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Hostage Tales
Sep. 29th, 2010 10:11 amOne of the books I got was Ingrid Betancourt’s Even Silence has an End, her account of her six years as a hostage. Reading it was a layered experience because I’m familiar with earlier accounts by some of her fellow hostages, Captive by Clara Rojas and Out of Captivity by Tom Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves, all of which draw a quite hostile and negative portrait of her (except for some parts of Gonsalves’ chapters in Out of Captivity, where she also appears in a positive light; they struck up an on/off friendship and of the other hostages, he appears to have the least bitterness towards her.
I’m familiar with completely different accounts about the same event and people from ages past, but when everyone concerned is still alive and breathing, and the events in question took place only a few years past, the “whom to believe?” question feels somehow differently. Taken by itself, Betancourt’s account of her ordeal is harrowing; she is also very good in bringing the FARC members and various other hostages to life, and the struggle to remain sane. Read in comparison to the other accounts, there is a distinct sense of tit for tat and mutual mud racking there. For example, Keith Stansell describes her as seeking to put herself at the top of a hostage hierarchy, hoarding used clothing and writing materials from the others, determining bathing schedules, hiding information from a transistor radio that she had squirreled away, even throwing a fit about the color of a mattress she was given (it was baby blue), and, most damaging, telling the FARC people the Americans were CIA and had chips implanted (both not true, they say), which could have gotten them killed. Ingrid Betancourt, for her part, describes Keith Stansell as the “ugly American” per excellence, going in everyone’s nerves in the camp, and trying to ingratiate himself with her by telling her only the American hostages and herself were important.
And then there is Clara Rojas. Who worked for Ingrid Betancourt as campaign manager when they were kidnapped. Relations went down from there, it seems, and so do accounts of each other. They both blame each other for their early escape attempts failing. Rojas describes Betancourt similar to Stansell, Betancourt describes Rojas as basically cooperating with the FARC. Then comes Clara Rojas’ pregnancy and the gruesome story of her childbirth and the FARC eventually taking the baby away. In Rojas’ own account, she refuses to name the father of her child, stating that this is no one’s business but hers and her son’s whom she’ll tell when he’s old enough and wants to know. (They were reunited after the hostages were freed.) The Americans’ account similarly has Rojas’ refusing to name the father, and includes descriptions of how when the baby was still with the group but was cared for by one of the guerrillas, with his mother being given the baby only intermittendly, she’d stand at the barricades just to hear it cry and catch a glimpse. Meanwhile, in Betancourt’s account Rojas first asks the FARC leader for permission to conceive a child because her biological clock is ticking, and once the baby was born (everyone’s accounts agree that this was a worst case scenario because of the lack of medical expertise and horrible hygeniec conditions) didn’t even have patience to care for it, handing it over to the guerrillas every time it cried.
Just like Marc Gonsalves was the one fellow hostage who also had good things to say about Ingrid Betancourt, he fares best in her descriptions; their accounts on the heights and depths of their relationship agree with each other more or less, with even the fallout (over the letters they’d written to each other, which she wanted back and even asked the camp leader to order him to hand over) similarly described and the differences explainable by a “her pov, his pov” thing; they also both end on a reconciliatory note, when they’re freed. But all the Clara Rojas passages are really irreconcilable with Rojas’ own account, and if untrue, spite on a spectacular level.
The most spectacular fallout, though, seems to have been between Ingrid Betancourt and Colombia, whose president she once sought to be. Again and again in her account, she emphasizes how France (she had dual citizenship) fought for her. Meanwhile, she sued the Colombian state for 6.8 million dollar in damages for her ordeal, which given she was freed by a rescue operation of the Colombian military caused great indignation in Colombia, until she withdrew the request.
It’s a reminder of the differences between fiction and reality. In fiction, the hostages would have bonded through the ordeal they all shared, especially the two women. In reality, their ordeal made them at times more hostile to each other than to their captors who were responsible for what happened. Depressing, and yet oddly riveting, in that horrified facepalming looking between the fingers way one watches public feuds.
I’m familiar with completely different accounts about the same event and people from ages past, but when everyone concerned is still alive and breathing, and the events in question took place only a few years past, the “whom to believe?” question feels somehow differently. Taken by itself, Betancourt’s account of her ordeal is harrowing; she is also very good in bringing the FARC members and various other hostages to life, and the struggle to remain sane. Read in comparison to the other accounts, there is a distinct sense of tit for tat and mutual mud racking there. For example, Keith Stansell describes her as seeking to put herself at the top of a hostage hierarchy, hoarding used clothing and writing materials from the others, determining bathing schedules, hiding information from a transistor radio that she had squirreled away, even throwing a fit about the color of a mattress she was given (it was baby blue), and, most damaging, telling the FARC people the Americans were CIA and had chips implanted (both not true, they say), which could have gotten them killed. Ingrid Betancourt, for her part, describes Keith Stansell as the “ugly American” per excellence, going in everyone’s nerves in the camp, and trying to ingratiate himself with her by telling her only the American hostages and herself were important.
And then there is Clara Rojas. Who worked for Ingrid Betancourt as campaign manager when they were kidnapped. Relations went down from there, it seems, and so do accounts of each other. They both blame each other for their early escape attempts failing. Rojas describes Betancourt similar to Stansell, Betancourt describes Rojas as basically cooperating with the FARC. Then comes Clara Rojas’ pregnancy and the gruesome story of her childbirth and the FARC eventually taking the baby away. In Rojas’ own account, she refuses to name the father of her child, stating that this is no one’s business but hers and her son’s whom she’ll tell when he’s old enough and wants to know. (They were reunited after the hostages were freed.) The Americans’ account similarly has Rojas’ refusing to name the father, and includes descriptions of how when the baby was still with the group but was cared for by one of the guerrillas, with his mother being given the baby only intermittendly, she’d stand at the barricades just to hear it cry and catch a glimpse. Meanwhile, in Betancourt’s account Rojas first asks the FARC leader for permission to conceive a child because her biological clock is ticking, and once the baby was born (everyone’s accounts agree that this was a worst case scenario because of the lack of medical expertise and horrible hygeniec conditions) didn’t even have patience to care for it, handing it over to the guerrillas every time it cried.
Just like Marc Gonsalves was the one fellow hostage who also had good things to say about Ingrid Betancourt, he fares best in her descriptions; their accounts on the heights and depths of their relationship agree with each other more or less, with even the fallout (over the letters they’d written to each other, which she wanted back and even asked the camp leader to order him to hand over) similarly described and the differences explainable by a “her pov, his pov” thing; they also both end on a reconciliatory note, when they’re freed. But all the Clara Rojas passages are really irreconcilable with Rojas’ own account, and if untrue, spite on a spectacular level.
The most spectacular fallout, though, seems to have been between Ingrid Betancourt and Colombia, whose president she once sought to be. Again and again in her account, she emphasizes how France (she had dual citizenship) fought for her. Meanwhile, she sued the Colombian state for 6.8 million dollar in damages for her ordeal, which given she was freed by a rescue operation of the Colombian military caused great indignation in Colombia, until she withdrew the request.
It’s a reminder of the differences between fiction and reality. In fiction, the hostages would have bonded through the ordeal they all shared, especially the two women. In reality, their ordeal made them at times more hostile to each other than to their captors who were responsible for what happened. Depressing, and yet oddly riveting, in that horrified facepalming looking between the fingers way one watches public feuds.
