News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Page B

was the magic number: nine journalists. Plus one—already condemned to death—who was the sister of a politician hunted by Escobar’s private police force. In this sense, before the decree could prove its efficacy, President Gaviria began to be the victim of his own creation.
    Like her father, Diana Turbay Quintero had an intense, passionate feeling forpower, a capacity for leadership that shaped her life. She grew up surrounded by the great names in politics, and it was to be expected that she would have a political perspective on the world. “Diana was a stateswoman,” a friend who understood and loved her has said. “And the central concern of her life was a stubborn desire to serve her country.” But power—like love—is a double-edged sword: Onewields it and is wounded by it. It generates a state of pure exaltation and, at the same time, its opposite: the search for an irresistible, fugitive joy, comparable only to the search for an idealized love that one longs for but fears, pursues but never attains. Diana experienced an insatiable hunger to know everything, be involved in everything, discover the whyand how of things, the reasonfor her life. Some of those who were close to her perceived this in the uncertainties of her heart, and believed she was not happy very often.
    It is impossible to know—without asking her the question directly—which of the two edges of power inflicted the more serious wounds. She must have felt them in her own flesh when she was her father’s private secretary and right hand at the age of twenty-eight,and found herself trapped in the crosswinds of power. Her friends—and she had many—have said she was one of the most intelligent people they had ever known, with an unsuspected store of knowledge, an astonishing capacity for analysis, and a supernatural gift for sensing another person’s most hidden agenda. Her enemies say straight out that she was a disruptive influence behind the throne.But others think she disregarded her own well-being in a single-minded desire to defend her father against everything and everybody, and could therefore be used by hypocrites and flatterers.
    She was born on March 8, 1950, under the inclement sign of Pisces, at a time when her father was already in line for the presidency. She was an innate leader wherever she happened to be: the Colegio Andinoin Bogotá, the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New York, or Saint Thomas Aquinas University of Bogotá, where she completed her law studies but did not wait to receive her degree.
    Her belated career in journalism—which is, fortunately, power without the throne—must have been a reencounter with the best in herself. She founded the magazine
Hoy x Hoy
and the television news journal “Criptón” as amore direct way to work for peace. “I’m not ready to fight anymore, or give anybody any arguments,” she said at the time. “I’ve become totally conciliatory.” To the point where she sat down to talk about peace with Carlos Pizarro, the commander of the M-19, who had fired the rocket that just missed the room where President Turbay had been sitting. The friend who told this story says, with a laugh:“Diana understoodthat in this business she had to be a chess player, not a boxer punching at the world.”
    And therefore it was only natural that her abduction—above and beyond its emotional impact—would have a political weight that was difficult to control. Former President Turbay said, in public and in private, that he had heard nothing from the Extraditables, because this seemed the most prudentcourse until it was known what they wanted, but in fact he had received a message from them soon after the kidnapping of Francisco Santos. He had told Hernando Santos about it as soon as Santos returned from Italy, when Turbay invited him to his house to devise a common strategy. Santos found Turbay in the semi-darkness of his immense library, devastated by the certainty that Diana and Franciscowould