November 1985: Jean-Michel Leprince arrives in Colombia for the first time, first to urgently cover the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, which will kill at least 25,000 people in the town of Armero. And then, as he is there, to cover the political fallout from the massacre of the M-19 guerrillas who stormed the courthouse in Bogotá — with the support, as we will know later, of Pablo Escobar, mythical and monstrous cocaine trafficker, who died in 1993. A Latin American baptism of fire, literally and figuratively, for this parliamentary radio-Canadian correspondent who, based in Ottawa, lived rather to the rhythm of Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival in power in Russia .
Latin America in general and violent Colombia in particular will never let go. Thirty-seven years that they stick to his skin, as evidenced by his abundant Blame it on Pablo Escobar.
These memoirs from the field are constructed in an original way: dozens of texts from his interviews and television reports are reproduced there (about fifteen of which are also collected on the Radio-Canada site for reviewing purposes). Leprince fleshes them out over 400 pages with abundant contextualization.
The practice of the profession of journalist too often obliges to sacrifice to the yoke of the conciseness the sum of the nuances which it would be necessary to make and knowledge which would deserve to be shared. Freed from this yoke, Leprince is having a field day, filling his notebooks to the brim with historical reminders and putting current events into context, taking us here on a run through the culture and urbanity of Bogotá and of Medellín, elaborating there his subject around references to the painter Fernando Botero, to the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez and to the journalist who was also Gabriel García Márquez…
A great highway reporter, he leads us into the labyrinth of interconnected violence — that of the state, the paramilitaries, the drug traffickers and the misguided FARC, with international ramifications extending as far as Canada — which exhausts and corrupts a life democracy that has never been hanging by a thread.
“Whether we like it or not, writes Leprince, Pablo Escobar is a pure product of the torments and cruelty of the history of Colombia. A son of Violencia [des années 1950]. However, if it is “the fault of Escobar”, he explains, the death of the drug trafficker, this December 2, 1993, did not deconstruct this violence. Colombia, a mountainous and magnificent country, has once again become touristy. Nevertheless, the Mexican cartels, among others, have taken over from Escobar, so that all cocaine trafficking paths still lead to the United States.
Former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, elected in August as the first left-wing president in Colombia’s history, has promised to fight against this violence and against corruption and to resurrect the 2016 peace agreement. he ? Colossal challenge, necessarily concludes Jean-Michel Leprince, on whom we can count to keep us informed.