News of a Kidnapping

by Gabriel García Márquez

  As soon as Beatriz walked into her house she thought of Maruja, alone and deprived of news in that miserable room. She telephoned Alberto Villamizar, and he answered at the first ring in a voice prepared for anything.

  "Hello," she said. "It's Beatriz."

  She knew her brother had recognized her voice even before she said her name. She heard a deep, rough sigh, like the growl of a cat, and then a question asked without the slightest alteration in his voice:

  "Where are you?"

  "At my house."

  "Perfect," said Villamizar. "I'll be there in ten minutes. In the meantime, don't talk to anybody."

  He was punctual. Beatriz had called just as he was about to fall asleep. Beyond the joy of seeing his sister and having the first and only direct news about his captive wife, he was moved by the pressing need to prepare Beatriz before the reporters and the police arrived. His son Andres, who has an irresistible calling to be a race-car driver, got him there in record time.

  Everyone was feeling calmer. Beatriz sat in the living room with her husband and children, her mother and two sisters, who listened with avid interest to her story. Alberto thought she looked pale after her long confinement, and younger than before, like a schoolgirl in her sweatsuit, ponytail, and flat shoes. She almost cried but he stopped her, eager to know about Maruja. "Believe me, she's all right," Beatriz told him. "Things there are difficult, but bearable, and Maruja is very brave." And then she attempted to answer the question that had tormented her for two weeks.

  "Do you know Marina's telephone number?" she asked.

  Villamizar thought the least brutal thing would be the truth.

  "They killed her," he said.

  The pain of the bad news threw Beatriz off balance with retroactive terror. If she had known two hours earlier, she might not have been able to endure the drive to her own freedom. She cried until she had no more tears. Meanwhile, Villamizar took precautions to make sure no one came in until they had decided on a public version of the abduction that would not put the other hostages at risk.

  Details of her captivity could give an idea of the house where they had been imprisoned. To protect Maruja, Beatriz had to tell the press that the trip home was a three-hour drive from somewhere in the temperate zone, though the truth was just the opposite: The real distance, the hilly roads, the music on the loudspeakers that blared all night on weekends, the noise of airplanes, the weather, everything indicated a neighborhood in the city. And questioning four or five priests in the district would have been enough to find out which one exorcised the house.

  Other even more careless oversights on the part of her captors provided enough clues for an armed rescue attempt with minimum risk. It ought to take place at six in the morning, after the change in shifts, because the guards who came on duty then did not sleep well at night and they sprawled on the floor, exhausted, not concerned with their weapons. Another important piece of information was the layout of the house, in particular the courtyard gate, where they saw only an occasional armed guard, and the dog was easier to bribe than his barking would lead one to believe. It was impossible to know in advance if there was also a security cordon around the place, though the lax disorder inside made it doubtful, and in any case that would be easy enough to find out once the house had been located. After the tragedy of Diana Turbay, Villamizar had less confidence than ever in the success of armed rescues, but he kept it in mind in the event that became the only alternative. This was, perhaps, the only secret he did not share with Rafael Pardo.

  These pieces of information created a moral dilemma for Beatriz. She had promised Maruja not to reveal any clues that might lead to a raid on the house, but she made the grave decision to pass these facts on to her brother when she saw that he realized with as much clarity as Maruja and Beatriz herself how undesirable an armed solution would be, above all when her release proved that in spite of all the obstacles, the negotiation route was still open. And so the next day, fresh and rested after a good night's sleep, Beatriz held a press conference at her brother's house, where a forest of flowers made it almost impossible to walk. She gave the journalists and the public an accurate picture of the horror of her captivity, but not a single fact of use to those who might want to act on their own, and endanger Maruja's life.

  The following Wednesday, positive that by now Maruja knew about the new decree, Alexandra decided to produce a program to celebrate it. In recent weeks, as negotiations progressed, Villamizar had made significant changes in his apartment, hoping his wife would find them to her liking when she was released. He had put in a library where she had wanted one, replaced some furniture, hung some new pictures, and found a prominent place for Maruja's prized possession, the Tang Dynasty horse she had brought home from Jakarta. At the last minute he remembered that she had complained about not having a decent rug in the bathroom, and one was bought without delay. The bright, transformed house was the backdrop for an unusual television program that allowed Maruja to know about the new decoration before she returned. It turned out very well, though they did not even know if Maruja saw it.

  Beatriz soon took up her life again. In her captive's bag she kept the clothes she had worn when she was released, and it held the room's depressing odor that still woke her with a start in the middle of the night. She recovered her spiritual balance with her husband's help. The only ghost that still came to her from the past was the voice of the majordomo, who telephoned her twice. The first time it was the shout of a desperate man:

  "The medicine! The medicine!"

  Beatriz recognized his voice and her blood turned to ice in her veins, but she found enough breath to ask in the same tone:

  "What medicine? What medicine?"

  "The medicine for the senora!" shouted the majordomo.

  Then it became clear that he wanted the name of the medicine Maruja took for her circulation.

  "Vasoton," said Beatriz. And, having regained her composure, she asked: "How are things?"

  "I'm fine, thanks," said the majordomo.

  "Not you," Beatriz corrected him. "Her."

  "Ah, don't worry," said the owner. "The senora is fine."

  Beatriz hung up and burst into tears, overcome by the nausea of hideous memories: the wretched food, the dungheap of a bathroom, the days that were always the same, the horrific solitude of Maruja in the fetid room. In any case, a mysterious announcement appeared at the bottom of the screen during the sports segment of a television newscast: "Take Basoton." The spelling was changed to keep an uninformed laboratory from protesting the use of its product for mysterious purposes.

  The second call from the majordomo, several weeks later, was very different. It took Beatriz a moment to identify the voice, distorted by some device. But the style was somewhat paternal.

  "Remember what we talked about," he said. "You weren't with dona Marina. Or anybody."

  "Don't worry," said Beatriz, and hung up.

  Guido Parra, intoxicated by the first success after all his efforts, told Villamizar that Maruja's release was a matter of three days. Villamizar relayed this to Maruja in a press conference on radio and television. Moreover, Beatriz's accounts of the conditions of their captivity persuaded Alexandra that her messages were reaching their destination. And so she held a half-hour interview with Beatriz, who talked about everything Maruja wanted to know: how she had been freed, how the children were, and the house, and friends, and the hopes she should have for her release.

  From that time on, Alexandra's program was based on trivia: the clothes they were wearing, the things they were buying, the people they were seeing. Someone would say, "Manuel cooked the pork roast," just so Maruja would know that the order she had left behind in her house was still intact. All of this, no matter how frivolous it might have seemed, had a reassuring significance for Maruja: Life was continuing.

  The days passed, however, and no signs of her liberation could be seen. Guido Parra became entangled in vague explanations and puerile excuses; he stopped ans
wering the phone; he dropped out of sight. Villamizar demanded an explanation. Parra wandered through long preambles. He said things had been complicated by an increase in the number of killings by the police in the Medellin slums. He asserted that until the government put an end to those barbaric methods, it would be very difficult for anybody to be released. Villamizar did not let him finish.

  "This wasn't part of the agreement," he said. "Everything was based on the decree being explicit, and it is. This is a debt of honor, and nobody can play games with me."

  "You don't know how fucked up it is being a lawyer for these guys," Parra said. "My problem isn't whether or not to charge them, my problem is that if things don't turn out right they'll kill me. What do you want me to do?"

  "Let's talk straight, no more bullshit," said Villamizar. "What's going on?"

  "If the police don't stop the killings and don't punish the ones responsible, there's no chance they'll let dona Maruja go. That's it in a nutshell."

  Blind with rage, Villamizar cursed Escobar with a string of oaths and finished by saying:

  "And you, you better get lost, because the man who's going to kill you is me."

  Guido Parra vanished. Not only because of Villamizar's violent reaction but also because of Pablo Escobar's, who apparently did not forgive him for overstepping his authority as a negotiator. Hernando Santos could appreciate this when a terrified Guido Parra called to say that he had such an awful letter for him from Escobar that he did not even have the courage to read it to him.

  "The man is crazy," he said. "Nobody can calm him down, and the only thing I can do is disappear from the face of the earth."

  Hernando Santos, knowing this would cut off his only channel to Pablo Escobar, tried to convince him to stay on. He failed. The last favor Guido Parra asked was that he get him a visa for Venezuela and arrange for his son to finish his studies at the Gimnasio Moderno in Bogota. Unconfirmed rumors say that he took refuge in a convent in Venezuela where one of his sisters was a nun. Nothing else was known about him until April 16, 1993, when he was found dead in Medellin, in the trunk of a car with no license plates, along with his son the secondary school graduate.

  Villamizar needed time to recover from a terrible sense of defeat. He was crushed by remorse for having believed in Escobar's word. Everything seemed lost. During the negotiations he had kept Dr. Turbay and Hernando Santos informed, for they too had been left with no channels to Escobar. They saw one another almost every day, and little by little he stopped telling them about the setbacks and gave them only encouraging news. He spent long hours in the company of the former president, who endured the death of his daughter with heartrending stoicism; he retreated into himself and refused to make a statement of any kind: He became invisible. Hernando Santos, whose only hope of freeing his son had been based on Parra's mediation, slipped into a profound depression.

  The murder of Marina, and in particular the brutal way it had been discovered and announced, gave rise to inevitable questions about what to do now. Every possibility for mediation of the kind provided by the Notables had been exhausted, yet no other intermediary seemed effective. Goodwill and indirect methods made no sense.

  Villamizar was clearsighted about the situation, and he unburdened himself to Rafael Pardo. "Imagine how I feel," he said. "For all these years Escobar has been my family's cross, and mine. First he threatens me. Then he makes an attempt on my life, and it's a miracle I escape. He goes on threatening me. He assassinates Galan. He abducts my wife and my sister, and now he wants me to defend his rights." There was no consolation to be had, however, because his fate had been decided: The only certain road to freedom for the hostages led straight to the lion in his den. In plain language: The only thing left for him to do--and he was bound to do it--was fly to Medellin and find Pablo Escobar, wherever he might be, and discuss the situation face-to-face.

  8

  The problem was how to find Pablo Escobar in a city martyrized by violence. In the first two months of 1991 there had been twelve hundred murders--twenty a day--and a massacre every four days. An agreement among almost all the armed groups had led to the bloodiest escalation of guerrilla violence in the history of the country, and Medellin was the center of urban terrorism. A total of 457 police had been killed in only a few months. The DAS had said that two thousand people in the slums were working for Escobar, many of them adolescents who earned their living hunting down police. For each dead officer they received five million pesos, for each agent a million and a half, and 800,000 for each one wounded. On February 16, 1991, three low-ranking officers and eight agents of the police were killed when a car was blown up with 150 kilos of dynamite outside the bullring in Medellin. Nine passersby were also killed and another 143, who had nothing to do with the war, were injured.

  The Elite Corps, the frontline troops in the battle against drug trafficking, were branded by Pablo Escobar as the incarnation of all evil. The Corps had been created in 1989 by President Virgilio Barco, when he was driven to despair by his inability to establish precise responsibility in entities as large as the army and the police. Its formation had been entrusted to the National Police in order to distance the military as much as possible from the deadly contagions of drug trafficking and paramilitarism. It began with only three hundred men, who had a special squadron of helicopters at their disposal and were trained by the Special Air Service (SAS) of the British government.

  The new group had begun operations along the midsection of the Magdalena River, in the center of the country, at the time the paramilitary groups created by landowners to fight the guerrillas were most active. From there a group specializing in urban operations broke off and established itself in Medellin as a freewheeling body of legionnaires answerable only to the National Police Commission in Bogota, without any intermediate jurisdictions, and, by its very nature, not overly meticulous regarding the limits of its authority. They sowed confusion among the criminals, and also among the local authorities, who were very reluctant to assimilate an autonomous force over which they had no control. The Extraditables fought them in a bloody war, and accused them of responsibility for every kind of human rights violation.

  The people of Medellin knew that not all the Extraditables' denunciations of murder and abuse by the police were unfounded, because they witnessed them on the streets, though in most cases there was no official acknowledgment that they had occurred. National and international human rights organizations protested, and the government had no credible response. Months later it was decided that no raids could be made without the presence of a representative of the Prosecutor General's Office, leading to the inevitable bureaucratization of their operations.

  There was little the judicial system could do. Judges and magistrates, whose low salaries were barely enough to live on, but not enough to pay for the education of their children, faced an insoluble dilemma: Either they sold themselves to the drug traffickers, or they were killed. The admirable and heartbreaking fact is that many chose death.

  Perhaps the most Colombian aspect of the situation was the astonishing capacity of the people of Medellin to accustom themselves to everything, good and bad, with a resiliency that may be the cruelest form courage can take. Most did not seem aware that they were living in a city that had always been the most beautiful, the liveliest, the most hospitable in the country, and in recent years had become one of the most dangerous in the world. Until this time, urban terrorism had been a rare element in the centuries-old culture of Colombian violence. The same historical guerrilla groups who now practiced it had once condemned it, and with reason, as an illegitimate form of revolutionary struggle. People had learned to live with the fear of what had happened, but not with uncertainty about what might happen: an explosion that would blow up one's children at school, or disintegrate the plane in midair, or pulverize vegetables at the market. Random bombs that killed the innocent and anonymous threats on the telephone had surpassed all other causes of anguished anxiety in daily life. Yet the
economy of Medellin was not affected in statistical terms.

  Years earlier the drug traffickers had been popular because of their mythic aura. They enjoyed complete impunity and even a certain prestige because of their charitable works in the marginal neighborhoods where they had spent their impoverished childhoods. If anyone had wanted them arrested, he could have told the policeman on the corner where to find them. But a good part of Colombian society viewed them with a curiosity and interest that bore too close a resemblance to complacency. Politicians, industrialists, businesspeople, journalists, even ordinary freeloaders, came to the perpetual party at the Hacienda Napoles, near Medellin, where Pablo Escobar kept a zoo with giraffes and hippos brought over from Africa, and where the entrance displayed, as if it were a national monument, the small plane used to export the first shipment of cocaine.

  Luck and a clandestine life had left Escobar in charge of the henhouse, and he became a legend who controlled everything from the shadows. His communiques, with their exemplary style and perfect cunning, began to look so much like the truth that one was mistaken for the other. At the height of his splendor, people put up altars with his picture and lit candles to him in the slums of Medellin. It was believed he could perform miracles. No Colombian in history ever possessed or exercised a talent like his for shaping public opinion. And none had a greater power to corrupt. The most unsettling and dangerous aspect of his personality was his total inability to distinguish between good and evil.

  This was the invisible, improbable man Alberto Villamizar proposed to seek out in mid-February so that he could talk him into returning his wife. He would begin by making contact with the three Ochoa brothers in the high-security Itagui prison. Rafael Pardo--with the president's approval--gave him the green light but reminded him of the limitations: This was not an official negotiation but an exploratory move. Pardo told him he could make no agreement in exchange for concessions from the government, but that the government was interested in the surrender of the Extraditables within the boundaries set by the capitulation policy. This new approach was the springboard for Villamizar's idea of also changing the thrust of his own efforts, centering them not on the release of the hostages--which had been the focus so far--but on the surrender of Pablo Escobar. One would be a simple consequence of the other.