Ingrid Betancourt

Should the U.S. government stop giving aid? Is it doing more harm than good?

This is a decision for the Americans to make, but I would say that the Americans should help us clean the political system in order to have a guarantee that the aid is going to be used properly. If we don't do this, we are wasting our time, we are wasting our money -- and we are frustrating both the Colombians, who are expecting a lot from the American aid, and the American people, who want to see results.

You come from a prominent Colombian family but you grew up in Europe. How did you get started in politics?

At home everyone spoke about politics. My father was an ambassador and my mother was linked to social issues in Colombia, and the major issues in the home were political issues. From very early in life I was forced to listen to people talking about Colombia, about our future, about our rights, about what we could expect as Colombians. I also think that because I was brought up in France, I was very sensitive to some issues like human rights protection, the environment and anti-corruption.

I returned to Colombia because I felt that Colombia was living in a very difficult crisis and it didn't feel good to be living outside Colombia knowing that my friends and relatives were facing problems in Colombia while I was living abroad. I had a sense of responsibility. I felt that I had to be with my people in their moment of difficulty. I felt like I could have a very comfortable life while others were putting their lives at risk in order to save our country.

Also, there was an incident. I'm very close to my mother and when I was abroad, she was participating in Louis Carlos Galan's presidential campaign. Galan was a leader that we all considered to be a moral figure; we thought that he was going to save Colombia. And the day he was killed, my mother was with him.

But the story is very strange. That night, I couldn't sleep; I had nightmares. And in the morning, the only thing I wanted to do was call my mother in Colombia. When I called her, she was at the other end of the phone, crying and yelling "They killed him, they killed him."

Then she told me the story, which is really incredible. She was behind him at the moment the shot was fired, but she had fallen down because she was wearing high heels. And that fall saved her.

So what I realized at that moment, when she was telling me the story, was that I could have called her that morning and someone else could have answered -- someone who told me that Mother had been killed. Suddenly, I had this obsession that I had to go home and home wasn't abroad. Home was Colombia.

Since returning, you've made many sacrifices for your cause, watching friends die, going on a hunger strike to fight for an investigation of the sitting president and sending your children to live with their father in New Zealand. Which of these was most difficult?

The hardest sacrifice is a daily sacrifice. I have been living apart from my children for six years, and there is not one day that I don't suffer.

And didn't you have to send your children away under dangerous circumstances?

We received death threats. The children were very young and there was a guy who came to my office. He was threatening us, so we had to leave. We took a plane the next day and I left them in New Zealand with their father. I thought that perhaps it was not going to be too long, but six years have gone by, they've grown to be teenagers and I haven't been able to live with them.

How old are your children now, and what do they think of your crusade?

My children were 10 and 7 when they left; they're now 16 and 13. I think I've been lucky because my children could have been traumatized or they could have hated me because of the decision I have taken. But they have grown into very healthy teenagers, very confident in themselves, and they support me. They are proud of me, they understand what I'm doing and they don't feel that I've abandoned them. They feel that I'm doing the correct thing. I have their support; it's a gift from heaven.

Do you think it's substantially harder to be a woman, a female leader, in Colombian politics?

Well, what's happened in Colombia is that we've been living through a civil war for 50 years, and when you live in Civil War -- or any war -- men go to fight and women take care of the important things, as I would say it. In Colombia, 70 percent of the families are raised solely by women. Women have been forced to take responsibility not only in family issues but also in economic issues. All women in Colombia work. Even among the wealthy, everyone works. I have no friends who stay at home as housewives.

This has opened the path to politics. What's also helped a lot is, well, men have done such a lousy job in politics that people think women will do it better. This is the hope that people have so they will vote more readily for a woman than a man.

But once you get into politics, things change. Once you're elected and you have the confidence of the people, the battle in the political field is terrible because those guys [in power] won't respect anything. They won't confront your ideas; they'll try to knock you down by attacking you in personal fields. This is something that we as women have to bear, the fact that they attack you for leaving your children, or because you have a divorce or because you've been married several times.

You've used some unconventional campaign tactics to fight back, such as handing out condoms as a sign that you would protect the people from the disease of corruption. How has the public responded?

At the beginning it was kind of shocking because Colombia is a conservative society. Church is very influential in Colombian society, and having a young woman distributing condoms in the street -- especially because condoms are a man's device -- was very shocking to a lot of people. But then they started to understand the symbol of the thing. They understood that I was trying to make them think that we needed to react against corruption, and that's why I was elected.

I think there is an enormous space in Colombia to do symbolic actions and be very pedagogical with the public to make them understand something that it would normally take years to make them understand.

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