Colombia Waits to See How Betancourt May Change the Political Landscape

While Ingrid Betancourt recovers in France from her six-and-a-half-year hostage ordeal and basks in the acclaim of French society, Colombia is buzzing with speculation about how she may change the political landscape here.

Flash polls after her spectacular release July 2 showed she had almost as high an approval rating as the ever-popular President Alvaro Uribe. While Uribe's favorability peaked at 85%, Betancourt's stood at 83%. In a separate poll, 31% said they would vote for her for president in the 2010 elections if Uribe does not run for a third term.

With those polls numbers, political parties on the left and right have made overtures toward Betancourt to join their movements but she apparently has plans to establish an alternative political movement based on a 190-point government program on sheets of lined notebook paper - a document that made it out of the jungle with her.

"Undoubtedly she will be an important player," says Jorge Londo?o, 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 just a week after her rescue, along with 14 others from the jungle camp where they were held hostage by Farc rebels, criticism of Betancourt has already begun. On talk shows and blogs some Colombians have questioned her decision to leave the country so soon after her release and to stay away from what are expected to be large demonstrations for the remaining hostages July 20th.

Betancourt announced she would not attend the march on Colombian Independence Day at the request of her family, who fear for her safety at such a public event.

The fears are not unfounded: on Wednesday her former fellow hostage Luis Eladio Perez was forced to flee the country with his family because of death threats against them. However she does plan to lead a parallel march that day in Paris, demanding the release of what Farc consider to be "swappable" hostages.

In Colombia, the families of the remaining "swappable" hostages still held by Farc ? 24 police and soldiers and three civilians ? say they are counting on Betancourt to keep up the pressure on both the guerrillas and the government to reach a negotiated end to the hostage crisis.

"Ingrid will not leave us alone," said Magdalena Rivas at a weekly protest Tuesday in Bogot? where the families of the hostages read out the names of those still held in the jungle.

Betancourt's husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, however, does feel abandoned by his wife. It escaped few people in Bogot? that when she greeted him on the tarmac in Bogot? hours after her rescue, she was less than effusive. In an interview with the El Tiempo newspaper, Lecompte, who did not travel to France with his wife, said he had hoped "she would have been more loving toward me, not so cold".

"I cannot discard the possibility that everything has ended with Ingrid, that her love for me died in the jungle," said Lecompte.

During her time in captivity, he flew over the jungles of Colombia in a small plane throwing leaflets with pictures of her children in the hope that she would receive at least one. She never did.