Women’s Space

The video above shows Ingrid Betancourt, founder of the Colombian Green Party, one-time Colombian legislator and candidate for president, confronting a member of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and saying to him in Spanish, “No more kidnappings No more kidnappings.” Shortly after this video was made, Betancourt was kidnapped.

FARC

FARC began in the 60s as a Marxist-Leninist guerilla resistance claiming or intending — depending on your politics and how charitable you want to be — to represent the rural poor as against Colombia’s wealthy classes, to oppose U.S. influence in Colombia, the privatization of natural resources, multinational corporations, and rightist violence. As is so often true of leftist groups, however, FARC is misogynist, violent and corrupt,  with half of its $200-$300 million annual income from drug trafficking (it supplies 50 percent of the world’s cocaine) and the rest from kidnapping for ransom, extortion schemes and protection rackets.  FARC’s history is one of executions, tortures, planting of landmines, and “street corner justice.” Children are harshly disciplined, are forced to execute others, including children, and are forced to watch and participate in torture.

FARC is also woman-hating. As is true of most leftist organizations, it claims to be egalitarian; in fact, girls and women who join describe having been raped, abused, exploited and forced into sexual servitude, usually to FARC commanders, often much older men, in exchange for protection from male comrades, so-called.   Girls and women are given IUDs or Norplant as soon as they join FARC and if they become pregnant, they are required to have abortions whether they want them or not.

Corrupt Politicians, Right-Wing Death Squads

But, this is a story with many, many bad guys– FARC is only one.  There are also the government officials who use money they receive from the U.S., theoretically to fight the “War on Drugs”, to fund right-wing paramilitary groups and death squads.  Colombia’s oil and mineral wealth have attracted the interest of the U.S. and other  important global economic players, and its government, army and paramilitary forces are allied with and kill in the interest of those important players.  The result has been thousands of murders of what one writer has described as “unworthy victims,” victims most of the world never hears about — peasants and labor leaders, teachers, journalists, priests, nuns, lawyers, women’s rights leaders, human rights workers, and citizens –  people killed because they are viewed as obstacles in the way of progress, threats to the flow of money from the U.S. and other nations whose real interest is in exploiting the natural resources of Colombia.

Throughout Colombia indigenous tribes, peasants, and small miners stand in the way of oil drilling, agro-business, and large scale mining which cause their dispossession and severe environmental damage. Occidental Petroleum has had a long-standing dispute with the U’wa Indian tribe that opposes their drilling on Indian lands. Exxon’s giant El Cerrejon coal mine, and other nearby mines in Venezuela, have had injurious effects on a half dozen local Indian tribes that have opposed their operations. The Choco area in the Northwest part of Colombia below Panama is rich in minerals and oil and contains one of the world’s last pristine rain forests. It is being rapidly opened to mining, oil, and timber exploitation, and pipelines, ports, railroads, a canal, and the last 65 miles of the Pan American Highway are being pushed forward to bring this region into the global market. Free trade zones are in the planning stage for the Choco area. The local peasants are resisting, and the paramilitaries, army, and other drug warriors have been quietly pushing them out, often by extreme terror (a preferred paramilitary method is cutting people alive in pieces with chain saws, impelling a flight in which everything is left behind).

In Southern Bolivar there is a gold mine long coveted by the transnational mining companies as it produces first quality gold in an open pit location. Local peasants have been [working in] this mine for 40 years, along with miners organized in a union and working for a local company. The peasant and union leaders in this area have been murdered and in 1998 some 10,000 farmers and peasants were driven out by paramilitaries, who were funded by gold mining companies and protected by the Colombian army.

Ingrid Betancourt

Into this morass — essentially a U.S.-supported “narco-army” and paramilitary death squads combatting “narco-guerrillas” — stepped Ingrid Betancourt.  She grew up in France, the daughter of the Colombian ambassador to UNESCO, married a French diplomat, but increasingly she wanted to return to Colombia.  Eventually she did, determined to fight corruption, drug trafficking and politicans who were in the pockets of drug traffickers.  She won a seat in the legislature, but her life and the lives of her children were immediately threatened.  Fearing for her children’s safety, she sent them to live in New Zealand with their father, her ex-husband; they never returned to live with her, it was too dangerous.  She went on to write a book, Til Death Do Us Part:  My Fight to Reclaim Colombia, began the “Green Oxygen” party, and ran for President of Colombia.  Her candidacy was controversial; at one point she handed out condoms (in a Roman Catholic country) to symbolize her intention to protect Colombia against the disease of corruption. She was consistently attacked because she was a woman, attacked because her children didn’t live with her, because she had been married and divorced, and attacked in the media by opponents who castigated her as an “attention-seeker” and “self-righteous.”   This is so telling and so consistently true: women activists and politicians who take the big risks, who are fearless in their political work, are invariably denigrated for “trying to get attention” or accused of being “narcissists”. When are male politicians or political activists –whatever their acts  — ever similarly accused? How dare the world pay attention to a woman, the sentiment seems to be. And how dare she make herself someone to whom the world would pay attention?

Betancourt Kidnapped

Shortly after Betancourt demanded that the FARC official in the video above “stop the kidnappings,” Betancourt herself was kidnapped by FARC guerillas.  She was held captive in the jungle for six years.   At times she was chained to trees by her neck; for three years she was chained 24 hours a day.  Recently she has been quite ill. The video below, released by her FARC captors about a year ago to prove she was still alive, shows her to be gaunt; she does not look well.

Betancourt Freed and the Hugo Chavez Connection

This week she was freed.   Although some hailed her rescue and the rescue of 14 other hostages, including three Americans, as a “brilliant” maneuver of the Columbian army, others said Betancourt was freed because a ransom of up to $300 million dollars was paid, presumably to FARC.  The Colombian government says it tricked FARC rebels into placing the hostages aboard one of its helicopters using spies infiltrated in the rebel command to issue false orders.

My own opinion?  I think FARC was paid ransom.  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has supported the FARC rebels and has been mediating the release of hostages for some time now. Documents discovered on the laptop of the recently-slain head of FARC,  Raoul Reyes, indicate Chavez may have had financial ties with FARC going back to 1992, and some documents seem to suggest a $300 million payment was being negotiated, possibly to free Betancourt and the other hostages.  Consider one e-mail found on Reyes’ computer:

‘Chavez reacted well to our petition’ — Nov. 12, 2007

In this email, the FARC’s main contacts with Mr. Chavez — Ivan Marquez, a member of the FARC’s seven-man secretariat, and Ricardo Granda — summarize for Mr. Marulanda and other members the results of a meeting with Venezuela’s President Chavez in Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas.

Comrade Manuel [Marulanda], comrades in the secretariat,

Cordial greetings. I’ll quickly summarize the results from the two meetings I had with President Chavez in Miraflores:

1. He approved completely and without blinking our request (300). [Colombian authorities believe the 300 in parentheses refers to a request for $300 million.]

2. In relation to the hostage swap, he suggested a slight change in our strategy that I’ll explain in point 3. Right now… he’s eager for a Marulanda-Chavez meeting [to negotiate further hostage releases] in the Yari. To achieve this, he thinks his upcoming meeting on Nov. 20 with [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy is crucial. [Chavez] will need the ‘proofs of life’ that Marulanda ordered. With them, he can approach Sarkozy. Chavez is sure that it will convince Sarkozy to pressure Bush to order [Colombian President Alvaro] Uribe to agree to the meeting.

Chavez is sure that by meeting Marulanda they’ll agree on a formula to release the hostages. When he told Sarkozy about his determination, he nearly jumped out of his chair to say he’d also like to go to the meeting with Marulanda. Chavez is very excited.

We need each other mutually. The meeting at Yari will give Chavez and the FARC a continental and global projection.

3. If we can’t set up a meeting at Yari with comrade Marulanda and Chavez, Chavez suggests the following:

a) That we make a unilateral release, for instance, of the women (without Ingrid). I think there are just two, the woman from Huila and Clara and her son. We could also throw in some sick ones.

b) That once he receives the prisoners he will declare a safety corridor between the Venezuelan and Colombian border, where spokesmen from each side can sit to negotiate a deal.

c) Chavez reacted well to our petition that he grant us recognition, and that he “lobby” Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Argentina to do it, too. These are countries that already informally recognize us as political actors. He will also pitch it to Sarkozy and Spain, countries that have us on the terrorist list. With Switzerland there is no problem. He will also seek for the non-aligned countries to do likewise. Once we achieve this, we open the doors for the FARC representation in all these countries.

[…]

12. There was a great empathy with Chavez. I think we raised his esteem for the FARC…. Chavez feels that we are soon to see the rebirth of the Great Colombia [Gran Colombia was the name of a short lived republic in the early 1800s that included what is today Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama, as well as parts of Peru and Brazil. Mr. Chavez has often said he would like to unite these areas again, presumably under his leadership].

To me this seems pretty clear.   Chavez has a history of supporting leaders and groups who are no friend to women. His brand of revolution seems to exclude us, just as FARC’s brand of revolution includes women only so long as women are willing to be sexual servants to their “comrades”.

Conclusion

I have spent much time writing this post not only because Betancourt is an amazing woman whose work and life may well be pivotal to the history of Colombia and for that matter, the world, but also because it so illuminates the experiences and difficulties of being a woman who aspires to political power, and ultimately wields it, in a male supremacist world. Betancourt was and still is surrounded by enemies of all political persuasions:  conservatives and elected officials interested in padding their own pockets with U.S. dollars,  including if it means payoffs to death squads, leftist insurgents who earn their money via extortion, kidnappings and terrorism,  enemies in the press who attack Betancourt because she acts outside of what gender stereotypes for women require–  she marries and divorces as she chooses, she sends her children to live with their father, she puts her life on the line, despite the impact to her husband and children, she gets up in the face of male terrorists and tells them in an unwavering voice to “stop”, she runs for public office, she creates a political party, she runs for President of her country and in a few months’ time moves from having almost no public support to being a threat to a conservative incumbent.  In many ways, she stands alone.  She has her supporters, but captive in the jungle for six long years, or as a woman making change in a male supremacist world, ultimately she is left to her own resources, dreams, fears, and raw courage.

In any event, Betancourt has been freed.  That is cause for celebration!  Below is a video of her reunion with her children.

Heart

Tags: Colonialism, Exile, Female Ritual Servitude, Inspiration, It's all connected, Love Between Women, Male Terrorism, Rape and Sexual Assault