Arguing of “the significant emotional anguish” that Lawrence Delloye had, American citizen, during the captivity of his mother, the judge sentenced FARCs to pay him $ 36 million.
Thirty-six million dollars, a little over 31 million euros. This is the amount of compensation that the guerrilla of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), today demobilized, to the son of Ingrid Betancourt, the former Franco-Columbian hostage, according to the decision of a Federal Judge of Pennsylvania, Thursday 13 January.
M me Bétancourt, today aged 60, was a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic at the time of his abduction on a road withdrawn from the south of the country in 2002. She passed more six years in captivity. In 2016, his captors signed peace and filed arms.
Lawrence Delloye – She was called Lorenzo – was 13 years old when her mother was kidnapped. He spent his adolescence waiting for him, ignoring for long periods if she was still alive. The Tribunal noted that the young man had experienced a “significant emotional anguish”.
Colombian by his mother, French by his father, the young delloye, born in California, is also a US citizen. It was in this capacity that it was able to seize American justice and benefit from the anti-terrorism law. His lawyers filed a complaint in 2018 in Pennsylvania where one of Ingrid Betancourt’s jailer served twenty years in prison for cocaine trafficking.
The US judge has solidly condemned the organization and thirteen of his former commanders, including Luciano Marin, Alias Ivan Mark. Official negotiator of the 2016 Peace Agreement, he is one of the few guerrilla chiefs who resumed the maquis.
No reaction of Ingrid Betancourt
For the penalist lawyer Gerardo Barbosa: “The decision of American civil justice has a significant symbolic value. But, by its amount and by the situation of the FARC, it will probably have no practical effect.” Front The Peace Tribunal, set up by the Peace Agreement, the former FARC commanders recognized their responsibility in the practice of kidnappings. And asked for forgiveness to their victims.
Friday night, Ingrid Betancourt still did not react to the judicial victory of his son. But she was picking on social networks. Some reproach him his supposed gain bait. Others its international visibility, which would make shadow to anonymous victims. The support it has continued to bring peace negotiations worth the criticisms of the hard right.
During all these years, it is reappeared that episodically in his country. At the end of 2021, she made a discreet return on the political scene for the legislative and presidential election of 2022. “Verde Oxigeno” (green oxygen), the party she had created to start his candidacy twenty years ago, recovered its legal existence. M me Betancourt, which would have declined an offer of candidacy for the vice-presidency, asserts that he had no ambition to “free his country sequestered by corruption”. It is not sure that the decision of the Judge of Pennsylvania serves his speech.