A gangster takes on the state
Philip Hensher
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Cape, £16.99, pp. 370. Though it doesn't live up to the excite- ment of a new novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the true story he tells in this book is so strange and interesting that, even ignoring the fascination of the author's personality, it deserves to be wide- ly read. It is often forgotten, by his legion of readers in Europe and North America, that he is a Colombian novelist. He seems, in his plain, visionary novels, to be too big to be confined by national borders; he appears to us to belong first, to Latin America as a whole, and then to the world. What this excellent book reminds us of is that he does not see himself in quite that light, nor do his first and best readers think of him as an international novelist. For them — for his Colombian readers — he is a writer of wonderful specificity, whose books are not the magical realist fantasies they are usually taken for in the West, but careful analyses of real situations. In News of a Kidnapping he makes no pretence of invention; and yet the splendid result, in its imaginative force and depth of thought, goes well beyond what reportage, on its own, could achieve.
Few countries have ever been held to ransom by one of its citizens; none, per- haps, has seemed as utterly helpless as Colombia did in the 1980s, under the grip of the immensely rich and powerful cocaine baron, Pablo Escobar. Like other crime rackets across the world, such as the Neapolitan 'ndrangheta, the Colombian drug lords began with real popular support; to their ordinary neighbours, the cocaine exporters seemed more powerful, more benevolent and altogether more effective than the agents of the state. One of the reasons the mafia in Sicily lasted so long was the strong memory of the local capo, in the Twenties and Thirties, fighting against the detested Northern fascists; similarly, in Colombia, if you wanted something done, you went not to the police station but to one of Escobar's lieutenants.
That was no longer the case by the 1980s, when any popular support in Columbia had long since vanished in an atmosphere of fear and rage. But it is important to under- stand that, though Escobar, with his immense fortune and huge business empire, no longer had any need for parochial support, he and his men still viewed themselves as representatives of a people. The organisation had become, in effect, an alternative state, with its own systems of law enforcement and taxation, its leaders and its proletariat. This is not quite as absurd as it sounds. It is pretty clear that the powers of the 21st century are going to be the huge multi- national companies, quite as much as the old, 19th-century nation states. Already, and particularly in South America, it is common to meet employees of, say, Shell or IBM who have a loyalty bordering on patriotism for their firm, a feeling based purely on antiquated sentiment for their country. And what was Escobar's business but a huge multi-national? It had every- thing except a pension plan for its employ- ees, and that only for the reason that none of them were ever likely to live long enough to need it. News of a Kidnapping takes up this strange story near its end. The Colombian state, having failed to make much of an impact on Escobar's activities, came up with an ingenious plan. The drug barons, once captured, would not be tried in Colombia but extradited to America. To lawyers, this seemed a dubious sort of idea, only to be overcome by viewing drug- trafficking as a crime sui generic; it was hard enough, for them, to see what Esco- bar, once captured, could be prosecuted for in Colombia with much hope of success. But the proposal had the satisfying resul of throwing Escobar, who was now on the run, into a complete panic, and, for the first time, his business had a name: the Extraditables.
What Escobar wanted, and now proceed- ed to bargain for, was not freedom, but the guarantee that he would be prosecuted and imprisoned in Colombia. The story of News of a Kidnapping is mainly of the means he used to press the government into agreeing to this. His men kidnapped a number of relations of members of the government mostly women — and held them hostage until he could be sure that the government would not extradite him. Most to the book is a wonderfully imagined recreation of the lives of the prisoners, and principally of the wife and sister of the politician Alberto Villamizar, Maruja Pachon de Villamizar and Beatriz Villamizar de Guerrero; a matter, as the weeks turned into months, of being held in a tiny, filthy room, under close guard; of small privileges extended and withdrawn, of combing television broadcasts for cryptic messages from the police and their families, of living under the constant threat of immediate execution.
The heart of News of a Kidnapping, though, is not with the hostages, wonderful though these chapters are, but with the enigmatic figure of Pablo Escobar. Escobar is handled in a way rather reminiscent of another classic account of a gangster; as in Francesco Rosi's great film, Salvatore Giuliano, the boss's face is never seen. Here, Escobar emerges slowly from veils of mystery and rumour, with stupendous impact; it is only in the last pages that he finally appears, at first in a reported conversation, then over the telephone, and finally, blinking, in person, getting out of a helicopter.
Around Escobar, Marquez builds a series of strange symmetries; he imprisons Maru- ja and Beatriz and the others in order to lose his freedom, and they are liberated when he can give himself up to captivity. His 'war' with the Colombian state comes to seem more like a war between neigh- bouring states than one between a gangster and the authorities. It involves arguments over territory and borders — at one point Escobar demands the cessation of police activity in Medellin — as well as about the applicability of Colombian law to someone who, for almost all purposes, now lives out- side it. It is characteristic of Marquez that he withholds one suggestive and poetic symmetry almost to the very end; through- out, the president of Colombia, Gaviria, is a slightly ineffectual figure, utterly unlike the forceful, shadowy presence of Escobar. Unlike him, Gaviria is always turning up at people's houses and inviting the families to his office for a chat; he is almost too much in evidence. It is not until the very end, though, that Escobar's full name is revealed: Pablo Emilio Gaviria. The curious coincidence of names condenses an argument which has never been far from the surface of the book, that the two Gavirias have more in common than either would admit.
It is a remarkable, expert book, giving the reader exactly the right details and leading him through a complicated series of events with perfect clarity. Few readers, in this country at least, will be familiar with the story in much more than general outline; few will put News of a Kidnapping down without a sense of understanding the situation, and a sense of having had a country, somehow, explained to them. Nothing could be less like the common notion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the flowery effusions of the South American novel; indeed, in his suggestive and serious explorations of the shadow-doubles to be found in political and criminal life, he invites comparison with no one less than Conrad. And he doesn't disappoint.
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