He didn't help them in their time of need, and to make things worse, he supported the thuggish Marxist druggie "insurgents" who, after years of war that led to 5 million plus people being displaced, a quarter millio dead, plus kidnapping, finally made ordinary Colombianos angry.
Over the course of my time in Aracataca, six people told me that García Márquez gave money to the FARC, a crime akin to murder (nothing I turn up verifies this claim). One man told me García Márquez secretly worked for Pablo Escobar as a courier between the drug kingpin and Fidel Castro, which makes sense given the close friendship between the Cuban and García Márquez. A former lieutenant of Escobar’s sold this story to a newspaper years ago and then recanted. In a Colombian move familiar to García Márquez, the Cataqueros (as people of Aracataca are called) insist this fiction reveals a greater truth than fact.
His novels are nice, but are in the meme of "fantasy realism", where fantasy is incorporated into a realistic story...the problem being that the people involved are not really people, just flat figures for the author to show off how he can write prose.
oh, his prose is mesmerizing, but half way through the story is dissolves into confusion and you are left without any "there" there...
I mean, do you remember the name of any one of his characters, or care about them?
Of course, I loathe this type of fiction: authors who write it are popular (often third world types, although Helprin's award winning book is another). Yet people don't think this way, and so don't bother reading them if you want insight into how people in these countries actually think.
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related item: Strategypage on Colombia
FARC opposes having all Colombians vote on the peace deal, in part because FARC understands the degree of hatred many, if not most, Colombians feel towards the leftist rebels and their half century of violence that has left nearly a quarter of a million dead.
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