Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom

Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom opens a window on a rarely glimpsed world: the couriers who transport drugs from Colombia into the United States and Europe. Written by one of Colombia's leading writers, the book lets English-speaking readers get a good look--for the first time--at the people behind the drug trade. Colombians from many different backgrounds and parts of the country tell the story of how they got involved in smuggling and how some of them managed to get out alive, This book is about the predicament in which ordinary Colombians find themselves, forced to find a way out of poverty in the middle of an unending civil war. Based on Alfred Molano's visits to Spanish and Latin American jails, Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom combines the gut-wrenching honesty of testimonial literature with the passionate storytelling we have come to expect from Latin America. In his native Colombia Molano has been compared to Gabriel García Marquez, and indeed the many layered narrative in this book resemble harrowing fictions.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.