A great colombian writer

Have you heard of Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez?

I thought you’d have.

And I bet you have not heard of Ger­man Cas­tro Caycedo. Unlike Gar­cia Mar­quez, Colombia’s most famous writer, Ger­man focuses on non-fiction. His pro­lific work has cov­ered an incred­i­ble range of top­ics that expose Colombia’s mod­ern and com­plex social land­scape; to name a few:

• “Mi alma se la dejo al dia­blo” (May the devil take my soul) tells the story of an adven­turer lost in the ama­zon jun­gle, and his jour­ney to death
• “El Karina” (The Kari­nai), a Tom Clancy-like story of a sub­ma­rine full of weapons with a nefar­i­ous des­tiny: Colombia’s marx­ist guer­rilla fighters
• “El Hueco” (The Hole) show­ing the amaz­ing pull of the ‘Amer­i­can dream’ for poor lati­namer­i­cans, and the entire eco-system that exists around the ille­gal trans­porta­tion of Colom­bians to the USA through the Mex­ico frontier.
• “La Bruja” (The Witch) describes the deca­dence of a trou­bled soci­ety where both pres­i­dents and noto­ri­ous drug deal­ers are con­sult­ing the same occultist
• “En Secreto” (Secretly) is an amaz­ing col­lec­tion of four inter­views with lead­ers of the three sources of power, blood and vio­lence that have sunk Colom­bia in a spi­ral of death and cor­rup­tion. The first two rep­re­sent the marx­ist guer­rilla that was born with the ideals of cre­at­ing a soci­ety with more social jus­tice, but degen­er­ated into large-scale kid­nap­ping and extor­tion rings (Jaime Bate­man and Jaime Are­nas). The third inter­view with Car­los Cas­tano, the leader of para­mil­i­tary armies, shows the other end of the vio­lent spec­trum. It fin­ishes with an inter­view to one of Colombia’s most infa­mous and well-known drug-dealers, Pablo Esco­bar; who fought Colombia’s inten­tion to extra­dite him to the USA by sow­ing fear in the syle of a pure ter­ror­ist: plac­ing bombs in civil­ian cen­tres of Colombia’s majour cities

If you like the style and sto­ries of non-fiction writ­ers such as Mark Bow­den, you’ll prob­a­bly enjoy the books by this illus­tri­ous Colom­bian writer. The catch: you will likely need to learn to read in Span­ish, as I am yet to come across one of these books in Eng­lish. I still can’t under­stand why his books have not been trans­lated into other lan­guages, but that seems to be the case

Tagged as: Book, Colombia, German Castro Caycedo, Review