Ex-FARC hostages say Betancourt "very sick" in jungle

By Patrick Markey

BOGOTA (Reuters) - French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, held hostage by FARC guerrillas, is "very sick" in a Colombian rebel jungle camp and has been mistreated by her captors, hostages released on Wednesday said.

Betancourt, a dual French-Colombian citizen captured six years ago, and three U.S. contractors are among the high-profile hostages held in secret jungle camps by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas.

"It hurts my soul, she is very bad, very, very sick. She is exhausted physically and in her morale," said one of the freed hostages, ex-lawmaker Luis Eladio Perez.

"Ingrid is mistreated very badly, they have vented their anger on her, they have her chained up in inhumane conditions."

He said Betancourt, 46, suffered from liver problems.

The FARC released Perez and three other hostages in a deal brokered by left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has riled Bogota and Washington by calling for the guerrillas to be taken off international terrorism lists.

Betancourt was last seen in a rebel video released last year in which she looked gaunt and despondent, sitting at a wooden bench in the jungle. In a letter to her mother she wrote: "We live like the dead."

"As a woman and a mother, I want to send a message to Ingrid Betancourt, who has been left behind in the jungle very sick," Gloria Polanco, another former lawmaker released after more than six years in captivity, told Colombia's Caracol radio.

Betancourt's husband, Juan Carlos Lecompte, told Reuters at his Bogota home that he already knew she was in bad condition.

"That is why it is urgent to find a way to free her," he said.

Perez said the three American captives -- Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes -- all suffered from jungle illnesses and injuries received when their aircraft crashed in the jungle during an anti-drug mission in 2003.

He said he had spent the last six months of his captivity sleeping in the same camp as the three U.S. Defense Department contractors, who recently marked five years in rebel hands.

A recent decision by a U.S. judge to sentence a rebel commander, alias "Simon Trinidad," to 60 years in prison for his part in the kidnapping of the Americans hit the three men hard. The rebels say the U.S. captives must be exchanged for two guerrilla commanders jailed in the United States.

"They are pretty down, especially after the sentencing of Simon Trinidad," Perez said.

A deal to release all high profile rebel hostages has been stalled over a rebel demand that Uribe demilitarize an area to facilitate hostage exchange. Uribe rejects the condition because he says it will allow the FARC to regroup.

(Reporting by Patrick Markey, editing by Stuart Grudgings)