Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín

7. Love and Letters in the Times of Narcos

134 7 Love and Letters in the Times of Narcos The novel Cartas cruzadas was published in 1995, amid the booming success of film and literary narratives about sicarios. In his novel, however , Darío Jaramillo Agudelo does not focus on criminals, narcos, or sicarios to narrate the effects of narco trafficking in Medellín.1 He delves into the years that preceded the emergence of the narcos and explores the transformation that the Colombian society experienced beginning in the 1970s, when easy money making suddenly became acceptable in all walks of life. By stepping back from the then common representation of violence enacted by young shantytown dwellers (the sicarios), Jaramillo Agudelo goes beyond the easy stereotyping of criminals and offers a self-reflexive view of the effects that the expansion of the traffic of illegal drugs had in the country. Jaramillo Agudelo wrote this novel after losing a foot to one of the narcos’ attacks in 1989. Bearing in mind that this book was written during the long years of his healing process (several surgeries and physical therapies were involved), his original literary approach becomes even more stunning. Instead of narrating his personal experience as a victim of the narcos’ violence, the author shows a profound preoccupation for understanding the dramatic changes that the emergence of the cocaine business meant in the lives of several middle-class Colombians and in society as a whole. In an interview for Babelia, Jaramillo Agudelo talked about the attack in which he lost his foot, an event that divided his life in two: It was a Sunday in January 1989, I was at my friend Fernando Martínez Sanabria’s farm where he breeds race horses. When we left the farm he told me, “Please, open the door.” I left with the keys in my hand and as soon as I put them in the lock a submachine gun exploded under my right foot. It was not an assault against me. I was then forty-two years old, and that helped me loVe anD letters In the tImes oF narCos 135 accept it. I don’t know what would have happened to me had I been a child, but it happened at a moment in which I was able to endure it. It has tied me up, but with serenity and I believe with sense of humor, my friends and I joke about my lack. (Blanco, “Dentro de mi hay muchos yoes que no conozco”; emphasis added)2 I begin the analysis in this chapter with the transcription of this interview because it demonstrates the impact that the violence of narco trafficking had in the lives of a common citizen, but most of all, because of the word Darío Jaramillo uses to articulate the effect of the violent attack : lack. In the Lacanian sense, “lack” is what defines our entrance to the world of the symbolic. I want to refer to the author’s lack as a way of entering the world (of violence) he wants to represent, and draw an analogy between this physical wound and the psychic one, which defines his own work as a poet. On the one hand, Jaramillo Agudelo digs into the history of the emergence of the traffic of illegal drugs in Colombia, and he examines the involvement of the middle and upper classes in the illegal business. He shows how—regardless of their moral reservations and class prejudices against narco traffickers—elite and middle-class Colombians enjoyed the economic bonanza brought by the cocaine trade and took an active role in the expansion of the illegal business. He thus moves away from common accounts of the public chaos and violence unleashed by the narcos, and explores the other subtle forms of violence experienced at more intimate and personal levels. On the other hand, while Cartas cruzadas is indeed a novel about the impact of narco trafficking in Colombia, it is also a love story, a story about friendship, and above all a story about poetry. Its characters —the friends, the lovers, and their families—do not live in the same city, so the plot is woven together by the letters they write to each other. Through these letters the author tells their stories while dealing with the moral queries that arise as a result of the social changes caused by the expansion of narco trafficking. The introspectiveness of the letters serves to illustrate the generalized feeling of moral uncertainty that permeates the characters’ lives. Not...