A few winters ago, I had lunch in New York with a 25-year-old Colombian man who had spent his previous summer on a farm outside Bogota, blindfolded and tethered to a tree. He had been kidnapped from his family's factory (one of the managers was later implicated) and held for four months until a ransom was paid. I told him the story sounded familiar. “García Márquez,” he said, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” I remembered the scene from that remarkable book. The old man, the patriarch of the family, José Arcadio Buendia, goes mad and is tethered, one end of a rope around his waist, the other around a large chestnut tree. “I asked the guards,” my friend said. “They answered, yes, they had read the book. That's where they got the idea.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that as many Colombians have been touched by kidnappings as have been touched by the books of Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel laureate and supreme commander of Latin American writers. So there is something oxymoronic in the title of García Márquez's latest book, the non-fictional News of a Kidnapping. Kidnappings are not news in Colombia, and, as my 25-year-old friend can attest, fiction is sometimes more useful in understanding them than is journalism.

The kidnapping of the title was not a single incident but a series of abductions carried out in Bogota in 1990 and orchestrated by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. He planned to use the hostages as a negotiating tool to force the repeal of a Colombian law that allowed him and other drug traffickers to be extradited to the U.S. Escobar was head of the cocaine cartel of Medellin, “a city martyrized by violence. … [T]wo thousand people in the slums were working for Escobar, many of them adolescents who earned their living hunting down police. For each dead officer, they received five million pesos, for each agent a million and a half, and 800,000 for each one wounded.”

To force the hand of the young Colombian president, Cesar Gaviria, Escobar had his henchmen abduct the sister of a politician; a TV reporter and her crew; the editor in chief of the country's largest daily newspaper; and the sister of another politician, along with the politician's wife, who was also a respected journalist. Colombia, at least on the level at which history is reported, is a nation of half-a-dozen families. They go to the same schools, learn to dance at the same parties, marry each other's cousins. And most of them find their power not in business, but between the incestuous sheets of journalism and politics.

Diana Turbay, a TV reporter and the most glamorous of those abducted, was the daughter of former President Julio Cesar Turbay. Throughout her captivity, her father, along with the father of the kidnapped editor in chief, conferred regularly with Gaviria. Most astonishing was the airwave access of the families of the hostages. Many of them TV personalities themselves, they were able to communicate with their captive loved ones by lacing their programs with coded messages. They paraded their families across the screen, even filmed on location in the victims' houses to show, for example, how a concerned husband had finally installed the library that his hostage wife had always desired. These programs were so effective that they not only gave hope to the hostages but even moved one of their guards to ask permission to date the daughter of one of the victims after she was released.

More interesting than the stories of the kidnapped are the stories of those outside, entrusted with the rescue. The most heroic of those was the well-known politician Alberto Villamizar, an associate of Gaviria's and brother-in-law of Luis Carlos Galan, “the young journalist who, in 1979, had founded the New Liberalism [movement,] … the most serious and energetic force that opposed drug trafficking and supported the extradition of Colombian nationals.” Galan was assassinated in 1989 while running for president.

On the evening of Nov. 7, 1990, Villamizar's sister, Beatriz, and wife, Maruja, were kidnapped as they were returning home from work in Bogota. A survivor of several attempts on his own life, Villamizar decided to devote himself to obtaining their release. He tried to come up with a plan to negotiate with the kidnappers, but kept running up against the government policy that left open the threat of extradition as a way to pressure them into surrendering. Rafael Pardo Rueda, security adviser to Gaviria, told Villamizar that he could not “‘overstep the bounds of the capitulation policy.’” “In other words,” writes García Márquez, Villamizar “could do as he wished in his own way, using all his imagination, but he had to do it with his hands tied.”

While official negotiations went on for release of the hostages and the surrender of Escobar and other narcotics traffickers, Villamizar met with Escobar's lawyers and enlisted the aid of two former presidents and a bishop, all of whom publicly pleaded for the lives of the captives.

Villamizar eventually became involved in the official negotiations. As the months passed and Escobar dug in, Villamizar was the only negotiator to recognize Escobar's deepest desire. He not only wanted the government to negate its extradition policy and build him a private prison outside Medellin in return for his surrender, but he wanted the government to see him as he saw himself—not as a common drug dealer but as the leader of a political party like the guerrilla group M-19, which, a decade earlier, had negotiated a move from the jungle into the parliament. Escobar wanted respect. He saw that Villamizar understood this, and he hung onto Maruja long after the fates of the other hostages had been decided.

“For Escobar,” García Márquez writes, “the only lifesaver in the water was Villamizar's mediation, and the only thing that could guarantee it was holding on to Maruja. The two men were condemned to each other.”

With the negotiations stymied, Villamizar decided to go to Medellin to try to discuss the situation with Escobar face to face. But numerous trips to and from Medellin, prison meetings with Escobar associates, and several exchanges of letters with Escobar failed to get him to agree to meet with Villamazir. Eventually, Escobar agreed to meet with Father Rafael Garcia Herrero, a saintly priest known nationwide for his TV show, “God's Minute.” Afterward, Escobar agreed to surrender—as long as Villamizar was there when he did.

After Maruja was released, Villamizar went to Medellin to take part in Escobar's surrender. He then escorted him to his custom-built prison:

“‘Let's go …,’ Escobar said. You and I have a lot to talk about.’

“He led him to the end of the outside gallery [of the prison], and they chatted there for about ten minutes, leaning against the railing, their backs to everyone. Escobar … expressed regret for the suffering he had caused Villamizar and his family. …

“‘I know you and I can't be friends,’ he said. But Villamizar could be sure that nothing would happen to him or anybody in his family again.

“‘Who knows how long I'll be here,’ he said, ‘but I still have a lot of friends, so if any of you feels unsafe, if anybody tries to give you a hard time, you let me know and that'll be the end of it. You met your obligations to me, and I thank you and will do the same for you. You have my word of honor.’”

García Márquez began his writing career as a newspaperman, and News of a Kidnapping contains a potent mixture of the newshound's well-documented detail and the novelist's tragic vision. In the book's acknowledgments, García Márquez says:

I interviewed all the protagonists I could, and in each of them I found the same general willingness to root through their memories and reopen wounds they perhaps preferred to forget. Their pain, their patience, and their rage gave me the courage to persist in this … task, the saddest and most difficult of my life.

It is sad that it took an episode revolving around narco-trafficking to bring García Márquez back to journalism. But perhaps, when journalists and politicians are abducted, it is to our novelists that we must turn for the news.