Betancourt `Put Off' Suicide to Hear Colombian Radio Broadcasts By Andrea Jaramillo

Betancourt `Put Off' Suicide to Hear Colombian Radio Broadcasts


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July 7 (Bloomberg) -- Within hours of being freed after six years as a terrorist hostage in the Colombian jungle, Ingrid Betancourt paused during a press conference when she spotted a man she said helped keep her alive.

``I'm sorry,'' said Betancourt, 46, as she moved away from a microphone set up on the military airport runway in Bogota. ``But this has to be a hug.''

She then embraced Herbin Hoyos, founder and host of ``Voices of Kidnapping,'' a radio program that relays messages from family members to people held captive by terrorists. Betancourt, a former presidential candidate, said the words read over the airwaves helped her fend off suicide.

``I never attempted it,'' she said. ``I put it off every day upon hearing my mom and my children on the radio.''

The program is unique to Colombia, where guerrillas, paramilitaries and cocaine traffickers have used kidnapping for decades to raise cash and strengthen their negotiating position with the government. Today, about 2,800 Colombians are being held, the most in the world, according to Fundacion Pais Libre, a Bogota-based organization. Most are held for ransom, which can top 1 billion pesos ($574,000), according to the organization.

Betancourt, who was freed with 14 others by the Colombian army last week, called Hoyos, 38, a ``friend for life.''

Hundreds of Calls

During the program, transmitted by Caracol Radio from midnight to 6 a.m. each Sunday, Hoyos takes hundreds of calls from Colombians who hope their kidnapped relatives are listening. Betancourt's mother, husband, son and daughter called regularly.

Captors hand out radios to keep up the morale of the hostages and discourage them from committing suicide. Hoyos calls the program a ``cruel mutual need.''

``We do this to keep them alive,'' Hoyos said. The guerrillas ``use the program for the same reason.''

Luis Eladio Perez, a 55-year-old former senator, said the radio was his ``umbilical cord'' during the seven years he was held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country's biggest guerrilla group, which also held Betancourt.

FARC guerrillas gave Perez his radio -- a silver, pocket- sized Sony -- in mid-2001, days before chaining him by the neck to a tree.

Back in his apartment overlooking the mountains that edge eastern Bogota, Perez clutched the Sony as he spoke one night in May of how the messages from his wife, Angela, and children kept him alive.

`Want to Die'

``There comes a point when you want to die,'' Perez said. The messages ``make you remember that your family is fighting to get you out. You have to hold on. You have to eat. And you have to exercise. You just have to try to stay alive.''

Hoyos hatched the idea for the show in 1994, when he himself was kidnapped as he finished his weekly news program. Whisked to a rebel camp, he encountered a hostage shackled to a tree.

Hoyos said he thought the man was dead. As he looked closer, he realized that 62-year-old Nacianceno Murcia, gaunt, pale and barefoot, was alive. In one hand, he held a radio.

Murcia told Hoyos he listened to him all the time. He urged the reporter to do a program on kidnap victims.

``You never talk about us,'' Hoyos recalled Murcia telling him.

Freed days later, Hoyos dedicated part of his air time to relatives of kidnap victims. Overwhelmed by the number of calls, he soon turned the whole show over to ``Voices of Kidnapping.'' Others have followed, including RCN Radio, Colombia's biggest station after Caracol.

`No Reply'

Martha Arango, 53, said she suffers from not being able to have a conversation with her husband, Oscar Tulio Lizcano, a 63- year-old former congressman kidnapped in 2000.

``They are monologues,'' said Arango, who sends at least one message a day. ``Words with no reply.''

While radio messages gave Betancourt some solace, the French-Colombian, who was kidnapped as she campaigned in 2002, wrote in a proof-of-life letter in October that she was tormented by not being able to watch her son Lorenzo, who was 13 when she was seized, grow up.

She said she found a Carolina Herrera magazine advertisement featuring a young man, tore it out and kept it, taking the image to be that of her son.

``That broke my heart,'' Juan Carlos Lecompte, Betancourt's husband, said in an interview outside Caracol's studios on a recent Sunday.

100,000 Photos

Lecompte said he made 100,000 copies of a picture of Betancourt's two children, Lorenzo, now 19, and Melanie, 22. In April, Lecompte took the prints, emblazoned with the words ``To Ingrid, From Juan Carlos,'' and scattered them across the jungle from a small plane.

Betancourt, who heard about the pictures by radio, said she asked her captors to bring her one. None ever reached her.

She got to see Lorenzo and Melanie on July 3, a day after her rescue. She climbed onto the government plane that brought them to Bogota and cried as she ran her hands through Lorenzo's hair. They look, she said, ``big and beautiful.''

``So different, yet the same.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrea Jaramillo in Bogota at ajaramillo1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: July 7, 2008 00:01 EDT