News of a Kidnapping: From the Nobel Laureate, the International Bestseller That Takes Us into the Horrific World of the Medellin Drug Cartel (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
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Books › Social Science › Criminology
ISBN: 0140269444 / Publisher: Penguin Books, June 1998
Chronicles the kidnapping of ten Colombians by Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar in 1990, the pressure put on the government to protect members of the cartel from extradition, and the toll taken on the families of the hostages
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Consumed these past twenty 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 Garcia Marquez 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, Garcia Marquez 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 Garcia Marquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists?but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.
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