Ingrid Betancourt

She’ll be here in SF on my birthday! I remember reading her first book before she was kidnapped and am super intrigued to see her in person.

The International Museum of Women presents Ingrid Betancourt for our latest Extraordinary Voices, Extraordinary Change Speaker Series. Former Colombian Senator and activist Ingrid Betancourt tells the story of her six and a half years of captivity in the Colombian jungle. In 2002, while campaigning as a candidate in the Colombian presidential elections, Betancourt was abducted by the FARC and was released in a dramatic 2008 rescue. Join us as she discusses her much-anticipated memoir, Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle.

To learn more about Ingrid Betancourt’s political career, kidnapping and rescue, read this 2008 story from the museum’s Women, Power and Politics exhibition, Kidnapping a Candidate: Ingrid Betancourt’s Six-Year Ordeal.

Event details: Thursday, October 28, 2010 from 7:00-8:00pm, followed by book sale and signing with Book Passage. Schwab Center, 211 Main Street (at Howard), San Francisco, California. Seating is limited. Reserve your tickets now! An RSVP is required. For more information email events@imow.org or call 415-543-4669 ext. 27.

Ingrid Betancourt will appear in conversation with Jeanne Carstensen, managing editor of The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit news organization in San Francisco that covers civic issues and produces the Bay Area pages of the New York Times. Previously, as managing editor of Salon, Carstensen worked on The Abu Ghraib Files, the magazine’s online archive of detainee abuse photos from the notorious U.S. military prison in Iraq. She was senior arts and features editor at SFGate.com and was awarded a National Arts Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University in 2001. While living in Costa Rica for six years, Carstensen covered human rights issues for Feminist International Radio Endeavor, a women’s program broadcast globally over shortwave radio.