Ingrid
Betancourt was born Dec 25, 1961, in Bogota, Columbia. As a politician and a
presidential candidate, she was celebrated for her determination to combat
widespread corruption. In 2002 she was taken hostage by the FARC, a Columbian
guerrilla organization. For six years, the FARC held her hostage in the
Columbian jungle. She was rescued on July 2, 2008.
Ingrid Betancourt, without proselytizing politics,
describes the day-to-day experiences and struggles of being a war zone hostage,
along with other hostages, in primitive jungle conditions, constantly on the
move. At one point, she aptly references the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, consciously
aware of the psychological horror in her own prison/guard relationships, while
trying to maintain her own humanity. This was her uncertain daily reality for
six years.
Her book is the perfect companion book to The Lucifer
Effect.
Even Silence has
an End by Ingrid Betancourt, 2010, Excerpt
My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle
A few months before my
abduction, I’d switched on the television and come on a fascinating
documentary. In the 1970s, Stanford University had undertaken a simulation of
prison conditions to study the behavior of ordinary people. The findings were
astonishing. Well-balanced, normal young people disguised as guards, with the
power to open and close doors, turned into monsters. Other young people,
equally well balanced and normal, masquerading as prisoners, let themselves be
mistreated. One guard dragged a prisoner over to a closet, where he could only
stand, not sit, and left him there for hours, until he passed out. It was a
game. However, faced with peer pressure, only one of them had been able to
react “out of character” and demand that the experiment be stopped.
I know that FARC was playing
with fire. That we were in an enclosed world, without cameras, without
witnesses, at the mercy of our jailers. For weeks I had observed the behavior
of these armed children, forced to act as adults. I could already detect all the
symptoms of a relationship that could easily degenerate and turn poisonous. I
thought it was possible to fight against it, by preserving one’s own character.
But I also knew that peer pressure could turn those children into the guardians
of hell.
When you’re chained by the neck
to a tree, and deprived of all freedom – the freedom to move around, to talk,
to eat, to drink, to carry out your most basic bodily needs – well, it took me
several years to realize it, but you still have the most important freedom of
all, which no one can take away from you: that is the freedom to choose what
kind of person you want to be.
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