Between September 1983 and January 1991, 26 Colombian journalists were murdered by the drug cartels who were crucifying that wretched country. One woman, Maruja Pachon, suggested to Gabriel García Márquez that he write a book about her kidnapping by the “shadow power”. Márquez soon realised that Pachon's experience was inextricably bound to nine other abductions at the same time. He expanded the narrative to include the kidnappings of Diana Turbay and her film crew, and the newspaperman Pacho Santos.

“Their pain, their patience and their rage,” he says, “gave me the courage to persist in this autumnal task, the saddest and most difficult of my life.”

In the hands of the great Colombian storyteller, News of a Kidnapping grew into a tragedy at once personal, national and international. This is neither straight reportage nor fiction; Márquez's brilliant “j'accuse” embraces and transcends both.

In November 1990 Maruja, a prominent journalist, and her sister-in-law, Beatriz, are kidnapped on their way home from work in Bogota. The gunmen are operatives of Pablo Escobar, the stinking rich, barking mad cocaine chief, terrified by the government's policy of extraditing drug traffickers to the US. “Theirs was an authentic shadow power, with a brand name—the Extraditables—and a slogan typical of Escobar: ‘We prefer a grave in Colombia to a cell in the United States.’”

Maruja and Beatriz are confined in a tiny, fetid cell, with another victim, Marina Montoya. Their guards are slum boys, almost as cowed and crushed by Escobar's organisation as their victims. Sometimes they take sadistic pleasure in the women's suffering, sometimes they assure them they pray for their release.

On the outside, Maruja's husband, Alberto Villamizar, battles tirelessly, caught between the government on one side, the equally powerful Extraditables on the other. Behind him is the Colombian media, controlled almost entirely by friends and relations of the hostages.

In one of the book's oddest episodes, the guards watch Alberto's emotional television appeal, and are impressed: “How young Dr Villamizar looks, how nice he looks, how he loves you.”

They ask Maruja to introduce them to her daughters. They also learn the date of her 53rd birthday, and insist on celebrating it with a bottle of local champagne and a cake “that looked as if it were covered in toothpaste”.

Márquez writes with wry affection and humour of the Colombian propensity for partying in the face of horror: “In Colombia, any gathering of more than six people, regardless of class or the hour, is doomed to turn into a dance.”

For Maruja, watching the television appeal in captivity is like “being dead and watching life from the next world without taking part, and without the living knowing you were there”. Every day is a battle against fear and uncertainty. Orders from above crash into the strangely balanced relationships like bombs.

Marina Montoya is suddenly led away by her favourite guard, whom she calls “the monk”. Maruja and Beatriz are not told what has become of her, but their worst fears are realised when they are awakened by the “moans of a wounded animal”, and see the monk sobbing for the woman he called “granny”.

The genius of Márquez is his ability to veer between the personal and the universal. News of a Kidnapping is a unique document, which everyone should read—particularly politicians fighting the drug war. Prohibition creates gangsters, and the gangsters are spreading their contagion far beyond this Nobel laureate's devastated nation.