Ingrid Betancourt

Without a doubt, Ingrid Betancourt’s Even Silence Has an End is one of the most heart-breaking, gut-wrenching memoirs I’ve read in a long time. In 2002, Betancourt was campaigning to become President of Colombia as a Green Party member. At a traffic checkpoint in Colombia’s DMZ, she was kidnapped by a member of the revolutionary FARC, and then held for more than six years. She was kept with many other captured people from around the world. She found herself among a mix of show more nationalities, social statuses, and walks of life. Her story is one of hope and loss, of freedom and failure.

Betancourt’s imprisonment caught the attention of the world. As a dual Colombian-French citizen-diplomat, several world governments tried to engage the Colombians for her release. Each year she was captured, at least one rescue attempt or negotiation was started, but it wasn’t until 2008 that she was freed from captivity. Her experiences in the jungle prison are both harrowing and enlightening. While there are some to dismiss her retelling of the events as either politically motivated or self-serving, they are still true. While imprisoned, she endured not only physical torture, but also news of her father’s death. Through all this, she still find ways to connect with those around her and not fall too deeply into despair. It is a long tale, told with excruciating detail, and very much demands your attentions. A lengthy but ultimately necessary book. show less

I will never again lightly look over a news report on hostages or captivity in any form after reading this book. Life is so taken for granted when not being tormented and punished by terrorists and Ms. Betancourt's description of her ordeal will never leave my mind as I recall her astounding story. She survived over 6 years in captivity and was able, with an indomitable spirit, survive to tell minute details of how it is to be captured, harassed, raped, and made to live like an animal. She show more told, again in full detail, how she tried to escape many times, and of the relationships formed with other captives. I am now able to understand the depth of the enemy, those who joined the FARC because of their own belief systems; young girls in this horrible army, giving up their world to help FARC punish others; young men, who gave up their futures, to join FARC for all of the wrong reasons. Just as Betancourt traveled into a military-controlled region as an advocate for peace because she believed in her mission, these abductors were just as strong in their beliefs. Betancourt shares her metamorphosis, revealing how in the daily rituals she established for herself, listening to her mother and children broadcast to her over the radio, the daily prayers, learning how to weave, moving from the pain of the moment to a place of serenity. This is a book that should be read by all people, to understand the hostility in those who capture and the life endured by those captured. show less

I did not find the author/protagonist more sympathetic than the average. The (relative, understandable) lack of geopolitical context made this just a true-crime sort of story like many other kidnapping/hostage narratives, and true crime is not my favorite. And yet, the literary qualities of this book—the structure, alternating close-ups and the big picture, different camps and the marches in between; the characters; and the exotic jungle setting—made this a gripping nonfiction novel.

In 2008, Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt made headlines when she and fourteen other hostages were rescued after being held by a guerrilla army in the Colombian jungle for over six years. Betancourt detailed her account of those events previously in her 2010 memoir Even Silence Has An End. But in her debut novel of the fictional persuasion she has undertaken the task of telling the story of Argentina's "Dirty War" - a period left out of most classroom history lessons - through the lens show more of her experience.

This "war," which Argentinians call the time of "state terrorism genocide" is a blight in the nation's history. Covering the early 1970s through the early 80s, it was a period of uncertainty and terrible truths in the wake of Peron's return from exile, and the subsequent succession of his widow Isabel to the presidency following Peron's death. Marxists and socialists - many of them students - were hunted down and tortured; members of their support networks were assassinated in the streets. And between 10- and 30,000 citizens became "desaparecidos" - the disappeared. Some of them - their bodies would wash ashore in Uruguay after being thrown from a plane. Some of them were tortured and then disposed of into mass graves, and wait even now to be identified. Still others will never be found.

In The Blue Line Betancourt merges her own experiences with this history, and creates a character - Julia - who embodies her own personal strength, but who also carries a secret that allows her (and the reader) to foresee the horrible suffering to come as the story unfolds. Julia has inherited her grandmother's gift - visions of the future through the eyes of an unknown source who calls, in one way or another, for help in their future moment. As a child, Julia saves her sister from drowning by teaching her to swim before the disaster she has foreseen can occur. As an adult, she has to confront a vision of her own future - which Mama Fina describes - in order to save another life, only to find herself being broken many more times by the death squadron that ruled Buenos Aires.

The magical aspect of the story takes a backseat to the horrors of the reality that Julia lives, but her character is stronger for it. What might in another novel be a distraction proves, in this one, to be a comfort - a way by which the reader can prepare themselves for each next step of Julia's perpetually angst-and-anxiety-ridden life. The story, if a shade unbelievable, is harrowing in its brutal descriptions of the horrors of a very real history. Julia, Mama Fina and Theo may not be as factual as that history, but Betancourt brings them to life with a deft vibrancy - an effect, I believe, of an empathy that most of us will thankfully never understand.

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