Ingrid Betancourt’s candidacy comes at a critical time, when Colombians are fed up with the political establishment and the future of the peace agreement is at stake.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Ingrid Betancourt, a former congresswoman and one-time guerrilla hostage who has come to symbolize both the brutality of Colombia’s long war and the country’s efforts at reconciliation, will run for president, a person close to Ms. Betancourt’s campaign said Tuesday.
Ms. Betancourt, who was kidnapped in 2002 and held by the country’s largest guerrilla force for more than six years, announced her bid for the May election with the country at a critical crossroads.
Following more than 50 years of war between the government and the guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the two sides signed a peace deal in 2016. But a swell of other armed groups have swept into the vacuum and continued to fight.
Violence has surged in parts of the countryside — and critics have faulted the government for not investing enough to address the inequality and poverty that had helped fuel the war, as it had committed to doing in the peace deal.
Many in Colombia are fed up with the political status quo, a sentiment that burst into the public sphere last May, when thousands took to the streets for more than a month to protest hardship that was only made worse by the pandemic.
Ms. Betancourt was campaigning for the presidency two decades ago when she was captured by the FARC. Following her years in captivity — in which she was sometimes held in chains — she has both supported the peace process and criticized the FARC, emerging as a symbol of national attempts to acknowledge the costs of the war, but also to move beyond it.
Sergio Guzmán, an analyst in Bogotá, called Ms. Betancourt the country’s “reconciliation candidate.”
The question, he said, is whether that’s what Colombians want.
There is widespread discontent with the current president, Iván Duque, who is a product of the country’s right-wing political establishment, while a left-wing populist, Gustavo Petro, is leading in the polls amid a leftist, anti-incumbent wave that is sweeping Latin America.
“Can Ingrid become a balm to those prevailing negative emotions that we’re feeling right now?” he said. “I don’t know. That’s one of the things that her candidacy is going to tell us.”
But to make any headway among voters, he said, “she needs to sell the idea that reconciliation is better than populism.”
“All our elections have been: fear and hope and hate,” he went on. “No election has really been fought on compassion and reconciliation.”
While Ms. Betancourt is widely known throughout the country, a win in May is far from certain.
Today, there are more than 20 candidates for the presidency, with most of the best-known candidates grouped into three coalitions: a coalition on the left, headed by Mr. Petro; a coalition in the center, which Ms. Betancourt is joining; and a coalition on the right, whose members are seen as the torchbearers for the current government.
To even get to the May election, Ms. Betancourt would first have to win the March primary, in which she will compete against others in the center, including Alejandro Gaviria, a former health minister and recent head of a prestigious university.
Mr. Guzmán pointed out that Ms. Betancourt joined the race late in the electoral calendar and called her bid “a Hail Mary.”
Ms. Betancourt is one of just a handful of women candidates in the three leading coalitions.
The most prominent female candidate to this point has been Francia Márquez, a young, Afro-Colombian politician and environmental activist.
Ms. Márquez, who has joined the coalition on the left, has distinguished herself not only because of her identity — Colombian politics has been dominated by wealthy white men — but because of her outspoken embrace of feminist politics and willingness to criticize Mr. Petro.
Ms. Betancourt is the daughter of a Colombian politician and a Colombian diplomat, and later became a French citizen through her first husband.
In 2002, following time in Congress, Ms. Betancourt launched a campaign for presidency as a member of the Partido Verde Oxígeno, a young political movement with a pacificist, environmental, anti-corruption philosophy. On Feb. 23, 2002, she was traveling to a campaign event in the city of San Vicente del Caguán, when she was stopped at a roadblock and taken hostage by the FARC.
During her years in captivity in the jungle, she was treated brutally and tried to escape repeatedly, experiences she recounted in her book “Even Silence Has An End.”
She was eventually rescued by the Colombian government, and over the years she has emerged as the country’s best-known victim. But she has also been the subject of criticism — from those who say she has taken attention away from poorer, lesser known victims, and from others who have criticized her for seeking compensation from the Colombian government following her captivity and rescue.
In a country of 50 million people, nine million are registered with the government as conflict victims.
“We have a window — a generational opportunity — to leave behind the insane violence we have lived in all our lives,” Ms. Betancourt told The New York Times in an interview last year, speaking of the country’s peace deal. “I would like us to be able to open that window and let the light in.”
Sofía Villamil contributed reporting.
