Freed Colombian Hostage Relied on Radio

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Consuelo Gonzalez rises before dawn every day, just as she did during the more than six years of crushing boredom and privation she endured as a hostage of Colombia's main leftist rebel army.

But now the woman who was seized at a rebel roadblock the day before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks has a purpose to her life.

Twice a week, Gonzalez makes a phone call to a radio program that broadcasts messages to those she left behind.

"I tell them what I'm up to, all my activities," Gonzalez, a former congresswoman in her 50s, told The Associated Press in an interview on Tuesday.

"What you live (as a hostage) is a collective tragedy. The hurt and anxiety are shared," said Gonzalez, who was freed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia on Jan. 10, along with fellow politician Clara Rojas, in a deal brokered by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

She tells captives held by the FARC guerrillas _ some for as long as a decade _ how she's working to get them freed.

She knows the hostages listen to the program religiously, as she did.

It is how she learned that her husband had died of a massive heart attack on Jan. 4, 2002. It is how relatives and friends of the hostages _ the government says the FARC holds some 700 _ keep the lifeline open and recount the anecdotes of their daily lives.

Gonzalez, a social psychologist, knows how much her words, transmitted live to the jungle, lift their spirits.

"There are many moments, almost all, of immense solitude and it always lifts one's spirits to hear the family," Gonzalez said in the living room of the Bogota apartment of one of her two daughters, her voice beginning to choke on tears.

Earlier, Gonzalez smiled broadly as her curly-haired 2-year-old granddaughter, Maria Juliana, toddled by, offering AP reporters imaginary tea in little plastic cups.

In a communique released last weekend, the FARC promised to free three more hostages from Gonzalez's group, saying they were ailing.