The three American hostages freed from FARC in a Colombian-government commando raid wrote a book, "Out of Captivity", that looks to be a best seller. What's making the headlines, they report that their fellow hostage, darling of the liberal media and Nobel Peace Prize candidate Ingrid Betancourt was an elitist, arrogant, duplicitous you-know-what. She was also banging one of her fellow hostages while her husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, was doing his best to negotiate her release and take care of their children. This wasn't out of character for the woman -- she left her first husband and two children for Lecompte.
What was more interesting to me, of the three Americans held in captivity, two of the men were married to women who lived in the U.S.A. The third, Keith Stansell, was engaged to an American woman. All of them had children with their wives/fiancee. And all three American women abandoned their husbands/fiancee for other men while they were being held by FARC.
Stansell, in addition to the fiancee in the U.S.A., also had a girlfriend, a Colombian stewardess. He knocked her up shortly before he was kidnapped. He told her he would help out with the child, but he was going to go ahead and marry his American fiancee.
There were so many people kidnapped in Colombia that radio stations regularly broadcast messages to captives from their loved ones. Stansell became concerned when his American fiancee stopped saying she loved him in her messages. The messages from her became less frequent, then they stopped. He knew she'd found someone else.
Stansell's Colombian girlfriend, the one who he was going to abandon for the American fiancee, kept broadcasting her love for him on the radio. She told her two children, twins, that some day their father would return, and they would be reunited. She never stopped loving him. When Stansell was finally released, the twins greeted him with joy, he'd finally returned. Stansell is now married and living with his Colombian family in Florida.
Another of the captives, Tom Howes, said his divorce when he returned to the U.S. was the second toughest thing he'd ever been through.
A sidelight, Clara Rojas, an attorney and friend of Betancourt who was another of the hostages, is writing another tell-all book that vilifies Betancourt. Rojas had an affair with a FARC guerilla while she was captive, and became pregnant. Normally FARC requires their women to have abortions, but they made an exception for Rojas. The birth was an ordeal, with a couple of guerillas with no experience cutting on Rojas during delivery and breaking the child's arm, but both mother and son survived. Betancourt later told Larry King that she stopped Rojas from drowning her baby in a river. Rojas says Betancourt was lying.
I imagine everyone already knows this, but Betancourt ran against Uribe for the Colombian presidency, and was kidnapped when she entered FARC controlled territory to give peace a chance, that is, as a publicity stunt that backfired.
I don't know what this shows, if anything, about American women, upper Class Colombian women or Colombian women who've spent lots and lots of time abroad (Betancourt), or middle class Colombian women (the stewardess). You can draw your own conclusions.
