CARACAS, Venezuela — Freed by Colombian guerrillas last week after six years of captivity in jungle camps, Clara Rojas, a former aspirant to the vice presidency of Colombia, boarded a military plane here on Sunday bound for Bogotá, where she was reunited with her 3-year-old son.
Upon arriving in Colombia, she said, “I have returned to life.”
The liberation of Ms. Rojas and another hostage, Consuelo González de Perdomo, a former Colombian lawmaker, has captivated Colombia. Ms. Rojas, 44, discovered in recent days that her son, Emmanuel, born in captivity and taken from her when he was 8 months old, was alive and living in foster care in Bogotá.
Details of Emmanuel’s birth, an improvised Caesarean section in the jungle that left him with a broken arm and Ms. Rojas bedridden for 40 days, have emerged in interviews here since President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela negotiated the women’s release with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Ms. Rojas has been vague about the identity of Emmanuel’s father, who is believed to be a member of the FARC named Rigo. “The information I have is that he could even have died,” she said at a news conference here. “I don’t have any confirmation.”
Emmanuel’s survival is a tale of resilience during a long internal war. Suffering from leishmaniasis, a disease caused by the bite of the sand fly, he was placed by the guerrillas with a poor family in 2005. But social workers soon took him in after he showed signs of malnutrition, diarrhea, anemia and malaria.
Colombian investigators found Emmanuel living in foster care at the end of December, using the name Juan David Gómez Tapiero; DNA tests confirmed that he was Ms. Rojas’s son.
She said in an interview over the weekend with Telesur, the regional news network backed by the Venezuelan government, that she had sought inspiration from the Bible when she gave him the name Emmanuel.
“It means ‘God is with us,’ ” she said.
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