But the FARC would not be cowed. In 2002 it seized Betancourt, a Colombian senator who was campaigning, somewhat quixotically, for president on a platform of fighting corruption.

Meanwhile, the ordeal of Betancourt, the daughter of a diplomat and a beauty queen, pushed Colombia’s conflict to the front pages of Europe’s largest newspapers. Her two children living in Paris rallied support even as she slowly deteriorated.

In letters and interviews since her release, she has described a routine of cruelty that left her at many points without the will to live. Her captors chained her and others by the neck to trees. She rarely changed her clothes. Tropical diseases, long marches through the mountains and a lack of nutritious food eventually shriveled her to a thin post with stringy hair reaching her waist.

“It was not treatment that you can give to a living being,” Betancourt told France 2 television on Thursday.