LEONOR

A Colombian journalist tracks the traumatic life of a former teenage soldier in a rural guerrilla group.

In 2016, the Colombian government negotiated a truce with the guerrilla group called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Nonetheless, the menacing activities of drug-trafficking gangs has not ceased in that beleaguered nation. Delgado-Kling, a journalist who grew up in a privileged household in Bogotá, recounts the odd intersection of her own life and that of Leonor, a poor farmer’s daughter who was caught up in the drug wars in the mid-1990s. As a child of prominent officials, the author was sent to Canada to be educated due to the threats of violence and kidnapping. “Between 1970 and 2013,” she writes, “39,058 people were kidnapped. Many cases were not reported for fear of retribution from the captors.” Delgado-Kling never traveled in Colombia without a bodyguard—even as a journalist, when she first met Leonor after she’d been freed from FARC captivity at age 17. Slowly, the two became friends. During numerous exchanges over the course of nearly two decades, Leonor shared her story: the family’s forced move to Mocoa from their farm due to FARC threats; numerous incidents of sexual assault; her brother’s work as a drug mule; her sister’s brutal murder, after which her body was tossed into the street; the lure into FARC, which served first as a haven but soon became a nightmare, with Leonor enduring sexual slavery under a man 34 years her senior; and her eventual capture by government troops and rehabilitation over many years. In the end, Leonor’s story has no neat resolution, but Delgado-Kling never wavers in her devastating portrait of unspeakable suffering. The author offers a helpful bibliography for further reading about the fraught situation in Colombia.

Visceral reporting of Colombia drug gang trauma by a committed journalist.