and i turned 20 in 1993, which was the year in which pablo escobar died at the height of his threatsian 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 expressing, in a way, a sort of deep fear and anger about what had happened to your homeland? frustration in a sense, but mainly... 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, as brothers and sisters and lovers and fathers 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 t