Someone said that fiction mimics reality and reality mimics fiction. There is one single truth about Gabriel Garcia Marquez' book News of a Kidnapping, and that is the shameful reality seen in Colombia of people being apprehended against their will or violated with unimaginable torture, or death.
While that is true, another idea many people accept as truth is that we Colombians are barbaric and dangerous. This is a misleading notion imposed by the mass media. They show us to be people who can’t be trusted by any means, even while many famous Colombians such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shakira, Juanes, Manuel Elkin Patarrollo, Alvaro Uribe (The actual President of Colombia) and others are trying to change the image of Colombians to the world. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote how magical Colombia can be. Recalling early memories, while in exile he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude about the magical realism or the magical reality that exists in Colombia along with all its problems.
There is a little fiction and a lot of reality in News of a Kidnapping. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote News of a Kidnapping he told the story of journalist Maruja Pachon and ten other victims who have one thing in common, the deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar. Even though the story reflects a single group of people, it is also the story of a country. It is a story for all the many people that fell victim to, and are still falling prey to, this kind of torture. Ifspeak Spanish and have the luck to watch RCN or CARACOL via TV cable or read the news of Colombia on the Internet like the EL TIEMPO newspaper or EL HERALDO, you will observe different stories and one common denominator: the violence and poverty that is seen daily and shadows the cultural diversity of the people. But even with all this violent history, Colombians smile and the country is considered the second in the world with the happiest people.
In the last few years with the government of Alvaro Uribe Velez, Colombia had experienced an improvement in terms of National Security contrary to the tense climate found in the 90’s. Then, you couldn’t go out of any city limits without feeling fear of the rebel groups. Since Alvaro Uribe came to power Colombia has shown an improvement never seen before. Even with economics at their present state it is not even a shadow of the terrible days in the decade of the 90’s. The subversive groups are being decimated by non violent strategies such as the Law of Justice and Peace, but at the same time military action has several policies of zero tolerance toward these groups, giving the message 'Surrender or you will be killed'.
Because of the hard side of the governmental response toward these groups, the kidnapped are in the center of the storm. Since there is a possibility of them being killed in a military rescue, people are demanding a Humanitarian Exchange to avoid the possibility of any more hostages being killed in a similar way to the 11 Representatives in the hands of the FARC. Due to the consequences of FARC many people have turned to pacifist methods and express a voice that condemns violent methods. An example of this is the professor Gustavo Moncayo , the “walker of peace” who used a pacifist protest to express his discomfort toward the violence and search for a liberation of his son Pablo Emilio Moncayo from his eleven year captivity. Some people even compare Gustavo Moncayo to Forrest Gump because they both used march to spread their message.
Beyond the fiction and reality of News of a Kidnapping there is a wide specter of this reality. A novel gives an ending to a story, but in reality the psychological effects on the victims last forever; they live with the constant fear of being deprived of their liberty. The families of the victims are also victims; they suffer with the hostage as well and live with fears that the same nightmare will repeat itself, never feeling safe again in the same territory where they once felt free to move around without any fear of being harmed.
If you would like to read books and reports about the social situation of Colombia I recommend Killing Peace: Colombia’s Conflict and The Failure of U.S. Intervention, Colombia and the United States: War, Unrest and Destabilization, More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia, Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerilla Politics in Colombia, The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia, Evil Hour in Colombia and Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw. These can give you an insight into the Colombian conflict if you are unaware of it or know little information about it.