BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – She is a 43-year-old, divorced mother of two teenage boys who wants to believe she can still experience true love.
She is an intensely private woman who was not afraid to fight back when that privacy was breached.
She was educated in Catholic schools and professes her belief in God, evil and the afterlife, and yet joined a married father of four in violating the Seventh Commandment prohibition against adultery.
Maria Belen Chapur has successfully eluded the news media since South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford revealed their yearlong affair last week. Friends and family have enfolded her and her boys in a protective cocoon, and the only image of her is a grainy, 8-year-old video from her brief moment in front of the cameras as a television reporter in New York.
Other than a 200-word statement denouncing a hacker's "evil act" of leaking her passionate e-mail correspondence with Sanford, Chapur has maintained her silence.
"I won't speak about my private life as it just belongs to me," she wrote to a former television colleague. "It has already been made too public during these last days, bringing to me even more pain."
Due partly to the loyalty of friends and family, and Argentine privacy laws, relatively little is known about Sanford's "other woman." In fact, much of what we know about Chapur comes from her purloined personal e-mails.
As a child, Chapur attended St. Catherine's Moorlands, a private, international baccalaureate school in Buenos Aires. Chapur's mother is from what one acquaintance described as a very powerful "oligarchic" family in Argentina.
After school, she married a grain exporter and bore two sons, now 15 and 19. Later, Chapur entered the Catholic University of Argentina, says a former classmate, graduating with a degree in political science and international relations.
The athletic, dark-haired Chapur traveled the world, learning English, French and Portuguese. She even studied Mandarin Chinese after accompanying her husband on a business trip to Beijing and Shanghai.
"It was like playing mimics all the time," she told The Associated Press in a 2005 story about Argentines rushing to study Chinese. "I've traveled to many parts of the world, but this was the hardest place for me to communicate."
Chapur dabbled in television, reporting from New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and also did stints as an English interpreter and market researcher.
She and Sanford met eight years ago, according to one of Sanford's e-mails, "in a wind swept somewhat open air dance spot" in Punta del Este — an upscale Uruguayan beach resort that attracts up to 1 million visitors in the South American summer.
Sanford had just finished his third term in Congress and was about to embark on his first gubernatorial campaign. Chapur was separating from her husband, and Sanford counseled her that she should try to salvage her marriage for the boys' sake and because it was "part of God's law."
For whatever reason, that reconciliation never happened, and the couple divorced. But her e-mail correspondence with Sanford continued, and intensified.
In June 2008, a relationship that started out innocently, in Sanford's words, "developed into something much more than that."
That month, Sanford traveled to Brazil on a state trade mission. He managed to build in a side trip to Buenos Aires.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Breed reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Associated Press Writer Michael Warren in Mexico City also contributed.
Wire
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