BOGOTA - Gaunt and despondent, she sits in a ragtag shirt in the Colombian jungle, her long hair slung across one shoulder as she stares silently at the ground.
Grainy video images of Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt, captured from leftist guerrillas who have held her for five years, on Friday revealed the grim conditions endured by kidnap victims in secret camps.
The Colombian government's broadcast of the five videos, some made in late October, is the first proof since 2003 that Betancourt, three Americans and a dozen kidnapped Colombians are still alive.
The evidence was released a week after Bogota suspended efforts by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to broker a deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, to free its hostages -- some held for nearly a decade.
The failed talks triggered a diplomatic dispute between Venezuela and Colombia, but President Alvaro Uribe said on Friday he was willing to keep working with French President Nicolas Sarkozy to reach a hostage deal with the rebels.
"The FARC are terrorist torturers ... these videos show the torture, they are an expression of torture, like those Europeans sent to concentration camps," Uribe said. "We will keep working for the liberation of the hostages."
A staunch ally to Washington, Uribe has received billions of dollars in U.S. aid to fight the rebels and the huge cocaine trade that helps fuel Latin America's oldest insurgency.
Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba, who had acted as a mediator with the FARC, said the captured videos had been meant for Chavez to see. But the French government said the leftist Venezuelan leader's mediating role was "a thing of the past."
Authorities handed captured letters, photographs and audio recordings of hostages to relatives on Friday.
"This is what we were waiting for," Yolanda Pulecio, Betancourt's mother, told local radio. "This is the first step and the second is the freedom of the hostages."
JUNGLE MESSAGES
Weakened by Uribe's security campaign, the FARC have been driven back into the jungles, but they hold hundreds of hostages for political leverage and ransom. The guerrillas want to swap 50 key captives for jailed comrades.
In one of the videos, Betancourt, a former presidential candidate kidnapped in southern Colombia in 2002, sits despondently next to a wooden bench in a jungle clearing, her face etched with lines and her thin arms bared.
Other recordings show U.S. contract workers Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Keith Howes looking fitter than Betancourt, standing with arms folded, brushing away bugs and talking to the camera without sound as an armed rebel stands nearby.
The three men were captured in 2003 when their light plane crashed while on a counter-narcotics mission.
Attempts to reach a hostage deal have been stymied by rebel demands that, to start talks, Uribe must pull troops from an area the size of New York City. Uribe, popular for his hardline stance, refuses saying it would allow the rebels to regroup.
