Three narratives coexist uneasily in this book. The central narrative concerns the kidnapping of Jake Gambini, a U.S. oilman and the author’s brother-in-law, by Colombian guerrillas. This story is based on the author’s memories of the kidnapping, negotiation, and final release, along with retrospective interviews with those involved, including Gambini himself. The tale is chilling and well told.
The second narrative addresses Colombian society and politics in an effort to explain the country’s history of violence and the guerrillas’ role in it. This story is told in postmodern fashion, combining bits and pieces of newspaper accounts, commentaries, and personal reflections with general history. The third narrative hinges on the author’s effort to square his own progressive beliefs and his image of the guerrillas as “good guys” fighting for a more just society with the reality that it is they who have kidnapped Gambini. They are therefore the source of the present problem, the origin (in this sense at least) of pain and suffering.
Braun is at his best with the first narrative, a story often experienced but rarely told in such intimate detail. The second story, about guerrilla movements, their relation to the historical Violencia, and Colombian society and politics in general, is less successful. The presentation is scattered and sometimes confusing; it offers no new information or insights on Right or Left. The third story is the least successful of all. Braun wants to continue believing in the guerrillas as products of injustice and agents of progressive change, but this is no easy task, especially in a country where alliances and positions are so complex and cross-cutting.
Braun hopes that his own bona fides as a progressive Colombian historian of Colombia will make it easier to work things out. Whom does he think he was dealing with? To Braun, the guerrillas are different—not common criminals but people with a cause (p. 176). At some points, he seems to fall victim to classic hostage psychology, identifying with the kidnappers. When it is all over, he muses that neither police nor negotiators could be trusted; the guerrillas were “the only ones we were ever really able to count on in Colombia during those months. Nobody else could come to our aid” (pp. 224-25). Braun seems to have forgotten who kidnapped whom! The guerrillas created the problem they then helped “solve” by first kidnapping and then releasing Gambini. The contrast between Braun’s views and those of his brother-in-law, for whom kidnapping is simply wrong (p. 207), is instructive.
Braun ends up ambivalent about the guerrillas. They are explained as instruments of social retribution, products of the injustices built deep into Colombian society and politics. “Savage capitalism and kidnapping are different sides of the same coin” (p. 226). But Braun (and the reader) is nagged by a sense that this position is little more than an intellectual reflex that sidesteps the real issue. Toward the end of the book, Braun asks, “Are all my ideas and all my historical knowledge just ways of messing up the truth? Am I simply trying to make something understandable that shouldn’t be understandable? Maybe I am even making it acceptable, making it seem inevitable. . . .Am I just making the truth relative?” (pp. 227, 228). The unfortunate answer is yes on all counts. The author’s romantic image of the guerrillas is at best misleading, at worst a serious distortion. Although his angst about historical knowledge is irrelevant to what happened, it colors the portrait he presents and detracts from the ultimate value of the book.
