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December 20, 2005
Why can't you afford this book?
If you want to buy a copy of British investigative journalist Simon Strong’s out-of-print 1995 book about Pablo Escobar, you had better start saving up now.
As Gerardo Reyes reported in Sunday’s El Nuevo Herald, used copies of Whitewash: Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars are going for $599.50 on Amazon.com. In a posting to Amazon’s page for the book, the author notes that the price had reached $937.10 earlier this month. (At Barnes and Noble, you can get it from a third-party seller for a mere $286.65. Alibris offers used copies at prices ranging from $271.95 to $1,989.90!)
Why so much for a book that, while well-received at the time, was not enough of a blockbuster for its publisher, MacMillan, to print more than 5,000 copies? Strong told Reyes that the online booksellers “have simply told me that is a question of supply and demand.”
“Flattering at it appears, I find it hard to believe this is the whole story,” Strong writes on Amazon.com. “For all I know, somebody whose name appears in the book dislikes the fact and has decided to put out a buy order!!”
That’s a good guess, but who is buying up all existing copies? I wish I had a copy of Strong’s book, so that I could see who in Colombia might be so keenly interested in keeping it out of my hands.
Reyes offers a hint in his article (my translation).
One of the book’s most controversial episodes identifies the current president, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who at the time was a senator, as “a young Liberal from Medellín, … accused of drug-related corruption as well as of collaborating politically with Escobar in the launch of what would become a successful political career.”
Strong dedicates a pair of pages in the book to a harsh exchange he had with Uribe during an interview at a Bogotá hotel in March 1994.
According to his narrative, Uribe reacted with visible anger to the reporter’s questions about his tenure as director of Colombia’s Civil Aeronautics agency [Colombia’s FAA, during the early 1980s] and his political support for Senator William Vélez, one of Escobar’s allies.
“This short-statured man jumped from his chair, furious, crossed the room between the waiters who were preparing for lunch, climbed the stairs, and did not stop until he was amid his bodyguards…” the reporter writes.
From there, wrote Strong, Uribe yelled several times, with rage, “I am honest.”
“I had not made any suggestion to the contrary,” Strong explained.
Following some other questions, the author adds, Uribe became even angrier, and with his hands jabbing at the reporter’s face demanded that he take back what he was saying.
At that point, Strong decided to suspend the interview.
Posted by isacson at December 20, 2005 6:01 PM
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