“‘They kidnapped Pacho.’ News of a kidnapping, no matter how painful, is not as irredeemable as news of a murder, and Hernando breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God.’”
The fact that someone can reply to a phone call about a loved one’s kidnapping with ‘Thank God’ encapsulates the devastating story that News of a Kidnapping tells. Several influential people are kidnapped, separately, and forced into an ordeal that would last months while power brokers in the government struggled to negotiate with the kidnappers’ leader, the notorious and seemingly immortal drug baron Pablo Escobar, who used the victims as semi-disposable pawns in the game to discuss his surrender. But this case is more complicated than it might seem to someone unfamiliar with the circumstances of the time; in a place like 1980s Colombia, rescue, and the trigger-happy, barely-literate soldiers that it promised, was as terrifying a prospect as execution by the kidnappers, and in News of a Kidnapping it is this constant fear that Gabriel García Márquez reveals with his detached yet immensely personal writing.
In a repeat of the journalistic style portrayed in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Márquez describes the events at a distance, the story being told as a series of past events, the outcomes of which are made clear from the beginning. We know straight away that a key character will be killed, that Escobar will surrender, and that the victims will be freed. And again, the story is not told in a traditional linear format; instead, vignettes of the individual players in the tale are described in great detail. Their actions and their thoughts are described with excellent lucidity by Márquez, whose journalistic sense of duty in telling the reader exactly what happens and how never wavers.
Several aspects of each abduction are explored in News of a Kidnapping. Some we may never have thought of before; the fragile teenage guards, hiding their own fear with boasts of their sexual prowess and murders, or the personal trauma behind the Colombian president’s hardline stance on the kidnappings. Some are obvious – the sobbing mother of the victim, staying up till the early hours in her holiday home on the frozen Guajira Peninsula, scrawling desperate pleas for help to the government, and the psychological effects of the filthy, cramped conditions on the victims. But all are described in such incredible detail, the reader may Google the author’s name, just to see if he was at some point held against his will for an extended period.
News of a Kidnapping is not an easy read. It’s long. The journalistic style may feel imposing and cold – after all, the book mostly focuses on facts and the political negotiations of the crisis rather than descriptive details of the kidnappings themselves. But in truth, this apparent detachment, as was so resoundingly proved by Chronicle of a Death Foretold, makes for a devastating and rich piece of writing. Read this book, and allow it to affect you.