The symbol is strong. Twenty years after her kidnapping for six years by FARC guerrillas, Franco-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt announced on Tuesday her intention to take part in the presidential election scheduled for spring 2022 in Colombia.
“I will work tirelessly from now on, from sunrise to sunset, to be your president,” she said during a press conference. At the head of the small environmentalist party Vert Oxygène, the ex-hostage, 59, will participate in a primary organized to decide between the candidates of a centrist coalition, the Coalition of Hope.
A ballot on May 29
In the event of victory, Ingrid Betancourt will therefore represent the center in the presidential election of May 29, a current which wants to be an alternative to face-to-face, structuring in Colombia, between the right in power and the left, represented by the former -mayor of Bogota and former guerrilla Gustavo Petro, today the favorite in the polls.
“For decades we had only bad options: extreme right, extreme left. The time has come to have a center option, ”said the candidate, who has set herself the fight against insecurity and pollution as her objectives. “I believe in a world with a woman’s vision”. “Today I am here to finish what I started with many of you in 2002,” she said, referring to her detention in the jungle. She had indeed been kidnapped by the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia while she was campaigning for the presidency.
Financial compensation
Ingrid Betancourt had been rescued during a military operation and has since lived abroad, regularly staying in Colombia where she often takes part in public debate. The Franco-Colombian also spoke on Tuesday about the 36 million dollars in financial compensation ordered in early January by the American justice against the deceased FARC, for their responsibility in her kidnapping.
“We have sometimes got into the habit of thinking that asking for justice is abusive (…). I came today to ask that every son, every daughter, every father, every mother be compensated, compensated and compensated, ”hammered the candidate.
A federal court in Pennsylvania in the United States ruled on January 4 that the son of the ex-hostage – born in 1988 from his first union with the Frenchman Fabrice Delloye – “is entitled to compensation of 12 million dollars before ‘It won’t be tripled with attorneys’ fees and costs’, or more than $36 million, according to his lawyers. Lawrence Betancourt, also called Lorenzo, who has American nationality, had filed a civil complaint in the United States in June 2018 against 14 former FARC officials, most of whom are presumed dead today or still armed in the jungle. .
