well, not necessarily. my guest is the renowned colombian novelistjuan gabriel vasquez, who weaves powerful stories out of fact and fiction. is there anything magical about colombia's current reality? juan gabriel vasquez, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. it's a pleasure to have you. now you inhabit two different intellectual worlds. you are a political commentator. it is yourjob to have instant, strong opinions for newspapers. on the other hand, you're also a novelist who writes complex, nuanced novels that are sort of riddled with doubt and uncertainty. which of these two mental attitudes comes more naturally to you? well, i'm first and foremost a novelist. iwas... i began writing fiction at a very young age, and it was always my ideal to write the kind of novels that i had grown up with. but in south america, a novelist is also a citizen. and so you develop very quickly the need, the compulsion sometimes, the feeling of obligation to comment on the political reality. so in a sense, there are two different and opposite ethics. erm... you write fiction out of uncertainty and doubts and questions. novels are written to ask questions, not to give answers. but at the same time, you're a political commentator who tries to have certainties, who tries to shed doubts... are you faking it when you come up with those certainties for your columns? no, but there are few... there are very few, very few moments during the week in which you are absolutely sure about something and you write to convince, you write to do a kind of proselytism. uh, you write to try to get answers. interestingly, you dig deep into your home country, colombia, and yet you spent a significant part of your adult life out of colombia. yes. would it be correct in a way to say that you became confident in your voice, you know, exploring your home country once you'd left it? yes, yes, ithink that's quite accurate. erm, in a sense, also, i was following a very old latin american tradition of leaving our countries to write about them, to understand them better. this is something that has been happening since, uh... ..since the nicaraguan poet ruben dario lived in paris and madrid in the early 20th century. and then, of course, the generation that i grew up as my role models, the latin american boom, and... and garcia, gabriel garcia marquez... ..garcia marquez. yes. ..perhaps the most famous south american author of our times. yeah, yeah. he belonged to a generation that, erm, that wrote, that retold the history of our countries from abroad. so we have this very strange situation in south america where the best novel about colombia — 100 years of solitude — was written in mexico, and the best novel about peru by mario vargas llosa was written in paris, and carlos fuentes, the great mexican novelist, wrote in washington and london. erm, so it is a kind of necessity, perhaps, that we find to, you know, get a little removed from the places that we are discussing. it's interesting to just reflect on garcia marquez, cos... yeah. i know it's become a bit of a cliche, but this this phrase used about his work — and, indeed, 100 years of solitude was "magical realism". you do something very different. yes. you use a lot of recent history, of facts, and you weave personal stories around those facts, and it's often quite brutal and it's quite violent and difficult. yes. was your writing a deliberate reaction against that sort of quote unquote "magical realism"? no, no, my writing isjust the recognition that my world is different. my world view comes from a different place. i was born in a big capital city in the middle of the andes, so 2,600 metres over sea level. whereas garcia marquez was born in a very small town, caribbean town, with a very different culture and outlook. so his, his demons, his obsessions, his ghosts were quite different from mine. and you were also raised at a time of horrible violence, instability, chaos... yes. ..in your home city, bogota. yeah. i mean, did that... do you reflect on that and think, "you know what, i was actually quite traumatised as a kid, "as a young adult, by what was happening around me"? yes. well, when i left colombia in 1996, i was 23. erm, i thought i was leaving because i wanted to become a certain kind of writer, and that was the latin american tradition. with time, i understood that i was also fleeing the violence. i was also fleeing a, erm, a particular situation. this was the years of drug wars and drug—related terrorism. erm... narco traffickers like pablo escobar were at the height of their power as you were a teenager and a young adult. exactly, exactly. napoleon says somewhere that, uh, in order to understand a man, you have to understand his world when he was 20. and i turned 20 in 1993, which was the year in which pablo escobar died at the height of his threats to the colombian system. so that's that. do you, do you think, when you reflect on it — and of course, i'm mindful you were writing in europe about this colombia of corruption, of chaos, of violence — do you think you were, erm, expressing in a way, a sort of deep fear and anger about what had happened to your homeland? em, frustration in a sense, but mainly, uh, mainly uncertainties, maybe mainly the feeling that, the stories that were being told were not complete. i think i write out of a sense of darkness, of shadows in the collective story of my country, and i think of fiction as a way to shed some light, particularly, on that, on that very special place in which the historical meets private lives, in which private individuals, erm, as brothers and sisters and lovers and, uh, and fathers and, and siblings, they have... they suffer the consequences of politics and history and those forces that we have never learned quite how to, how to control, but that do change our lives. and this is the territory of our human experience that i try to tell in my novels. you call it fiction, but of course you fill your books with facts, sometimes very personal facts. yes. i mean, i'm thinking of one of your most successful novels, the sound of things falling, which involves a plane crash. and in fact, you really did find, i think, the transcript of the recording of the last moments of a plane, which i believe was carrying a family friend, which crashed. that's right, yes. and you very literally took these horrific final moments and wrote about them. yes. you also included some other bizarre facts, like the hippo that escaped from pablo escobar�*s infamous zoo and which was then hunted down years later. and that was the beginning of your book. so i guess, you know, your audience might be sometimes quite confused about these blurred lines between fact — and you're a journalist, so you deal in facts — but then fiction, which is where you as a novelist come in. yes, i've understood with time that in my work... my work always begins with meeting an actual person who has a story that seems to me interesting, uh, or who is hiding something, who has evidently some kind of secrets. and i start asking questions. so i always begin writing as a novel... as a journalist. i'm a journalist first, and then, since my novels often deal with the colombian past, with our collective past, i turn into a historian — ifind documents, i go into archives, and then the last, uh, the last person to come into the process is the novelist. and the novelist�*s only task is to try to say something that neither the journalist nor the historian has said. but in so doing, you twist and bend the truth. or do you not believe there is such a thing as truth? i do believe there is such a thing as truth. epistemologically i do believe that, but i don't think it's accessible through one story. i don't think one story can...interpret it fully. so you need several stories coming from several parts. and this is particularly true in my country, where we are trying to, uh, deal with a recent history of violence. and we are all trying — storytellers, journalists, historians, novelists — who are trying to open a space in which different stories about these last 50 years coexist, have the right to exist. but if, if your perception that, actually, truth is complex and it requires the understanding of different people's perspectives and memories... yes. ..and they can recollect the same event in very different ways. yes. where does that leave colombia's attempt to reach, you know, what in south africa was known as "truth and reconciliation"? is it possible in colombia? that's what we are trying to do. the peace agreements that were passed in 2016, which i think is one of the great successes in the history of my country, these agreements between the colombian government ofjuan manuel santos and the farc guerrilla... yeah, it should be said it was with the farc group, which was the dominant insurgent group... only one of them. ..but there are many other rebel groups who have not made peace and who are not part of that agreement. exactly. but it was the biggest guerrilla, perhaps the oldest one, and the strongest one, certainly. so it was a success story to make peace with this guerrilla movement. erm, now, part of the... part of what the agreements created were two institutions, the commission of truth and the transitionaljustice tribunals. both of them are, among several other things, in charge of telling stories, opening spaces in which people can come and, uh, tell their story, be recognised as victims of violence, or as perpetrators who ask for forgiveness. the victims may or may not forgive, but the most, the most wonderful human situations have been created or allowed by this, by the institutions. and they all go through the same phenomenon of telling stories. but is it really healing wounds, or do those wounds still fester in your country? that's, that's a great question. you never know if remembering can be sometimes, erm, exciting new resentments or keeping hatred alive. erm, i do have i do have faith in the power of remembering correctly and accurately the past. carlos fuentes, the mexican novelist, said there is no living future with a dead past, and part of our role, i think, as novelists and storytellers in general, is keeping the past alive, trying to keep it true, keep it honest, so that we can understand it and move forward. ah. i mean, something pretty extraordinary happened in 2022 when the colombian electorate voted into power... yeah. ..president petro, who in a previous life, not so very long ago had been a committed guerrilla fighter in the m—19 group, and now he sits in the presidential palace. but that clearly sticks in the throat of many colombians. and ijust wonder, as you look at your country today, whether you fear that petro, who came to power pledging, quote unquote, "total peace with all of the "different armed groups" in his country... yes. ..whether in fact his presidency is deepening polarisation. well, uh, i'm very critical about president petro. i think he is a populist and a demagogue, uh, of a very old latin american tradition. but he had this unique opportunity of — and this is why i thought his election was good news — of implementing the peace agreements of 2016, which had been, uh, disregarded or actively sabotaged by the last conservative government of ivan duque. erm... he hasn't... it's not looking so good right now, is it? i mean, as i understand it, of the different armed groups... because he seems to be saying that he wants a, you know, an ultimate peace and a disarming of all the groups, including criminal gangs as well as insurgent rebel groups and paramilitary groups, he wants them all to be in this umbrella of total peace. yes. well, of the 20 or more different armed groups, only about five are currently engaging with the government. yes, and not only that, to me, the bad side of the whole project is that he is taking away from the 2016 agreements, all the attention and the resources and the rhetorical energy of the government. so he is forgetting them, leaving them to die a slow death through inattention, through negligence, concentrating on his own projects. erm, whereas we, we looked forward during his election to the first serious implementation of those wonderful agreements that we managed to pass in 2016 after much polarisation. it's not, it's notjust a question, is it, of the men with guns. it's also the politicians who for decades and decades, at the very least, turned a blind eye and sometimes were actively complicit in the violence, the murder, the chaos and the mayhem in your country. do you think there will be an accounting of those politicians — one could say the old political elite in colombia — will they be held to account? well, i certainly think they're one of the... one of the main objectives of the peace agreements and the peace negotiations has to be to find the truth, to have people speak the truth and, and accept some kind of truth as the only way for which we... a reconciliation of the country. but there has to be a reconciliation. it's absolutely no use to go through these difficult processes that have, uh, divided us and polarised us as a nation. so as you say that and you talk about your hopes for the future of your country — i'm just looking at my notes where i noted down that right now, opposition leaders in bogota are saying that they have plans to launch national strikes to paralyse the country if petro attempts to establish this talk of a constituent assembly, assembly to bypass parliament and the courts. there's allegations of corruption being bandied around involving close family and associates of petro, including charges that his son is facing of bribery with allegations that it was linked to campaign finance, which of course, he the son — and indeed the president himself — clearly deny all involvement. but nonetheless, it looks in a way like colombia is sinking back into something very dark and dangerous. i think we are not strangers to a certain kind of dynamics in the whole of the continent. 0ur continent, our continent in south america is being divided into different kinds of populisms — right—wing populisms such as bolsonaro in brazil some years ago and milei in argentina — and the left—wing populisms active in nicaragua and venezuela, which are turning their countries into failed democracies. in the middle, we have this negotiation between two kinds of extreme ideas, extreme erm, projects, political projects in colombia. and in the middle there are some looking for a way to create a new political centre of a progressive kind, and this is turning into one of the most difficult things of all. because of the current situation of that tension between what the government of petro is doing, a populist demagogue, erm... on that spectrum of latin american politics — with the populism, as you describe it, of both the left and the right — where do you see the greatest danger lying for colombia? which way do you believe it might... it's very clear to me that the greatest danger is that petro�*s government will open the way for a right wing — or rather, extreme right wing — populism, which is already in the making and gathering force as a reaction to what is going on from the government. that is the most worrying situation for me. underpinning much of the violence in colombia — and we've talked about politics and insurgency — but underpinning much of it has been drugs. yes. narco trafficking... yeah. ..and the vast amounts of money and indeed the power that come with controlling the drugs. you have suggested that the only way out of this for a country like colombia is the full legalisation of currently illegal narcotics. yes, for any country, i would think. but particularly... what do you think that would do to colombia? erm... i think drugs are a double problem. you have public order problems linked to the violence and the corruption and the instability created by criminal gangs who try to vie for control of the trade. and on the other hand, you have public health problems linked to consumption of drugs and what that does to... the burden that places on health systems. if you legalise, every experience tells us that legalisation would get rid of the first problem — violence, corruption, mafias, criminal gangs are a product of the illegal character of drugs, not of drugs themselves. and we saw that during prohibition in the united states — only during prohibition did we have not only alcoholism and private problems, but also mafias and corruption and violence, which are the results of illegality, of the criminal world that is built around the protection of an illegal business. you legalise, you get probably rid of all these things, and you can devote the insane amounts of money that we use in drug wars to prevention and education and treatment of addiction. when you, as a journalist, write about the narco traffickers and the scourge that drugs represents in your country — and you write about corruption and the corrosive nature of corruption — you're in very dangerous territory. journalists and writers get targeted in colombia. yes. some of them occasionally get killed. do you worry about that? well, this is... this is a trend in the whole of the continent. journalists are being persecuted and imprisoned in venezuela and nicaragua. there are networks closed there. they're being actively persecuted by the government. i'm interested in your personal story because we discussed you moving to europe to get a distance where you could write about colombia, but you then moved back in around, i think, around a decade or more ago. 2012, yes. yeah, so you have a presence inside colombia now. do you feel constraints on what you can say? i'd rather not think about that maybe. erm... surely, you have to. well, i, uh... i do believe there's a kind of, erm...obligation i have as an intellectual, as an observer, and as a novelist. we have a certain kind of take on colombian life, novelists, erm, and it is, it is very difficult to... not to do what albert camus, who is a big figure for me, said — it is the role of the journalist to say things are so when you effectively see that things are so, and this is what i try to do. and i know you are friends with many writers around the world, including salman rushdie. when you see what happens to writers who take on, uh, those who don't want their voice to be heard on certain issues, does it make you become more careful about what you say and write? well, salman, salman rushdie is a great example of somebody who has spent the last 30 years defending the freedoms the rest of us take for granted and thriving. i think he is an example of, of courage and of resilience. erm, and it's. .. for me, it's a source, it's an inspiration and a source of admiration in many senses. and you will continue to write about your country from inside your country? i have never, except for one book, i haven't written a page of fiction that is not obsessively about my country, about trying to understand its violence and trying to, uh, explore it and illuminate it. and as a journalist, i only try to defend our right — our right to peace, to have a peaceful country. which is, you know, hopefully in the making, but not there immediately. juan gabriel vasquez, thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. it was a pleasure. thank you. hello, there. for most of us, it has been a disappointing start to the week, in terms of the weather. a frequent rash of showers, particularly across scotland, gusts of winds coming from the north, and in excess of 30 mph, at times. temperatures struggled to get into double figures, but it was a slightly different story, further south and west. just look at anglesey — beautiful afternoon, lots of sunshine and temperatures peaked at around 18 or 19 degrees. high pressure is continuing to nudge its way in from the west, so west will be best, through the course of tuesday. there's still likely to be a few showers around, but hopefully few and further between. most frequent showers, certainly, are going to be across eastern scotland and down through eastern england. so, sunny spells and scattered showers going into the afternoon. that will have an impact with the temperature, 1a or 15 degrees, but again, with a little more shelter, a little more sunshine, 17 or 18 celsius not out of the question. a few scattered showers moving their way through northern ireland and scotland. hopefully, some of these will ease through the afternoon, but you can see those temperatures still really struggling — ten to 15 degrees at the very best. now, as we move out of tuesday into wednesday, this little ridge of high pressure will continue to kill off the showers. so, wednesday is likely to be the driest day of the week — and make the most of it — there's more rain to come, but it will be a pretty chilly start, once again, to wednesday morning. single figures right across the country, low single figures in rural spots. but, hopefully, the showers should be a little bit few and further between and more favoured spots for those showers, once again, to the east of the pennines. more sunshine out to the west. temperatures, generally, similar values to what we've seen all week, 10 to 18 degrees the high, but the wind direction will start to change, as we move into thursday. unfortunately, towards the end of the week, this low pressure will take over. we'll see further spells of rain at times, some of it heavy. but the wind direction will play its part, a little — a south—westerly wind means that we will see temperatures climbing a degree or so. don't expect anything too significant, because we've got the cloud and the rain around. but it's not out of the question that across eastern and southeast england, we could see highs of 20 celsius. take care. live from london, this is bbc news. the united nations security council adopts a us resolution supporting an immediate ceasefire in gaza here in the uk, campaigning continues as the conservatives launch their election manifesto today. jurors have started deliberating in the trial of president biden�*s son, hunter. later in the program, we'll be finding out how elephants call to each other using their names. and coming up in business — strava is one of the worlds most popular fitness apps. i'll be speaking to its chief executive on this programme. hello, i'm sally bundock. a very warm welcome to the programme. the united states is making a major push to pause fighting in gaza, with diplomatic efforts taking place both in the region and at the united nations. the un security council endorsed a ceasefire proposal for gaza on monday. it is the first time the council has passed a resolution demanding a stop in fighting, after eight months of war. the resolution urges both hamas and israel to fully and quickly implement the three—phase plan. 1a countries voted in favour, and russia abstained. us ambassador to the un linda thomas—greenfield says the resolution shows hamas that the international community is united. colleagues, today this council sent a clear message to hamas. accept the ceasefire deal on the table.