Ingrid Betancourt, 46, has twice given her children up for politics. Once, voluntarily, she sent them to New Zealand to live with their father to escape Colombian death threats. The second time, six years ago, she had no choice. Watching the moment on Wednesday when she and her daughter, Melanie, now 22 and Lorenzo, 19, embraced for the first time since 2002, it was as if, physically and psychologically, France’s most famous hostage, would never let her babies go again.
Constantly smiling, radiant with happiness, she devoured them with her eyes, touched their faces, joy and love fused in a way that made a thoroughly modern maternal icon out of France’s resistance heroine, ‘the Joan of Arc of the Andes’.
In a letter to her mother, Yolanda Pulecio, written in 2007, hope appeared to be draining away from Betancourt. She described how she was chained by the neck every night. Sick and depleted, she explained that, in the early years, she could not allow herself to think of her children; amnesia was less painful. But they had became a source of strength: ‘Now, I can hear [my children on the radio] and feel more joy than pain. I sustain myself with the images I keep in my memory.’
