Captive: 2,147 Days of Terror in the Colombian Jungle
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On a fateful day in February 2002, campaign manager Clara Rojas accompanied longtime friend and presidential hopeful Ingrid Betancourt into an area controlled by the powerful leftist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Armed with machine guns and grenades, the FARC took them hostage and kept them in the jungle for the next six years.After more than two years of captivity deep in the Colombian jungle, surrounded by jaguars, snakes, and tarantulas, miles from any town or hospital, Clara Rojas prepared to give birth in a muddy tent surrounded by heavily armed guerrillas. Her captors promised that a doctor would be brought to the camp to help her. But when Rojas went into labor and began to suffer complications, the only person on hand was a guerrilla wielding a kitchen knife. The guerrillas drugged Rojas with anesthetic while one of them slit open her abdomen. Her son, Emmanuel, was born by amateur cesarean section in April 2004. His survival was miraculous, but her joy was soon cut short when the FARC took him from her when he was only eight months old. For the next three years, Clara was given no information about him, but her desire to one day see him again kept her alive. In early 2008, Clara was finally liberated and reunited with her son—to whom this book is dedicated. Kirkus Reviews Another perspective on the most famous hostage case in Colombia's troubled recent history. Rojas, a lawyer and former legislator, was captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2002 with her friend, presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. The author would have been all but overshadowed by her world-famous co-captive-whose saintly reputation was sullied by the 2009 book Out of Captivity, written by three Americans held hostage in the same camp-had it not been for the fact that two years into her captivity, she became pregnant and delivered a baby boy via crude field-medicine techniques. Except for her capture and release and a couple of escapes that she and Betancourt attempted early on, the birth merits the majority of Rojas's attention. Though she maintains the mystery of her son Emmanuel's paternity, she writes that the pregnancy caused friction between her and her fellow hostages. She and Betancourt had fallen out after the escape attempts, but unlike the authors of the previous book, Rojas doesn't dwell on her friend's flaws. Rojas claims that she never sympathized with the guerrillas and holds righteous anger toward them for robbing her of six years of her life and separating her from Emmanuel not long after his birth, but the rebels' decency toward her, particularly during her pregnancy, shines through in contrast to the pettiness of her co-captives. Undoubtedly, the author's courage in withstanding her ordeal marks her as an unusual person with an extraordinary story to tell. Unfortunately, the narrative doesn't live up to the subject. Rojas says she wrote the book to put this unpleasant experience behind her and move on. In fact, she seems to have alreadybeen in the process of emotionally escaping from it as she wrote about it, resulting in a quick, light-handed sketch composed from a cautious distance. A disappointingly superficial, unrevealing adventure memoir.
1. Dispatched from Freedom 12. My Mother 33. The Day Before the Kidnapping 74. The Day 155. The Day After 336. The Jungle 397. Night 498. The Guerrillas 539. A Sense of Decency 6110. Friendship 6311. Escape 6712. The Unraveling of a Friendship 7913. Solitude 8314. Fasting 8915. Faith 9316. Doubt and Anxiety 10117. Pastimes 11518. Motherhood 12319. Emmanuel 13520. With a Baby in the Camp 15321. The Trek 16322. Christmas 17323. The Long Separation 17724. Waiting 18325. Murmurs of Freedom 19126. On the Road to Freedom 19927. Operation Emmanuel 20928. The Reunion 22129. Readaptation 23330. Time Lost 23731. Forgiveness 23932. A New Tomorrow 241Acknowledgments 243
