CAPTIVE NATION

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ DOCUMENTS THE PERSONAL DRAMAS OF HIS COUNTRY'S HOSTAGES IN THE COCAINE WARS

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 1, 1997

Page: N20

Section: Books

These quarters -- with a single mattress on the floor, a boarded-up window, and a television that played incessantly -- would be the three women's home for the next several months. Two of them would get out alive. They would undergo the usual transformation of long-term hostages: wildly ambivalent emotions toward their captors, debilitating health problems, the shrinking of a psychic landscape that was counted by minutes but where time in fact held no greater counsel. Maruja and Beatriz, respectively the wife and sister of the politician Alberto Villamizar, were the last of 10 people kidnapped in a rash of crimes that autumn -- all of them taken as a retaliatory negotiating tool by the country's drug warlords, best known here as the Colombian cartel and commanded by the infamous Pablo Escobar.

The sweep and horrific reign of the cartel's top guns -- known in Colombia as ``the Extraditables,'' because they were fighting to avoid US prosecution -- has now taken on the force of legend, signifying not just the random brutality of a cocaine regime but also the corruption and mayhem of a government that tried to stop them. Escobar was killed in a police shoot-out in 1993, at least removing that particular charismatic despot from the game. But the specificity of the story has been more elusive, gone the way of newspaper headlines and folklore. Its high-stakes personal drama is part of what drew the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez to the subject -- to what he calls ``only one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than twenty years.'' ``News of a Kidnapping'' is his literary reprisal for that holocaust, an effort to document the captivity of Pachon and Villamizar, and untangle the events that placed them in their squalid, makeshift prison.

Garcia Marquez was a reporter and foreign correspondent before he transformed world literature three decades ago with ``One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' and he has chosen for this nonfiction work an unadorned, reportorial style. He began the project with the aim of telling Maruja Pachon's story, but quickly realized hers was inextricable from the other kidnappings of that vicious season: Pacho Santos, the editor in chief of El Tiempo; Diane Turbay, a well-known journalist and daughter of the former president and leader of the Liberal Party; four members of her news team; the German journalist Hero Buss; and Marina Montoya, the sister of a politician sought by Escobar's hired guns. Relying upon interviews with the surviving victims and their families, as well as the journal kept in captivity by Turbay, who was killed during a shoot-out, he has constructed a dark narrative that roams between the particularities of imprisonment and the labyrinth of governmental response. While Pachon, Villamizar, and Montoya were subsisting on lentils and what hope they had left, Alberto Villamizar and other key players were trying to put together a governmental decree that would convince Escobar to surrender.

This is a frustratingly complex story, full of failed negotiations and political egos, and Garcia Marquez has tried to humanize it. But ``News of a Kidnapping'' is written, understandably, from a Colombian's perspective, with scant context of Escobar's reign or the social upheaval of such tyranny. Medellin, for instance, headquarters of the cartel, has one chilling descriptor in the corpse of a young girl, flung onto a street and ignored even by taxi drivers -- but the anecdote is buried in a sea of legal maneuverings and appears with little explanation. The cast of characters can be almost as confusing as that in ``One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' without the literary payoff. Stunned by the gravity of his story -- he calls the task of writing it ``the saddest and most difficult of my life'' -- Garcia Marquez has chosen to strip it of images or detail he must have considered superfluous. You can feel the presence of the somber divining rod that must have led him this way, and yet the consequence is so barren, so dependent on red-tape conversations and journalistic telescoping, that the story is stilted, robbed of a great deal of power.

Amid the frozen calm of President Cesar Gaviria, the obsequious panderings of Escobar's lawyer, Guido Parra, the reader begins to long for evocative clues to tell the larger story: the chess games that helped Pacho Santos survive his captivity; the nightgowns Marina Montoya and her cellmates wore on a special occasion; the insanity with which Escobar held the whole social order of Colombia in thrall. (In his heyday, the zoo he built near Medellin had a plane displayed on its entrance, celebrating the first exportation of cocaine.) But one has to work to find this greater tale. It is midway through the book before we get a sense of Escobar's nefarious charms; 100 pages, for that matter, before we find out Pachon's age (she turned 53 in captivity). It's almost as though Garcia Marquez feared his inimitable tools as a novelist, and so sacrificed the imagination in favor of fact. But fact without literary reach cannot capture a story; it can only relay it.

There are moments when ``News of a Kidnapping'' rises to great power, particularly upon the horrific occasions of the deaths of Montoya and Turbay. And the occupation of journalism has its small triumphs here: Pachon's daughter used her TV show to smuggle messages of hope to the hostages; dictating from newspaper headlines to establish the date in a tape his captors released, Santos tipped the public he was in northern Bogota by reading from a late local edition. These are perfect vignettes, all too rare in a story of such epic proportion, but they help carry ``News of a Kidnapping'' through its grayer corridors of narrative. And never does one doubt the simple heroism of the people who lived through the events of this book. Turbay's mother, Nydia Quintero, was a former first lady of Colombia, and she appears here with a merciful dignity that seems superhuman. On the other side of the death of her daughter, she wrote to Escobar before his surrender, begging him to free the other hostages, ``my heart overflowing with pain, forgiveness, and good will.'' Not even Pablo Escobar could stand up to that.

The guards talked a good deal among themselves, taking no precaution except to speak in whispers. They exchanged blood-soaked news about how much they had earned hunting down the police at night in Medellin, about their sexual prowess and their melodramatic love affairs. Maruja had succeeded in convincing them that in the case of an armed rescue attempt, it would be more realistic to protect the captives so that they at least would be sure of receiving decent treatment and a compassionate trial. At first they seemed indifferent, for they were absolute fatalists, but her strategy of mollification meant they no longer pointed their guns at the prisoners while they slept, and their weapons, wrapped in cloths, were kept out of sight behind the television. Little by little, their mutual dependence and shared suffering brought a thin veneer of humanity to their relations.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

From ``News of a Kidnapping''