News of a Kidnapping

Front Cover
Knopf, 1998 - History - 291 pages
Consumed these past twenty years by a "biblical holocaust," Colombia has endured leftist insurgencies, right-wing death squads, currency collapses, cholera epidemics, and, most recently and corrosively, drug trafficking. Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel Garcia Marquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar's henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, Garcia Marquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor. We are drawn into a world that, like some phantasmagorical setting in a great Garcia Marquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists'but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.

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Contents

I
3
II
16
III
43
Copyright

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About the author (1998)

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927. After studying law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogota, he became a journalist. In 1965, he left journalism, to devote himself to writing. His works included Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, The Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth, Clandestine in Chile, and the memoir Living to Tell the Tale. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He died on April 17, 2014 at the age of 87.