I first met Ingrid in December 1999 at my office at the Washington Post. She wanted to talk about the rampant corruption that was destroying political life in her home country of Colombia. She brought along a stack of documents, and we spent several hours going over them and preparing a memo that I could share with my Post colleagues in Latin America, who might be able to pursue the story.

As we talked that day nearly a decade ago, Ingrid began to share her personal story. She had grown up in Paris as the daughter of Colombia's ambassador to France. After university (where her friends included Dominique de Villepin, later France's prime minister, who was the person who had sent her my way) she had married a French diplomat. She could have returned to an easy life of power and wealth in Bogota -- if she had been willing to make her peace with the corrupt politicians who ruled the country.

But Ingrid doesn't do compromise. She began a political career back home as a reformer, and after she was elected to the Colombian House of Representatives in 1994, she began asking questions about an arms deal that had involved big commission payments to prominent political figures. Then she began investigating whether Colombia's drug lords had financed the campaign of President Ernesto Samper, who was ruling the country at the time. Samper was eventually charged and tried by the Colombian congress. (Colombia's Chamber of Deputies later cleared the charges.)

Ingrid began receiving death threats in 1996, as she was pursuing her campaign against Samper. One arrived in a crude letter in June 1996, with a warning that her family would pay a price for her actions. Inside the envelope was graphic documentation of what that threat might mean.

"There was a Polaroid of the body of a child, torn apart," she told me in one of our conversations. I asked if she meant that the photo had been torn apart. "No," she said. "The child was torn apart."

She evacuated her children from Colombia the day after she received that letter. But she didn't stop her campaign against the drug mafias and corrupt politicians. She kept talking to journalists about the corruption that afflicted her country. And she wrote a book, "La Rage Au Coeur," which became a bestseller in France when it was published in 2001. (It was translated into English in 2002 as "Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia.")

Ingrid's friends worried that she was taunting people who were killers, and warned her to be careful. But as I said, she was not a person who was capable of compromise. I remember talking with her in Paris in 2001, when she was promoting her book. She brushed tears out of her eyes as she remembered that horrific threat to dismember her children, but she said she wouldn't think of easing her crusade.

"There is always a difficult question of why we do things in life, especially things that are dangerous and difficult," she told me. But it wasn't in her to stop, or pull back.

She decided to run for president of Colombia in 2002, as a way of taking her crusade for justice to the country as a whole. During the campaign, she decided that she would go to a demilitarized zone in the jungle and try to meet with the FARC guerrillas, who had been waging an insurgency that was devastating the country. That was typical of her--to meet the scariest of people, face to face, in the belief that by her raw courage, she could transform the situation. Many in Colombia warned her not to go, but she wouldn't listen. She was kidnapped by the FARC on Feb. 23, 2002.

Now she has been freed, and returned to what we like to call "normal life." But anyone who thinks she won't keep battling for justice -- anyone who thinks that the years in captivity have somehow softened her, or blunted her spirit -- doesn't know Ingrid Betancourt. These are the people who change history -- the ones who refuse to bend, and instead make events bend around them. We should watch for the next chapters in the story of this remarkable woman, who with luck will be a political force in Latin America for many years to come.