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Review [published April 2004]
Gabriel García Márquez: News Of A Kidnapping
Chris Mitchell
“The men opened Maruja’s door and another two
opened Beatriz’s. The fifth shot the driver in the head
through the glass, and the silencer made it sound no
louder than a sigh. Then he opened the door, pulled
him out, and shot him three more times as he lay
on the ground. It was another man’s destiny: Angel
Maria Roa had been Maruja’s driver for only three
days, and for the first time he was displaying his new
dignity with the dark suit, starched shirt, and black
tie worn by the chauffeurs who drove government
ministers. His predecessor, who had retired the week
before, had been the government agency’s regular
driver for ten years.”
This quote from the opening pages of News Of
A Kidnapping has the unmistakable ring of Gabriel
García Márquez’s world famous prose style – at once
laden with pathos and yet tinged with black absurdity,
it could easily have come from any of the Nobel Prize
winner’s acclaimed novels. Yet News Of A Kidnapping
is not fiction – in its documenting of cocaine baron
Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror in Colombia, the book
is solely concerned with the murderous realities of
Colombian political life rather than the magic realism
for which García Márquez is famed. These are realities
which leave no-one untouched: García Márquez himself
has recently become dangerously embroiled within
the ongoing war between Colombia’s government and
guerrillas, in a particularly twisted version of life imitating
literature.
News Of A Kidnapping is the culmination of three
years research by Márquez, marking a return for the
69-year-old author to his days as a young journalist
within the Colombian capital of Bogota. He traces
the stories of those relatives of Colombian politicians
who were abducted in the winter of 1990 by Escobar’s
Medellin cocaine cartel, an organisation so powerful
that it systematically undermined all of Colombia’s
civil institutions by murder, abduction and bribery.
Given that Colombia produces 80 per cent of the
world’s cocaine supply and that Escobar was the most
ruthless of the country’s drug barons, it’s not difficult
to understand why he wielded such influence and was
wanted by both the Colombian and Americans governments.
Escobar ordered the kidnappings in order to
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