Colombia’s Unlikely Opposition Leader

People here share a memory of Ingrid Betancourt.

On a night just over two years ago, the nation watched as the freshman representative from Bogota took the floor of Congress to argue for the impeachment of President Ernesto Samper.

In those two hours, she became the most recognizable congressional figure to emerge from a campaign finance scandal that shook Samper’s presidency.

“From then on, everywhere I went, people referred to me as Ingrid’s dad,” said Gabriel Betancourt, who until then had been known as a former education minister and ambassador. “That’s fine, because I feel very proud to be Ingrid’s dad.”

Ingrid Betancourt is Colombia’s Sam J. Ervin Jr., the senator who presided over the Watergate hearings a continent and nearly a quarter-century away. Both came to represent integrity in countries suffering a crisis of doubt over the honor of their public servants--and wit in nations too shocked to laugh.

But Betancourt’s story is strikingly different from Ervin’s. And those distinctions reveal a lot about Colombia.

To start with, Betancourt lost her battle to topple a president. Unlike Richard Nixon, Samper appears certain to finish his term in August, even though polls show that most Colombians believe he accepted $6 million in campaign contributions from the drug barons who supply 80% of the world’s cocaine.

After their respective hearings, Ervin became a hero, but Betancourt has paid dearly for bucking the leader of both her country and her political party.

The most vivid public example came when she was gaveled down while trying to address the Liberal Party’s convention this year. The most agonizing private consequence was her decision to send her children, ages 9 and 12, into exile more than a year ago after learning a murder contract had been put out on her and her family.

While Ervin cultivated the image of a folksy Southern lawyer, Betancourt is unabashedly cosmopolitan--educated in France, England and at Bogota’s exclusive Lycee France.

She started learning dressage--an intricate form of horse riding--about the same time she learned to walk. Her playmates, besides her older sister, were the offspring of diplomats and the street children from shelters that her mother, Yolanda Pulecio, had started.

In the end, the most important difference might turn out to be that during the Watergate hearings, Ervin was a senator nearing the end of a distinguished career. At 36, Betancourt is just getting started.

So far, she has parlayed her opposition to the president and the embedded party corruption that she claims he represents into tremendous popularity with the electorate. In the March race for Senate--an office chosen by nationwide balloting in Colombia--Betancourt received more votes than any other candidate.

Now she is testing whether her personal popularity can be transformed into a solid voter base for a movement to reform machine politics. She blames patronage politics--where votes are exchanged for favors, as in New York’s once-infamous Tammany Hall--for eroding Colombia’s democratic institutions. That, in turn, has prolonged three decades of guerrilla war and allowed illegal drug money to permeate the government.

“Between the drug traffickers and the guerrillas, we have been made almost ashamed to be Colombian, and a country that is ashamed of itself is a country without a future,” she said. “We have to reconstruct our hopes and dreams.”

While remaining a Liberal Party member, Betancourt recently founded a political movement called Liberal Oxygen with the goal of reforming Colombian politics in general and the Liberal Party in particular.

In her drive for change, Betancourt has pledged her support in today’s presidential election to Andres Pastrana, the candidate of the Social Conservative Party, traditionally her own party’s archrival.

But it is not clear whether voters will follow her into the Pastrana camp. Does the lady have coattails?

Veterans of her own party scoff at the notion.

“This is a transitory phenomenon,” Sen. Marta Catalina Daniels said. “Here in Colombia, every four years, there is a current of opinion that disagrees with whichever government is in power, and someone gets those votes.”

Thanks to the huge vote for Betancourt in March, her slate will have two senators in the 102-member upper house that begins its session in July, Daniels noted. The Liberal Party will have 53.

Further, her ticket’s candidates for the lower Chamber of Representatives were all defeated.

“People who vote freely [without party pressure] vote based on what a person has done,” not because of endorsements, said Claudia Vasquez, a distant cousin and political ally.

That lesson makes Betancourt’s decision to support Pastrana risky.

“A lot of people feel that Pastrana is also a [political] machine,” Vasquez said. “We are making a compromise with a person who is involved with some things we don’t like. But that is politics.”

To explain why she endorsed Pastrana--the son of a former president and a lackluster campaigner who lost to Samper four years ago--Betancourt is broadcasting a television spot.

In the commercial, she quizzes Pastrana on his promise to call a referendum on election reform within 30 days of taking office--her condition for supporting him.

Huddled in a home studio near Bogota’s Pink Zone of fashionable shops and restaurants, the senator-elect critiques three takes of the commercial with her closest advisors, including her husband, publicist Juan Carlos LeCompte.

“I’m just a product in the hands of my husband,” she said with a giggle.

That comment would sound absurd to anyone who knows Betancourt. As her father said: “She has always been hard-headed.”

In fact, Vasquez recalled that when they attended the prestigious Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris, Betancourt shared a tiny two-room apartment with three other students out of stubbornness. She had left the family’s comfortable Paris apartment after a disagreement with her mother.

Their experience as students marked them both, Vasquez said.

“People there are very passionate,” she recalled. “The people who went to that school went into French politics.”

Thus, the school is oriented to forming leaders who will set the course of a nation.

Vasquez was with Betancourt when she met her first husband, a French diplomat, in a Paris cafe. After their marriage, Betancourt traveled the world with him.

But in 1989, Betancourt decided that her days as a world traveler were over. She made the decision the day that drug traffickers assassinated presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan.

“When they killed him, I had a single obsession: to come back to Colombia at whatever cost, even though it cost me my marriage,” she said. “They killed Galan on Aug. 17, 1989, and by the beginning of January 1990, I was in Colombia.”

Betancourt landed high-level jobs, first at the Treasury Ministry and then at Commerce. But she did not come back home to be a bureaucrat.

“She was very clear that what she wanted to do was politics,” Vasquez recalled.

Usually, getting into Colombian politics requires a “godfather” and accumulating favors for financing. But Betancourt did not want those kinds of strings.

She raised money from friends for a campaign that she herself calls scandalous. She distributed condoms, drawing this analogy: Use condoms to protect yourself from AIDS; vote for Ingrid to protect yourself from corruption.

In 1994, she was the Liberal Party’s top vote-getter in the Bogota congressional district. Then the real work began.

“In Colombia, an attractive young woman has to prove that her success in politics is not just because she is attractive, young and a woman.”

Her big issue became the influence of narcotics money in the campaign of Samper, a president she had supported because of his social programs.

As she looked over the evidence and investigated on her own, Betancourt became convinced Samper knew that the drug barons had financed the final push of his campaign.

She presented her findings, first in her eloquent, prime-time plea for impeachment, then in a book, “He Did Know.”

Not everyone admires Betancourt’s stance.

“All she has done is dedicate herself to personal insults and inciting accusations,” Daniels said. “Traditionally, the country has been divided between Liberals and Conservatives. Now they want to divide it between good guys and bad guys.”

Daniels charged that Betancourt’s dispute with Samper was over money, not ideology.

Betancourt began attacking the president after he refused to name her father an ambassador, so that he would be eligible for a $500 monthly pension, Daniels said. Foreign Ministry records show that both of Betancourt’s parents have served as an ambassador: her father in Paris, her mother in Guatemala City.

But mudslinging is the least of Betancourt’s problems. After her book about Samper was published in December 1996, a stranger visited her congressional offices to warn her that a professional killer had been hired to murder her family. The next day, she was on a plane to New Zealand to leave her children with their father, her first husband.

Now they communicate daily by Internet.

“They feel very Colombian and stay informed about what is happening here,” she said.

With her children far away, Betancourt occupies her weekends with her husband of two years, her Labrador retriever, her mare and the classics.

“When I read Plato, I laugh,” she said. “It is incredible that this man felt the same anguish 2,500 years ago as I feel, in countries with nothing in common, struggling for the same justice, the same democracy, the same fair government--in other words, the same republic.”