Ingrid BetancourtReviews

2.5 stars

[a:Ingrid Betancourt|27818|Ingrid Betancourt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1283019977p2/27818.jpg], a politician who was kidnapped by FARC and held for over 6 years, wrote this novel about a young woman, Julia, living in Argentina in the 1970s, during the Dirty War. She and her boyfriend join the radical Montoneros opposed to the military dictatorship of the country and are eventually kidnapped and tortured.

There are two timelines – one following Julia as a young woman when she meets and falls in love with Theo and his political leanings, leading into their kidnapping; and a second taking place roughly 30 years later, when she and Theo are married and she suspects him of having an affair.

Julia has the gift of premonition, and this promise of magical realism was one of the main reasons I read the book. This premonitory aspect, though threading together certain events, was not a big part of the story. I'm just disappointed that the publisher's description made this out to be something that it wasn't.

I loved the first two chapters, but then Betancourt starts to lay the foundation for the political upheaval, and she lost me. The writing style became very dry and there was too much information overall, but not enough of the kind I needed – the kind specific to the main characters. I disliked how she wove real historical figures into her characters' lives with detail – rather than portraying their lives objectively to simply set the scene. After Julia is kidnapped and tortured, I started to get more interested in the story. Her imprisonment was the best part of this book, undoubtedly informed by the author's own time as a prisoner.

Most of the book is written from Julia's perspective but over halfway in, we're shown things from Theo's perspective all of a sudden, and then it bounces back between the two. I didn't like this shift at all.

The dialogue was somewhat stilted and unrealistic, as were some other parts of the writing – I'm not sure how much of this was the author's doing and how much happened in translation, as this was originally written in French.

Though I enjoyed some of the book, it was disjointed and I'm not sure how much of the story I'll actually retain because of that.

I feel like a jerk for quitting, but I don't want to be immersed in this story any longer. I'm glad she and the other hostages were rescued, and maybe I'll look up a few news stories and interviews to get the rest of the story.
Since there were other hostages involved, and apparently some controversy over what's true, I'm calling it quits on listening to just one person's lengthy account.

The author, Ingrid betancourt, was from an elite family, half french, half colombian. She identified more with the French side of her, and was married to a French man. For that reason, and besides the fact that she was a politician, the farc hated her.
This book was really long. When it comes to memoirs, especially one as long as this one, with as much detail as there was, I have a hard time believing that the author can actually remember every little thing that they write. When I look back at my life, and think about writing my memoir, I can only remember the major parts of it, the most painful, and some of the most happy, but definitely not every little bit in between. But, then, the author is much younger than I am. She was in her 30s when this happened to her.

The first escape attempt we read about in the author's book, when she tells us a bit about herself, explains their disgust with her:
"they'd been told that I had run for president of colombia. I belonged, therefore, to the group of political hostages whose crime, according to farc, was that they voted to fund the war against farc. As such, we politicians had an appalling reputation. We were all parasites, prolonging the war in order to profit from it. Most of these young people did not really understand the meaning of the word 'political'. They were taught that politics was an activity for those who managed to deceive and then amass wealth by stealing taxes."

"In the 1940s, Colombia was plunged into a civil war between the conservative party and the liberal party, a conflict so merciless that those years were called la Violencia -- 'the violence.' It was a power struggle that spread from the capital of Bogotá and brought bloodshed to the countryside. Peasants identified as liberals were massacred by conservative partisans and vice versa. The Farc was born spontaneously as The peasants' effort to protect themselves against that violence and to safeguard their land from being confiscated by the liberal or conservative landlords. The two parties reached an agreement to share power in government and end the civil war, but the farc was not a part of it."
"*The official initials are f a r c - EP, which in Spanish stands for Colombian revolutionary armed forces - people's army."

On the day before the author's daughter was to turn 17, she asked the commander if she could bake a cake to honor her daughter. She was granted this request, and the guerillas spontaneously made a party:
"FOr a few hours, these young people changed as if my magic. They were no longer guards, or terrorists, or killers. They were young people, my daughter's age, having fun. They danced divinely, as if they'd never done anything else their entire life. They were perfectly synchronized with one another, dancing in that Shack as if it were a ballroom, whirling around with elegant self-awareness. You couldn't help but watch. Jessica, with her long, curly black hair, knew that she was beautiful. She moved her hips and shoulders, just enough to reveal the contours of her curves. El mico was a rather ugly boy, but that night he was transformed. The world was his. I wanted so much to have my children there! It was the first time I thought this. I would have liked for them to know these young people, to discover this strange way of life, so different and yet so close to theirs, because all adolescents in the world are alike. These young people could have been my children. I had known them to be cruel, despotic, humiliating. I could only Wonder as I watched them dance whether my children, under the same conditions, would not have acted the same way."

The guerillas are cruel towards the animals in the jungle:
"The guards had seen them, too. Through the bushes I watched as they grew excited and gave the order to load their guns. I couldn't see anything anymore, I could only hear their voices and the monkey's cries. And then a first detonation, and a second, and yet another, the sharp sound of branches cracking and the thuds on the carpet of leaves. I counted three. Had they killed the mothers to capture the babies? Their perverse satisfaction in killing disgusted me. They always had good excuses to give themselves a clean conscience. We were hungry, we hadn't eaten a real meal for weeks. All that was true, but it wasn't a good enough reason. I found hunting difficult to tolerate. Had I always felt like this? I was no longer sure. I'd been profoundly upset by the business with the guacamaya that Andres had killed for pleasure, and by the death of Cristina's mother. She had fallen from her tree, and the bullet had gone through her stomach. She put her finger in her wound and looked at the blood coming out. 'she was crying, I'm sure she was crying,' William had said to me with a laugh. 'She showed me the blood on her finger, as if she wanted me to do something about it, and then she put her fingers back in the wound and showed me again. She did that a few times, and then she died. Those animals are just like humans,' he concluded. How could you kill a creature that had looked you in the eye, with whom you've established contact, for whom you exist, who has identified you? Of course, none of that mattered anymore when you had already killed a human being. Could I kill? Oh, yes, I could! I had every reason to think I had the right. I was filled with hatred for those who humiliated me and took so much pleasure in my pain. With every word, every order, every affront, I stabbed them with my silence. Oh, yes -- i, too, could kill! And I would feel a pleasure in seeing them put their fingers in their wounds and look at their blood as they became aware of their imminent death, waiting for me to do something. And I wouldn't move. I would watch them die."

Another kidnapping victim, lucho, a fellow senator of the author's, was a diabetic. There was no insulin for him in the Guerilla's camp. Occasionally he would fall sick, and there was danger of him falling into a coma. When the farc was angry with the prisoners, they would refuse to give them the medication they needed:
"Gira, the nurse, came through the prison door. She was doing her rounds among her patients to say that there was no more medication.
'Reprisals.' said pinChao behind me, almost imperceptibly. 'They're going to tighten the screw.'
She walked right by me, staring at me, her gaze full of reproach.
'Yes, look at me carefully,' I said to her. 'Don't ever forget what you see. As a woman you should be ashamed to be part of this.'
She went pale. I could see she was trembling with rage. But she continued her rounds, without saying a word, and went out.
Of course I should have kept my mouth shut. Humility begins with holding one's tongue. I had a great deal to learn. If God didn't want me to be free, I had to accept that I wasn't ready for freedom. This notion became a lifebuoy."

One thing I enjoyed reading about in this book was the fauna of the jungle, the Amazon basin. The author was constantly attacked by insects, some of them so tiny that you couldn't see them, yet they would dig under your skin. She was attacked by many different kinds of animalitos.
BetanCourt was a fastidious observer of the Dynamics constantly going on between herself, the other hostages, and the guerillas, and which were constantly changing.
As an aside, I got sick of the author's always talking about God's plan for her to be kidnapped and held in captivity for more than 6 years. I can't believe anyone would believe that b*******.

Six years is a long time for a Colombian politician to be held captive in the jungle by rebels. I had to keep reading because I knew she escaped alive to write the book. Everything about this book is really interesting - the history, the setting, her struggle to keep up hope - survive - get along with captors and other captives. Very well written. Powerful.

This is a book that I went out of my usual genres of reading and was surprised at how much I liked this book. One must realize that this is not a feel good, pick me up book. This is describing one woman's experience of being held captive for six and a half years in a Columbian jungle. Ingrid Betancourt describes in as much detail her experience. Surviving this type of trauma would probably make telling the story in very graphic details very difficult. The story is told with enough detail to understand the strength that Ingrid had to have to survive six and a half years. I recommend this story to people frequently who are looking for something different to read.

Basically, it's like Isabel Allende meets Susanna Kearsley -- South American history and politics with a little supernatural romance-y-ness. I really really wanted to like this one, being partial to Betancourt, but it was just a little too ... I can't put my finger on it ... emotionless? Stiff? The flipping between the past and present -- always something I'm "eh" on anyway -- was tiresome to me -- artificially stretched the tension.

This was a nicely executed piece of historical political fiction. Most of the novel took place in Argentina during the 1970's. I enjoyed the fact it set during a hostile political environment in a foreign country, unfortunately for me, I think I lost some of the impact because I didn't have any prior knowledge or point of reference for the events described. I really enjoy mysticism, and supernatural elements, but I'm not sure those tied in well with the rest of the novel. It's interesting from the standpoint of familial inheritance and perhaps being attuned to ancestral roots. I did enjoy the passages with the visions she had, they were climactic and vivid. However, it didn't jive well for me in regards to the rest of the material.

I dove into this book the moment I found it on a local bookshop's shelves. I remember when Ingrid Betancourt was released from captivity and I very much wanted to read her story.

She is a powerful, brave, driven woman, and those character traits are what kept her alive in the harsh and unkind conditions in which she found herself. Granted, not all of her captors are heartless and cruel, men and women both, but they shortly become so once they have a power over her life and a gun in their hands. Ingrid befriends several of her fellow captives and takes extraordinary risks to keep one friend, a diabetic, alive.

Sadly, though, most of her captors are as interchangeable in personality and name as are her camps and walks through the immense jungles of Collombia. And what can you do to change this fact of her book? Her experiences are intense, and she conveys that she felt as unhappy and helpless as her writing. For this reason this book is worth reading to understand a bit better the feelings and experiences of someone in such straits.

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 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.

www.theliterarygothamite.com

3.5 This book goes back and forward in time, a structure that I usually don't like but which worked for this book, at least until the end. A vivid and graphic description of the torture and violence that was Argentina in the seventies, the military coups and the disappeared. Julia, who also has the power of vision, showing her small snippets of events in the future, becomes caught up in the plight of the Montenaros and is therefore wanted by the government. Not sure this type of magical realism was necessary though it did serve her a good turn on one important occasion and is not an overwhelming theme of the novel. Loved her grandmother, who also has this sight. She isms very memorable characters.

The author's own background leads to her expertise in writing this type of novel, as she herself was a prisoner in the Colombia jungle for six years. The parts in the prison, the fear and terror, the torturers were hard to read but this was when her writing was the strongest. So many people went through such horrible things. Such a horrible time in this countries past. The story of Julia and Theo was very interesting, and it showed to sides of the people involved in such horror, one bent on revenge, the other willing and wanting to start over, not forget but just to live. Felt the ending was a bit rushed and confusing but all in all a very interesting story and an indepth look at a particular if horrible time in history.½

Well, on the plus side, the supernatural aspect is there right from the get-go. No surprise aliens or alternate personalities thrust upon me after I've gone a good way into the novel. Julia, our protagonist, is one of a long line of women in her family who have some sort of second sight, able to foretell future deaths and work to avoid them. Anyone remember that show from the 90, Early Edition? Sort of like that, but set during Argentina's Dirty War and its aftermath. But right there, at the beginning, bam, supernatural. Thank you Ingrid Betancourt for not trying to trick me or surprise me, but just being honest from page one that there is some weird otherwordly stuff that's going to be going on.

You know what else happens right around page one: two or three metaphors right after each other. Then more. Then characters that earnestly spout vapid phrases like Love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Then coincidences. Then a narrative that jumps around from Julia to other people and back again. Each time I think Okay, I can deal with this, the book goes back into airport thriller style, completely illogical.

So I don't believe any of the characters. Or the plot. But I do believe Betancourt really really really really really really tried. She can do some things well; she writes the violence amazingly. But then she has a wife hide in the trunk of her husband's car to see if he's cheating on her and people oh so randomly running into each other on buses or seeing enemies countries away in photographs hung on the wall of a lover's house and I think Sure to myself. Whatever.

Maybe go read The Dancer Upstairs if interested in a South American dirty war-esque struggle. Or read The Blue Line, but for the violence, not the book itself.

The Blue Line by Ingrid Betancourt went on sale January 12, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Ingrid Betancourt, was held hostage by the FARC in the remote jungles of Columbia for six years. What courage and character it took to survive this ordeal! The book was an ordeal in itself as Ingrid is moved from one remote camp to another anonymous and indistinguishable remote place. Her existence was composed primarily of boredom and of cruelty from her captors so it is probably appropriate that the book is quite tedious in places. I did love that she took up needlework that she learned from the women holding her hostage.

I got close to finishing the first chapter and it gave me scary dreams. As much as I want to read this, I think it is going to be too disturbing for me so it is going back to BookCrossing

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 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.

While the story of her capture and captivity is gripping, the memoir aspect is highly disappoint. Situations in a quite complex combination of historical ill-will, struggles for autonomy, institutional brutality, and politics are given simplistically. Her thinking is not only black and white, she seems incapable of even attempting to present herself and her choices in an honest light. Seems more like pre-candidacy propaganda than a real attempt to share something of herself.

A gut-wrenching memoir that highlights the extremes of humanity.

resilience in 6 years of jungle captivity.

I like this book becauseit is very interesting, and I like interesting books. my favorite part is when she is trying to escape.

This book is not a cheery read. Six and a half long years in capticity told in a way that leaves you in awe of her abilty to remember the tiniest of details. I was moved by the book and am astounded that she was able to go through what she did and survive without going insane. It details her five escapes and the constant epic marches through the jungle as the FARC had to keep moving constanty to avoid the columbian military. It also details her relationships with her fellow hostages and her captors. I was moved by her strength, her honesty and her ablity to write about the ordeal in a poetic, spititual and philisophical way. A fascinating read on many levels. The book stays with you long after you have finished it. It is first and foremost an investigation in to human nature and the worst and best things we are capable of. In these most awful of circumstances freindships, loyalty and love persist and keep her from the depths of dispair.

Six years of imprisonment in the jungles of the Amazon must have been a hideous experience - and it's inherently difficult to make an interesting story out of a long period of unrelieved hardship. Even harder to get through as I didn't think it was well written, and I also wondered whether the author wasn't presenting herself in a kind light.½

Six years in captivity under conditions of severe hardship is hard to imagine. Betancourt portrays vividly both the physical and emotional toll exacted. The problems with this memoir are the conditions that she is describing; after a while, one forced march through the jungle seems like the previous one, and one sadistic commander blurs into the next.

Excellent account of Ms. Betancourts' horrendous 6-year ordeal at the hands of FARC Guerillas

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 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.