News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman

in his briefcase, and for two weeks had to ask permission to use the bathroom or the telephone in other people’s offices. But the president often consulted with him on a variety of subjects, and listened with premonitory attention when he spoke at difficult meetings. One afternoon, when they were alone in the president’soffice, Gaviria asked him a question:
    “Tell me something, Rafael, aren’t you worried that one of these guys will suddenly turn himself in and we won’t have any charge to arrest him with?”
    It was the essence of the problem: The terrorists hunted by the police would not surrender because they had no guarantees for their own safety or the safety of their families. And the state had no evidencethat would convict them if they were captured. Theidea was to find a judicial formula by which they would confess their crimes in exchange for the state’s guarantee of protection for them and their families. Rafael Pardo had worked on the problem for the previous government, and when Gaviria asked the question, he still had his notes among all the other papers in his briefcase. They were, ineffect, the beginning of a solution: Whoever surrendered would have his sentence reduced if he confessed to a crime that would allow the government to prosecute, and a further sentence reduction if he turned goods and money over to the state. That was all, but the president could envision the entire plan because it was consonant with his own idea of a strategy focused not on war or peace but on law,one that would be responsive to the terrorists’ arguments but not renounce the compelling threat of extradition.
    President Gaviria proposed it to Jaime Giraldo Angel, his justice minister, who understood the concept immediately; he too had been thinking for some time about ways to move the problem of drug trafficking into a judicial framework. And both men favored the extradition of Colombiannationals as a means of forcing surrender.
    Giraldo Angel, with his air of a distracted savant, his verbal precision, and his genius for organization, completed the formula, adding some of his own ideas combined with others already established in the penal code. Between Saturday and Sunday he composed a first draft on a laptop computer, and first thing Monday morning showed the president a copythat still had his handwritten deletions and corrections. The title, written in ink across the top of the first page, was a seed of historic importance: “Capitulation to the Law.”
    Gaviria is meticulous about his projects and would not present them to his Council of Ministers until he was certain they would be approved. He therefore reviewed the draft in detail with Giraldo Angel and with RafaelPardo, who is not a lawyer but whose sparing comments tend to be accurate. Then he sent a revised versionto the Council on Security, where Giraldo Angel found support from General Oscar Botero, the defense minister, and the head of Criminal Investigation, Carlos Eduardo Mejía Escobar, a young, effective jurist who would be responsible for implementing the decree in the real world. General MazaMárquez did not oppose the plan, though he believed that in the struggle against the Medellín cartel, any formula other than war would be useless. “This country won’t be put right,” he would say, “as long as Escobar is alive.” For he was certain Escobar would only surrender in order to continue trafficking from prison under the government’s protection.
    The project was presented to the Councilof Ministers with the specification that the plan did not propose negotiations with terrorism in order to conjure away a human tragedy for which the consuming nations bore primary responsibility. On the contrary: The aim was to make extradition a more useful judicial weapon in the fight against narcotraffic by making non-extradition the grand prize in a package of incentives and guarantees for thosewho surrendered to the law.
    One of the crucial discussions