Because Latin American reality resembled the wildest imagination, journalism reportage, in particular has remained for Garcia Marquez an essential part of his writing life. Intermittently, Marquez has written a column for the Spanish paper, El Pais, produced a book of reportage in 1987, Clandestine in Chile, an account of the return to Chile of Miguel Littin, the Chilean director, to a make a secret documentary while Pinochet was still in power. News of a Kidnapping (Penguin paperback, special Indian price, £4) is an exhaustive piece of reporting that tells the story of kidnappings of Colombians in 1990 by Pablo Escobar, then the most powerful of drug traffickers, and of the negotiations set in motion to release them.
Nine abductions took place at a tense stage in the confrontation between the drug traffickers and the Colombian government. The outgoing government of President Barco had reacted with some force against drug cartels. During the presidential campaign of 1990, Carlos Golan, the candidate of the Liberal Party, had promised to take action against the cartels and in particular to extradite the key players to the United States.
Golan was assassinated. His campaign manager, Cesar Gavia won the presidency with extradition as one of his aims. The grounds for kidnapping were well and truly laid. In attempting to make the complex story intelligible, Marquez sets aside the imagination that mark his great novels.
Hostages were carefully targeted. The two women around whom the story hinges Maruja Panchon and Beatriz de Guerrero had close connections with Gaviras government: Maruja was the sister-in-law of the assassinated candidate while Beatrizs husband had personal access to the president.
Marquez uses all his ingenuity as a story-teller from the mass of detail, he skilfully builds up a narrative on shifting levels, describing the stalemate and inertia of confinement.
That Marina (she had been kidnapped three months earlier) became all the more depressed with the arrival of the women was understandable. After almost two months in the ante-chamber of death, the arrival of the other two hostages must have been intolerable for her in a world she made hers, and hers alone. ...in less than two weeks, she was suffering once again from the same interminable pain and intense solitude she had managed to overcome.
News of a Kidnapping carries Marquezs stamp blunt, fevered conversations, the constant back and forth where memory moves forward, hope backwards. On what this did to Colombia, he writes: Easy money, a narcotic more harmful than ill-named heroic drugs was injected into the national culture. The idea prospered: The law is the greatest obstacle to happiness; it is a waste of time learning to read and write; 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.
With the concentration of detail and the imperturbable style, you need to remind yourself that this is not fiction but the truth which at times sounds eerie, as though the quality of writing detached it from its reality.
