Muammar Al Khadafi

The 49-year-old mother of two walks through the door of the Siebel Pier One hotel in Sydney’s historic port district in a flowing silk dress. She is soft-spoken, with a slim figure silhouetted against the water and blue sky of Sydney Harbour.

It’s May, and Ms. Betancourt is in Australia for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, where she has been discussing her book “Even Silence Has an End,” published by Virago Press in September. “For me, there was no option but to escape. I had to get back to my children. I wanted them to know I had done everything possible to get back to them, even if I died in the attempt,” she says.

The book recounts, in almost 600 pages, her detention from 2002 to 2008. She was taken by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, while campaigning for the Colombian presidency on an anticorruption platform, and lived in fear of execution with 14 other hostages.

At first, if there were nothing else to occupy her, she would walk back and forth in her cage all day. Later, she would go over every detail of her day in her mind, meditating on how she could have reacted differently to events.

There were also dangers in the jungle—snakes, tarantulas, jaguars and poisonous insects. The hostages were shown a dead anaconda—six meters in length and thick as a barrel, Ms. Betancourt says—to discourage escape attempts. She asked one of the guards how he dared to enter the rivers knowing these creatures were lurking. “The guy said, ‘I’ll die of something, I don’t know if it’s from a bullet or a tree that will fall down on me or an animal that will eat me but when it comes, it will come and I’m ready.’ ” This became her mantra, too.

Today, three years after a dramatic helicopter rescue by Colombian military, Ms. Betancourt is traversing the world on book tours and dividing her time among New York and Boston—where her daughter Melanie, 22, and her son Lorenzo, 19, are studying film and music, respectively—and her mother’s home in Paris.

She says she enjoys indulging in small things: fresh fruit, feminine clothes, and being able to make decisions about the details of her day, such as when to take a shower or whether to take a walk without asking permission.

Reconnecting with her old life has been tough, she says. The first night after her rescue, she stayed at her mother’s house, and had to sleep on the floor because the soft bed felt too strange after years of sleeping on wood panels.

She and her husband filed for divorce in 2009, shortly after her rescue. And while her relationship with her daughter has always been strong, she has had to work harder on Lorenzo. “When I came back, I didn’t have anything to wear, so Melanie and I were sharing everything and we were the same size. Immediately we are connected with no distance. 

With Lorenzo, it was a little different because it was a mum’s relationship with her boy, and he wasn’t a boy anymore. He was eager to make it clear that he was a man and that he was independent.”

Ms. Betancourt says she wrote the book because she had difficulty telling her family about the ordeal. “Melanie has read the book completely and it was difficult for her. Lorenzo read 100 pages and gave up and he said ‘No more of this’ and I’m OK with that.”

Ms. Betancourt says the experience has given her a “deep feeling of gratitude for life.” Before the kidnapping, she was focused on others’ expectations of her as well as her own ambitions, which made her less able to fully experience each moment, she says. “I love life, I love love. I see life in amazing colors,” she says.

By Rebecca Thurlow (Wall Street Journal)