Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Falklands war produced its share of sensational stories, but none more so than the one published by Gabriel García Márquez in the Madrid newspaper El Pais on 6th April 1983, a year after the war ended. Based on a purported letter from an unnamed witness, it told of gruesome atrocities perpetrated by the Gurkhas, the British Army's Nepalese auxiliaries. García Márquez, who had won the Nobel prize for literature the previous year, wrote that the "legendary and ferocious Nepalese decapitators," wielding "assassins' scimitars," beheaded one Argentine prisoner "every seven seconds." And "because of some strange custom they held up the severed head by the hair and cut off the ears." The "beasts were so crazed," García Márquez reported, that "they continued killing the English themselves, until the English had to subdue them with handcuffs." There was one problem with this story. Nothing remotely like it had taken place. The one kernel of truth was that the Gurkhas-who carry not scimitars but curved knives called khukris-did appear briefly in the Falklands. They cleared mines after the fighting ended. Confronted later with the facts, García Márquez conceded only that his numbers might be a little off. Too late: Radio Peace and Progress, a Soviet-operated service, had picked up his tale and beamed it to every corner of Latin America, at a time when the continent was still seething over Argentina's defeat. For a lesser writer, a mishap such as this might have been a setback. Not for García Márquez. He has a proven genius for the exciting application of imagination to reality. His reputation was secured 30 years ago with One Hundred Years of Solitude, a masterpiece. Throughout the Americas and Europe, the Colombian writer is celebrated as the voice of the downtrodden peoples of Latin America. His new book of reportage, News of a Kidnapping, has been hailed as a literary and historical achievement. In one book, you get the high pleasures of García Márquez's style and a true story of great importance. "More like a novel than all my novels," García Márquez told Newsweek last year; and yet, as he declared to a 1996 seminar of Latin American reporters, "every single detail in this book is real." Call it magical realism journalism. García Márquez's new book is set in Colombia in 1990-91, when the Medellín cocaine cartel used a campaign of murder, bombing and kidnapping to force Cesar Gaviria, the newly elected president, to abandon the policy of Virgilio Barco, his predecessor, of honouring an extradition treaty with the US. Under this treaty, drug lords were delivered to the US to stand trial in courts which they could not corrupt. Pablo Escobar, boss of the cartel, calculated that public opinion would turn against extradition—if he made enough Colombian blood flow. Colombians tended to see the war on drugs as a sop to the US—or even a threat to their income. In the slums of Medellín, Escobar was a folk hero. His strategy paid off. As García Márquez put it: "After the first bombs, public opinion demanded prison for the terrorists, after the next few bombings the demand was for extradition, but as the bombs continued to explode public opinion began to demand amnesty." Gaviria could not withstand the cries for peace at any price. In May 1991, Escobar agreed to turn himself in—to a "golden prison" in exchange for non-extradition. Escobar continued to run his drug cartel from this phony jail and then bribed his way out anyway. He was killed in December 1993, in a shoot-out at the end of a US-orchestrated manhunt. News of a Kidnapping tells the story of several prominent Colombians—most of them journalists and friends or acquaintances of García Márquez—whom Escobar seized as bargaining chips in his war against extradition. Two of them, Marina Montoya, an elderly member of a prominent political family, and Diana Turbay, a television journalist and daughter of a former president, were killed—the former by the kidnappers, the latter in a bungled rescue attempt by the police. The others were freed in the deal which led to Escobar's sham confinement. This must have seemed powerful material when García Márquez's friends, Maruja Pachon a journalist, and her husband Alberto Villamizar, a well known politician, proposed that he write a book about her kidnapping. It marks his grand return to reportage. The bulk of the book describes the hostages' nerve-racking life in captivity and their families' tense efforts to negotiate their release. But fruitless negotiations are not all that spellbinding a subject, except for those who were personally involved; neither are the grey days of a bored and frightened prisoner. This is where style comes to the rescue. García Márquez believes that he can freshen up old news through the sheer accretion of outlandish details—rendered in his poetically controlled, matter-of-fact tone. As he told the reporters' seminar in 1996, "one must keep the reader hypnotised by tending to every detail, every word." (And every slash of that Gurkha scimitar?) "It is a continuous act where you poison the reader with credibility and with rhythm." Passages in the book remind one that the reporter is also a writer. But there is also the florid pointillism for which García Márquez is famous. Some of the kidnappers liked Guns 'n' Roses; one group of hostage negotiators flew in a six-passenger Bell 206; a second group used a 12-passenger Bell 412; the details become hypnotic in a way which García Márquez never intended. Even he himself seems to lose interest, dozing off into cliches. "Power—like love—is a double-edged sword." Characters are "pursued by demons... pale as death." And so on. These failures of style are related to the more serious question of journalistic practice. Detail alone does not produce "credibility." On the contrary. The accumulation of particulars is a fine way to provide the appearance of verisimilitude in the absence of its reality, but it is possible to get the minor things right and the major things wrong. Simple declarations of the fantastical can be a form of propaganda. ("They held up the severed head by the hair and cut off the ears.") This is more likely to happen if the magical realist himself is close to the events which he is writing about, yet does not feel the need to disclose this.
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The essential background to García Márquez's non-fiction work is his own role in the ideological and political dramas of Latin America. The extraordinary success of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Nobel prize have made "Gabo" a figure of enormous influence; it has been a long time since he could have been described as a detached observer. At every opportunity he has sought to involve himself in the affairs of the powerful, in his native Colombia and elsewhere in the region. He has used his prestige to advance a political agenda whose only consistent principles have been mindless hostility to the US and mindless obeisance to Fidel Castro. The origins of García Márquez's anti-Americanism lie in the 1920s, when the United Fruit Company held sway on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Born there in 1928, García Márquez was raised by a grandfather who supported the populist wing of the anti-clerical Liberal party, and who weaned his grandson on the legend of the great banana strike of 1928. It ended when Colombian soldiers purportedly massacred hundreds of workers for demanding better conditions from the gringos. That incident, vividly transmogrified in One Hundred Years of Solitude, hardened in García Márquez's imagination into an imperishable emblem of the relationship between the US and Latin America. But the Colombia of García Márquez's youth was consumed by even worse killing, entirely domestic in origin. La Violencia, the civil war of 1948-57 between the Liberal and Conservative parties, caused about 150,000 deaths and undermined the legitimacy of the Colombian state. The civil war eventually petered out and after an interlude of military rule the parties agreed to trade power in periodic quasi-free elections. But then came the wars waged by Marxist guerrillas, by right-wing death squads and by the drug cartels. La Violencia may have ended, but the violence never did. Like many Latin American intellectuals of his generation, García Márquez felt shame and revulsion at his country's chaos and sought explanations in impersonal forces: class conflict and US imperialism. He joined the Colombian Communist party in 1950 as a 22-year-old journalist. During the next ten years of his clandestine membership he collected party dues from other journalists and used the party's underground leaders as sources for his stories. On three occasions between 1955 and 1957, García Márquez travelled to eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. His accounts of life in the orbit of communism were sometimes critical, sometimes not. East Germans were the "saddest people I have ever seen," but he met "not one Czech who was not more or less content with his lot in life." The Poles, who were "just as anti-American as they were anti-Soviet," told him that what they really wanted was "socialism... now." In Moscow, he admired Khrushchev's "reforms," but seemed unsure whether to believe the worst accounts of Stalin's terror. In Hungary, just after the Soviet invasion, he noted the police state tactics, but also the danger that "reactionaries" might exploit the weakness of the party. He returned disillusioned with the Soviet model; obviously, he has resisted socialist realism as a literary method. But he sought a collectivist alternative to US-style modernity. Democracy was never really the object of his desire; he saw it as a consequence of economic circumstances. "Democracy in the developed countries is a product of their own development, not vice versa," he told a friend. "To try to introduce it in a crude form into countries with other cultures—like those of Latin America—is as mechanical and unreal as to try to introduce the Soviet system." García Márquez dreamt of a great leap forward for a united Latin America. He longed not so much for prosperity and freedom as for power: for a magical formula which could make gleaming cities rise out of the backwaters of Bolivar's continent and unite its heroic people into a mighty whole, capable of contending with the colossus of the north. Soon a proletarian Latin American hero appeared to answer García Márquez's longing. His name was Fidel. In January 1959 García Márquez was invited by Castro to cover "Operation Truth"; the trials-and executions-of hundreds of officers of the Batista regime. García Márquez came away from this grim spectacle a believer, and helped to open a bureau of Prensa Latina, Castro's official wire service, in Bogota. But García Márquez's mentor at the agency, the Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti, became too close to Che Guevara. One step ahead of a purge, García Márquez fled to Mexico and returned to his novels. In 1967, he published the great One Hundred Years of Solitude. Despite this brush with the Cuban revolution's internal contradictions, García Márquez never lost his ambition of being useful to Castro. His opportunity came in 1971, when the poet Heberto Padilla was the target of a cultural crackdown led by Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl Castro, the defence minister. Padilla's arrest prompted a group of leftish European, American and Latin American writers—including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and García Márquez—to sign a letter to Castro advising him of their "misgivings" about the treatment of Cuban writers. Castro responded with vitriol. The intellectuals wrote again, expressing "shame and anger." For many Latin American intellectuals, most notably Vargas Llosa, the Padilla case marked the end of their honeymoon period with Fidel and socialism. For García Márquez, the case was also a turning point—in the opposite direction. He refused to sign the second letter. Indeed, he began to protest that he had never approved the wording of the first one. Given the impact of One Hundred Years of Solitude, his stance was important to Castro. The writer had helped to mitigate what could have been an even worse embarrassment. And the caudillo reciprocated: García Márquez was welcomed into the inner circle of the Cuban regime. Many years later the artistic repression, economic failure and political despotism of Castro's revolution are almost universally acknowledged. Still, Castro has no more fervent defender than García Márquez, who last year told Newsweek that "Cuba is doing very well emerging from its problems." This is crazy. Why does García Márquez persist? Norberto Fuentes, a Cuban writer once close to both Castro and García Márquez who has since left for Miami, told me that Cuban intelligence must control García Márquez through "some mechanism of blackmail, the exact nature of which I don't know," but which may involve the writer's leftist past. The reason for García Márquez's stubborn support of Castro is probably not so mysterious. García Márquez loves Castro because Castro hates the US. On drug trafficking, too, García Márquez's attitude is an expression of his antipathy towards the US. It can be argued that consumption in the north, not production in the south, is the real problem: in the matter of drugs, the US has not exactly covered itself in glory. But the criticism that can responsibly be levelled against the US is not the one which García Márquez levels against it. In November 1989 he published a newspaper column in Colombia calling President Barco's decision to send six traffickers to the US "shameful." He told the Medellín newspaper El Mundo that "Colombia cannot give up its sovereignty and turn it over to a foreign nation. The next step would be to allow US troops into Colombia to fight drug trafficking..." He also condemned the Gaviria government's "hypocrisy" for offering Escobar a deal while continuing police operations against the cartels. Even his proposal for the legalisation of drugs, launched in a 1994 New York Times article, is couched in anti-US terms. Legalisation would end "the war that the consuming countries have inflicted on us." In March 1995 he told the paper: "All the money Colombia invests in fighting drugs should be invested in the US to research synthetic cocaine." García Márquez did not seem to realise that his president could not seriously negotiate with drug barons if he stopped enforcement efforts; that the spectre of a US invasion of Colombia was a paranoid fantasy; or that the cartel bosses' crimes included not simply selling drugs to gringos, but murdering Colombians. Extradition is a common arrangement among states. When Canada recently sent to the US a Saudi national suspected of terrorism against Americans, it did not sacrifice its sovereignty. Only an extreme nationalist could feel threatened by transnational co-operation against transnational crime. Only an imagination such as García Márquez's could portray Colombian drug lords as the victims of imperialism. The effect of the writer's rhetoric was to bolster the traffickers' cynical efforts to wrap themselves in the mantle of Latin American solidarity. If Colombians "began to demand amnesty," it was to some degree because their most illustrious countryman counselled them to give up the fight.
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In spite of his passions and his principles, García Márquez has an unconquerable weakness for power, a self-described "obsession with different styles of power," which "is more than literary—it's almost anthropological." It is also quite amoral. His power worship was evident on his early trips to eastern Europe. At Stalin's mausoleum in Moscow, he stood transfixed by the "delicacy" of the tyrant's embalmed hands: "They were the hands of a woman." More recently, García Márquez's enthusiasm for the "great man" theory of history has been reflected in his hagiographical words about Castro. The Cuban dictator, he wrote in 1990, is afflicted by "shyness," and yet he is "one of the greatest idealists of our time," an intellectual who "breakfasts with no less than 200 pages of news from all over the world," and reads treatises on orthopaedics in his spare time. Cesar Gaviria is no Fidel Castro and no dictator. But he possessed power; and since 1991 he and García Márquez have been friends. The former president of Colombia is now secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), a position which makes him useful to the writer. García Márquez portrays the politician in the fustian which he usually reserves for Castro. The writer's "anthropological" obsession even gets the better of him with Pablo Escobar. He does not deny that Don Pablo committed "indiscriminate merciless terrorism." But he was a very powerful man—so García Márquez makes excuses for him. When the drug lords launched their campaign of murder, they "offer to surrender to the authorities and bring home and invest their capital in Colombia, on condition that they are not extradited." This was the traffickers' game of plata o plomo—take a bribe or take a bullet—writ large. García Márquez presents it as a proposition in good faith. We learn that Escobar agreed to surrender as a "sacrifice for peace." Moreover, "with his awesome calm, he expressed regret for the suffering he had caused Villamizar and his family, but asked him to understand that the war had been very hard on both sides." García Márquez repeats a priest's assessment of Escobar without comment: "Deep down all men are good, although some circumstances can make them evil. Escobar is a good man." His treatment of Escobar is hard to square with his sympathy for the victims of the kidnappings, who are, after all, both his friends and the sources for "this autumnal work, the saddest and most difficult of my life." García Márquez, however, sees no contradiction. In spite of his dismay at Colombia's "biblical holocaust," he sees no need to make Colombians responsible for it. The whole mess is the fault of the US: "People had been correct in identifying extradition as a contributing factor to social unrest... and terrorism." The Escobar deal was a guilt-free solution in which the Latin American men of power preserved their honour. He dedicates News of a Kidnapping to "all Colombians—innocent and guilty." Indeed, García Márquez's forte as a public figure in Latin America is the brokering of freedom for political prisoners. His ace in the hole is his access to Castro, who releases the innocent for some benefit, tangible or intangible, while García Márquez reaps a reputation for humanitarianism. Last year he mediated between Castro and Gaviria, whose brother had been kidnapped by pro-Cuban Colombian guerrillas. García Márquez asked Castro to intercede: Gaviria's brother was freed; the guerrillas decamped to Cuba. Gaviria repaid Fidel with friendly words at the OAS. This is the deep irony of News of a Kidnapping: here is a story of hostage-taking by a writer-celebrity whose specialty is arranging the release of hostages and whose efficacy in that role is due to his relationship—direct or indirect—with the captors. García Márquez, of course, sees it differently. "It's much more important for Latin America that I remain friends with Castro than for me to break with him," he has said. Is not Latin America better off for his policy of engagement with Castro? Not exactly. A strategy of forever negotiating with terrorists, or their sponsors, encourages more terrorism. Since 1979, when García Márquez and Graham Greene helped to spring two British bankers held by guerrillas in El Salvador, García Márquez's efforts as a hostage liberator have had just such a cyclical quality. In 1980 a group of M-19 terrorists seized the the Dominican Republic's embassy in Bogota taking 14 diplomats hostage. García Márquez helped to arrange for the guerrillas to release their captives and to escape to Havana with $5m in ransom. An enriched and rearmed M-19 struck again in 1985, seizing the entire supreme court at the Palace of Justice in Bogotoa's hostages. García Márquez again offered to broker a deal. "Gabo is a charlatan," Colombia's minister of interior concluded. A horrific battle ensued and dozens were killed, but M-19 was never a threat again. It later negotiated its peaceful conversion into a political party. García Márquez also touts his representations to Castro on behalf of Cuba's own dissidents. In 1992 he claimed to have helped to free more than 2,000 political prisoners. This is almost certainly an exaggeration. Even in the case of those releases for which he has been credited García Márquez was less helpful, and more calculating, than he claims. He takes credit, for instance, for Norberto Fuentes's exit in 1994; Fuentes himself ascribes more importance to his own hunger strike, and to the protests of American writers. Now the man who brought us the bloodthirsty Gurkhas of Las Malvinas has set himself up as an arbiter of journalistic standards throughout Latin America. In a series of speeches and articles, he has decried an ethical crisis in contemporary journalism. He condemns modern newsrooms as "dehumanising laboratories," and has established a Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism in Cartagena, Colombia-funded by western taxpayers via Unesco. In fact, the Latin American press has never been more vibrant and effective than today. The media have been central to the renaissance of democracy and civil society, exposing corruption and human rights abuses from Mexico to Chile. This change is partly a result of private sector growth, which has financed sophisticated non-state broadcasting and has freed print media from dependence on state-supplied paper and advertising. It is also the achievement of reporters such as Gustavo Gorriti, who has documented both governmental and guerrilla atrocities in Peru, and Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a former Sandinista who now writes what may be the first trustworthy political reporting in Nicaraguan history. García Márquez would have us believe that things were better in the 1950s, when he worked as a reporter in Bogotoa Barranquilla and Caracas. His nostalgia obscures the grim past of the Latin American press: the bribery, the inaccuracy and the political clientelism. In many countries reporters are still subjected to bullying. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori stripped an Israeli-born television entrepreneur of his Peruvian citizenship recently, in retaliation for his station's news reports about Fujimori's domestic spying. Only in Cuba, however, are independent journalists systematically harassed and jailed, and the press directly controlled by the state. García Márquez has barely lifted a finger to change that scandalous situation. (He claims to have written a critical book about socialism in Cuba, but will publish it only after the US lifts its trade embargo against the island.) Uncomfortable with institutions which hold those in power accountable for their actions, and addled by his resentment of the US, García Márquez cannot comprehend the role of a free press, or other manifestations of the hemisphere's new democratic and capitalist order. He seems to believe that the latest covert operation of the US in Latin America is Latin American democracy itself. "I ask myself if this type of democracy isn't too vulnerable and, above all, if the US continues to pose a very great danger to us," he told Newsweek. In the meantime, he has departed for self-imposed exile from Colombia once again, proclaiming that he could no longer abide the corrupt rule of President Ernesto Samper, whom he had previously defended from gringo charges of narco-democracy. His refuge? That great drug-free zone, Mexico. It is, surely, just a matter of time before we hear about his intense friendship with the new mayor of Mexico City, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.
