BOGOTA (Reuters) -- A Colombian woman freed by rebels after nearly six years in captivity said on Friday she tried to escape with her friend, French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, and their captors used jungle snakes to punish them.

The nighttime escape plan crumbled when they got lost in the darkness. They blamed each other and fell out over the failed attempt while the guerrillas disciplined them by throwing snakes, tarantulas and even a dead tiger into their bunks.
The episode recounted by the 44-year-old Clara Rojas is one of many harrowing experiences she described having during her captivity. The Marxist guerrillas handed her and another hostage over to the left-wing government of neighboring Venezuela on Thursday.
""We could not leave the area around our camp because we could not find our way in the darkness, so we failed,"" Rojas told Colombian radio from the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, where she is undergoing medical checks before returning to Colombia.
When they were taken in February 2002, Rojas was running for vice president on the same ticket as presidential candidate Betancourt, who is still in captivity.
Rojas said she made up with Betancourt after the dispute over their failed escape, and she was the first person Rojas told when she got pregnant by one of her guerrilla captors in 2003.
Many of the hostages held by Colombian rebels are kept chained in barbed-wire camps and are terrified by encroaching army artillery and machine-gun fire, said former lawmaker Consuelo Gonzalez, captured in 2001 and released on Thursday along with Rojas.
Gonzalez said she was constantly afraid she would be killed by bombs or bullets from Colombian air force helicopters.
""(Kidnapped) soldiers and police live chained all day by the neck,"" Gonzalez told Colombia's Caracol Radio. ""Whatever they have to do, wherever they have to go, to bathe, to wash their clothes, they carry their chains.""
""We lived in horrible situations of risk, of high risk,"" she said. ""We practically felt the bombs going off only a few meters (yards) from where we were. Army helicopters firing machine guns also came very close. Living in war is a horror.""
Gonzalez's husband died while she was held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the Andean country's largest guerrilla group that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Friday should no longer be branded a terrorist organization.
Rojas and Gonzalez trekked for 20 days with a small group of armed rebels before reaching a forest clearing where they were picked up by Venezuelan helicopters painted with symbols of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Colombia's government says it wants to swap high-profile captives like Betancourt and three Americans snatched in 2003 for jailed rebels. But the two sides are deadlocked over conditions for a hostage exchange.
In a video released by the FARC last year, Betancourt appeared gaunt and depressed. She told her mother in a letter she was barely eating and her hair was falling out in clumps.
When she gets back to Colombia, Rojas said she will head straight for her 3-year-old son, Emmanuel, who has been living in a Bogota foster home, and give him a long overdue hug.
Emmanuel was taken from her when he was 8 months old and placed by the rebels with a local peasant family, which then turned the child over to state child welfare officials.
""Very soon I will meet him, and little by little we'll start sharing what for us is a rebirth,"" Rojas told reporters.
""I never saw the boy's father again,"" she said.
""I don't have any information about the boy's father. What's more, I don't have any idea if he even knows he's the boy's father,"" Rojas said at a news conference, holding the hand of her elderly mother. ""The information I have is that he could even have died. I don't have any confirmation.""
After she learned she was pregnant, Rojas shared the news with her fellow captives — ""this happiness but also of course the anxiety.""
She was later separated from the rest and moved to a tent where she waited out the final months alone, sleeping on a cot and trying to ""have the peace to face the situation of the birth.""
She asked for a doctor, but none came. When the contractions came in April 2004, it was the start of a full day of difficult labor, and Rojas said the rebels, including a male nurse who was in charge, explained she would need a Caesarean section because there were risks to the baby and her own life.
""And I said, well, I'll put it in the hands of God,"" Rojas said. When she awoke from the anesthesia, one rebel told her: ""Clara, don't move. ... It's a boy.""
She named him Emmanuel, ""because he was a gift from God."" The boy suffered a broken arm at birth when he was pulled out by the nurse, Rojas said.
When the boy was 8 months old, Rojas said she allowed the rebels to take him away for two weeks to receive treatment for the broken arm and leishmaniasis, a parasite malady common in the jungle.
Rojas didn't hear of the boy again until Dec. 31, when she heard Colombian President Alvaro Uribe say on the radio that the child was no longer with her captors.
Rojas said she will return to Bogota in the coming days to reclaim him.
In the forest, radio broadcasts were one of the few comforts for the captives. Rojas recalled weeping with joy one Christmas when she heard her brother wish her the best on a program for hostages' relatives.
Asked if she sees the FARC as a terrorist group, Rojas did not answer directly but called it ""a criminal organization,"" condemning its kidnappings as ""a total violation of human dignity"" and saying some captive police and soldiers are constantly chained.
Colombia's government, which has made eradicating the rebels a top priority, reacted with outrage. Interior Minister Carlos Holguin said Colombia ""cannot accept a request of this sort.""