News of a Kidnapping

By: Gabriel García Márquez

Narrated by: Christopher Salazar

Consumed these past 20 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 García Márquez 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, García Márquez 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 García Márquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.

©1996 by Gabriel García Márquez and the heirs of Gabriel García Márquez. Translation © 1997 by Gabriel García Márquez (P)2021 by Blackstone Publishing

This is NOT “Narcos”

Reads like a very long magazine article, which may have been as Maáquez intended. Many of us first learned the details of the kidnappings integral to the civil war between the Colombian government and Escobar’s army from the series “Narcos”, However, “News of a Kidnapping “ tells a somewhat different story — likely a more accurate one.