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PARIS - Hopes of a breakthrough in a long-running French campaign to release a celebrity hostage in Colombia have been dealt a setback.
The fate of Ingrid Betancourt has fixated France's elite since she was kidnapped in February 2002, and at one point the country even launched a secret operation in the Amazonian jungle in a bid to secure her freedom.
Betancourt, who holds joint French and Colombian nationality, was seized by a far-left group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as she was campaigning as presidential candidate for her party, Green Oxygen.
France usually stages a big effort to release its journalists or diplomats who are abducted abroad but the mobilisation for Betancourt, 45, is exceptional and also somewhat controversial.
Hopes had been high of a sign this week that FARC would provide the first direct proof that she was alive since August 2003, when she made a video message.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, speaking ahead of a visit to Paris this week, stoked the optimism, saying he would not arrive "empty-handed". Chavez has been mandated by the Colombian Government to negotiate a swap of 45 hostages held by the FARC for 500 jailed insurgents.
After lunch with President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday, Chavez said he was "absolutely certain" Betancourt was alive but admitted he did not have any proof. FARC had promised through a mediator that it would provide such evidence by year's end, he said.
The daughter of a Colombian education minister and former beauty queen turned senator, Betancourt spent her childhood in the elite playgrounds of Paris, raised as a francophone and francophile. She was a student of former prime minister Dominique de Villepin at the upscale Sciences-Po school and married a French diplomat with whom she had two children, Melanie and Lorenzo.
On her return to Colombia, where she divorced her husband, Betancourt got the political bug and campaigned hard against her country's endemic corruption and drugs trafficking. She was elected senator in 1998, and received so many death threats that the children were sent to New Zealand for safety.
Betancourt and her election campaign manager were abducted after entering a demilitarised zone in Colombia, dismissing warnings that the region was too risky.
France has become extraordinarily focussed on her fate, thanks to a well-run campaign by her two telegenic children, support from celebrities but also close and sometimes contested involvement by senior politicians.
In one of his first acts in office, President Nicolas Sarkozy persuaded Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to release a senior FARC leader as a sign of good faith. His decision to meet Chavez this week was sharply criticised in some quarters as giving the renegade Venezuelan leader international credibility.
Betancourt has been made a "citizen of honour" of Paris, and a massive portrait of her hangs outside city hall, complete with a digital clock notching up the days since she disappeared.
Last weekend, ahead of the Chavez visit, a galaxy of French stars took part in a concert to boost attention to her plight.
In 2003, Villepin, while foreign minister, dispatched a French air force Hercules C-130 plane with a medical team to the Brazilian jungle after receiving a tip that Betancourt was about to be exfiltrated from Colombia.
The operation became a fiasco after the plane, which landed on an airstrip near the border with Colombia on the pretext that it needed refuelling, was ordered out by Brazil, upset that it hadn't been informed.
It transpired that Villepin had not even told his president, Jacques Chirac, or the Defence Ministry.
Colombia and Brazil were outraged by the operation, not least because of its implications that France had had secret dealings with FARC.
French commentators say it probably made FARC more aware of her value and thus prolonged her detention.
Colombia has frequently expressed irritation at France's fixation on Betancourt and its pressure to cut a deal with FARC. Colombian officials, media and the Catholic church point out that around 3000 other people have been kidnapped by the FARC.
