A Spanish review of a French documentary about Colombia
In the early 2000s, l’affaire Íngrid Betancourt —the hostage-taking of a Colombian French dual national presidential candidate at the height of the 2002 Colombian general election campaign—gripped France. Successive French governments of Jacques Chirac and Nicholas Sarkozy attempted to secure Betancourt’s release from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist-Leninist guerilla organisation which controlled a vast swathe of the country at the time. Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin declared her prospective liberation ‘une affaire d’Etat’ and launched a freelance military operation to rescue her, ending in failure and diplomatic embarrassment. Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë made Betancourt an honorary citizen of Paris and, in 2004, unveiled a larger-than-life portrait of her on the front of the town hall.
For a while, the intricacies of Colombian politics were the talk of the town in Paris. When new proof of life-footage was dispatched from the Colombian jungle on 30 November 2007, the interest in Betancourt’s whereabouts gained new momentum. Delanoë replaced Betancourt’s town hall-portrait with a still from the video footage showing the emaciated hostage in chains—an image that has stayed with one of our colleagues at Translator ever since.
Betancourt’s ordeal in the Colombian jungle ended six years, four months and eighteen days later with her liberation on 2 July 2008, as part of the Colombian military mission Operación Jaque. Sixteen years further on, French filmmakers Christophe Astruc and Julie Peyrard have revisited the rise and fall of the FARC as part of their documentary Colombie: la paix confisquée – Paroles d’otages. Diario Red’s Iván Reguera, himself a filmmaker who was working in Colombia’s so-called demilitarised zone (DMZ) at the time of Betancourt’s kidnapping, has reviewed the documentary now streaming in Spanish on Movistar Plus+. (For those in France, the film is currently available for free here).
A nostalgic Reguera sets the scene with personal recollections of his time spent filming in Colombia’s poverty-stricken Tumaco, Salahonda, and San Sebastián, where he produced a series of documentaries for an NGO in the early aughts. He vividly recalls the constant military presence during filming (“young men armed to their teeth”), a precarious chase through mangroves, and the charred remains of a taxi, whose driver had unsuccessfully tried to settle scores related to drug-trafficking. Reguera paints a personal picture of his own lived experience in the DMZ. This was no film, he makes clear, but rather the crass reality of day-to-day life for the local population.
Fast-forward to 2024, “peace in Colombia is still fragile” notes Reguera. He points to recent developments last summer when the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), a splinter group of ex-FARC members, called in question the 2016 peace agreement between the now-diminished guerilla organisation and the current Colombian government. EMC-leader Iván Mordisco is not part of the current Total Peace policy implemented by President Gustavo Petro in 2022. The film critic grapples to understand why “a country with such resources had to suffer so much and for so long”: the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship, drug-traffickers, communists, nationalists…
Betancourt’s kidnapping – and Betancourt herself – might have been the hook for Colombie: la paix confisquée – Paroles d’otages, but the French documentary also features exclusive interviews with former guerillas, including a former child soldier (“the Pied Pipers of Hamelin, but with machine guns instead of flutes”, writes Reguera), as well as testimonies from several former hostages. One interviewee, policeman Jhon Frank Pinchao Blanco was instrumental in relaying the coordinates of Betancourt’s whereabouts in 2008 to the Colombian government, leading to her liberation months later.
But Betancourt was only one of over twenty thousand hostages kidnapped by the FARC between 1990 and 2016, Reguera notes. She had to rebuild her life from scratch. So did the many, many others. While he declares the film good, Reguera’s sympathies ultimately seem to lie more with the Colombian people as a whole, than with just one of the prominent victims of those violent days.
Colombia: La Paz Secuestrada is a documentary now streaming in Spanish on Movistar Plus+. For those in France, the film is currently available for free here.
Iván Reguera reviews films for Diario Red, the digital magazine of Spain’s free-to-air television channel Canal Red. Full original film review in Spanish under the title ‘Colombia: la Paz secuestrada’: el país que nunca mereció una historia tan feroz’, published on 11 January 2025.
