Expat Village is edited and published by
Iain Williams in Caracas and Porlamar,Margarita Island, Venezuela.
Freed hostage Clara Rojas wore a photograph of her three-year-old son around her neck as she described his birth and upbringing among Colombian rebels in jungle camps.
A day after she was released along with another Colombian hostage, she said her main priority was being reunited with her son Emmanuel, who was fathered by one of the guerrillas and separated from her at eight-months-old. The boy has been living in a foster home in Bogota.
"Very soon I will meet him and little by little we'll start sharing what for us is a rebirth," Rojas told reporters in Caracas, Venezuela where she and Consuelo Gonzalez met their families and thanked President Hugo Chavez for negotiating their release.
In their accounts of some six years in captivity, Rojas and Gonzalez described long treks through the forest, prisoners in chains and tense moments when rebels told captives to be silent for fear of nearby troops.
Rojas, an aide to former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who is also being held hostage, said she knew little about the rebel fighter who fathered her son and would raise the boy on her own.
"I don't have any information about the boy's dad. What's more, I don't have any idea if he even knows he's the boy's father," Rojas said. "The information I have is that he could even have died. I don't have any confirmation."
Born in a dangerous, kitchen-knife caesarian delivery in the jungle, Emmanuel had a broken arm sustained during the birth when he was pulled out by a rebel nurse, Rojas said. The guerrillas helped carry the infant through the jungles and, at one point, across a wide river, she said.
When the boy was eight-months-old, Rojas said, she gave the rebels permission to take him away for two weeks to receive treatment for leishmaniasis, a parasite malady common in the jungle.
The next time Rojas received news of her son was two weeks ago, while listening to a radio broadcast of a New Year's Eve speech by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who asserted the child was no longer with Rojas's captors, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc.
DNA tests confirmed the boy had been living in a Bogota foster home for more than two years under a different name.
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Expat Village is edited and published by
Iain Williams in Caracas and Porlamar,Margarita Island, Venezuela.
