BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A meal was rice and beans. Bed was the ground under a patched plastic tarp. They bathed in rivers, and when they weren’t chained by the neck to trees, they were forced on long marches to new hide-outs under the jungle canopy.
Hostages freed in a daring helicopter rescue said Thursday that their grueling existence as captives of Colombian rebels worsened in recent months as government troops closed in and supplies became more scarce.
“In the last year, it was tougher to get food. There was little variety, no fruit, no vegetables,” said Ingrid Betancourt, the former presidential candidate who spent six years in captivity.
Betancourt, three U.S. military contractors, and 11 Colombian soldiers and police officers were freed Wednesday from the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) of Colombia. In their first hours of freedom, they offered tidbits of information about their grueling lives in the jungle.
The hostages would wake about 5:30 a.m., kidnapped soldier William Perez said Thursday, speaking to The Associated Press from the military hospital where he was being treated.
They would eat a breakfast of coffee and corn cakes, listen to the radio and exercise for an hour. Lunch was rice, pasta and lentils. About once a month, they would get a little bit of meat or vegetables. The only fruit was what they could pick — wild fruit whose names he didn’t even know. He said he craved papaya most of all.
They would be in bed by 6 p.m.
“Nothing more,” said Perez, who spent a decade in captivity. “The only thing was the radio. They gave us batteries.”
Meals came from an old pot with no lid. They slept in improvised tents of plastic tarp. Clothing, especially underwear, was scarce, Betancourt said.
“We had to patch up our boots because there was no way to get new ones,” Betancourt said.
Hostages made references to the cruelty of their captors but offered few details.
“It was not treatment that you can give to a living being, I won’t even speak of a human being,” Betancourt told France 2 television. “I wouldn’t have given the treatment I had to an animal, perhaps not even to a plant. … There was only arbitrary cruelty.”
But often the greatest challenge was boredom, Perez said, interrupted only by periodic marches from camp to camp. His worst memories were being chained by the neck to a post, and forced marches without boots.
Hostages lived with injuries sustained during capture and with jungle diseases they had no way of treating. Two of the Americans were infected with a jungle parasite that causes painful sores.
All three Americans were described Thursday as being in very good physical condition and high spirits by a U.S. Army team.
Medical treatment was scarce, although Betancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen, said she was able to get some care because the rebels knew “France was behind” her so they had to keep her alive.
William Perez, who studied nursing in the military, said his background helped him treat ailing hostages, including Betancourt, whom he fed with a spoon at one point.
Overall, the hostages said, their lives were miserable. “Life here is not a life,” Betancourt wrote to her mother last year. “It is a complete waste of time.”
On their first full day of freedom, the hostages were reunited with relatives.
Betancourt embraced her two grown children for the first time since she was kidnapped.
“Nirvana, paradise — that must be very similar to what I feel at this moment,” Betancourt told reporters after hugging her daughter, Melanie, 22, and her son, Lorenzo, 19.
The three American defense contractors arrived late Wednesday in San Antonio, where they were admitted to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. They did not make a public appearance or issue any statements.
U.S. military officials said the men — Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves — showed remarkable resilience and appeared to be in good physical and psychological condition. Stansell had a private reunion with his son, daughter and parents, while relatives of Howes and Gonsalves were en route for reunions with the men. The three are expected to remain at Fort Sam Houston for two to four days.
In Colombia, television coverage alternated between images of the Betancourt reunion and a boisterous rally at the Defense Ministry. At the rally, a band welcomed back the 11 Colombian army soldiers and police officers who had been rescued.
The former captives, dressed in fatigues, stood on a balcony and spoke to a crowd assembled below. They waved and, at one point, linked hands and yelled in Spanish, “Hip, hip, hooray for the Colombian army!”
In what Colombian officials called an elaborate ruse, army commandos deceived a rebel unit entrusted with the prized hostages into turning them over. The rescue operation further strengthened the government’s hand in its four-decade battle with the guerrillas of FARC.
“The guerrillas feel more and more defeated and demoralized,” said Juan Carlos Bermeo, one of the freed soldiers.
The Washington Post contributed to this report.
