welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. colombians will elect a new president this year. amid a crowded field, one candidate has reason to view the coming campaign with mixed emotions. my guest today, ingrid betancourt was running for president 20 years ago when she was captured by farc guerrillas and held captive in the jungle for more than six years.

colombia's guerrilla war is over, and now she's running again, promising a war on corruption. she says she'll finish what she started — is that possible? ingrid betancourt in bogota, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me, stephen, it is really really a pleasure after so many years. it is, many years since we last spoke and that, of course, was when you got out ofjungle captivity in 2008. but i want to begin by taking you back a full 20

years to your running for the presidency in 2002. that, of course, was the campaign during which you were taken and held captive by farc guerrillas. it seems extraordinary that you have decided to run again. are you simply revising your own personal trauma by doing so? i think it's, what i feel i have to do, it is like the vector of my life and it is also a strong duty i feel with my country. i think that today, colombia has this window of opportunity to really change the system. we put an end to very bloody war and that opened the path to another kind of consciousness and for me, since the beginning, you know, 20 years ago i was battling

against corruption and i think today it is still the same problem. i mean, colombia has lots of opportunities but even if it is a rich country, colombians are poor. 50% of our citizens are in a situation of hunger. kids are not going to school. and this is a result of corruption. so, for me, it is really, as you were saying, it is taking the banner where i left it and trying to take colombia with me to this newjourney of freedom, freedom from corruption. i do want to get into some detail of your policy platform and what you believe you can offer colombians in the course of this interview.

but i have to stick with the personal for a short while because if anybody in the world has been through the most profound trauma, it is you. more than six years in the jungle, many of those years in chains, you were physically abused, you tried to escape at least three times and failed. you went through extraordinary hardships. surely you have what we now call ptsd, post—traumatic stress and i do wonder whether running a presidential campaign is in your own best interest? i think i have done a very good job in trying to fix my emotions, of course i have to deal with the past but the past is also a strength. it gives me knowledge of what other colombians have been suffering. i was living for years under a makeshift shed, i was chained, as you said, and many colombians are, in a way, chained too.

they have to leave their kids during hours of slave labour, working in the informality, subject to abuse of all kinds or working in illegality with drug traffickers and this is never an option. we are chained to this system of corruption and i think i have...i have, of course, my scars but i have also the knowledge of what people in my country are suffering and i have the strength in me to fight for them. you talk of scars and this is a difficult question, ingrid, and i should say i have your extraordinary book in front of me that you wrote years ago, even silence has an end, where you are very candid about what captivity did to you. it was very difficult and you talk about the way it exposed some of your fragility and weakness along with the other captives and, one of them was your very close companion who worked with you,

clara rojas, and she has written a book too and so has one of the american captives who you were held with for some time. it has to be said, in their books they describe some of your behaviours, a degree of, let's be honest, selfishness that they saw in you, a way in which you, in their view, held yourself aloof from the rest of the captives, which may come under scrutiny again in this election. are you prepared for whatever other candidates might throw at you in terms of reflecting on what happened and what it says about you? you know, i am very conscious that the system of abduction we were forced in was an environment where the guerrillas tried to divide us, tried to put us to confront each other because they needed to divide captives in order to subdue us and to dominate us. we were also living difficult

situations, of destitution, of hunger, and i think that, you know, yes, probably we all met the worst of each other but we also met the best of each other and i discovered in this captivity, light. light in all of us, in all humankind, which is our capacity to overcome difficulties by solidarity, by generosity, by confiding in each other and, of course, that's a transition, it is a path of transformation and i know that colombians are aware of this, i know also that politics is hard and i know i have been already under all types of scrutiny and critics are easy but i am strong and i want to fight for what i believe and critics are a part of politics.

and continuing the theme of scrutiny, i guess, if we are realistic about it, some colombians will say to themselves that ingrid betancourt showed extraordinary courage and her story is amazing and she has come through it with great resilience. but she did not really spend a lot of her time post—ca ptivity in colombia. you have french citizenship as well and you spent an awful lot of time in paris and you said after you came out, quite understandably, that your focus was on rebuilding relationships with your grown—up children and that has taken you far from colombia for many years. you also studied at oxford university. that is hardly the cv of a woman who is focused like a laser beam on winning the presidency of colombia. i see it under a different light. i think that, of course, wherever i was in my life during all these 14 years

after my liberation, i was always a voice for colombians. i was always advocating for my people, i was defending the peace process. i was also active in the reconciliation process with my abductors which were the ones signing the peace process and i was contributing to this state of mind where i want colombians to be where we can look at each other beyond our confrontation and try to see the humane in us. but also, i see it under a different light because the fact i have not been in colombia, actively in politics gives me an immense freedom to just see what the others do not see. colombia is very a corrupt system and when you see what is going on in the colombian campaign you can see how everybody throws accusations to each other.

i'm not into this because i have not been a part of it. i have no machinery, corrupt machinery, as they call it here in colombia, nobody can accuse me of having been benefited by any contract orany bribe orany.... but... so i feel i have this authority, in a way, and more than moral authority i think that i have this comprehension and this absolute, you know, certainty that we really need to put an end to corruption. but, ingrid, if i may, as you say you have followed colombian politics closely, even if you have not always been living in the country. but in 2018 you did back, and correct me if i am wrong,

but i think you backed the leftist candidate, gustavo petro, and of course he is running again and many of the things you say about corruption and about redistributing the wealth of colombia and giving a fair shake to those who have been neglected for so long in colombia, many of those things mr petro says too and he is running again this time. if you chose to lend him your support, you would strengthen his campaign. why don't you do that? that is a very good question and probably if the petro of 2018 was the same as today i would probably be backing him. but he has transformed himself into one of the same, the supports he has for his campaign come from all kind of corrupt forces. he is not here to defend himself so i think it is only fair to record that he would deny those allegations you just put to him but it seems, if i may say so, you are throwing allegations

of corruption around in a way that does not even work for your own political campaign because you, injanuary, decided to nominate yourself for a presidential run within the centrist hope coalition but within weeks you then decided to walk away from that coalition, accusing the coalition of corruption. i was not, you know, accusing the coalition of being corrupt. i was just taking a decision that i think it is a very powerful decision. in colombia corruption lives in a grey area and people try to accommodate to corruption by denying facts. in the coalition, the centre of our unity was to fight against the way traditional politics has been done in colombia which is through machinery, machinery is a concept that it is

an organisation that sticks into politics, they use the elections to get into congress or to get to the presidency and the government and then the aim is to rub and get reach and, of course, to get the system of impunity. so they can get their way without jail. crosstalk. i get the absolute clarity. wait a second, wait a second. no, because it is important that you understand that when i took the decision to leave the coalition it is an action. it is notjust a speech and you see my difference with other candidates in colombia, including petro is that they talk about corruption but they do not act against corruption. he could have done the same i did, saying that these people cannot be in my campaign,

i do not want their support. no. i understand... hejust denies things. crosstalk. i understand what you are saying but i also understand the realities of politics. what you have done by walking away from this centrist coalition, by also choosing to criticise, as you do, both the leftist coalition and mr petro who you used to support but no longer do and, of course, you are critical of the rightist coalition, what you have got, yourself, as ingrid betancourt is your own, if i may say so, very small party — the green 0xygen party — and you do not really have the sort of network, the organisation, the movement that can make you a credible candidate in this coming national election. how can you, when you are between 2% and 7% in the polls, expect to turn that into a national campaign? well, first, i think it is kind of something that you will need to rethink here. saying that in colombia

the only way to do politics is with corruption. i mean, why do we expect in the uk or in europe to have a moral standard or ethical standard to, you know, to demand from our politicians to be pristine and not to do the same in colombia? i think, in fairness, this is not a normal standard. normal standard is to play fair in politics. that is the fair thing. second, i have been doing politics for 30 years and every time i have won my elections i have had people like you saying that i can't win because i do not have an organisation. i do not want a corrupt organisation. i am linked with the people. you are saying that i am 7% in the polls. well, i am in the third position in the polls. after two weeks or three weeks of campaigning. all the candidates, all the

other candidates are behind me. so, of course, i have a battle in front of me and i have to get to the second or first place and that is my aim, but i am very comfortable that in the time i have been expressing my will of campaigning for colombians that the response and the results are amazing. there's another very obvious factor here. that is — you are a woman. colombia has not had a woman president and i think i'm right in saying you are the only serious contender who is female in this coming election. is colombia ready for a woman president? i think colombia's ready. i mean, precisely because it is a patriarchal society, precisely because we have corruption, precisely because we had been living in a bloodshed, lots of violence, the feminine vision, the vision of women into politics will bring oxygen to the country. we can give results, we can give solutions that

are different from the ones normally are designed by a very male kind of standard politics. and this is what i'm offering. i want to change, change — deeply change the culture, change the way we relate to each other, open a path of trust, which is something that we haven't been doing in colombia, and reconcile the country. not reconcile the country in ideological terms, but reconcile the country in emotional terms. and because we have been divided in colombia, not between left and right, but between people that abuse and rob and bribe and steal and cheat, and the others, 51 million colombians, really do have the same opportunities as you have in europe. we really just want to have the same opportunities and are fighting for that.

let's talk about peace in colombia. you have always been a great supporter of the government's deal with the farc, that has its roots back in 2016. there is more peace in colombia than there was, but it's still not peaceful. there are other militant groups that are still waging their violent campaigns, people are still losing their lives, including some leading human rights activists. you, last year, had a pretty extraordinary meeting with some former farc guerillas. i think it was the first time you had met them face—to—face. what was that like? i think it was very important for me and for the country, because, you see, we have been in this peace process talking aboutjustice,

law, condemnation, etc, but at the end of the day what we want is to be able to see what motivated these people to have such an inhumane behaviour to others of their peers. how could a human being chain another to a tree for six years? how could they be abusive? how could they humiliate everyone that were under their custody and enslave them? did you ask them direct... crosstalk. ..and enslave them. because here's something that one of the leaders of the farc, known as timoshenko, said last year. he said, "to those who never returned from abduction, to those who lost their lives at our hands, to all those burdened by the years of loved ones�* absence, we beg them to forgive us and we speak today with a sense of shame." do you, today, as a

presidential candidate, do you offer that sense of forgiveness? of course, you know, forgiveness is a very intimate path. you don't forgive because people ask you to forgive them, you forgive them because you want to get the past in the past and to let it there. i'm working in something more profound, i think, which is reconciliation. reconciliation is the moment when you meet the other one that has harmed you and that person doesn't try to justify what he did and you try to understand why he did it. it's a communication of souls. and my abductors, which are now congressmen and women, have difficulties to just do that extra mile. and the country needs to see them in their soul, not in their political speech or the justification

of their ideology, and this is something i'm working since i was liberated and i want to work with them. i believe in human beings, i believe in the light of each of us, and i think this is important for colombia, because we are, in a way, people that they are looking at and our behaviour, the way we speak, the way we act is also a model for other colombians who have been suffering violence, not only political violence or violence because of drug trafficking or of the war... crosstalk. ..but also family violence, inside of families. forgive me, we don't have much time, sorry, ingrid, to interrupt, but there is a time lag on the line. i want to ask you about one specific policy area, which you say can help colombia broaden its peace and corruption, and that is your notion that all narcotics,

all illegal drugs, should be legalised as part of a more universal shift of approach towards the drugs war. do you, in any sense, think that is practical politics? would you really do that if you were president? i think that we need to be careful with terminology, because legalisation means open markets. we don't want that. we want to decriminalising consuming of drugs. and we want to do it because we need to end the trafficking. i mean, today, as you know, drug trafficking is financing the war in colombia, corruption in colombia, but also terrorism in the world. and this is a fact. i mean, we have been in the war on drugs for a0 years with no results,

and we have had the best of allies in this war, which is the united states with the might and power of their economics, and we haven't been able to destroy this trafficking. so i think that after a0 years we need to begin thinking that we need to give results. and i really think that we need to propose what i think we could call an alliance for progress. you remember president kennedy in the �*60s had this programme, an alliance for progress with latin america where they would invest in social means in order to boost prosperity in the subcontinent. i think that if we stop the war on drugs and we take what we are investing, the funds that we are investing in chasing drug traffickers, and we end the possibility

for them to get rich with the trafficking of drugs. i just want to ask one very simple question at the end of all of this, because we have talked about your personal journey and we have talked about your political platform. are you really sure you want to win, given everything that has happened to you? i'm absolutely positive. not only that i want, but i will. ingrid betancourt, we do sadly have to stop there, but i thank you very much indeed forjoining me from bogota. thank you. thank you so much. some of us are still feeling the effects of the storms. we are flooding in places.

how about the weather in the short term? well, it's not going to be a bad start to the day for many parts of england and wales. but for scotland, northern ireland and to an extent the very far north of england, it is going to be once again a very blustery day on wednesday and it will turn progressively when to read through the day. it is still very active on the satellite picture here. these weather fronts across the atlantic racing our way. all of this, this is wintry weather, linked to this low pressure. a cold front is approaching but to the south, we are under the influence of a high—pressure here. so, clearerskies, lighter winds and through the early hours of the morning, a touch of ground frost at the very least in rural areas. city centres itself won't be that cold, 6 degrees in plymouth, pretty nippy enough in birmingham at two celsius milder, slightly milder weather than the morning in the lowlands of scotland

and northern ireland. now, here's the next low pressure that is coming in. a cold front behind it, we have wintry showers. the morning is going be pretty soggy and northern ireland and scotland come up with increasing winds and gale force winds and 60 mile an hour gusts, the weather will eventually go downhill in the far north of england too. particularly blustry in the northeast there in newcastle, but all the while there, new england and wales, not a bad day. increasingly through the afternoon and we will see winter showers and scotland and northern ireland to lower and lower levels. and then that takes us into wednesday night and thursday, that cold front crosses the country and therefore, we are all in the blustery, chilly stream of air from the north atlantic and you can see how frequent the winter showers are across northern ireland. some showers could be wintry also across england and wales, maybe not the extreme south and in fact, if anything, thursday should be a decent enough day. single figure temperatures will certainly feel coldest and the northwest here. 5 degrees and you add on that gale force wind

and you'll feel like it's barely above freezing. there is a hint of better weather on the way as high pressure builds on friday. i think that's going to be a very decent day and perhaps into the weekend, some of us could hold onto some that better weather. goodbye.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines: nato warns that russian troops are heading for eastern ukraine. we report from the frontline, where ukrainians are preparing for an invasion. the troops here say they have been fighting a long war against russian backed separatists. they know that president putin may now send more forces. the us and europe respond with a series of targetted sanctions, and universal criticism of russia's aggression. who in the lord's name does putin think gives him the right

to declare new so—called countries on