Colombia: The Acclaim, and the Backlash

While Ingrid Betancourt recovers in France from her six-and-a-half years as a hostage, Colombia is buzzing with speculation about how she may change the political landscape here.

Polls after her release on July 2 showed she had an approval rating almost as high as the president, Alvaro Uribe - at 83% to his 85%. In a separate poll, 31% said they would vote for her for president in 2010, if Uribe does not run for a third term.

Politicians on the left and right have made overtures, but Betancourt apparently has plans to establish an alternative movement, based on a 190-point program drawn up in a notebook during her captivity. "Undoubtedly she will be an important player," says Jorge Londoño, head of the Invamer-Gallup polling company. "She is someone with a very high public recognition. It remains to be seen how she uses that now that she's free."

But a week after she was rescued with 14 others from a Farc rebel jungle camp, some Colombians have questioned her decision to leave the country so soon, and to stay away from a march for the release of remaining hostages on July 20, Colombian independence day.

Betancourt said she would not attend because her family fears for her safety. The fears are not unfounded: on Wednesday, her fellow former hostage Luis Eladio Pérez was forced to flee the country because of death threats. The families of 24 police and soldiers and three civilians still held hostage by Farc say they are counting on Betancourt to keep up the pressure on both the guerrillas and the government to negotiate their release.

Betancourt's husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, however, has said he feels abandoned. When Betancourt greeted him on the tarmac in Bogota, hours after her rescue, she seemed less than effusive. In an interview with El Tiempo newspaper, Lecompte said: "I cannot discard the possibility that everything has ended with Ingrid, that her love for me died in the jungle." During her captivity he flew over the jungle dropping pictures of their children, in the hope that she would receive at least one. She never did.