CARACAS, Venezuela — Clara Rojas, one of two hostages freed after years held captive by Colombian rebels, gave birth to her son nearly four years ago by kitchen-knife cesarean and has not seen him since he was taken from the jungle at 8 months old.
“Very soon I will meet him, and little by little, we’ll start sharing what for us is a rebirth,” Rojas told reporters late Friday in Caracas, where she and fellow captive Consuelo Gonzalez met their families and thanked Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for engineering their release.
Wearing a photo of her son around her neck, Rojas said it wasn’t until two weeks ago that she learned what had happened to 3-year-old Emmanuel, hearing on the radio that he was in a foster home in Bogota.
Rojas — an aide to former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who remains in captivity — spoke in general terms about the rebel who fathered her son, reportedly a rank-and-file guerrilla named Rigo.
“I never saw the boy’s father again,” she said in one Colombian radio interview.
After she learned she was pregnant, Rojas shared the news with her fellow captives — “this happiness but also, of course, the anxiety.”
She asked for a doctor, but none came. When the contractions came in April 2004, it was the start of a full day of difficult labor, and Rojas said the rebels, including a male nurse who was in charge, explained she would need a cesarean section because there were risks to the baby and her own life.
“And I said, well, I’ll put it in the hands of God,” Rojas said. When she awoke from the anesthesia, one of the rebels told her: “Clara, don’t move. . . . It’s a boy.”
She decided to name him Emmanuel, “because he was a gift from God.”
The boy suffered a broken arm at birth when he was pulled out by the rebel nurse, Rojas said.
When the boy was 8 months old, Rojas said, she allowed the rebels to take him away for two weeks to receive treatment for the broken arm and leishmaniasis, a parasite malady common in the jungle.
“I didn’t hear any news of the boy again until Dec. 31,” she said.
Listening to the radio that day, she heard Colombian President Alvaro Uribe say in a speech that the child was no longer with Rojas’ captors.
DNA tests later confirmed the boy had been living in a Bogota foster home for more than two years under a different name.
Elvira Forero, head of Colombia’s child welfare agency, says authorities are ready to hand over Emmanuel “whenever she decides she’s ready.”
