MEXICO CITY — Lucia Morett survived the attack Saturday by the Colombian military on a rebel base in Ecuador, an act that has brought three South American countries to the brink of war.
Since then, many have wondered what the 26-year-old Mexican drama student was doing in a base led by the No. 2 commander of Colombia's largest guerrilla group.
On Wednesday, Morett remained in a hospital in Quito, Ecuador, recuperating from wounds suffered in what appeared to be an aerial bombing, she said. Her public statements have shed little light on the mystery.
Her story is being cast in Mexico City as an espionage tale involving Mexican students and local support networks sympathetic to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
In media reports, Morett has been called a "Mexican guerrilla" and "drug trafficker." But her friends and relatives say she is an aspiring actress who was in Ecuador working on her bachelor's thesis on Latin American culture.
Jorge Morett, Lucia's father and a professor at the University of Chapingo, said in interviews with the Mexican media that his daughter was an idealistic young woman who had traveled to Ecuador to attend a leftist meeting. She is not a guerrilla, he said.
Many students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico's School of Philosophy and Letters said Lucia Morett often gave speeches on campus. Morett, who completed her studies at the university, Mexico's largest, about three years ago, was a committed activist who took up a variety of causes, including support for the Zapatista rebels in the Mexican state of Chiapas, some students said.
"She's a woman with values who fights for social causes and who is unjustly being treated like a criminal," said Dulce Ortega, 24, a sociology student. "There's a lot of us like Lucia in this school."
On Wednesday, the newspaper El Universal reported that Colombian officials believed that the FARC rebels had a support network at the university.
Colombian intelligence officials have sent agents to Mexico to monitor student groups at the university and in other cities, the newspaper said.
El Universal said it had obtained a confidential Colombian intelligence report that indicated the FARC was attempting to recruit Mexicans between the ages of 16 and 30 in Mexico City, Monterrey and other places.
