Sicario (novel)
Sicario (alternatively "The Children of Bogotá" ) is a factual novel by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa .
author
Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa was born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1936 . Shortly afterwards, his family was deported for political reasons to the Moroccan desert, where he spent his childhood and youth. For fifteen years he toured Africa and Latin America as a journalist and foreign correspondent until 1980 when his world bestseller »Tuareg« appeared. He has now published more than forty books that have been translated into many languages; the total circulation is over 15 million copies. Nine of his novels have been filmed for the cinema.
action
Vásquez-Figueroa describes in his factual novel Sicario the stories of the "gamin" (street child) Jesús Chico Grande. Chico Grande is born the unloved son of an alcoholic prostitute in a slum in Bogotá .
In the streets of Bogotá
As a small child, Chico Grande and his friend Ramiro escaped from his mother's depressing miserable living conditions, got by with him through begging in downtown Bogotá and later joined a street gang. Vásquez-Figeroa describes in very drastic words the daily struggle for survival of the children on the streets of Bogotá and the constant flight from the violent attacks by the police. The children have to assert themselves against the Cholos , landless Indians who, because of the crushing poverty in the countryside, populate the streets of Bogotá, steal and murder, and then commit their first murder. With the murder of a much stronger and dominant Cholo, Chico Grande gets the respect of his neighborhood “La Magdalena” and the other youth gangs. The gang grows to eleven members and defends their territory from intruders with knives, machetes and clubs. The author describes how the girls leave the gang at the beginning of their puberty and earn their money as underage prostitutes, the decline of the children who consume basuco , the daily violence and cruelty on the streets and the attacks on tourists on the Montserrate mountain . The survival rate of the gamines from Bogotá is put at 15: 2, only two live to be older than 16 years. After a girl from a middle-class family was raped on the street, the Limones brothers from Tuluá / Valle del Cauca appear to decimate the street children as a death squad hired by hotel and restaurant owners. The police, paramilitary groups and death squads mercilessly hunt down street children who then retreat into the sewer system of Bogotá after numerous massacres. Vásquez-Figeroa draws parallels to Rio de Janeiro , where 440 street children were executed in one year just for begging on the street. The gamines use the underground sewers as a retreat and for their lightning-like robberies of shops by disappearing again through the manhole covers. Chico Grande's attempts to pursue an honest job as a “Chircalero” brick maker fail because of the tough everyday life and the miserable pay. As the bodyguard of the pimp "El lindo Galindo", Chico Grande controls brothels in which prostitutes are exploited. Including the famous “La Casa Roja” brothel from Bogotá. "El lindo Galindo" wants to get into the emerald business and goes to the heavily guarded mines in Muzo for negotiations with Chico Grande and several attractive high-class prostitutes . El lindo Galindo and his 5 girls are brutally murdered, only Chico Grande survives the massacre.
Sicario of the Medellin cartel
Back in Bogotá, Chico Grande kills the building lion Don Matías José Bermejo as an assignment. He then earned himself a Sicario in the streets of Itagüí and Antioquia for the Medellin cartel. Even as a once hardened gamin, he has to get used to the natural, ubiquitous violence in Medellín . For a while, Chico Grande worked in the drug laboratories of Griselda Blanco on the border with Peru , until the jungle laboratory was dug up by an armed unit with attack helicopters. While escaping through the forests of the Río Napo , he was arrested by soldiers and falsely accused of being a member of the Sendero Luminoso ( Shining Path ). Chico Grande was held for several weeks together with 6,000 inmates in the notorious prison in Lurigancho / Lima , which he called the “courtyard of hell”. Chico Grande manages to return to Bogotá, where he meets his childhood friends Abigail Anaya and Román “Marrón” Morales, who get him a job in Cartagena de Indias .
Cartagena and Miami
1985 Chico Grande arrives in Cartagena and falls in love with the cheerful mulatto Maria Luna, who sells fruit at the market, and her laugh. Chico Grande, Maria Luna and Morales transport 50 kg of cocaine as "mulas" in the outside / inside of a tanker. The three of them spend the crossing on steel bars, always afraid of being crushed by the big propeller or drowning. Morales dies of a heart attack, Maria Luna loses her mind and becomes catatonic . Chico Grande rows with the immobilized Maria Luna and the cocaine in suitcases on the beach in Miami. The thought of revenge keeps him alive. A Dominican helps the illegal immigrant, they deliver Maria Luna to the hospital. Chico Grande sells the cocaine to the Cubans, procures forged papers and takes brutal revenge on his clients. Through middlemen, he learns that this organization is using "human ants" to bring three tons of cocaine with a market value of US $ 200 million to Florida . Two drug couriers are always sent on the illegal journey in the stern of tankers so that at least one can survive the journey and bring the cocaine to the USA . He kills the heads of the organization one after the other: the Jamaican is fed to the alligators (the novel speaks of caimans ), the boss of the drug dealers, music producer Carlos Alejandro Criado Navas, is also on a journey in the room above Ship propeller of a tanker (on the way to the Persian Gulf) because he had stolen Maria Luna’s laughter. Jesús Chico Grande died in Caracas in 1991.
Reviews
“ Sicario, el relato que marcó el paso de Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa a la plena madurez como escritor, recrea un terrible drama de miseria y desarraigo: la infancia abandonada en las calles de las grandes ciudades de America Latina. A lo largo de sus páginas, el autor ofrece, en clave de ficción, un desgarrador y valiente testimonio acerca de un fenómeno social explosivo que reclama profundos cambios sociales . - Sicario is the story that marks the step of Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa to the full maturity of a writer. He created a terrible drama of misery and uprooting: the lost childhood on the streets of the big cities in Latin America. On the pages of the book, the author offers, using fiction as a key, as painful and courageous testimony to an explosive social phenomenon that calls for profound changes. [...] "
“ Con el conocemos la historia de un niño, hijo de una prostituta a la que abandona y se abra paso por la vida en las calles de Bogotá. Durante su vida en las calles y las cloacas mendigando, robando y luego matando, conocerá a personas especiales, Ramiro su casi hermano, Abigail Anaya su ángel de la Guarda, María Luna por quien perdió la cabeza y su sin fin de personajes que dejan marca en la vida de un hombre destinado desde niño a luchar por vivir en una ambiente lleno de violencia, carteles y narcotráfico . - We get to know the story of a child, the son of a prostitute, who left him and decided to live on the streets of Bogotá. During his life on the streets and in the sewers he learns to beg, rob, and kill. Ramiro becomes something like his brother, Abigail Anaya his guardian angel and he falls head over heels in love with María Luna. Since childhood, it's all about survival amid a world of violence, cartels and drug trafficking. [...] "
Notes and individual references
- ↑ La Magdalena is a neighborhood in the old town of Bogotá. It is bordered by the Teusaquillo, Las Amércias, La Soledad and Sucre neighborhoods, as well as by Calle 39 to the north, Carrera 24 to the west, Calle 34 to the south and Calle 45 to the east.
- ↑ The red house
- ↑ Drug Couriers
literature
- Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa: “ Sicario ” (Eng. “Bogotá”), Blanvalet Verlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7645-7666-9 .
- virtual books, Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa: Sicario (Spanish)
- Luis H. Castañeda and Javier González: Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture . Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2016. P. 92. ISBN 978-144-381278-8 .