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A profile emerges of Sanford's paramour

In paradox, a privacy-loving Argentine woman had an affair with a very public American politician

Maria Belen Chapur in the only public image of her so far - from a 2001 video as a TV reporter in New York. She said a hacker revealed her e-mail correspondence with Sanford.
Maria Belen Chapur in the only public image of her so far - from a 2001 video as a TV reporter in New York. She said a hacker revealed her e-mail correspondence with Sanford.Read moreAssociated Press/C5N TV

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - She is a woman of many paradoxes.

She's a 43-year-old, divorced mother of two teenage boys who told her lover in an e-mail, "I haven't felt this since I was in my teen ages."

She was educated in Catholic schools and professed her belief in God, evil and the afterlife, and yet joined a married father of four in violating the Seventh Commandment prohibition against adultery.

She is zealous about her privacy but had a yearlong affair with a high-profile American politician.

Maria Belen Chapur has successfully eluded the news media since South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford revealed their relationship last week.

Friends and family have enfolded her and her boys in a protective cocoon, and the only public image of her is a grainy shot from an 8-year-old video 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."

As a child, Chapur attended St. Catherine's Moorlands, a private, international baccalaureate school in Buenos Aires. Her mother is from what one acquaintance described as a 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 after 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 a million visitors in the South American summer.

Sanford had just finished his third term in Congress and was embarking on his first gubernatorial campaign.

Chapur was separating from her husband, and Sanford counseled her to 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.