News of a Kidnapping
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Gabriel García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping is a powerful retelling of actual events from a turbulent period of Colombian history.
'She looked over her shoulder before getting into the car to be sure no one was following her'
Pablo Escobar: billionaire drugs baron, ruthless manipulator brutal killer and jefe of the infamous Madellín cartel. A man whose importance in the international drug trade and renown for his charitable work among the poor brought him influence and power in his home country of Colombia, and the unwanted attention of the American courts.
Terrified of the new Colombian President's determination to extradite him to America, Escobar found the best bargaining tools he could find: hostages.
In the winter of 1990, ten relatives of Colombian politicians, mostly women, were abducted and held hostage as Escobar attempted to strong-arm the government into blocking his extradition. Two died, the rest survived, and from their harrowing stories Márquez retells, with vivid clarity, the terror and uncertainty of those dark an volatile months.
'Reads with an urgency which belongs to the finest fiction. I have never read anything which gave a better sense of the way Colombia was in worst times' Daily Telegraph
'Compellingly readable. A book with all the panache of Márquez's fiction, hitting home rather harder' Sunday Times
'A piece of remarkable investigative journalism made all the more brilliant by the author's talent for magical storytelling' Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In October 1993, Mauja Pachon and Beatriz Villamizar, the wife and sister of a prominent Colombian politician, were taken hostage by Pablo Escobar, the billionaire don of the Medellin cocaine cartel. The story of their captivity, and of the negotiations that led to their release, is also the story of a legal crisis that turned into a terrorist civil war and, in the last decade, left thousands dead, from the children of Medellin's slums (where people prayed to effigies of Escobar) to soccer stars and presidential candidates. The heart of the struggle, played out daily in Colombia's Supreme Court and the National Assembly, in newspapers, on TV and in the streets: terms of surrender for Escobar and his henchmen, "The Extraditables," whose motto was "Better a grave in Colombia than a cell in the United States." This struggle has been reported to North American readers, notably by Alma Guillermoprieto in her recent collection of New Yorker correspondence, The Heart That Bleeds, but never with such tragic elegance as here, for Nobel laureate Marquez knows his subjects as friends or acquaintances and at the same time understands them as types, symbols of a national destiny. Their private premonitions, foibles and heroism fascinate him. What emerges from these pages is not just a chronology of the harrowing events of 1993-94, but also a detailed portrait of Colombian society today, in particular of the moneyed intelligentsia (known in Colombia as "the political class") for whom government and the media are still very much a family affair. Nevertheless, Marquez's calm sympathy reaches beyond these leading families taken prisoner by the war on drugs; he takes a human interest in the foot-soldiers who face certain death in Escobar's service--and even in Escobar himself, a doomed anti-hero whose "most unsettling and dangerous aspect... was his total inability to distinguish between good and evil." Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is its insistence on individual choice between good and evil, pluck and cowardice, at a moment when a lesser writer might see only the drama of a gripping true-crime story, with villains and victims foreordained. 100,000 first printing.
