News of a Kidnapping

News of a Kidnapping by García Márquez, originally published in Spanish (1996) under the title Noticia de un Secuestro a year before it was published in English, is a nonfiction book which recounts events that took place in Colombia in the early 1990s. García Márquez’s friends Maruja Pachon de Villamizar and Alberto Villamizar asked the Nobel Laureate to write a book about Maruja’s abduction. While researching the book, García Márquez found an additional nine kidnappings that took place in Columbia around the same time as Maruja’s ordeal. He found it necessary to expand the scope of the project to include the stories of those incidents as well. He tells the story of ten people’s lives in captivity after their abductions and of the reactions of their families, as well as the attempts of the families to rescue them. García Márquez places the events in the context of the ongoing Colombian drug crisis and of terrorism at large. The kidnappings were ordered by Medellin cartel leader, the drug lord Pablo Escobar in the face of possible extradition to the United States.

The book opens with the story of Maruja Pachon and Beatriz Villamizar de Guerrero’s kidnappings, which occurred on November 7, 1990. The prevailing thought was that Maruja was abducted because she was the sister of Gloria Pachon, the widow of the New Liberalism founder, the journalist Luis Carlos Galan. Beatriz served as Maruja’s assistant and was her sister-in-law. Others whose stories are examined include Diana Turbay, the director of Critpon, a television news series, who was taken along with four members of her news team. Turbay was the daughter of Julio Cesar Turbay, the former Colombia president and the leader of the Liberal Party. The team members were editor Azucena Lievano, writer Juan Vitta, and cameramen Richard Becerra and Orlando Acevedo. Also abducted was German journalist Hero Buss. The stories of Marina Montoya and Francisco Santos Calderon, a newspaper editor-in-chief, who were abducted on September 18, 1990, are also included.

Escobar’s primary motivation was to pressure the government of Colombia. Not wanting to be extradited to the United States, Escobar sought to negotiate his surrender on his own terms. Extradition was the government’s strongest threat, while the hostages became Escobar’s strongest bargaining chip. García Márquez details the poor conditions in which the hostages were held and the low regard Escobar held even for the guards in his employ, considering them less valuable than his hostages as the guards had no trade value. The narrative describes the political background of the time and place along with the personal backgrounds of the figures involved.



Adding to the difficulty of resolving the situation, the general public in Colombia had more faith in the communiqués from Escobar than they did in the information being released by the authorities. More details about Escobar continued to emerge: he displayed the plane he used to export cocaine for the first time as almost a monument; he had his underlings create strange conversations while on the phone in order to bury real messages in nonsense; he would disguise himself and ride on buses that seemed to be, but were not, public buses with his bodyguards disguised as passengers, sometimes taking the wheel for the fun of it.

García Márquez conducted as many interviews as possible with those directly involved in the incidents. Of the two victims who did not survive, one had kept a diary while imprisoned to which the author had access. The narration of the book makes everything the hostages experienced accessible to the reader. There was no consistency in their lives—the guards could be equally abusive and understanding. Ironically, although all hostages yearn to be rescued, the captives and their families feared it as well as a rescue would likely end in violence and death.

When García Márquez died at eighty-seven in 2014, The New York Times said of him, “Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers—Dickens, Tolstoy, and Hemingway among them—who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.”