A `Joan of Arc' pilloried by Colombia's press

It's easy to see why Ingrid Betancourt's book, La Rage au Coeur (Rage in the Heart) was an instant best-seller in France.

The 40-year-old Colombian presidential candidate shares the name of the L'Oreal cosmetics heirs. "We were related - about 300 years ago," Ms Betancourt says. But hers is a different, Latin American, tale of rebellion against her own class, corruption and death threats from narco-traffickers.

If those ingredients, with Ms Betancourt's Madonna face and flawless French, were not enough to sell tens of thousands of copies, the former Colombian president, Ernesto Samper, tried to have her book banned.

She accuses Mr Samper, who lives in Spain after being refused entry to the US, of financing his 1994 presidential campaign with money from the Cali drug cartel.

Since Rage was published here a month ago, it has stayed at the top of the non-fiction best-seller list.

Ms Betancourt is the darling of the French media, but back in Bogota she is pilloried by the Colombian press. The country's main weekly, Semana, mocked her success in Paris, describing Ms Betancourt as a "Joan of Arc who won the French over by presenting a heroic version of her life in a country where everyone is wicked except her".

"I like being compared to Joan of Arc," Ms Betancourt said in Paris. "The magazine belongs to the Lopez family, who supported Samper."

She spent half her life in Paris, where her father was Colombia's ambassador to UNESCO.

Little Ingrid grew up in a vast apartment in the avenue Foch, frequented by the poet Pablo Neruda and the painter Botero. She studied politics at "Sciences Po". Now she is seen as a traitor to Colombia's ruling class.

As she told Liberation: "These families - and I say it because I am myself one of the privileged - are the descendants of the European conquerors who pillaged the country. They still have the same mind set."

But doesn't it look as if she is campaigning in France rather than Colombia? "I have no control over this," she says. "Semana asked me how much I paid to promote my book here; if it were a failure they wouldn't ask this question. The success in France was unexpected, and I am grateful. It has forced the Colombian press to end their silence about me."

Ms Betancourt stood for the Colombian parliament in 1994 as a member of the liberal party, which she now denounces as "a club of mafiosi". She won more votes than any other liberal candidate in Bogota. Four years later, after founding her own party called Oxygen, she was elected a senator, with the highest number of votes in the country.

But Ms Betancourt's methods have shocked even her own family. In 1994 she distributed condoms in the streets of Bogota, saying that corruption was "the AIDS of Colombia".

In December 1996 she published her first book against Mr Samper, Yes, He Knew. "Four days later someone came to my office and said, `We've already paid the sicarios [hired motorcycle gunmen] to get you and your children'." A snapshot of a mutilated child's body arrived in the mail.

Ms Betancourt fled with Melanie, now aged 15, and Lorenzo, now 12. She left her children in New Zealand with her first husband, a French diplomat. They returned after Samper left office in 1998.

In the run-up to the 2002 presidential election, the government has promised her more protection than the 10 bodyguards she has at present.

"For my children it's different," she says. Tears well up in her eyes and she stops speaking for a long moment. "They cannot be protected like me. They will probably have to leave the country."

She says she is certain to be elected president, "because despite the fact that the establishment is against me, Colombians want to live in a democracy, under the rule of law".

Ms Betancourt opposes US plans to give weapons to the Colombian army before it is fully reformed, and is against the use of defoliants to destroy coca plantations. Instead, 200,000 Colombian peasants must be given a viable way to earn a living, she says.

A million Colombians have fled in the last three years, in despair over a 37-year-old civil war that has killed 130,000 people.

"It is impossible to be more unstable than Colombia right now," Ms Betancourt says. "The political class has no legitimacy so it relies on the army and police to prop it up."

The security forces are allied with right-wing paramilitaries, who like the two main guerrilla groups are financed by cocaine-trafficking.

Their confrontation accounts for half of the 30,000 violent deaths each year.

"The evening news is like a horror movie," Ms Betancourt adds. "If I'm fighting this battle in Colombia, it's because for me there are faces behind all this."