PARIS
“I owe everything to France,” she said, after landing at a military air base outside Paris to a warm greeting by President Nicolas Sarkozy. “France is my home. You are my family.”
In comments to Europe 1 radio, she said that her captors had chained her day and night for the first three years, but that she was sustained by her Roman Catholic faith and thoughts of her family. “I was in chains all the time, 24 hours a day, for three years,” she said. “I tried to wear those chains with dignity, even if I felt that it was unbearable.”
Asked if she had been tortured, she said, “Yes, yes,” and said her captors had fallen into “diabolical behavior,” adding, “It was so monstrous I think they themselves were disgusted.” She called her rescue “a miracle of the Virgin Mary” and said, “You need tremendous spirituality to stop yourself falling into the abyss.” She had made herself a wooden rosary in the jungle, she said.
Pope Benedict XVI has invited her to meet him next week.
Speaking at the Élysée Palace with Mr. Sarkozy later on Friday, before a reception for her family and supporters, Ms. Betancourt said the jungle was “an absolutely hostile world.” She described “no sun, no sky, a green ceiling — it was too much, it was too much, a wall of trees, a lot of insects, each more dreadful than the next.”
She said she walked perhaps 200 miles a year. “I walked with a hat pulled down over my ears because all sorts of things fall on your head, ants that bite you, insects, lice, ticks, with gloves because everything in the jungle bites, each time you try to grab on to something so that you don’t fall, you’ve put your hand on a tarantula, you’ve put your hand on a thorn, a leaf that bites, it’s an absolutely hostile world, dangerous with dangerous animals,” she said. “But the most dangerous of all was man, those who were behind me with their big guns.”
Ms. Betancourt, 46, whose father was a Colombian diplomat in Paris, studied here and married a French diplomat, attaining dual citizenship. They divorced, but their two children campaigned for their mother’s release, helping make her a French symbol of suffering and endurance.
On the flight to France, news agencies reported, Ms. Betancourt said: “I owe my life to France. If France hadn’t fought for me, I wouldn’t be here making this extraordinary journey.”
Mr. Sarkozy, who championed her cause, greeted her at the airport with an embrace, and said: “Dear Ingrid, we have been waiting for this so long. All of France is welcoming you back today.”
He called her bloodless rescue “a message of hope today for all those who believe in freedom.”
Mr. Sarkozy was accompanied by his wife, Carla, senior officials and members of the support group that has campaigned for Ms. Betancourt’s release. It was a signal honor for the French president to meet the plane, which he had sent to Colombia with her children to reunite the family and which now brought them all back to France. But it was wonderful publicity, too, covered live on television, allowing Mr. Sarkozy to bask in the good feelings around the release, which he had made a priority of his government.
At one point, Ms. Betancourt grabbed Mr. Sarkozy’s hand and said, “I owe so much to this extraordinary man who did so much for me,” and she praised France for aiding her family, providing moral support and for pressing the Colombian government to find a nonviolent way to rescue her. “France opposed a military operation that would put the lives of the hostages at risk, particularly my life,” she said. “So in a sense you saved my life.”
She asked Mr. Sarkozy for his continuing help in freeing the other 700 or so hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. She was freed along with three American contractors and 11 Colombians. He answered, “Let it be clear, we will continue.”
While the French saw Ms. Betancourt as a symbol of their own sense of political activism — an ecologist, an educated person with a social conscience, independent and brave — many in Colombia saw her as a dilettante, an exile who returned to teach the natives how to live and who courted publicity.
Mr. Sarkozy’s own role became a topic of heated internal politics on Friday. The rescue operation, carried out by Colombian forces with American guidance, was done with no French involvement and no forewarning to Paris.
That prompted the Socialist he defeated for the presidency, Ségolène Royal, to belittle the diplomatic role Mr. Sarkozy had played. “Nicolas Sarkozy had absolutely nothing to do with this liberation,” she said in an interview during a visit to Canada. She called his diplomatic efforts “useless.”
Mr. Sarkozy’s allies leaped to counterattack. Prime Minister François Fillon said Ms. Royal was behaving like “a little girl in the playground” while Frédéric Lefebvre, a spokesman for Mr. Sarkozy’s political party, said it was “pitiful” that Ms. Royal was “trying to break the national unity” surrounding Ms. Betancourt’s release.
He said that Mr. Sarkozy had displayed “total commitment these past 12 months in the search for all possible ways” to ensure Ms. Betancourt’s release, and that making accusations against him “is really not worthy of a woman who aspires to the highest responsibilities.”
French officials also dismissed Swiss reports that bribes had been paid to the FARC and that the rescue was a staged affair. Ms. Betancourt is expected to undergo a medical examination at a French military hospital on Saturday.
