“Drug trafficking is a global business, but Colombia puts up the dead,” according to a writer

The Colombian writer Gustavo Forero denounced this Wednesday at the Semana Negra cultural festival in Gijón (northern Spain) that he drug trafficking It is a global business that moves more money than the budgets of many states, although it is “stigmatizes” to countries like yours when they are the ones who “they put the dead”.

Drug trafficking is, along with prostitution and human trafficking, the big business in the world today, and “It is unfair” that Colombia “be stigmatized for it”stressed the author in a meeting with the press at the festival, where he presented his book “Out in the open”.

The Colombian’s book addresses drug trafficking, prostitution and human trafficking in a plot that mixes the noir genre with the travel and adventure novel against the background of relations between Europe and Africa.

“Out in the open” narrates the adventures in the Sahara desert, in North Africa, of a tourist who confronts reality with his own prejudices, making him more committed and skeptical, while he finds himself entangled in a criminal plot.

The novel recovers the classic idea of ​​an adventurer who seeks to radically change his life and faces a world that forces him to exceed his own limits, as an excuse to analyze the struggle between two cultures in the relations between Europe and Africa. as explained by the author.

In this African desert, the protagonist, a lover of dancing, good food and sex, meets curious personalities, such as an Algerian dancer, a reclusive writer, a Catalan dancer, a Moroccan photographer or an old man who met the French philosopher Roland Barthes.

Forero said that in this work he wanted to show “an original, unprecedented perspective”of the novel “Sheltering Heaven”by the American Paul Bowles, made into a film by the Italian Bernardo Bertolucci, which narrates the journey of a couple from New York to North Africa in search of experiences that give a new meaning to their lives.

The Colombian writer also shared that in his novel the criminal plot seeks to provoke a reflection on where relations between Europe and Africa are headed, when interracial, intercultural and religious conflicts are still very present in the world.

Source: EFE