The War on Drugs Between Exception and Legitimacy: García Márquez's

Law & Literature

ISSN: 1535-685X (Print) 1541-2601 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlal20

The War on Drugs between Exception and Legitimacy: García Márquez’s News of a Kidnapping

Héctor Hoyos & Jorge González-Jácome

To cite this article: Héctor Hoyos & Jorge González-Jácome (2020): The War on Drugs between Exception and Legitimacy: García Márquez’s NewsofaKidnapping, Law & Literature, DOI: 10.1080/1535685X.2020.1754020 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1754020

Published online: 30 Apr 2020.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rlal20 LAW & LITERATURE The War on Drugs between Exception and Legitimacy: GarcıaMarquez ’s News of a Kidnapping

Hector Hoyos and Jorge Gonzalez-J acome

Abstract, The article reads GarcıaMarquez’s journalistic novel News of Keywords, war on drugs, a Kidnapping against the grain, demonstrating its potential for global rule of law, Garcıa interrogating unifying narratives about global legality. The argument has Marquez, News of a Kidnapping several parts. First, it builds upon a careful textual and structural analysis of the literary work in question, parsing out the suggestive complexities of the novel’s narrative voice and metaphors as they confront issues of transnational legitimacy. Secondly, it examines how GarcıaMarquez’s narrative, perhaps unintentionally, engages with and buttresses the selective suspension of legality in Colombia (“the exception”). Special attention is given to the Colombian constitutional reform movement in this context, as well as to the novel’s grappling with the contradictions of reasserting legality through lawless means. Heuristically, News of a Kidnapping is then measured against contemporary judicial decisions. In closing, the article situates the novel within the panorama of contemporary legal and literary studies pertaining to the global drug trade.

Is nation building enough to ask of a novel? In the notable Noticia de un secuestro (1996, trans. News of a Kidnapping, 1997), Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel GarcıaMarquez does nothing less. From an interdisciplinary law and literature perspective, we propose that the book does something more: not just provide reparation and national refoundation, but serve as a repository for alternative legal pasts and futures at a local and a global level against the backdrop of the War on Drugs. Our goal is to demonstrate the relevance of this hybrid work of literature and journalism for thinking critically about the representations of legality during the so-called War on Drugs, understood as a three-pronged political, legal, and narrative construct. The argument, in turn, has three parts. First, we con- duct a succinct narratological study of the ways in which GarcıaMarquez frames

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the events under his purview. Secondly, we read the novel against the grain to reveal the alternative legal accounts that the author, more or less knowingly, hides from view. Finally, we elaborate on the consequences of our findings for law and literature studies. We stress two issues throughout: first, we problematize the humanistic turn of law toward literature, through which the former sought to find the “human element” that was arguably lost in dry legal technical issues. Rather, we agree with the view that interdisciplinary encounters between the two domains also show that works of literature sometimes “reproduce and naturalize prevailing power relations, good and bad.”1 Second, we shall espouse the view that provinci- alizing this interdiscipline requires adopting conflicting temporalities and teleolo- gies about the transformation of legal theory and practice at the turn of the 21st century. In particular, News of a Kidnapping, very much a work of the mid-nine- ties, did not escape a hegemonic narrative framework about law and order established by the War on Drugs. In this article we attempt to read GarcıaMarquez ’s book to understand how this hegemonic narrative has hitherto foreclosed many possibilities for imagining law otherwise.2 Our interdisciplinary exploration resists the pulsion of finding law’s shortcomings and literature’s upper hand in this relation; instead, we propose a reading that problematizes global hegemonic frameworks that condition representations of law in the literary and legal realms. Law’s authority, and not only literature’s alleged humanistic qualities, might work as a counterhegemonic force to resist and debunk narratives that stymie social change.3 Because the illegalization of the narcotics trade is the condition of possibility for both GarcıaMarquez ’s narrative and the painful events it depicts, issues of verisimilitude and internal consistency in one of these realms is connected to the other in a special way. A metonymy turned legal construct, the “War on Drugs” already imposes a single narrative on an incredibly complex, transnational, loosely connected series of events.4 A novelistic account, if it is not to burst at its seams, also imposes a number of conventions—characters, plot, setting—to something that involves numerous agents and countless stories around the world. The book’s unity of action, already encapsulated in the title, is “a kidnapping,” but the crime in question cannot be easily plucked away from the politics around global governance and the rule of law. Kidnapping is, moreover, a litmus test for moral and legal relativism. Imprisonment hinges upon a legal order. Putting someone in jail is a legitimate act when due process and legitimacy exists; putting someone in a makeshift prison is a heinous act. But to some extent this distinction lies in the eyes of the beholder, especially in times of disputed legitimacy and parallel de facto statehood—just the conditions that the War on Drugs glosses over.5 How the issue is framed, then, matters plenty. There are many possible stories from the Colombian experience of the War on Drugs: crop growers,

2 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY middlemen, consumers, policy enforcers, bystanders, casualties, to name a few. GarcıaMarquez focuses on ten real-life strategic captives and the efforts to liberate them, set in the year 1990. Of these ten, the central characters are the couple of Maruja Pachon de Villamizar, a former secretary of education held by Pablo Escobar’s henchmen, and Alberto Villamizar, her husband and the government’s lead negotiator. The writing veers away from the magical realism commonly associated with the author; it follows the conventions of gonzo or new journalism, albeit incorporating sophisticated techniques from the modernist novel.6 If the Villamizar couple is at the center of the drama and the remaining captives are, so to speak, at the next concentric circle, Colombia and the world would be the outer rings. In this symbolic tropology, the scene of captivity becomes the center of the global order, or lack thereof. For a thriller, the stakes are uncom- monly high. Noticia narrates a crucial moment that laid the foundations for modern Colombia, explains the pivot of drug-fueled violence toward Mexico, chronicles the messy efforts to establish a relative global rule of law under post-1989 U.S. hegemony, and has become a point of reference in world literature: Iran oppos- ition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi, under house arrest since 2001, quotes the book’s vivid depiction of captivity to illustrate his plight.7 More than a mere chronicler or observer—a persona he cultivates in this book in particular—at the time GarcıaMarquez was a key actor in Colombian politics. He had gone into exile for fear of persecution in the early 80 s, used Nobel Prize money to jump- start various influential journalistic ventures, brokered backroom diplomatic deals—some of which remain to be made public—and was at a cusp of gathering symbolic capital as a national author.8 (Upon the author’s passing in 2014, the country’s highest legal tender—50.000 pesos, approximately $15 USD—adopted his face, turning such symbolic capital into capital tout court.) In short, Noticia is part and parcel with a national coming to terms with the worst years of “narco-terrorism”; it has the moral and symbolic standing to inform this process, not just by representing it. Arguably, the same is true about its global resonance: a rara avis, this early best-selling work of auteur semi-fictionalization of the War on Drugs serves as template for many to come, leading all the way to entertainment products such as the Netflix hit series, Narcos.9 Global citizenry relies on just such narratives to make some sense of this vaguely defined but reliably violent conflict. All the more reason to take a closer look at the narrative devices that construct the book’s paralegal scaffolding.

A LOST RING FOUND: NATIONAL REPARATION

Noticia comprises a prologue, eleven chapters, and an epilogue. The chapters trace an arc from capture to release, with a clear unity of action. They convey

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suspense through several means, some of them journalistic and others more squarely novelistic. On the one hand, there is the thrill of piecing together information by cross-referencing sources and citing actual interviews; on the other, the intrigue of alternating third-person narrator omniscience with captives’ limited, if very vivid, perspective. This idiosyncratic combination of the novel form with the professional techniques of investigative journalism turns the facts of captivity into plot twists that buttress individual chapters. The military precision of the abductions themselves receives quite a bit of attention, as do the varying conditions of captivity affecting main and secondary characters, down to their everyday routines and especially their tussles with their captors, big and small. Journalist and political heiress Diana Turbay’s death in the crossﬁre of a rescue attempt (Chapter 6) is both a turning point for the multipronged ransom negotiation and a turn of the screw in the plot. (It tips the balance from the standstill of captivity to the urgency of release, arguably more for the sake of maintaining readers’ attention than for that of depicting events realistically.) There is a totalizing drive in the book that seems to capture the kidnapping from every angle—which is not quite the case, as we shall see. However, an authoritative array of sights and sounds, family reac- tions, government efforts, even digressive explanation of the juridical framework of extradition and constitutional reform compound the effect. For illustration, consider how the narrator steps back from the action to situ- ate Turbay’s death in a broader context:

Diana’s death—even before the discovery of Marina’s body—had a powerful impact on the country. When Gaviria had refused to modify the second decree, he had not given in to Villamizar’s harshness or Nydia’s entreaties. His argument, in brief, was that the decrees could not be judged in terms of the abductions but with a view to the public interest, since Escobar was not taking hostages to put pressure on the capitulation policy but to force non-extradition and obtain an amnesty [indulto].10

The passage, deceivingly simple and legible, alludes to Villamizar’s severity (“asperezas”) and recalls how Turbay’s mother—a president’s former spouse, vic- arious ﬁrst lady, and actual mater dolorosa—, pleaded that then president Gaviria conceded Escobar’s wishes to modify Decree 3030.11 The decree set a lenient path for cartels to turn themselves in, yet remained ambiguous on whether they would eventually be extradited to the United States. Garcıa Marquez combines petite histoire (behind-the-scenes dealings the journalist- author presumably had access to), l’histoire des grands hommes (a president, a drug lord), and a discussion of the key legal topics of the day, which were of course motivating factors for the kidnappings.

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Upon closer look, the quote is not quite as legible: “estado del paıs,” describes the country as if it were a sick or nervous patient, jumping straight from the predicament of specific people to that of an entire society, at a time where similar predicaments befell thousands if not hundreds of thousands. “Estado” here, despite the lower-caps, could also nod provocatively at the State, which was truly at stake in the woes of ultimately a few (influential, mediatic) families. Then there is the tit-for-tat logic employed to explain how both president Gaviria and Pablo Escobar were purportedly playing the long game, one refusing to negotiate legal principle against ransom and the other kidnapping not to press for immediate leniency but to guarantee local jurisdiction and outright pardon. The sentence, a feat of wit and parallel structure, interprets real- ity to the verge of didacticism. Because it belongs to an anti-climactic, informative digression after Turbay’s death, it enhances rather than hurts the page-turner. Suspense outpaces faulty logic, and the burden is on readers to determine whether the “ası como” equates the authority of a president with that of a drug lord, or rather points at the absurdity of both their positions in light of captives’ suffering. For present purposes, suffice it to say that the above-cited passage exemplifies the startling complexity behind an authorial late style that often poses as naivete. There are competing master narratives among the book’s sections. Because GarcıaMarquez constantly shifts between them, no one exhausts the subject matter. They all contribute to the realism effect, but they also leave unassimil- ated symbolic residue. Take chess, a prominent metaphor. It casts certain characters as strategic or cunning, establishing an intellectual distance with crime reminiscent of classic detective fiction: at one point, Diana wonders what piece of chess she is.12 But despite such memorable meta-fictional moments, chess also reduces a conflict as complex as the War on Drugs to a black-or-white, possibly good vs. evil conflict. The cover of the first edition takes note, with good graphic sense, featuring a white bishop atop an oversized black rook, as if to signal the unevenness of the “players.” The mind reels with associations: white Rapunzel in black captivity, redolent of racialized class hatred, but also Pablo Escobar, held in the special prison known by its nickname of “La Catedral,” as the white bishop. The topsy-turvyness of it all is also there. Bright contrasting colors of propaganda or advertising (red and yellow) inter- rupt the dichotomy of chess. Similarly, the text itself interrupts this grand narrative by multifariously framing the kidnapping as a game of poker, which is arguably more about chance than skill; as a duel, which is predominantly about honor; or as a negotiation, which revolves around profit. These juxta- posed narratives are themselves negotiations with the constraints of fictionaliz- ing actual events. In a veiled ars poetica, GarcıaMarquez identifies with Villamizar:

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No other virtues could have served Villamizar as well as his determination and patience in sorting through the internal contradictions present in these conditions. In other words, he could do as he wished in his own way, using all his imagination, but he had to do it with his hands tied.13

Indeed, the trace of contradiction is everywhere to be found, at a very basic narratological level. (Picture a creative writing instructor recommending an apprentice GarcıaMarquez, in some parallel universe, to “stick to just one” metaphor.) These overlapping ﬁctionalizations-cum-rationalizations give the book an essayistic quality, in the etymological sense of an attempt. The implication here is that the events narrated are too momentous even for the most adept of writers. At the same time, the consummate prose carries the action forward, producing genuine readerly commotion. The unintended consequences of a single metaphor—Manicheism, say—, are counter-balanced by a different one. At best, this affords a multitude of perspectives. At worst, cacophony. Evidently, the baroque antics of the author’s real maravilloso works are present here, in different garbs. Overdetermination informs, other than in chapters themselves, a very heady prologue and epilogue. We have chosen not to start our discussion of the book by the prologue, treating it rather as a paratext, because it so programmatically seeks to condition interpretation that it may eclipse middle sections that, as noted, have their own unity of action. Unequivocally, and speaking as if a private person, the narrator couches the story of a kidnapping as one of sacriﬁce for the new nation. We read in the carefully crafted acknowledgements:

[Thank you] for not letting this gruesome drama [drama bestial] to sink into oblivion. Sadly, it is only one episode in the biblical holocaust [holocausto bıblico] that has been consuming Colombia for more than twenty years. I dedicate this book to them [the real-life characters and book collaborators], and to all [con ellos a todos] Colombians—innocent and guilty—with the hope that the story it tells will never befall us again.14

Alongside the sacriﬁcial structure, note the self-quote to the agonism of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the overtones of bestiality, the drive to peg the narrative to referentiality, the suspension of agency (“befall us”), and the trickle- down logic of representation. Under this light, the book’s victims make sacred, like angels among animals. The passage also underpins the important point, present throughout, that understanding the ongoing war happens through the elites and the media establishment (“con ellos”). The book is unapologetic about its structural elitism, because it sets itself to the task of translating the experiences

6 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY of the privileged few, not so privileged after all given their sacrifice in the War on Drugs, to a broader audience. For its part, the epilogue provides an eleventh-hour tour de force. Conspicuously, until this point News of a Kidnapping has not been a story about Pablo Escobar. As if trying to escape the gravitational pull of this acutely mytho- poetic criminal, GarcıaMarquez confines him to a long coda that summarily recounts the drug lord’s surrender to justice, the cushy time he spent at the notoriously corrupt La Catedral, his escape through bribery, the U.S.-backed manhunt, and the kingpin’s eventual gunning down—all this before returning to the Villamizar couple. Pressing the chess metaphor, one could say the epilogue is about castling, late in the game, after a first check and before the checkmate. The checkmate or denouement of the novel is another instance of mixed structural metaphor, deserving of attention as a narrative device. It subsumes all others and, in so doing, provides the secular take on legality that complements the religious, sacrificial narrative. The master narrative is the story of a ring. Reportedly, when Maruja was kid- napped, she lost her wedding band. Months after her liberation, as she slowly recovers from trauma, a man comes knocking on the door. It’s Sunday after lunch. The text remarks, unnecessarily and purposefully, “The servants had the day off, and Villamizar opened the door”.15 Before dashing away, the man hands Villamizar a package with the ring, intact except for a lost diamond sparkle. (One wonders: how many diamonds does this ring have?) Eeriness sinks in: the Cartel can still get to the protagonists any time it wants to, even during lazy Sunday bliss. The observation about “the day without maids,” insinuates the per- sistence of class hatred. And yet the final note is one of reparation. Maruja wears the ring and, noticing that it fits, realizes that she is regaining her health. The plotline comes full circle, pun intended, and a lost order is restored, albeit slightly chipped. There is something of subtle mockery of the bourgeois here, but the prevailing tone is class harmony. Not coincidentally, an earlier passage intro- ducing benefactor Father Garcıa Herreros, whom Escobar trusted enough to serve as guarantor of his surrender to justice, features a lady with a diamond ring “the size of an almond” presenting it to the priest as a donation to build “one hundred and twenty houses for the poor.”16 The fabled object reinforces unity of action and symbolizes national reparation, which emerges as the central telos of the book.17 And yet, to put the matter with yet a different metaphor, there are many loose threads. At a moment of crisis, one of the captors yells at Maruja: “You rich motherfuckers! Did you really think you’d run things forever? Not anymore, damn it: It’s all over!”18 The dignified protagonist replies with a plea to friend- ship, a value that GarcıaMarquez would champion late in life over partisanship, and an animalization of criminals: “You kill your friends, your friends kill you,

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you all end up killing each other,” she screamed. “Who can understand you? Find me one person who can say what kind of animals you people are.”19 The opportunity to tell a different story is lost: an epic of compromise, News of a Kidnapping insists on its account of a patrician, mediatic intelligentsia waging war against a parvenu with a country as backdrop and sicarios as nothing other than abetting pawns or animals. Whenever the narrator approaches the sicarios, young gunmen from the slums, it is from a position of tutelage and even bourgeois taste. We read that they slash their pants with mowing scissors, an unlikely premise that casts them as brutes and rustics. They profess, we read, “absolute fatalism.” The novel, compassionate but paternalistic, sees them as lost children.20 Noticia understands itself as post-political, a humanitarian drama, but the above casts it as a wishful, performative ﬁctionalization of a leap forward in the top-down globalization of law. Wishful because the war raged on as the novelist brings his story to a close. GarcıaMarquez ’s politics in this book are so aligned with the new national project and media talk that they are almost invisible to the eye: their ideological colors blend in with the room. The kidnappings were Escobar’s means to pressure a crucial concession he eventually got: not getting extradited to the United States. The 1991 Constitution bolstered civil rights, sanctioned privatization and, until Constitutional reform in 1997, forbade extradition. A triumph against legal imperialism and a victory for thuggish, charismatic power, it was also the exception that, relatively speaking, reestablished national sovereignty. GarcıaMarquez struggles to make sense of this convoluted story in a way that rebuilds social tissue at a time of neoliberal reform.

FOUNDATIONAL EXCEPTIONALISM AGAINST THE GRAIN

As we have seen, News of a Kidnapping commemorates the role of members of the political elite in their negotiations with Escobar, telling a heroic, sacrificial story about the refoundation of the Colombian state amidst the global and local War on Drugs. In this section, we will expose how, more or less unintentionally, GarcıaMarquez ’s narrative also shows that the exception, as sovereign decision- making about the suspension of legality, lies at the core of the 1991 reforms that constitute the underlying legal drama of the novel. Suspension of legality and rule by exception use law’s justificatory powers to make decisions about life and death. Several subplots, tropes, symbols and other devices point in this direction, skirting the lawless foundation of the rule of law. Rendering the exception into the novel form generates a different source of narrative tension: how many deus ex machina before a story fizzles into nonsense? Refoundation hinges upon verisimilitude in ways that the exception both enables and puts at risk—an ambiguity fictionalization must contend with. As a result, the exception produces three

8 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY effects in Noticia. First, lawlessness produces hope and despair during the draft- ing of a new Constitution. Second, the exception opens the possibility for negotiating rule of law through criminal policy measures that incentivized drug lords’ rendition. Third, and most problematically, the exception allows the temporary suspension of the humanity of known and alleged criminals. These facets of the exception speak to the paradoxical consolidation of the Colombian state through lawlessness, exclusion, and the instrumentalization of law. Sweeping the novel for emplotments of the exception is thus highly revealing. Such is the task we now undertake, in conversation with relevant political and legal theory. It is worth recalling how, in Carl Schmitt’s well-known formulation, the exception appears as a figure that evidences the impossibility of liberal legality to justify the validity and legitimacy of the legal system in strictly legal terms. At the basis of the system lies a sovereign decision about the presence or absence of a “normal” situation where the law can or cannot be applied. If the sovereign decides that there isn’t such a state, he can suspend legality, thereby creating an exception. As Schmitt puts it, “the exception [ … ] can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law [ … ]. The precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a case”.21 More recently, Giorgio Agamben has shown the paradoxical features of the state of exception, where emergency decla- rations authorized by law can actually suspend legality. Once legality is suspended, political power shows its true face, untied from formal legal rules.22 Both theories criticize liberal legalism’s faith in rule of law as the foundation of political action. Arguably, lawlessness is pervasive in contemporary rule of law; the basis for the state’s political action lies ultimately in sovereign decision-making about the suspension of the rule of law. According to prevailing legal historiography, the Colombian constitutional reform movement that Noticia alludes to sought to overcome a ghastly cycle of violence, civil war, and state repression.23 The 1991 Constitution was the product of a six month-deliberation by a multi-party elected body, the Constituent Assembly. GarcıaMarquez ’s first mention of the Assembly acknowledges one of its main achievements: its contribution to the demobilization of guerrilla organization M-19 by opening a political space for its former militants. In fact, M-19 obtained the second highest vote count in the election for Assembly representatives. In the first pages of the book, Maruja asks her kidnappers: “Who are you?” They answer: “We are from the M-19.” The narrator reflects: “A nonsensical reply: The M-19, a former guerrilla group, was legal now and campaigning for seats in the Constituent Assembly.”24 M-19 had gained notoriety for its daring actions, including the 1978 raid of an army arsenal at Canton Norte, the 1980 siege of the Dominican Republic embassy, and the 1985 suppressed takeover of

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the Palace of Justice—a painful event that would later gain the moniker of “Holocaust” at a local level.25 Even this radical, belligerent group was now inside legality thanks to the political maneuvering that led to the Constituent Assembly. But Cartel violence challenged this moment of supposed inclusiveness. With the nod to M-19, the book raises a legal and political theory question: how can political institutions react when they open political spaces for participation, but groups that remain outside the pale of legality and politics violently press for further inclusion? In responding to this question, Noticia implicitly places the exception at center stage.26 The constitutional reform movement was actually part of a long-standing dispute between legality and exception, worth considering in some detail. The main legal hurdle for constitutional reform was article 218, which stated that Congress was the sole institution that could amend the Constitution. The Barco government, supported by a creative and active student movement, enacted a couple of emergency decrees that sought to elect a Constituent Assembly to tackle specific constitutional issues charted out by the government and political parties. The Supreme Court upheld the emergency decrees, arguing that the people always held constitution-making power, but also asserted that neither government nor political parties could place limits on the people’s constituent power. After the Court reviewed the last decree, the people could elect members for a Constituent Assembly without restriction, that is, they could enact a completely new Constitution and not merely a limited set of amendments.27 The book renders these legal intricacies more or less explicitly: “But when the Supreme Court reached the spectacular decision that the Constituent Assembly could deal with any subject, without any restrictions, the question of extradition reemerged from the ruins. Amnesty was not mentioned, but it was also possible: There was room for everything in the infinite.”28 This opening up to “the infinite,” in Garcıa Marquez ’s rendering of the Court decision, is an unambiguous nod to ambiguity. Truly, the Court created a space of lawlessness. Fittingly, the “infinite” or the exception remains a source for either hope or despair for different characters throughout the novel. For hostages, the election and discussions of the Constituent Assembly were events that helped them in measuring their time in captivity. For the reader, they buttress the main plot’s timeline. In several passages, the day when the people voted for representatives to the Constituent Assembly (December 9, 1990), figures as the due date by when the hostages were to be released, a day “to celebrate.”29 But the exception becomes a source for despair once the Constituent Assembly is elected and their liberation is not forthcoming. Later on, the constitutional body’s deliberations about extradition and its eventual prohibition represented a hopeful event both for Pablo Escobar and for chief negotiator Alberto Villamizar. GarcıaMarquez acknowledges President Gaviria for “achieving a less turbulent environment to

10 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY sail through the storm” thanks to the windy legal path that led to discussing even “the hottest topics: extradition and amnesty” for drug lords.30 The Court’s ruling meant that even the prohibition of extradition as a constitutional right for Colombian nationals was on the table. In this scenario, the exception that created lawlessness to discuss a new Constitution was eventually the lifesaver for hostages. GarcıaMarquez ’s humanitarian vindication of exceptionality happens within these coordinates. To boot: toward the end of the book, after negotiating the hostages’ liberation and Escobar’s surrender to justice, Villamizar turns on the radio and listens to news that the Constituent Assembly voted in favor of forbidding the extradition of Colombian nationals. If we peg the complex unity of action discussed above to the constitutional reform process, then it seems the drama comes to an end because the exception opened an “infinite” space where the prohibition of extradition could lead to the liberation of hostages, Escobar’s surrender to justice, and the refoundation of the Colombian state in the 1991 Constitution. Legality too has come full circle, so the ring can now return.31 Nonetheless, at the same time the novel captures the contradictions between the project of legality and its reassertion through lawlessness by highlighting how the rule of law is suspended for the purpose of negotiating its scope and con- tent. Traditionally, Colombian legal and political theorists have underscored the authoritarian effects of states of exception, which challenged a liberal understanding of the separation of powers, aided in the militarization of the country, and restricted rights.32 Meanwhile, Noticia shows that states of exception are not only tools that enhance authoritarianism, but also devices that create exceptions for the purpose of negotiating the foundation of the rule of law. GarcıaMarquez illustrates this understanding of the exception by addressing polıtica de sometimiento a la justicia—the set of legal rules that established lenient jail terms for drug lords including Pablo Escobar, above, in exchange for sur- rendering to justice and confessing crimes that would effectively lead to the disbandment of drug cartels.33 This polıtica—translated as “policy,” albeit with more contingent overtones—initially set the course for the negotiations between the government, via Villamizar, and Escobar. Cesar Gaviria’s government acted as if law and legal institutions were merely means to achieve the specific end of having drug lords surrender to justice. The surrender itself was a steppingstone toward rebuilding Colombia. In this sense, the kidnapping also represented an opportunity for the government to seek the rendition of Escobar. Strategic uses of rule of law and of lawlessness in the story evidence how the Colombian government heavily relied on an instrumental—amoral—conception of legality. Lenient rendition and extradition were, respectively, the carrot and the stick. Hence GarcıaMarquez highlights that when an emergency decree suspending extradition under certain circumstances did not sufficiently incentivize Escobar

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to turn himself in, the President was “disappointed” (sufrio un desencanto) and went on to issue new decrees that transformed emergency legislation into a bargaining chip.34 Although GarcıaMarquez applauds the political elites’ legal creativity around polıtica de sometimiento, he briefly flirts with denouncing this instrumentalization of law. This is not a line he pursues very far. Both law and lawlessness sub- ordinate Villamizar’s efforts to liberate his spouse to the government’s main objective: again, Escobar’s rendition. Negotiations were never primarily about the dignity, lives and liberty of hostages, but about bringing a drug lord to justice.35 Instead of delving into the government’s own instrumentalization of hostages, Noticia privileges the narrative of Villamizar’s ingenuity in representing Gaviria’s interests, which led him to change the terms of engagement with Escobar. A different narrative would point out that Villamizar, in his double role of husband and legal ransom negotiator, had an unsolvable conflict of interest. The novel is not set up for the reader to realize that Villamizar, having been literally robbed of the love of his life, was also a victim. The third narrative of the exception relates to the military and police opera- tions deployed to capture Escobar. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, parts of Medellın were a war zone. The government created a special police force, cuerpo elite, in charge of hunting down Escobar and his associates. The cuerpo elite answered directly to the President, purportedly to shield it against Cartel bribery.36 Meanwhile, Escobar’s underground organization, the Extraditables, claimed time and again that the cuerpo elite used torture against young inhabi- tants of the Medellın slums to extract information leading to their capture. They even demanded Gaviria to put a stop on human rights abuses. In fact, the group’s first public acknowledgement of the kidnappings of Noticia also asserted that this action was a retaliation against the violation of their rights, particularly after the assassination of Luis Hernando Gaviria Gomez (no connection to the president), the kingpin’s cousin. In a letter to a Medellın newspaper, they accused the police of torturing and killing him. The letter ended with a threat against the government and the police: if they came after their friends or families once more, they would execute the hostages.37 Claims about human rights violations and executions are minimized in the novel, thereby constituting Noticia’s own narrative of the exception. Meanwhile, framing events in terms of “monstrosity” and “biblical holocaust” puts its grain of sand in legitimizing, even sanctifying the suspension of law and liberties: Sodom, Gomorrah, and the deluge are about renewing vows with God, rather than about massive death. Although GarcıaMarquez reproduces the Extraditables’ denunci- ation of grave human rights violations, he takes sides regarding the veracity of the accounts (Chapter 2). The government was telling the truth about the horrors of Escobar, but the Cartel was lying: “The government’s credibility was not at

12 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY the high level of its notable political successes but at the abysmal level of its security forces, which were censured in the world press and by international human rights organizations. Pablo Escobar, however, had achieved a credibility that the guerrillas never enjoyed in their best times. People tended to believe the lies of the Extraditables more than the truths told by the government.”38 Arguably, GarcıaMarquez makes room for the Cartel to hold at least a modicum of truth, because “someone’s” lies are not the same as lies tout court. But for all the grammatical circumlocution about credibility and trustworthiness—a carefully equivocal way to talk about truth and falsity—the novel exonerates the State. The point is not that GarcıaMarquez hides evidence but that, in its absence, he stacks the deck against plausible victimizers who were also plausible victims.39 Unbeknownst to the novelist, the evidence would eventually surface. In 2008, the State Council, Colombia’s highest administrative court, found that the Colombian state was liable for the extrajudicial killing of Gaviria Gomez, a civil- ian. Judges determined that cuerpo elite had illegally killed a man who had not committed a crime or resisted the police operation against him, “Apocalypse II.” (What’s in a name?) Reassessing the ballistic evidence, the court established that Gaviria Gomez was unarmed, drunk and did not engage in combat when the police arrived to his country house nearby Medellın. The police demonstrably killed him, extrajudicially, with his hands tied. A warrant for the search and seizure was nowhere to be found; the weapon placed beside the corpse had not been fired in at least eight days. Forensics demonstrated that no shots were fired outwards from the house.40 The State Council was aware of the sensible nature of the case, given that Gaviria Gomez ’s death had been presented in 1990 as a key blow against the Cartel, for he was presented to the public as the organization’s military mastermind.41 However, it concluded that one of the key roles of the judiciary was to be “particularly careful in evaluating the behavior of the parties in their search for truth and the resolution of this conflict according to the law, because the legal system is legitimized only along this path.”42 The Council alluded to the fact that there had never been a proper police investigation about Gaviria Gomez ’s death, despite the challenges raised against the operation since the 1990s.43 The judicial decision problematizes GarcıaMarquez ’s economy of political representation; it also seeks to repair the effects of the exception over the rights of alleged criminals. While in this case literature aligned itself with the exception, the narrative of a legal decision recovers the humanity that had been lost by the deliberate creation of lawlessness in the project of refounding the Colombian state. Law here both critiques and complements literature, revealing its less obvious potentialities. The flipside of this argument is that, in contexts where the rule of law is still rather precarious, many a decree, the State Council ruling

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included, risks remaining letra muerta (literally, dead script), as unenforceable laws are known in the country. A long-seller, Noticia is akin to an engine that, over time, continues to generate a legal culture. Starting with the decision of making civil society—and not Pablo Escobar—the protagonist of the story, and despite its elitism, the book asks contemporary readers to take ownership over what happened. The prologue and the miraculous ring may be steeped in religios- ity, but the plight of captivity is truly secular.44 There is room to speculate, alongside Carl Schmitt’s notion of the modern state as a secularization of theo- logical concepts, whether this casts the Colombian state as only half-modern, or whether the alleged secularity of the State itself is something to revise in light of the War on Drugs. Be this as it may, it becomes apparent that efforts to monu- mentalize GarcıaMarquez are also attempts at domesticating him. The one-sided celebration of his oeuvre’s foundational quality misses its thorough, sometimes unwitting questioning of foundation itself.

TOWARD HETEROCHRONIC LAW AND LITERATURE

Legal deliberation is limited by the contingent, pressing needs of adjudication.45 But a work of literature is free from such time constraints, and can continue to rethink a situation long after it has occurred. News of a Kidnapping is a case in point. Reconsidering coldly, the 1990s could have been a time when Colombia rallied around, rather than against, its druglords. Escobar’s offer to pay off the country’s foreign debt was egregious, no doubt, but it was also a missed opportunity.46 Drug lords are extractive industrialists similar to rubber barons and oil tycoons who, unlike them, draw their immense profits less on the backs of the poor in the Third World than on the noses and bloodstreams of the addicts in the First. An endowed Pablo Escobar Business School or a trade agreement with the drug- friendly Netherlands do not exceed the imagination. Neither does a society that wouldn’t succumb to neoliberal biopolitics, that is, one that effectively refused to negotiate with human lives. Less rosy alternative pasts involve a descent into outright thuggery, a world where Escobar’s own paralegal principle of “plata o plomo” (take a bribe or get shot) prevailed.47 The point is not to be flippant, but to mobilize the affordances of literature to rethink a historical conjuncture. If the War on Drugs is both real and imaginary, then its critique requires both facts and fancy. Criminalization gelled puritan values into punitive law, while health emergency approaches, though messier, were and still are available. (They involve hard-sell measures like sponsoring controlled heroin doses to prevent withdrawal from turning into all-out relapse.) At the same time, criminalization affirmed a world order where lives lost south of the Rio Grande, or in U.S. inner cities, are a relatively minor political cost that decision-makers readily assume.

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Works such as GarcıaMarquez ’s offer a window into the cascading consequences of this approach. Unifying narratives of global legality, post-colonial or otherwise, are more part of the problem than of the solution: they reify fundamental unevennesses even when seeking to redress them. The War on Drugs makes no attempt at the latter, for it is arguably a neo-colonial project. But even the triumphalist post- Cold War narrative of the expansion of the rule of law around the world is com- plicit in such center-periphery dynamics. The legal victories of the West in Latin America and Africa involve the construction of legality as a complex interaction between the utterance of law by elite-controlled formal institutions (the predom- inant narrative) and the use of legal arguments by non-State authors. If we shift toward a different perspective, one “from below,” we arrive at different conclu- sions.48 First, it becomes apparent that polities pressured to permanently negotiate their terms of existence and viability cannot afford an unquestioned fidelity to the rule of law. This explains Escobar’s understanding of polıtica de sometimiento, but also the current challenges Colombia faces while implementing the findings of a transitional justice tribunal. Second, there is an opposing impulse where law preserves a halo of authority and moral redemption, leading to the reexamination of an established historical “truth.” Law can also interrogate and reconfigure power. For decades, many Colombians believed in law’s narrative, against all odds, even when they doubted it could lead to social transformation.49 This dialectics of law and adjudication for both the consolidation and dispute of a “truthful” narrative evidences how premature was GarcıaMarquez ’s attempt to give closure to the story of the War on Drugs. Our contribution participates in the trend to extend the purview of law and literature beyond Euro-American coordinates. This is indeed an agenda worth pursu- ing, with a caveat: rather than top-down application of legal and literary theory, the goal is re-theorization from the ground up. To some extent, one could claim that the task is undertaken by literature itself. After all, Colombia has world- renowned writers and artists—critics or jurists, less so. And yet there are pitfalls in ascribing to great literature the social function and argumentative power that more robust academic practices would provide.50 This applies to Colombian scholarship based in the country, but also to international collaborations of the sort that make the present article possible.51 It similarly applies to Latin Americanism, as a disciplinary formation that occasionally glosses over sub-regional differences. For a quick illustration, consider that “the Pink Tide,” as a metaphor and narrative framework for the alleged shift of the region to the left in the mid-aughts, not only ignores the rightist turn in Colombia, Peru, or Costa Rica, but fails to appreciate its dialectical relation with that other trend.52 Theorizing law and literature from the Global South and, moreover, from particular coordinates therein, poses the challenge of writing or revising foundational work, rather than applying it.

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Consider Anker and Meyler’s seemingly incontrovertible assertion that “Literature’s alterity to law and politics is what allows it to generate insight into law’s constitutive failures and negative limits.”53 This is a truism in places where the separation of spheres and the broader specialization of economic and public life has largely been achieved. Also in those locales where the pacification of literature, to adopt the late Pascale Casanova’s felicitous phrase, is now complete.54 (Picture novel-products circulating “freely,” guarded from piracy by copyright, as highbrow entertainment: the “business as usual” of literature.) The alterity to law of News of a Kidnapping is already suspect, for the author’s charismatic pro- nouncements touched the force of legal doctrine. The book’s identification with the law offers the most insight. Ironically, Noticia came out already plagiarized, available from bootleg publishers and distributed by street peddlers.55 Of course, lawlessness in copyright was the least of the country’s worries. The takeaway here is that, in a combative literature, what orients reception is something akin to hunger: a will to read even when you cannot afford it. The politicity of a text of this nature cannot be secondary. In terms of social function, conversely, you cannot afford not to read it. The illegal circulation of a book with foundational legal qualities is not just ironical, but dialectical. While overcoming the exception and establishing a relative rule of law is salutary in practice, thinking creatively from within the exception has great value for theory. At a meta-critical level, the above entails a valorization of dialectics as a necessary methodological component in the interdisciplinary practice of law and literature. Rather than shy away from paradoxes (how can something be both unlawful and foundational?), one can engage with them as such. It may be because of, not despite of, their paradoxical quality that certain exceptions are so generative. Ironing out contradiction without acknowledging its efficacy on the terrain will produce eschewed accounts. One example would be the ill-fated attempt to straight-jacket Colombia into teleological narratives about the globalization of the rule of law.56 The country would often appear as an anomaly in such accounts, rather than a case-study that could very well call for the revision of the model. This is particularly the case at the Latin American level, where the country’s “lack” of formal military dictatorship—barring Rojas Pinilla’s from 1953 to 1957—make it illegible to the more established analytical categories in the region. (As with “Pink Tide,” above.) More broadly, GarcıaMarquez ’s textured prose suggests that there is merit to entertaining, at the same time, contradict- ory positions. This actually approximates scholars to what legal actors had to face in their real-life attempts at squaring the circle. News of a Kidnapping tells and participates in a story that is global, regional, and local: a problematic milestone in the War on Drugs, in the convoluted history of US-Latin America relations, and in Colombia’s constitutional history. Doing justice to these different facets requires adopting seemingly conflicting

16 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY temporalities. The War on Drugs, as promulgated by Richard Nixon, is the template for George Bush’s War on Terror in that it is a struggle with no end in sight. The two collapse in utterances such as “narco-terrorism,” an obfuscating term favored by right-wing pundits North and South, often bestowed unreflectively on the likes of Pablo Escobar. But even less extreme, well-meaning attempts to syn- chronize the world into an all-encompassing narrative—including that of the globalization of the rule of law—have significant pitfalls. Such narratives both generalize and underestimate the exception, which is something inextricably bound to a time and a place. For the specific case discussed here, as we have seen, it is important to resist the tendency of subsuming the refoundation of the Colombian state to the War on Drugs, or vice versa. Appreciating these movements contrapunctually is ultimately more productive, even when they may occur in different, though partially overlapping, temporal and spatial coordinates. This particular paradox is best captured in a plea that GarcıaMarquez makes in a different work of his, The General in His Labyrinth, published in the fateful year of 1989. It is voiced by no other than the title character, a fictionalized Simon Bolıvar, in an irate response to a condescending Frenchman:

Don’t attempt to teach us how we should be, don’t attempt to make us just like you, don’t try to have us do well in twenty years what you have done so badly in two thousand. [ … ] Damn it, please let us have our Middle Ages in peace!57

The passage reads well at the dawn of the republic as during the more recent stages of uneven development. Yet it is less straightforward than it seems. Literally a postcolonial pronouncement, it uses comparison with the metropolis precisely to discredit such a comparison; a gesture of non-sensical authoritarianism or hopeless desperation, it unabashedly ventriloquizes the past. The relevant aspect from this mise en abyme is the impossible temporality it puts forward: both Western and not, kairetic and chronological, exceptional and everyday. By using ﬁction to interrogate the empty, deadly teleology of the War on Drugs, the present article marks just such a passing of time.58

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

1. Greta Olson, “De-Americanizing Law and 2. See particularly the research lines announced in: Literature Narratives: Opening up the Story,” Law Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler, & Literature 22 (2010): 357. “Introduction”,inNew Directions in Law and

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Literature, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Randolph Hogan, as The Story of a Ship-Wrecked Meyler (New York: Oxford University Press, Sailor in 1986). Throughout his life, Garcıa 2017), 21–22. Of particular relevance is Anker’s Marquez would have numerous involvements criticism against law and literature scholars in with journalism, including banking a weekly, co- the Global South who tend to see literature as founding a daily newscast, and laying the an emancipatory force that would liberate law foundations for the very influential Foundation from its inhumanity. Anker’s criticism applies to for New Ibero-American Journalism, recently the Latin American state of the art law and renamed “Fundacion Gabo.” The latter’s literature. In a relatively recent dossier about the journalism fellowship program has influenced topic in an important law journal of the region, generations of long-form journalists. For a recent most perspectives seek to problematize law’s collection of the author’s journalistic pieces, see qualities and treat literary works as a revelatory The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings corpus that “liberates”Á the legal. See: Iuris Dictio. (New York: Knopf, 2018). Dossier: Derecho y Literatura en America Latina 7. “Gabriel GarcıaMarquez, ıdolo de la oposicion Vol. 18 (2016). en Iran,” El Espectador, September 22, 2011, 3. The more sustained discussion of law and https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/cultura/ literature in Latin America remains see Roberto libros/gabriel-garcia-marquez-idolo-de- Gonzalez Echevarrıa, Myth and Archive: A Theory oposicion-iran-articulo-301162 of Latin American Narrative (New York: 8. See: Gerald Martin, Gabriel GarcıaMarquez: A Life Cambridge University Press, 1990). For human (New York: Knopf, 2008), 405, 514–6. rights and literature, see Sophia A. McClennon 9. For a broad-ranging account of what is arguably and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, The Routledge an evolving genre, see Gabriela Polit Duenas,~ Companion to Literature and Human Rights (New Narrating Narcos: Culiacan and Medellın York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016); (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). in Latin America: Fernando J. Rosenberg, After For an argument against applying genre theory Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in to parcel out stories of narco trafficking from Latin America, 1990-2010 (Pittsburgh: University other popular accounts of social mobility, see of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and Andrew C. Rajca, Hector Hoyos, Beyond Bola~no: The Global Latin Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and American Novel (New York: Columbia University Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay Press, 2015), Chapter 4. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018) 10. Gabriel GarcıaMarquez, News of a Kidnapping, both of which also engage with memory studies. trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Penguin, For the latest wave of studies on Garcıa 1998), 151. Marquez, see Gene H. Bell-Villada Gabriel Garcıa 11. Between 1984 and 1991, Colombia was under a Marquez in Retrospect: A Collection (Lanham, “state of siege” [estado de sitio]: an emergency Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016). regime that empowered the executive branch to 4. For a brief chronology of the complex War on promulgate extraordinary measures to confront Drugs, see “Thirty Years of America’s Drug the crisis. Hence the tit-for-tat decrees to War,” PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ facilitate a negotiation with drug lords. For frontline/shows/drugs/cron/ instance, in 1990 it went into law that, if drug 5. Cfr. Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale lords agreed to surrender to justice, the Law Journal 95 (1985-1986): 1601–29 (highlighting government would guarantee that they would the similarity of the violent deeds behind murder not be extradited. Such emergency decrees thus and judicialized death sentences and the became the bargaining chips between the relationship between the words of the law and the government and Escobar during 1990 and 1991. materialization of violence over bodies). See: Decreto 2047 de 1990 (por el cual se crean 6. The first major foray of the author into this mecanismos para incentivar el sometimiento a la mash-up writing mode is the real-life account of justicia de quienes hayan cometido delitos a sailor adrift for ten days on the Caribbean, relacionados con los motivos de perturbacion de published as a series of installments in the orden publico) [available at: http://www.suin- newspaper El Espectador in the mid-fifties. (It juriscol.gov.co/viewDocument.asp?ruta= would appear in book form, translated by Decretos/1390630]; Decreto 2372 de 1990 (por

18 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY

el cual se adicional el Decreto 2047) [available 20. The road not taken is illustrated by Fernando at: http://www.suin-juriscol.gov.co/ Vallejo’s novel, Our Lady of the Assassins (1994), viewDocument.asp?id=1443360]; Decreto 3030 which works with similar materials to produce a de 1990 (por el cual se dictan medidas story of an intellectual who falls in love with a tendientes al restablecimiento del orden publico sicario. As Rosenberg notes in After Human y se subrogan los Decretos legislativos 2047, Rights, that work critiques legality from a 2147 y 2372 de 1990) [available at: http:// different perspective than the liberal romantic www.suin-juriscol.gov.co/viewDocument. tradition (51). asp?id=1508657]. 21. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: The 12. GarcıaMarquez and Grossman, News of a University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6–7. Kidnapping, 117. 22. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: 13. Ibid., 52. The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 31–41. 14. Ibid., ii. GarcıaMarquez offers a heroic narrative In this chapter, Agamben underscores the of the political elite that accompanied President mysterious force of law that attaches to Gaviria in his negotiation with Escobar. However, emergency decrees despite the suspension of ’ ’ other elites narratives have portrayed Gaviria s the law. bargaining with Escobar as nothing short of a 23. See: Julieta Lemaitre, El derecho como conjuro betrayal. For example, Colombian novelist (Bogota: Ediciones Universidad de los Andes, Ricardo Silva Romero delves into his own 2011), 79–117, where the author describes the memories as a child in the late 1980s and violent and yet hopeful environment surrounding criticizes President Gaviria for abandoning the the enactment of the Colombian 1991 extradition strategy of his predecessor, President Constitution. ’ Barco. Silva considered the latter s strategy as a 24. GarcıaMarquez and Grossman, News of a moral and lawful plan to face the drug lords. Kidnapping,14–15. After Gaviria adopted the polıtica de sometimiento 25. For a history of the M-19 and the impact of the a la justicia, according to Silva, the many deaths siege of the Supreme Court, see: Darıo fi of people ghting for extradition of Escobar and Villamizar, Aquel 19 sera (Bogota: Editorial ’ his associates had been in vain. Gaviria s Planeta, 1995). It is unclear when Colombians government represented an elite that used began using the term “holocaust” to describe the emergency powers to negotiate the authority of siege of the Courts and the impact that this the state with a bunch of thugs that had usage has had for memory studies focusing on murdered hundreds. See: Ricardo Silva Romero, this paradigmatic event. On the debates fi Historia o cial del amor (Bogota: Penguin Random surrounding the emergence and usage of the House, 2016), 155. term in American English after the 1960s, see 15. GarcıaMarquez and Grossman, News of a Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life Kidnapping, 291 (our emphasis). (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 133. 16. Ibid., 241. (We are grateful to Samuel Moyn for 17. In this regard, the book is not unlike the 19th this reference). century “foundational fictions” studied by Doris 26. More explicitly, discussing Estado de Sitio 2047: Sommer. These are allegorical romantic novels “It was law in its simplest, purest form: the where a member of a couple symbolizes a gallows and the club,” GarcıaMarquez and segment of society—for instance, liberal Grossman, News of a Kidnapping, 74. professionals or landowners—, while their union 27. Republica de Colombia, “Decreto 1926 de 1990,” symbolizes a new national pact. GarcıaMarquez August 24, 1990, http://www.suin-juriscol.gov. appears untroubled by the idea of a “marriage” co/viewDocument.asp?id=1371701. between journalism and the state. See: Doris 28. GarcıaMarquez and Grossman, News of a Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Kidnapping, 200. Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: The 29. “[L]es habıa hecho la promesa de que saldrıan el University of California Press, 2007). primer jueves de octubre. Les parecio cierto, 18. GarcıaMarquez and Grossman, News of a porque hubo cambios notables: mejor trato, Kidnapping, 248. mejor comida, mayor libertad de movimientos. 19. Ibid. Sin embargo, siempre aparecıa un pretexto para

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cambiar de fecha. Despues del jueves anunciado 33. The “polıtica de sometimiento” was introduced les dijeron que serıan libres el 9 de diciembre to the public as a set of presidential decrees that para celebrar la eleccion de la Asamblea sought to give special benefits to drug lords who Nacional Constituyente. Ası siguieron con la surrendered to justice. In fact, the decrees were Navidad, el Ano~ Nuevo, el dıa de Reyes, o el not spontaneous government concessions but cumpleanos~ de alguien, en un collar de the end-result of lengthy negotiations with the ı aplazamientos que mas bien parec an drug lords themselves. See: Ivan Orozco Abad, ” ı cucharaditas de consuelo, Gabriel Garc a Rebeldes, combatientes y terroristas (Bogota: Marquez, Noticia de un secuestro (Bogota: Norma, Editorial Temis, 2005), 251–97. 1996), 76. 34. “Si el presidente Gaviria esperaba que el decreto 30. “Sin embargo, en sus primeros cinco meses, de sometimiento provocara una rendicion masiva Gaviria habıa conseguido un ambiente menos e inmediata de los narcotraficantes, debio sufrir turbulento para capear la tormenta. Habıa un desencanto. No fue ası. Las reacciones de la logrado un acuerdo polıtico para convocar una prensa, de los medios polıticos, de juristas Asamblea Constituyente, investida por la Corte distinguidos, y aun algunos planteamientos Suprema de Justicia del poder suficiente para validos de los abogados de los Extraditables, decidir sobre cualquier tema sin lımite alguno. hicieron patente que el decreto 2047 debıa ser Incluidos, por supuesto, los mas calientes: la reformado,” GarcıaMarquez, Noticia de un extradicion de nacionales y el indulto,” Garcıa secuestro, 113. Marquez, Noticia de un secuestro, 155. 35. GarcıaMarquez, Noticia de un secuestro, 216. 31. “No bien despegaban cuando oyeron por radio la 36. The cuerpo elite was a special police force noticia de que la posicion del gobierno habıa created during the Barco government to hunt sido derrotada en la Asamblea Nacional down Escobar. Its main activities were Constituyente, donde acababa de aprobarse la performed in Medellın but responded directly to no extradicion de nacionales por cincuenta y un the general police headquarters in Bogota. This votos a favor, trece en contra y cinco bureaucratic organization, according to Bogota, abstenciones, en una primera instancia que serıa would protect the cuerpo elite from the mafia fl ı ratificada mas tarde. Aunque no habıa indicios politics and in uence so pervasive in Medell n. ı de que fuera un acto concertado, era casi infantil See, Garc aMarquez and Grossman, News of a no pensar que Escobar lo conocıa de antemano Kidnapping, 178-9. “ ” y habıa esperado hasta aquel ultimo minuto para 37. Redaccion el Tiempo. Amenazan a Periodistas, El Tiempo, October 31, 1990, https://www. entregarse,” GarcıaMarquez, Noticia de un eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-2587. secuestro, 325. More recent testimonies include that of the 32. There is a long tradition of Colombian legal infamous Popeye, Escobar’s right-hand hitman, scholarship highlighting this point. In the realm who claims the cuerpo elite had a torture of constitutional analysis, see: Alfredo Vazquez chamber in which they used drills to break Carrizosa, El poder presidencial en Colombia bones to extract information; he also describes (Bogota: Ediciones Enrique dorby, 1979); Jorge that they used a sauna with extremely high Gonzalez Jacome, Estados de excepcion y temperatures where the police would flay the democracia liberal en America del Sur. Argentina, person captured. Astrid Legarda, El verdadero Colombia y Chile 1930-1990 (Bogota: Editorial Pablo: Sangre, traicion y muerte (Bogota: Dipon, fi Ponti cia Universidad Javeriana, 2015). For a 2005), 181. Marxist explanation about authoritarianism and 38. GarcıaMarquez and Grossman, News of a states of exception, see: Gustavo Gallon, Quince Kidnapping, 132. ~ anos de Estado de Sitio en Colombia: 1958-1978 39. He also appears to fault sicarios for their bad (Bogota: Librerıa y Editorial America Latina, taste. A passage describing their gaudy looks 1979). For a criminal law perspective see: climaxes with an unlikely sartorial practice. Note Alejandro Aponte Cardona, Guerra y derecho how a blunt instrument, in an understated flight of penal enemigo: Reflexion crıtica sobre el fancy, conveys rusticity and bruteness: “[They eficientismo penal de enemigo (Buenos Aires: Ad- were] all in T-shirts with advertisements printed Hoc, 2008). on them, sneakers, and shorts they had cut

20 HOYOS AND GONZÁLEZ-JÁCOME • THE WAR ON DRUGS BETWEEN EXCEPTION AND LEGITIMACY

themselves with shears [tijeras de podar] (Ibid. a staging of the micropolitics of captivity. As 57).” Who would use tijeras de podar to cut miraculous deliverance and embodied resistance through, presumably, blue jeans? (The answer is: clash, excretion mirrors the release of narrative not even a gardener’s son.) It is unclear to what tension. “The guard shook his head, not knowing extent we are seeing through the bourgeois eyes what to think. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘Enjoy of Maruja and Beatriz, or whether a punk kid from yourself. [Buen provecho.]’ He stayed at the a nice neighborhood would be equally vilified. door, shining the flashlight on him, not blinking, 40. This judicial decision is: Consejo de Estado-Sala until Pacho pretended he had finished [hasta de lo Contencioso Administrativo-Seccion que Pacho termino lo suyo como si fuera Tercera, “Marıa Victoria Viana Arroyave vs. cierto].” GarcıaMarquez and Grossman, News of Nacion-Ministerio de Defensa-Policıa Nacional a Kidnapping, 254. Exp. No. 16741,” Consejera Ponente Myriam 45. Cfr. Duncan Kennedy, “Freedom and Constraint in Guerrero de Escobar, 13 de noviembre de Adjudication. A Critical Phenomenology,” Journal 2008, 31–35. of Legal Education 36, no. 4 (1986): 518–562. 41. In the 1990s, the mainstream press reported 46. On the different bargaining chips that Escobar that Gaviria Gomez was the military leader of raised in his negotiations with the government, the Medellin Cartel and was killed in a Police including the offer to pay Colombia’s foreign Operation labeled “Apocalypse III” (what’sina debt, see: Edgar Torres, “Abogados de Escobar name?). See, for example: Redaccion El Tiempo, contactan Gobierno,” El Tiempo, Mayo 24 de “En Guarne Antioquia muerto Primo de Pablo 1991, https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/ Escobar,” El Tiempo, October 24, 1990, https:// documento/MAM-92393. www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/ 47. Mark Bowden describes “plata o plomo” as “a MAM-1769. pattern of dealing with the authorities that 42. Consejo de Estado, “Marıa Victoria vs would become [Escobar’s] trademark.” Killing Nacion ”, 37. Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw 43. Lacunae about police actions exist also in the (New York: Penguin, 2001), 24. The idea of latest authorative reports about the violent eroding state power from below while flaunting 1980s and 1990s in Medellın. Although the newfound wealth has captivated popular Centro Nacional de Memoria Historica asserts imagination. Examples include the opening that Medellın communities were mistrustful of episode of the Netflix series Narcos, where a the police because of corruption and youngish Escobar explains the dichotomy to a “indiscriminate repression, especially against policeman who has seized a drug shipment, as young people,” it also acknowledges that the well as the 2017 album “Plata o Plomo” by “role of [armed and police forces] in those years American hip hop artists Fat Joe and Remy Ma. remain to be determined.” See: Centro Nacional On a visit to Medellın, rapper Wiz Khalifa payed de Memoria Historica, Medellın: Memorias de una tribute to Escobar’s grave in 2017, sparking guerra urbana (Bogota: CNMH, 2017), 74–5. social media outrage. 44. Case in point, imposed routines on bowel 48. A particularly helpful example of the movements, a particularly humiliating and all too construction of the state and legality as a result common feature of kidnappings, is a recurrent of an interaction between political elites and motif—the understated “ring” here being the peasants is: Catherne LeGrand, Colonizacion y anus. A half-asleep guard stumbles to find an protesta campesina en Colombia (1850-1950) unchained Pacho Santos in the bathroom, (Bogota: Universidad de los Andes, Universidad atypically, in the middle of the night. Nacional y Cinep, 2016). For a useful account of Unbeknownst to him, Pacho has plans to escape the most invisibilized narratives of the War on through the window. The guard points a lantern Drugs, namely, those of rural workers, see to the captive’s face and asks him what he’sup Alberto Fonseca, Cuando llovio dinero en to. For a split second, the captive’s life is at risk Macondo: Literatura y narcotrafico en Colombia y in the bathroom stall. He replies, resolutely, that Mexico (Culiacan: Universidad Autonoma de he is taking a shit. Although the scene may be Sinaloa, 2016), 198. based on fact, the language is most likely an 49. Peace negotiations in the 1950s in Colombia led exercise in Rabelaisian, coste~no humor, as well as to peasants’ legal demands against a

21 LAW & LITERATURE

government that did not fulfill its commitments. Zepp and Klaus Hoffman-Holland for organizing See: Robert Karl, Forgotten Peace. Reform, a November 2017 law and literature symposium Violence, and the Making of Contemporary at Freie Universit€at Berlin where we presented Colombia (Oakland: The University of California an earlier draft of this paper. Press, 2017), 95–119. Likewise, the emergence of 52. See John Beverley, The Failure of Latin America: human rights language in the 1970s led workers Postcolonialism in Bad Times (Pittsburgh: to frame their claims in legal jargon, thereby University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). holding some hope in formal legal and political 53. Anker and Meyler, New Directions in Law and institutions. See: Luis van Isschot, The Social Literature, 19. Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political 54. “The notion of ‘combative literatures’ thus Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital 1919-2010 (The suggests the idea of a collective movement: these University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). literary spaces are engaged—to a greater or lesser 50. “The separation between producers of thought extent, according to their degree of dependence— and producers of objects for thought is in struggles for recognition which are both political somehow turned into a presumed asset, a and literary,” Pascale Casanova, “Combative fecund void to be filled by a “great” literature all Literatures,” New Left Review 72 (2011). too satisfied to occupy a position previously 55. See: “Noticia de Piratas,” Semana, July 1, 1996 assigned. This reinforces, in its turn, exotic and Jeff Browitt, “Review of Gabriel Garcıa expectations by those on the other side of the Marquez, Noticia de un secuestro,” Journal of spectrum, i.e. the dominant traditions: “give us Iberian and Latin American Research (1997), 81–6. more GarcıaMarquez, more magical realism, 56. For a thoughtful discussion of how, in light of give us what we don’t have, after all there are multi-level governance and legal pluralism, global plenty of people doing this theoretical stuff in rule of law does not need entail the centralization English departments!” Idelber Avelar, “The Ethics of legality, see Peter Rijpkema, “The Concept of a of Interpretation and the International Division of Global Rule of Law,” Transnational Legal Theory 4, Intellectual Labor,” SubStance 91 (2000): 97. no. 2 (2013): 167–96 51. We acknowledge the Tinker foundation and the 57. Gabriel GarcıaMarquez, The General in His Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford Labyrinth, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: University for hosting Jorge Gonzalez for a Knopf, 1990), 124. research and teaching stay in 2017. Similarly, the 58. We are greatful to Sanjana Friedman, who kindly Law School at Universidad de los Andes in assisted in preparing this manuscript. Bogota for hosting Hector Hoyos for a summer program the following year. Finally, Susanne

Hector Hoyos is Associate Professor of Latin American literature at Stanford University. He is the author of the monographs Beyond Bolano:~ The Global Latin American Novel (Columbia University Press, 2015) and Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America (Columbia University Press, 2019). Jorge Gonzalez-J acome is Associate Professor at the School of Law in Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. He holds an SJD from Harvard University and is the author of Estados de excepcion y democracia liberal en America del Sur: Argentina, Chile y Colombia (1930–1990) (Javeriana, 2015) and Revolucion, democracia y paz : trayectorias de los derechos humanos en Colombia (1973–1985) (Tirant lo Blanch-Universidad de los Andes, 2019).