NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

Softcover. Tr. from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. The author's book begins in November 1990 in Bogota, Colombia, when a group of gunmen ambush a car and kidnap its two women passengers. The gunmen were working for Pablo Escobar, boss of the Medellin cocaine cartel, who in the early nineties kidnapped the relatives of a number of Colombian politicians in order to pressurise the government to suspend the policy of extraditing drug traffickers to the USA. It is at once an angry, disturbing account of how Escobar undermined all Colombia's civil institutions by murder or bribery, and a moving exploration of the fate of Escobar's hostages, who were mostly middle-aged or elderly women. The author has talked to the survivors, read their diaries and reconstructed their ordeal. 291pp. 8vo. softcover. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. F. with no creasing to covers.