CHRONICLING LIVES ON HOLD

By R.Z. Sheppard

The imps of literary happenstance could not have done better than News of a Kidnapping (Knopf; 291 pages; $25). It brings together the world's two best-known Colombians, symbolically locked in a struggle for their nation's soul. The first is the book's author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel prizewinner and one of the greatest living storytellers. The other is the late Pablo Escobar, once head of the Medellin drug cartel and a terrorist responsible for hundreds of violent deaths.

These two men, who achieved international fame and fortune peddling their respective though vastly different habit-forming products, seem to have been destined for a literary rendezvous. But where? Escobar and his remorseless crew are too malignant for Garcia Marquez's familiar magic realism. Fortunately, the author learned the writer's trade in journalism, where the best editorial advice still comes from Hamlet's mother: "More matter, with less art."

One can almost hear Garcia Marquez asking, Who? What? Where? When? and Why? on every minutely detailed page of this factual account of political kidnappings orchestrated by Escobar. The writer's respondents are mainly the survivors of a group of prominent residents of Bogota whom the drug lord held hostage during 1990 and 1991. Then the target of a relentless manhunt, he used the captives as bargaining chips. The negotiations eventually led to releases and a surrender agreement with a no-extradition clause and a luxurious protective-custody package for Escobar, his family and his business associates.

Most of the hostages were women, including Diana Turbay Quintero, daughter of a former Colombian President. A TV journalist, she imprudently walked into an Escobar trap, taking a film crew with her. Turbay, 40, was killed during a raid by government security forces. The other fatality was 64-year-old Marina Montoya, a former Bogota belle and the sister of a once highly placed Colombian politician; she was executed with six bullets to the head. Her body, clad in expensive underwear beneath a pink sweatsuit, was then dumped in a vacant lot.

By now the world is well acquainted with hostage holding as a grotesque basis for personal relationships. But here the unusual experience of living in close quarters with your potential killers is intensified in prose as precise and deadpan as a coroner's report. And as he has done so often, Garcia Marquez makes the fantastic seem ordinary. At one point Marina Montoya asks her cold-blooded keepers to kneel with her and pray. They do, each to the same God for the same reasons: to protect their lives and deliver them from evil. It is a classic Garcia Marquez instance--comic, tragic and all too human.

--By R.Z. Sheppard