writes.