News of a Kidnapping

...But later they were replaced with well-mannered high school graduates, who reminded Maruja of her own sons, and who showed anger only when she offended them with atheistic remarks...

...The social differences between captors and captives are plain, and Marquez does not belabor them...

...The first guards were brutal: smoking crack, playing pornographic videos, and boasting of their murderous careers...

...Certainly he does not suggest that the horrendous backgrounds of these "adolescent killers" excuse their actions...

...Marquez focuses on the experience of Pachen, captive for more than six months, during which she endured fluctuating levels of misery...

...Hero Buss, a German journalist kidnapped along with Diana Turbay's news team, was held in an atmosphere of constant festivity: His captors went without masks, danced and drank with their hostage, and even borrowed money from him —which they scrupulously repaid...

...By that time he was already a has-been, the center of the country's drug trade having moved from Medellin to Cali...

...Although the author is a well-known leftist— friend of Fidel, defender of the Sandinistas, one-time member of the Communist party—there is little evidence of it here...

...He chose his bargaining chips well...

...But when the authorities finally objected to the luxurious fur-nishings he had smuggled in, their guest checked out...

...Maruja Pachen ran the government film-promotion board...

...With such a guarantee, he was willing to surrender to the Colombian authorities — indeed, he actively sought to turn himself in, since prison was the only place where he could be safe from his enemies in the rival Cali cartel...

...Escobar vowed to dynamite the colonial city of Cartagena if the police did not cease their Medellin offensive...

...There is also something cinematic about the portrait of Escobar's lawyer Guido Parra — pompous, unctuous, and indiscreet—who mishandles the negotiation and winds up dead in the trunk of a car...

...her husband was a former diplomat and legislator, and her brother-in-law had been the leading candidate for president until his assassination by the Medellin cartel in 1989...

...That will give you some idea of the impact on Colombian society of the events recounted in News of a Kidnapping...

...Like Escobar himself, who attributed his survival to the protection of the Holy Infant, almost all of the gangsters professed an apparently heartfelt piety...

...In News of a Kidnapping, Marquez prescribes no cure for his country's suffering...

...Kidnapping ten people in the summer and fall of that year was just Escobar's latest contribution to making Colombia "one of the least secure and most disordered countries in the world...

...They're holding him in Bogota," observes the paper's legal editor, recognizing a headline from the local edition...

...Here it may seem that Marquez is resorting to his famous gift for the fantastic —but he is simply writing about Colombia, where reality itself often seems magical...

...In a rush to save his wife and the other remaining hostages, Villamizar changed his strategy to negotiating Escobar's surrender...

...which the drug boss drew his troops...

...Marquez has the great novelist's sympathy for all of his characters, not least for the villain, who overshadows the whole book but does not appear until the epilogue: "Villamizar knew who he was at first sight only because he was different from all the other men he had ever seen in his life...

...When Escobar nonetheless refused to meet him, Villamizar turned to Father Rafael Garcia Herreros, a white-haired, poncho-clad priest famous for his cryptic nightly sermons on national television...

...In 1990, Pablo Escobar was the leader in an illegal industry worth perhaps 5 percent of his nation's GDP...

...But this is a conclusion reachable from any point on the political compass...

...Yet it is Marquez the novelist who shapes this information into literature...

...Yet even this analogy falls short...

...yet when one of her captors panicked at the ominous sight of a tan butterfly on the front gate, she reassured him that only black butterflies are unpropitious...

...The reunion of a released hostage with her husband is the occasion for an acute and beautiful insight: Beatriz and he—married for twenty-five years—exchanged an unhurried embrace, not shedding a tear, as if she were back from a short trip...

...A year later, he was dead at the hands of the police...

...At his surrender, when Escobar orders the police to lower their guns, they automatically obey...

...The only hint is the transformation of Pacho Santos, since childhood "a precocious example of the Romantic right," who emerges from his confinement convinced that his nation's political system is corrupt...

...To contact the fugitive, Villamizar sought the help of the Ochoa brothers, Medellin drug traffickers who had already surrendered and were serving prison time...

...Cesar Gaviria, the youthful president only a few months into his term, eventually obliged Escobar (and popular opinion) on the question of extradition...

...At first she was crammed with two other hostages (one of them her sister-in-law) and a pair of masked gunmen into a room 18 feet square, their only sources of light a television set and a constantly burning votive candle...

...it is a waste of time learning to read and write...

...Clearly this is a man who might have been great, but for "his total inability to distinguish between good and evil...

...you can live a better, more secure life as a criminal than as a law-abiding citizen—in short, this was the social breakdown typical of all undeclared wars...

...It is a moment ready made for the big screen...

...Ransom demands included sanctions against the police, whom Escobar accused (apparently with justification) of randomly killing Medellin slum kids, the ranks from FRANCIS X. ROCCA is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...

...T he story of the hostages alternates with that of Maruja's husband Alberto Villamizar...

...Over the preceding decade he and his associates in the Medellin drug cartel had bribed or killed prominent politicians, journalists, and judges—not to mention countless policemen— in order to stay in business...

...Guerrilla groups that dominate parts of the countryside are increasingly involved in drug dealing, kidnapping, and extortion (from mercenary rather than revolutionary motives...

...His personal fortune was said to be $3 billion...

...For almost a year Escobar lived in the prison specially built for him and his cronies, where he continued to run his narcotics business...

...But Gaviria refused to call off the war against the cartel until the surrender of its leader...

...But whereas in the movies this discovery would lead to a spectacular rescue mission, everyone here agrees that such action would be too risky...

...But what he really wanted was the assurance that he would not be extradited to the United States, where the judiciary was beyond his suborning or intimidation...

...The only hope he offers is in the courage of its people...

...My mother, from an intellectual Bogota family, grew up believing that her grandfather could stop trains or break light bulbs just by staring at them...

...For a time the drug traffickers had even bought their way into the legislature...

...He portrays them as pathetic, and in a sense also prisoners of the ruthless man they serve, yet anything but innocent...

...Almost all the hostages worked in the media, and three had especially important jobs, along with the family connections common in the Colombian elite: Diana Turbay, a television newscaster and magazine publisher, was the daughter of a former president (who was also her great-uncle...

...Both had thought so much about this moment that when the time came to live it, their reunion was like a scene in a play, rehearsed a thousand times, capable of moving everyone but the actors...

...Parra is the closest thing to a caricature here, yet even he is more than that...

...They rarely let their captives go to the bathroom, and struck Maruja for coughing in her sleep...

...The result, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes it, was a profound national demoralization: "The idea prospered: The law is the greatest obstacle to human happiness...

...The author also betrays his experience as a movie scriptwriter...

...Such colorful and telling anecdotes are the fruit of diligent reportage, and show Marquez for the long-time newsman that he is...

...In his relentless efforts to free his wife, Villamizar originally concentrated on lobbying the government to deal with her kidnapper...

...When Pacho Santos's family and friends listen to his voice on a tape released by the kidnappers, they hear him read from E/ Tiempo to prove the date of the recording...

...The father was regarded as a saint by Escobar and his minions, and claimed supernatural powers: 'Don't worry about me, my boy,' he shouted to Villamizar, 'I con68 September 1997 • The American Spectator trol the waters.' A clap of thunder rumbled across the vast countryside, and the skies opened in a biblical downpour...

...In the last few years, the national police have captured or killed all of the Cali cartel's leaders, apparently auguring an end to "the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than twenty years...

...When Maruja received a visit from the dead Marina, she took it not for a hallucination but the real thing...

...Diana Turbay died in an unauthorized rescue attempt, and Maruja's cell mate Marina Montoya was executed in retaliation for the deaths of some of Escobar's henchmen...

...Francisco Santos was the editor-in-chief of the country's top newspaper, owned by his family...

...News of a Kidnapping Gabriel Garcia Mcirquez Knopf / 291 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Francis X. Rocca I magine John Gotti abducting Maria Shriver, Donald Graham, and Sharon Percy Rockefeller, then threatening to blow up Boston—starting with the Old North Church—unless the authorities call off their operations against him...

...Yet the current president, Ernesto Samper, has been compromised by accusations that the cartel financed his election, and the ensuing scandal has brought on sanctions by the United States...