Consumed these past twenty years by a “biblical holocaust,” Colombia has endured leftist insurgencies, right-wing death squads, currency collapses, cholera epidemics, and, most recently and corrosively, drug trafficking. Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel.
Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar’s henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor. We are drawn into a world that, like some phantasmagorical setting in a great García Márquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.
Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was an author, journalist, and pioneer of the Latin American boom. Among his many books are The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Living to Tell the Tale, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Edith Grossman (1936 - 2023) translated the poetry and prose of major Spanish-language and Latin American authors, including Nobel laureates Gabriel García Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as Alvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero, and Miguel de Cervantes.
Christopher Salazar, originally from Miami, Florida, is classically trained with an MFA from the Old Globe. He has worked with top theater companies in New York, Los Angeles, and regionally throughout the country.