Did Former Farc Hostage ,Ingrid Betancourt, Treat Her Fellow Captives "Worse Than The Guards"?

Ingrid Betancourt is one of the former Farc captives that is regarded as a hero.She is a woman who was well respected for enduring six long years in captivity.But,now her heroic status is in jeopardy of being diminished by a new book that two of her fellow hostages wrote.Here's more from the Guardian:

"There was celebrating all around the world when Ingrid Betancourt was rescued last July from the Colombian jungle, where she had been held hostage for six years by leftist guerrillas. Newspapers dubbed her the new Joan of Arc, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy greeted her with a hero's welcome in Paris and a special service in her honour was held at Lourdes.

But reverence for great people never seems to last long these days. And so it comes to pass that Betancourt, a Colombian-French politician who once stood for president in Colombia, has been partially toppled from her pedestal.

The attack on her exalted reputation comes from two of the three US military contractors who were among the 14 other hostages rescued alongside Betancourt. In a new book published in the US yesterday in which they describe five years of jungle captivity at the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, they present Betancourt as a domineering presence who suffered from arrogance and egotism.

The strongest attack contained in Out of Captivity comes from Keith
Stansell, a former marine from Florida. He was head of the mission run by a private company Northrop Grumman to gather intelligence on the Farc's drug running activities that came a cropper in February 2003 when their surveillance plane crash-landed in the middle of a FARC training camp.

In passages of the book written by Stansell, he accuses Betancourt, who was kidnapped by the rebels a year before the Americans, of haughtiness and self-obsession. She would steal food from other hostages, refuse to share the scarce books that the group managed to obtain and even put the Americans' lives in danger by telling the guerrillas - wrongly the men claim - that they were CIA agents.

Stansell, 44, told the Associated Press: "I watched her try to take over the camp with an arrogance that was out of control. Some of the guards treated us better than she did."

Similar complaints have been made by a second of the Americans, Thomas Howes, 55, a co-pilot of the stricken plane. He told a Bogotá radio station that Betancourt was "a person who likes to control and manipulate, for whom being in captivity was very difficult". "She did not like to share food in equal portions and was "interested in herself."

The 15 hostages, including Betancourt and the three Americans, were snatched from the Colombian jungle on July 2 last year in dramatic fashion. Colombian military forces, with the help of US intelligence, conceived an elaborate plot in which Farc leaders were conned into handing over their prisoners."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here.