Ingrid Betancourt, who grew up among diplomats, literati and artists in Paris, where her father was Colombia’s ambassador to UNESCO, is running for president of her strife-torn homeland. And she is putting her life on the line to do it. Her memoir, “Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia” (Ecco, $24.95), a best seller in France that was published in the U.S. last month, describes her fight against corruption and the byzantine establishment that runs Colombia, where a civil war also has been raging for almost four decades.
The mother of two teenagers, Betancourt, 40, is a most unconventional politician. During her 1994 campaign for congress, she passed out condoms on street corners to symbolize protection against corruption. As a presidential candidate, she recently handed out Viagra to drivers at traffic lights in Bogota, saying she wants to “lift up the country.” She spoke with WomanNews from Miami.
Q: Why are you running for president?
A: The decision was the normal conclusion of my struggle in Colombia to rescue a democracy, and because I feel the other candidates don’t have the political will to clean the system.
Q: You created your own party called Oxygen? Why that name?
A: Oxygen was a symbol and also an image. We felt that [Colombian] politics were smelling very bad. We needed clean air. Our politicians are very corrupted and so the environment in politics is, we could say, rotten. So Oxygen was, of course, the response to that.
Q: Is the corruption as bad as we have been told it is there?
A: I would say it’s worse, but I think it’s important to point out that we the people of Colombia want to get rid of corrupt politicians.
Q: How do everyday working people deal with the situation?
A: They have two ways of dealing with it. One is just ignoring it, and this is what half of the population does. They feel it’s so dirty and so dangerous, they don’t want even to get close to it. The other is to confront the system, which is what I do. And others do. I am not the only one to do this. Many have died in Colombia confronting the system. When we talk about corruption, we’re dealing with violation of human rights. But we’re also dealing with environmental problems. It’s always linked. When you begin fighting corruption, you end up always fighting for human rights and fighting for the environment.
Q: You were elected to the Senate. Do you still hold that office?
A: I resigned because I felt if I was going to run for president, it wasn’t ethical to be at the same time a senator.
Q: Ethical? A lot of people in your country don’t seem to bother with a word like that. Do people there admire you for trying to be ethical?
A: I find that I bring hope to many people. I don’t know if they admire me, but at least they will say, well, there is somebody they can trust. This is the rewarding thing at the end of the day, finding that you have people that feel what you’re doing is important.
Q: In 1996, after a man came to your office to tell you some people had put out a contract on your life, you decided to send your son and daughter to live in another country with your ex-husband.
A: Yes, I have been accused of having abandoned my children for doing politics. When you’re in this battle, you not only make sacrifices but also you’re criticized for the sacrifices you make.
Q: Do you think you arebeing any way naive about this?
A: I’m very much lucid about what I’m facing, but I try to nurture a certain degree of naivete because I think that it’s important to stand by your principles and your values.
Q: If you don’t win, what will you do?
A: I don’t want to think about it because losing is not an option. Not because I’m eager to go into the presidency. It’s not a personal ambition. But because I know that if I win, it will be so big an opportunity to my country. It will be an 180-degree change. I just want to focus on what I have to do.
Q: “Until Death Do Us Part” is in some ways a very chilling title.
A: Life is not worth living if you’re going to be a slave and not able to live the way you want. If you’re a human being and freedom means a lot to you, the first freedom you have to gain is the freedom of not fearing death.
Q: What do polls say about your chances?
A: They don’t favor me at all. I am always between 1 and 5 percent.
When I was running for the senate, the polls were shown a week before the election, listing all the [candidates] that would be elected. I didn’t appear. And I was elected with the highest number of votes in the nation.
