Miss Betancourt, 47, is being feted by Hollywood producers after it emerged she had spent much of the time chained by her neck to a tree, and subjected to torture, by the terrorist organisation Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
But the most provocative claim from the first book about the experience, Out of Captivity, by three fellow American prisoners, was not about the forced marches in chains and close calls under fire.
It was the extraordinary allegations about the behaviour of Miss Betancourt, a Colombian politician, with dual French nationality.
One of the American prisoners claimed that she was haughty, self-absorbed, stole their food, hoarded books, and risked their lives by informing the guards that they were CIA.
Keith Stansell, 44, a former Marine, told Associated Press: “I watched her try to take over the camp with an arrogance that was out of control. Some of the guards treated us better than she did.”
Mr Stansell was freed along with Miss Betancourt, fellow contractors Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves, and 11 Colombians, when military agents posing as humanitarian workers in helicopters scooped them out of a jungle clearing in July.
The three Americans take turns narrating their experiences in the 457-page chronicle. The other two agree with Mr Stansell on most issues but not everything, but don’t always see eye-to-eye with him on Miss Betancourt who became a worldwide symbol of hostage suffering. Punished for efforts to escape, she spent long periods chained by her neck to trees, suffered from untreated infections and intestinal upsets and endured long marches over punishing terrain.
In the book and in telephone phone interviews they said that they held no grudges, even though conflicts were frequent among hostages during their captivity. “These were literally concentration camps,” Mr Gonsalves said. “There was barely room to breathe.”
Dr. Keron Fletcher, a British psychiatrist who debriefed hostages held by extremists in Lebanon two decades ago, said it was unusual for a former hostage to publicly criticise someone with whom they had shared a traumatic experience.
“For this man to go for the jugular is quite unusual,” he said of Stansell. People who live through such trauma “tend to keep quiet about problems that they had with each other and do their best to support each other”.
The hostages competed for sleeping space, meagre food rations and the lone Spanish-English dictionary. And when Mr Gonsalves developed a close and tender friendship with Betancourt, it triggered intense jealousies among other male prisoners, according to the book.
“She’s a tough woman,” said Mr Gonsalves, 36, who has remained in touch by phone and email. “She used to give those guerrillas a hard time.”
Miss Betancourt declined to comment on the allegations by Mr Stansell. A spokeswoman, Catarinja Laranjeira, said via email from Paris that she is “dedicated to writing her (own) book and not making declarations until it is finished.”
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