News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Read Free Book Online Page B

thepresidency alerted the public to a proliferation of false communiqués and asked the people not to put more faith in them than in announcements from the government. But the grave and bitter truth was that the public had implicit trust in the Extraditables’ communiqués, which meant that on October 30—sixty-one days after the abduction of Diana Turbay, forty-two days after the kidnapping of FranciscoSantos—everyone gave a sigh of relief when the last remaining doubts were dispelled by a single sentence from the Extraditables: “We acknowledge publicly that we are holding the missing journalists.” Eight days later, Maruja Pachón and Beatriz Villamizar were abducted. There were plenty of reasons for assuming that this escalation had even broader implications.
    On the day following the disappearanceof Diana and her crew, when there was still no suspicion in anyone’s mind that they had been kidnapped, Yami Amat, the distinguished news director atCaracol Radio, was intercepted on a street in downtown Bogotá by a group of thugs who had been following him for several days. Amat slipped out of their hands with an athletic maneuver that caught them off guard, and somehow survived a bullet inthe back. Just a few hours later, María Clara, the daughter of former president Belisario Betancur, and her twelve-year-old daughter Natalia, managed to escape in her car when another armed gang blocked her way in a residential neighborhood in Bogotá. The only explanation for these two failures is that the kidnappers must have had strict orders not to kill their victims.
    The first people to havedefinite knowledge of who was holding Maruja Pachón and Beatriz Villamizar were Hernando Santos and former president Julio César Turbay, because forty-eight hours after their abduction, Escobar himself informed them in writing through one of his lawyers: “You can tell them that the group is holding Pachón.” On November 12, there was another oblique confirmation in a letter written on the Extraditables’stationery to Juan Gómez Martínez, director of the Medellín newspaper
El Colombiano,
who had mediated on several occasions with Escobar on behalf of the Notables. “The detention of the journalist Maruja Pachón,” said the letter from the Extraditables, “is our response to the recent tortures and abductions perpetrated in the city of Medellín by the same state security forces mentioned so oftenin our previous communiqués.” And once again they expressed their determination not to free any of the hostages as long as that situation continued.
    Dr. Pedro Guerrero, Beatriz’s husband, overwhelmed by his utter powerlessness in the face of these crushing events, decided to close his psychiatric practice. “How could I see patients when I was in worse shape than they were,” he has said. He sufferedattacks of anxiety that he did not want to impart to his children. He did not have a moment’s peace, at nightfall he consoled himselfwith whiskey, and his insomnia was spent listening to tearful boleros of lost love on “Radio Recuerdo.” “My love,” someone sang, “if you’re listening, answer me.”
    Alberto Villamizar, who had always known that the abduction of his wife and sister was one more linkin a sinister chain, closed ranks with the families of the other victims. But his first visit to Hernando Santos was disheartening. He was accompanied by Gloria Pachón de Galán, his sister-in-law, and they found Hernando sprawled on a sofa in a state of total demoralization. “What I’m doing is getting ready to suffer as little as possible when they kill Francisco,” he said when they came in. Villamizarattempted to outline a plan to negotiate with the kidnappers, but Hernando cut him off with irreparable despair.
    “Don’t be naive, my boy,” he said, “you have no idea what those men are like. There’s nothing we can do.”
    Former president Turbay was no more encouraging. He knew from a variety of sources that his