Together with fellow Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, Clara Rojas also spent six years held as a hostage by the FARC. She has just visited the Netherlands for the presentation of the Dutch translation of her book I survived for my child.

While in the country, she gave an exclusive interview to José Zepeda of Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s Latin American service.
 

Clara Rojas says that if she had it within her power, she would see to it that the Colombian government started to negotiate again with the leftwing FARC guerrilla movement, to obtain – what she regards as the most important objective – the release of all the hostages. She finds it hard to understand that the government has not reacted positively to the FARC proposal to release another group of hostages. Ms Rojas adds that she would not delay in sending a helicopter to pick them up.
 
Pregnant
During the many years she spent forced to live amongst members of this rebel movement, Clara Rojas noted that guerrillas are people who generally lack family ties. They live in complete isolation from the rest of the world, including ‘normal’ Colombian society. Many of them are very young; just teenage boys and girls, but ones who carry weapons. But Ms Rojas’s feelings about her former captors are divided. On the one hand they were capable of the most cruel and inhumane acts; they kept her chained up. On the other, they could be polite, too, and did their best to save her life.
 
Clara Rojas became pregnant by one of the guerrillas, and gave birth to her child under the most atrocious circumstances. One of her captors – not a trained physician - performed a Caesarean section on her to deliver her child, who had an arm broken during the birth. She called him Emmanuel ‘God with us’, a name she found most appropriate for this infant, born in captivity. Clara Rojas accepted the fact of her pregnancy, and says she never once thought of having it aborted. In a certain sense, as she herself comments, it was this child who helped her to survive.

Despair
Of course, there were also moments of despair, as – for example – when her child was taken away from her because he was sick. This left her distraught and screaming out night after night ‘get me out of here’. But her cries disappeared into the depths of the forest. Nonetheless, she believes her pleas were eventually heard, for after six years she was finally liberated thanks to the intervention of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and reunited with her young son.

Clara Rojas is a delicate, gentle woman, who does not harbour any feelings of revenge against those who held her captive for six long years. She is convinced that survived this hell because of her faith. She admits that she did want revenge at the very beginning, but she has since learned to forgive, a process that was helped by the writing of her book.