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In 1990, fearing extradition to the United States, Pablo Escobar – head of the Medell?n drug cartel – kidnapped ten notable Colombians to use as bargaining chips. With the eye of a poet, Garc?a M?rquez describes the survivors’ perilous ordeal and the bizarre drama of the negotiations for their release. He also depicts the keening ache of Colombia after nearly forty years of rebel uprisings, right-wing death squads, currency collapse and narco-democracy. With cinematic intensity, breathtaking language and journalistic rigor, Garc?a M?rquez evokes the sickness that inflicts his beloved country and how it penetrates every strata of society, from the lowliest peasant to the President himself.
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OTHER BOOKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968) One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976) Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories (1978) In Evil Hour (1979) Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1979) Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1986) Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín (1987) Love in the Time of Cholera (1988) The General in His Labyrinth (1990) Strange Pilgrims (1993) Of Love and Other Demons (1995)
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY EDITH GROSSMAN ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK
CONTENTS
1997
Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Epilogue A Note About the Author A Note About the Translator ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1993, Maruja Pachón and her husband, Alberto Villamizar, suggested I write a book about her abduction and six-month captivity, and his persistent efforts to obtain her release. I was already well into the first draft when we realized it was impossible to separate her kidnapping from nine other abductions that occurred at the same time in Colombia. They were not, in fact, ten distinct abductions—as it had seemed at first—but a single collective abduction of ten carefully chosen individuals, which had been carried out by the same group and for only one purpose. IN OCTOBER
This belated realization obliged us to begin again with a different structure and spirit so that all the protagonists would have their well-defined identities, their own realities. It was a technical solution to a labyrinthine narrative that in its original form would have been confused and interminable. But this meant that what had been foreseen as a year’s
work extended into almost three, even with the constant, meticulous assistance and collaboration of Maruja and Alberto, whose personal stories are the central axis, the unifying thread, of this book. I interviewed all the protagonists I could, and in each of them I found the same generous willingness to root through their memories and reopen wounds they perhaps preferred to forget. Their pain, their patience, and their rage gave me the courage to persist in this autumnal task, the saddest and most difficult of my life. My only frustration is knowing that none of them will find on paper more than a faded reflection of the horror they endured in their real lives—above all, the families of Marina Montoya and Diana Turbay, the two hostages who were killed, and in particular Diana Turbay’s mother, dona Nydia Quintero de Balcázar, whose interviews were a heartrending, unforgettable human experience for me. I share this sense of inadequacy with the two people who suffered along with me through the intimate hammering out of the book: the journalist Luzángela Arteaga, who tracked down and captured innumerable impossible facts with the tenacity and absolute discretion of a crafty hunter, and Margarita Márquez Caballero, my first cousin and private secretary, who took care of the transcription, verification, and confidentiality of the intricate raw material that we often though