We asked six writers to choose one or more events that they think have marked the past decade. Today, the Colombian Juan Gabriel Vasquez, born in Bogota in 1973, where he still lives. A law graduate, he studied literature at the Sorbonne. Before leaving to live in Belgium and Barcelona, where he collaborates on various literary supplements. Thanks to the distance, he was finally able to write about his country, of which he did not stop exploring the near past as in The Noise of Falling Things (Seuil, 2012), on the fight against drug cartels in the 1980s. Or, more distant, with Secret history of Costaguana, on the political earthquakes which led, in 1903, to the separation between Panama and Colombia. Composed of novels, short stories and essays, his work has been crowned with numerous prizes, including the Roger-Caillois prize in 2012, or the prize of the Royal Academy of Spain for Reputations (Seuil, 2014). His latest book, The Ruins Corps, appeared at Seuil in 2017.
Tribune. The second decade of this troubled century began two years later for the Colombians: when, in 2012, the government announced the opening of a peace dialogue with the FARC guerrillas. It was a question of arriving at the negotiated exit from a war which, going back more than half a century, had left in its path nearly a quarter of a million dead, and including the number of other victims – wounded, abducted or forced to go elsewhere as a result of the multifaceted violence – amounted to the appalling figure of over seven million.
In the past, similar negotiations had been initiated on several occasions before resulting in resounding failures. In 1992, after an aborted attempt, a guerrilla had left the government delegation saying these distressing words: "We will see each other in ten thousand dead. " In 2012, we Colombians hoped that it would not be necessary to wait another twenty years and many more than ten thousand dead to finally know a country in peace. In other words, we hoped to save the next victims from the war.
Metaphor of our continent and our time
The Havana negotiations and their aftermath marked the rest of the decade, not just in Colombia. The conflict inside my country was a kind of strange metaphor for the whole continent, a theater where important stories from the last years were told, from the last bursts of the Cold War at birth to the heyday of drug trafficking. And where all the actors seemed to play a role: from the United States – whose military aid had radically changed the balance of power of the conflict – to Venezuela from Chavez, refuge and support of the Colombian guerrillas. This distant war came to France under the face of Ingrid Betancourt, a French citizen whose sequestration, for six years, in the jungle was an opportunity for Europeans to discover the abject methods of the FARC.
