NPR Interviews Colombian Ingrid Betancourt

Folks, I heard this very moving interview of former Colombian presidential candidate and one time prisoner Ingrid Betancourt in today’s NPR’s All Things Considered. It is a moving testimony of how faith in God strengthens one’s character and all theological virtues in the face of terrorism, torture, and hopelessness. She came out with her Catholic faith renewed and strengthened. This is an excerpt:

In 2002, Ingrid Betancourt was campaigning for the presidency of Colombia. En route to a remote village, she was stopped by a group of armed men. Betancourt knew the area was controlled by the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but thought she could pass through without trouble.

Author Ingrid Betancourt spent six years in the jungle as a captive of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC.

She was wrong.

Betancourt was brought deep into the jungle, tortured, underfed and forced to march through the rain forest for six years.

"At the beginning, I thought it was going to be for a couple of weeks," Betancourt tells NPR’s Guy Raz. "Then I thought, perhaps a couple of months, because it was just lingering, and I said, 'OK, perhaps till the end of the presidential campaign,' and then when a year went on, I thought, my god, this is a year now?"

She tells the story of her time with the FARC in a new book,Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle.

Betancourt spent most of her time in one main prison camp along with other hostages.

"We were … confined in a very small space," she says, "surrounded with barbed wire. And in this very confined space, we had to live with people we didn’t know, men and women all together."

Read it all or listen to the interview here.

Commentary. The beautiful country of Colombia which I’ve had the pleasure to visit, and its warmth, welcoming, friendly people, has been the victim of a relentless communist terror group since the late 1960’s. Since the 1990’s, the FARC has been a principal actor in the production and transportation of cocaine, as well as leaders in kidnappings and extortions. One of their victims was Ingrid Betancourt.

What a classy lady she is! And you know, she beat them. She came out unbroken, spiritually strengthened and untouched by the FARC’s wanton evil. Glory be to God on high.

Listen to the interview and allow yourself to be moved.