Violence and Responsability

Ingrid Betancourt recalls, in the midst of captivity, a harsh and dull day in 2007:

I hated Enrique, but in a way I knew I could stop hating him. When Enrique looked at me and said, “You know I will get that proof of survival no matter what,” I had the immediate feeling that he was defeated beforehand. I felt sorry for him. Of course, he would get the test, but I was indifferent to that. Therein lay my strength. He had no dominion over me, for I had already accepted the possibility of death. Throughout my life I believed myself to be eternal. My eternity ended there, in that putrid hole, and the very near presence of death filled me with a stillness that I savored. I no longer needed anything, I no longer desired anything. My soul was naked and I no longer feared Henry […] Chained by the neck to a tree, deprived of all freedom, the freedom to move, to sit or stand, to speak or be silent, to eat or drink, and even the most elementary of all, the freedom to relieve the body… I understood - but it took me many years to do so - that one keeps the most valuable of freedoms, the one that no one can take away from one: the freedom to decide who one wants to be. There and then, as if it were obvious, I decided that I would no longer be a victim. I had the freedom to choose between hating Enrique or dissolving that hatred in the strength of being who I wanted to be. I could die, of course, but I was already elsewhere. I was a survivor.