Emmanuel was taken from her when he was 8 months old and placed by the rebels with a local peasant family, which then turned the child over to state child welfare officials. Rojas said she had lost contact with the father while in captivity.
TERROR AND BARBED WIRE
Many of the hostages held by Colombian rebels are kept chained in barbed-wire camps and are terrified by encroaching army artillery and machine-gun fire, said former lawmaker Consuelo Gonzalez, captured in 2001 and released on Thursday along with Rojas.
Gonzalez said she was constantly afraid she would be killed by bombs or bullets from Colombian air force helicopters.
"(Kidnapped) soldiers and police live chained all day by the neck," Gonzalez told Colombia's Caracol Radio. "Whatever they have to do, wherever they have to go, to bathe, to wash their clothes, they carry their chains."
"We lived in horrible situations of risk, of high risk," she said. "We practically felt the bombs going off only a few metres (yards) from where we were. Army helicopters firing machine guns also came very close. Living in war is a horror."
Gonzalez's husband died while she was held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the Andean country's largest guerrilla group that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Friday should no longer be branded a terrorist organization.
Rojas and Gonzalez trekked for 20 days with a small group of armed rebels before reaching a forest clearing where they were picked up by Venezuelan helicopters painted with symbols of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Colombia's government says it wants to swap high-profile captives like Betancourt and three Americans snatched in 2003 for jailed rebels. But the two sides are deadlocked over conditions for a hostage exchange.
In a video released by the FARC last year, Betancourt appeared gaunt and depressed. She told her mother in a letter she was barely eating and her hair was falling out in clumps.
