Novelist Revisits The Assassination And Conspiracies That Fueled Colombia's Civil War

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Last month, in the span of just a few days, the Tree of Life synagogue was attacked. Several critics of the President received pipe bombs in the mail. And a man, after unsuccessfully trying to break into a black church, was arrested for shooting to death two African-Americans at a supermarket in Kentucky. Now the headline of a New York Times Magazine article warns, U.S. law enforcement failed to see the threat of white nationalism, and now they don't know how to stop it. The article is about how domestic counter-terrorism strategy has ignored the rising danger of far-right domestic extremism and how that has enabled the movement to grow and become more dangerous.

The article was written by my guest, Janet Reitman, who is a contributing writer to the magazine and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. She's working on a book about the rise of the far-right in post-9/11 America. Her new article will be published in The New York Times Magazine this Sunday. It's already on the Times website.

Janet Reitman, welcome to FRESH AIR. You write that for two decades, domestic counterterrorism strategy has ignored the rising danger of far-right extremism, and you illustrate that with several points. But one of them is with Lieutenant Dan Stout, who was preparing for a Unite the Right rally in Gainesville, Fla., and had seen what happened in Charlottesville. And he knew next to nothing about the "alt-right" or white nationalism, so he tried to find what the latest intelligence was on white nationalism. And he ran into some obstacles. What problems did he face trying to find out more?

JANET REITMAN: He found a big zero, as he would put it. He found nothing. Dan Stout had never really heard of Richard Spencer, knew almost nothing about his "alt-right" movement, knew very little of anything about this opposition to the "alt-right" movement. You know, this would be the antifascist left. And so when he found out that Richard Spencer was coming to Gainesville, this was going to be his first big public event after Charlottesville. And Stout was (laughter) completely terrified.

And so he began to try to do all kinds of research, and he couldn't find - all he could do was watch YouTube videos. There was nothing available to him from his - obviously his own police department didn't have anything. He called the state police. They didn't have much. There was no way they could access the social media or any kind of, like, chats that these guys were now engaging in because a lot of this stuff by this point was now encrypted, and, you know, they were in private channels. They were not just on open Facebook. He reached out to the FBI. They weren't very helpful. They were - had a kind of, well, whatever we have, we're not sharing it kind of (laughter) perspective.

GROSS: What about...

REITMAN: But...

GROSS: ...Homeland Security?

REITMAN: Homeland Security had produced - you know, Homeland Security produces these threat assessments, these kinds of reports. And they had done some on white supremacists over the years. But they were not - nothing - none of this is very specific, and so there was really nothing.

GROSS: So Lieutenant Stout was lucky in the sense that the Gainesville rally was kind of a fizzle because the protesters far overwhelmed the white nationalists who came. But it illustrates your larger point that he couldn't find information about who might be coming and what the threat might be. So whose job is it to be monitoring extremists on the far-right who do pose the threat of violence?

REITMAN: The joint terrorism task forces, the DHS-run fusion centers at the local level - they are able and should be able to at least track, pay attention to these events. That's the first, number one - pay attention to these events where there is repeated violence and they're public. And, two, take a look at who's engaging in the violence. And chances are most of those guys who are really engaging in violence are people who are violent. Many of them have criminal histories. They are in the system.

At that point, there are any number of law enforcement agencies that can do a little digging and can alert the next town that's planning - I mean, these guys announce their events quite some time in advance, so that's enough time for, you know, both local and state and federal law enforcement to look at who have been the more violent people within these groups. What have they done? Do they have any history of violence? Do they have criminal histories? Are they out on parole? And just monitor them. That is what does not seem to be getting done.

GROSS: So you're saying there isn't much - there aren't many resources being put toward far-right extremism. But if you compare the numbers of violent attacks from jihadis in the U.S., extremist Muslims, with the number of attacks from far-right extremists in the U.S. like white nationalists, how do the numbers compare?

REITMAN: The number of far-right extremist attacks and deaths related to far right extremism vastly, vastly outnumber the number of deaths connected to Islamic extremism. It's by - the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, has - the numbers from 2017 I believe were 71 percent of the cases of domestic extremist-related violence were committed by members of the far-right. Twenty-six percent were Islamic extremists. I mean, these numbers will vary depending on who's counting and how they're counting, but if you look at a survey of maybe five or six different groups that look at these numbers, the one conclusion you can draw is that the far-right is responsible for the majority of these incidents.

GROSS: You write after President Trump came into office that security analysts noted with alarm what seem to be a systematic erosion of the Department of Homeland Security's analytic and operational capabilities with regard to countering violent extremism. And you're referring there to violent extremism from the far-right - and that this began with the appointment of a new national security team. What were the features of this new national security team when President Trump came to the White House?

REITMAN: So Donald Trump was advised prior to being elected by - in terms of national security by a number of people who came from what we might call the Islamophobic fringe, including people like Frank Gaffney, who is a longtime peddler of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories in Washington. He's a former Reagan administration official. And when Trump came in, he brought with him people like - well, Steve Bannon embraced some of these ideas. You had Sebastian Gorka and his wife, Katharine Gorka, who had run this little think tank in Washington which was very much devoted to an anti-Islam perspective, anti-Jihad perspective.

This is - in some ways, there is an industry - an Islamophobia industry similar to the anti-immigration industry that grew up in D.C. over the years and that was always considered very fringy. And just like that, an anti-immigration group has made its way into the mainstream now. So has the Islamophobia. And so you had a number of different players who came into the administration in either an advisory capacity or actually - in the case of the Gorkas, they actually held jobs in the administration. Katharine Gorka still does hold a job at the Department of Homeland Security.

And they were just, you know, not interested in white supremacy in any regard. I mean, Sebastian Gorka said at one point that he didn't think this was an issue. There was no white supremacy-related terrorism. That was, like, a myth. It was only about jihad.

And so over the next several months after - during the transition and then in the early months of the administration, they just started to chip away at the very tiny, tiny efforts that had begun to be made to look at white supremacy. It was not - there was no robust effort within DHS to look at white supremacy.

GROSS: So you also report in 2017 at the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis analysts who had been looking at domestic terrorism and coordinating with local law enforcement sharing information - they were reassigned as public affairs liaisons. Does it mean that it's going to be more difficult for cities to find out about potential threats from, for instance, rallies that are going to be held there and people coming in to do right-wing rallies?

REITMAN: Yeah, I think so. If there is not a lot of investigative work done on the part of, say, the FBI to pre-emptively warn cities about who might be coming to their community based on, you know, analysis of their own crime database - if that is not happening, then these cities will be caught unaware.

Now, what I think is really important to stress is that rallies like we saw in 2017 are not the way of the future. The way of the future are attacks like what we saw with one guy in a van sending - allegedly sending pipe bombs to 15 people or a guy who was promoting his anti-Semitism on a far-right platform for quite a long time finally taking it upon himself to get his AR-15-style assault rifle and a bunch of handguns and go and shoot up a temple. That's what we're going to start seeing more of. That's the future.

GROSS: What makes you say that?

REITMAN: That's very scary.

GROSS: What you makes you say that?

REITMAN: Because that is - my reporting on this kind of quote, unquote, "alt-right" movement is that they found Charlottesville and those big rallies that they were having to be in some ways counterproductive. They were great recruitment tools, but they didn't really do much for them. I mean, they wound up - some of these guys wound up with court cases. There were lots of internal divisions within the movement.

And I just - I think that they didn't see it as a particularly effective way to go. They have their own networks. They have their own media. They have their own websites. They have their own, you know, YouTube channels. They have meetups that they do. I mean, they have their own little - it's an alternate universe of people. They don't really need to convince the rest of us.

I mean, that's what's kind of scary - is there are a lot of people that, in some way or another, buy into these ideas. They may not all want to go shoot up a temple or send a pipe bomb or even go to a big rally, but they in some way or another kind of agree with some of these ideas that have been made palatable to them. And it's a large number of people. I mean, apparently there was a study that was done right after Charlottesville that basically said about 10 percent of the American population thinks some of the ideas of the "alt-right" are OK.

GROSS: But the people who are responsible for the attacks that you just mentioned seem like they're not leaders of the movement. They're, like, lone wolves who found the far-right through various websites. So in what sense are they the wave of the future? It's not like they're part of an organized cell that, you know, is taking some kind of orders from the top.

REITMAN: Yeah, the wave of the future - that wasn't...

GROSS: And also, my impression, too, is that people who are part of, like, the larger white national movement - they want to be heard. They want to be seen. They want people to feel and hear their voice and their power.

REITMAN: First of all, I think that the wave of the future are - quote, unquote, "lone wolf cells." They are one guy, a couple of people, who are, you know, self-radicalizing. This is a movement in many regards that is oriented around this principle of leaderless resistance, which is that it's not really about being an organized movement with a leadership. It's about being inspired by somebody like Donald Trump.

You know, there are a number of people who have emerged and have, you know, some kind of prominent voice that they've publicized through websites or through these kinds of rallies over the year or the past year. And their ideas and their writing and - that has proved to be inspiring to individuals. It's a self-reinforcing movement, and it's not hierarchical. It's in many ways a very horizontally-structured - just like the Internet itself, it's kind of a horizontal movement.

And that is I think what makes it very difficult for law enforcement - just to give them some credit, it's very hard to know. There's so many people out there who may hold some kind of racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Islam, anti-immigrant point of view. And they will say that somewhere on Twitter, on a comment on a New York Times or Washington Post online piece. They may send a nasty text message. How do you know which one of those people is actually planning something? It's really hard to know.

GROSS: Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Janet Reitman, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her new article in the magazine is titled "U.S. Law Enforcement Failed To See The Threat Of White Nationalism. Now They Don't Know How To Stop It." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Janet Reitman, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her new piece in the magazine, which is on the web - on The Times' website and will be published in the actual newspaper on Sunday, is called "U.S. Law Enforcement Failed To See The Threat Of White Nationalism. Now They Don't Know How To Stop It."

One of the things you write about is a report that some of our listeners might know about that came out in 2009 from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis. And this report issued a warning of a rise in right-wing extremism. The report was titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic And Political Climate Fueling Resurgence In Radicalization And Recruitment."

And the economic and political climate referred to in the report had to do with the fact that President Obama, a black man, was president and that the housing crisis and the financial crisis had left people with a lot of financial problems. And that also a lot of military people were returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finding that they had few options, that the housing crisis was making their options and the financial crisis was making their options even worse and that they were feeling disenfranchised and left with - without what they needed.

So what happened to this report? Oh, another thing the report mentioned was that between October 2007 and March of 2008, Daryl Johnson, the author of the report - his unit documented the formation of 45 new antigovernment militia groups. So what happened to this report?

REITMAN: This went out to all of DHS' partners in law enforcement. And within a very short time - a couple of days - it was leaked to a right-wing radio host named Roger Hedgecock, who's, like - has a syndicated program. And it was posted on his website. And they saw this report as the Obama administration attacking people who had a "right-wing," quote, unquote, ideology. And it was very clearly noted that right-wing extremism included a number of groups that we would recognize - neo-Nazis, white supremacists, radical anti-abortion activists, things like that.

After this report was leaked, it went absolutely viral across right-wing - the - sort of the whole far-right and right-wing Internet. And they attacked this report as this political, biased, essential attack on conservatives. And within two months of that report being released, the DHS rescinded it. And Janet Napolitano, who was then DHS secretary, apologized to veterans groups who particularly took issue with this report.

GROSS: So the Obama administration withdrew the report from 2009.

REITMAN: Right.

GROSS: But what happened to the information in the report? Did the Obama administration take any action on the information?

REITMAN: So they did continue to look at domestic extremism. There was no dedicated far-right extremist team like what Johnson had set up. He had this tiny, little unit of analysts who spend all their time on these far-right websites. Like, that was dismantled, and those analysts either were transferred to other parts of I&A, of Intelligence and Analysis, that department, or they just left altogether.

What happened was the Boston bombing happened in 2013. And then Jeh Johnson came in as Obama's next DHS secretary. And he had about 3 1/2 years. And his entire focus now was on domestic extremism, what we called - what they called homegrown violent extremism which related directly to people inspired by sort of Islamic jihadist ideology that were committing acts in the United States. So you had the Boston bombers, and then you had these ISIS kids who were joining ISIS. Or they were launching, you know, ISIS-inspired attacks here. And that's what the focus of really every law enforcement body just - you know, across the board, that was their focus sort of from 2013, 2014 onwards.

GROSS: And I think one of the points of your article is that far-right extremists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis took advantage of the lack of attention they were getting from the federal government.

GROSS: Yes, absolutely. The Internet had exploded in a - as a social venue in ways that I don't think the federal government was particularly clued into or aware of. They didn't see - they were paying attention to it in some ways in terms of how ISIS was using it to recruit and sort of mobilize young people. They weren't really looking at the - at least as far as I've found, they really weren't looking at the far-right and seeing how they were using their spaces in that same regard. And they've just - they also just weren't taking seriously what was being said.

And that's, like - that gets to the core of actually in some ways who we are as a society. A society based around institutions that have built by and to benefit white people has a very hard time looking at itself and seeing language and offensive ideology as dangerous, whereas, you know, you could see, for example, a kid putting the black flag of jihad on his Twitter feed. That's actually almost an act of war. That's something that could earn you an investigation. You know, there were kids who were investigated by the federal government. And, you know, there were material support cases opened on kids based on what they - initially based on what they were talking about on their social media pages.

That - putting a Confederate flag on your Twitter feed wouldn't get a blink of an eye, you know? And so it's a really complicated issue of who we are as a society. What do we - how seriously do we take this imagery, this kind of speech? How seriously do we look at the ideology of white supremacy and go, this is actually dangerous to people? I think we're just coming to terms with that.

GROSS: Well, Janet Reitman, thank you so much for talking with us.

REITMAN: Thank you so much for having me, Terry.

GROSS: Janet Reitman's New York Times Magazine article titled "U.S. Law Enforcement Failed To See The Threat Of White Nationalism. And Now They Don't Know How To Stop It" (ph) will be published in the magazine Sunday. It's already on the website.

After a break, Sam Briger will talk with Juan Gabriel Vasquez, whose new novel is about political assassinations and conspiracy theories. And Ken Tucker will review the new album by Pistol Annies.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RICKY FORD, ROLAND HANNA, REGGIE JOHNSON AND JIMMY KNEPPER'S "REINCARNATION OF A LOVEBIRD")
TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez grew up in Bogota, Colombia, when drug lord Pablo Escobar had declared war on the country, setting off car bombs in the capital and terrorizing its citizens. Vasquez himself was almost blown up in one of those bombings. In his novels, he's written about how his country's violent past shapes its present. His new novel, "The Shape Of The Ruins," looks at Colombia's history of political assassinations and the conspiracy theories that swirl around them.

In 1948, the liberal presidential candidate Jorge Gaitan was murdered by a lone gunman in the streets of Bogota. The assassination sparked a bloody riot that claimed the lives of 5,000 Colombians and began a period of political unrest called The Violencia. A decade later, over 200,000 people were dead. Many Colombians are obsessed with Gaitan's assassination the way many Americans are obsessed with President Kennedy's assassination. And conspiracy theories stick to both. Juan Gabriel Vasquez spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger. They started with a reading from the new novel.

JUAN GABRIEL VASQUEZ: (Reading) Like all Colombians, I grew up hearing that Gaitan had been killed by the Conservatives, that he'd been killed by the Liberals, that he'd been killed by the communists, that he'd been killed by foreign spies, that he'd been killed by the working classes feeling themselves betrayed, that he'd been killed by the oligarchs feeling themselves under threat. And I accepted very early, as we've all come to accept over time, that the murder of Juan Roa Sierra was only the armed branch of a successfully silenced conspiracy. Perhaps that's the reason for my obsession with that day. I've never felt the unconditional devotion that others feel for the figure of Gaitan, who strikes me as more shadowy than is generally admitted. But I know this country would be a better place if he hadn't been killed and most of all, would be able to look itself in the mirror more easily if the assassination were not still unsolved so many years later.

April 9 is a void in Colombian history, yes. But it is other things besides - a solitary act that sent a whole nation into a bloody war, a collective neurosis that has taught us to distrust one another for more than half a century. In the time that has passed since the crime, we Colombians have tried, without success, to comprehend what happened that Friday in 1948. And many have turned it into a more or less serious entertainment, their time and energy consumed by it. There are also Americans - I know several - who spend their whole lives talking about the Kennedy assassination, its details and most recounted particulars - people who know what brand of shoes Jackie was wearing on the day of the crime, people who can recite whole sentences from the Warren Report.

People are the same all over the world, I imagine - people who react like that to their country's conspiracies, turning them into tales that are told like children's fables and also into a place in the memory or the imagination, a place we go to as tourists to revive nostalgia or try to find something we've lost.

SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: That's Juan Gabriel Vasquez reading from his new book "The Shape Of The Ruins."

Juan Gabriel, welcome to FRESH AIR.

VASQUEZ: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

BRIGER: So on April 9, 1948, the Liberal leader Jorge Gaitan was assassinated in Bogota. And you call it the most famous political crime in Colombian history. Who was Jorge Gaitan?

VASQUEZ: Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was this Liberal leader who had been mayor of Bogota. During the '40s, he had become the most influential populist leader. He had a huge following. He was respected to the point of adoration. And he had become a presidential candidate, quite likely to become president. That was the moment in which he was killed.

BRIGER: The assassination had severe consequences for Colombia. The immediate repercussion was called Bogotazo...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

BRIGER: ...Which was an incredibly violent riot that led to a 10-year civil war known as La Violencia. Can you describe those events for us?

VASQUEZ: The riots and the popular revolution that this crime provoked ended three days later with something like 3,000 casualties. The city became a city at war. It was burned down in the downtown neighborhoods. Snipers climbed onto the rooftops to shoot at everything that moved. The killing ignited this rage at a national level and turned the country into the theater of an unofficial civil war between the Conservatives and the Liberals that ended, more or less, in 1958, after a quarter of a million killings.

BRIGER: You say that there's a lot of similarities between Gaitan's assassination and that of Kennedy's. Like with the Kennedy assassination, the official history of Gaitan's murder states that there was one shooter acting alone...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

BRIGER: ...Juan Roa Sierra, who right after the shooting was taken out and murdered, dragged through the streets by mobs. But there's a lot of Colombians who believe that he was just merely, you know, the instrument in a larger conspiracy. What are some of the beliefs swirling around Gaitan's assassination?

VASQUEZ: It's easy to see these points in common between the Gaitan assassination and the Kennedy assassination, both murdered by so-called lone wolves, both murdered by people who were murdered themselves immediately after the crimes - Lee Harvey Oswald a day later or something like that, if I remember correctly.

But Juan Roa Sierra, Gaitan's murderer, was lynched by a furious mob just minutes after the assassination. All these are issues that not only have been turning around in my mind for the longest time but also obsess my character, the main character in the novel. He's a man called Carlos Carballo, who is obsessed with the idea of a conspiracy behind the Gaitan assassination. And so he finds these threads, these points in common between the two murders that I wouldn't subscribe to necessarily myself. But you know, he's the one who holds those opinions.

BRIGER: This gets a little complicated, but you also compare this assassination to an earlier assassination in Colombia's history of another Liberal leader named Rafael Uribe. And I don't want to get too deep into that, but it does seem that conspiracy theories are becoming more mainstream, at least in the United States. And that...

VASQUEZ: Yeah.

BRIGER: ...Seems to coincide with a deep suspicion of journalism. Phrases like fake news and alternative facts are becoming more and more commonplace.

VASQUEZ: Yes, yeah.

BRIGER: I'm just wondering what you make of that.

VASQUEZ: Well, I think it's a symptom of one of the most dangerous moments we have suffered as democracies. A free press, a press that can work with no restrictions is absolutely essential for the well-being of a democracy. Democracy doesn't exist without dissent, without criticism, without debates, public debates. And journalism is the place where that goes on.

BRIGER: The narrator of your novel has a very distinct name.

VASQUEZ: (Laughter).

BRIGER: He's called Juan Gabriel Vasquez.

VASQUEZ: Yes.

BRIGER: And I always wonder why novelists sometimes use a version of themselves in their fiction. I think this is the first time you've done it. But sometimes...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

BRIGER: ...It seems like they're doing it ironically or there's something postmodern about it. That doesn't seem to be your reason, though. Why did you decide to make yourself the narrator of your novel?

VASQUEZ: Yes, that's true.

Well, the reason had to do with the circumstances in which the novel was born. I met this surgeon who invited me to his place and showed me the human remains - right? - a vertebra that belonged to Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and then a part of the skull that belonged to Rafael Uribe Uribe. This happened in September of 2005. That was the same moment in my life in which my twin daughters were being born in Colombia - in Bogota. Now, they were born very prematurely - at 6 1/2 months - which is a complicated situation that led to my wife and me spending a lot of time at the hospital while the girls recovered in their incubators. So...

BRIGER: And it sounds like your wife was hospitalized before the delivery...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

BRIGER: ...Too, in order to give your premature daughters time to develop before coming out into the world.

VASQUEZ: Exactly, exactly. So in those days - these were several weeks, maybe a month and a half in total, that we spent at the hospital. This is the time in which I met this doctor who showed me the bones that he had at his home. And so I saw myself immersed in this very strange situation in which I went to this guy's place to take in my hands the human remains of two victims of political violence in Colombia, and then I went back to the hospital to take my own girls into my hands.

And the situation was so - so potent with me that these questions began taking shape very slowly in my head. What relationship is there between the two moments? Is my country's violent past, is that transmissible? Will that go down generation after generation to reach, in some way, the lives of these girls that have just been born? How can I protect them from this legacy of violence? I have always been aware that my life has been shaped by the crime of Gaitan for personal reasons, family reasons, sociopolitical reasons. It has shaped my whole country and the life of everybody I know. And so I thought, will that happen to my girls?

And so I realized that inventing a narrator, inventing a personality different from myself would, in a way, diminish them - or rather, undermine the importance these events had for my life. So - making a narrator up would remove me from these events, these anecdotes. And I didn't want that to happen. I wanted to take moral responsibility, as it were, for everything that I was telling in the novel.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger recorded with one Gabriel Vasquez author of the new novel "The Shape Of The Ruins." We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF TOMISLAV BAYNOV PERFORMANCE OF JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU'S "GAVOTTE WITH VARIATIONS")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger recorded with Juan Gabriel Vazquez, author of the new novel "The Shape Of The Ruins," about political assassinations and conspiracy theories in Colombia.

BRIGER: You grew up in Bogota when the city was suffering from the terrorism of the drug lord Pablo Escobar.

VASQUEZ: Yeah.

BRIGER: And Escobar was assassinating both political figures but he was also indiscriminately killing civilians...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

BRIGER: ...In order to put political pressure on Colombia's leaders. He killed thousands of people, both with just random bombings in the city; he also blew up a passenger airplane.

VASQUEZ: Yeah.

BRIGER: I'd just like to hear you talk about what it was like growing up in that period.

VASQUEZ: I was born in 1973, so this means that drug traffic between Colombia and the United States had just begun. Richard Nixon closed the Mexican border in 1969 in order to prevent marijuana from entering the U.S. through the southern border. And this is when people began to look towards Colombia, and the first generations of smugglers began to appear. So I always like to remember that the DEA was created in the same year that I was born. So I'm part of that generation, that generation that was born with drug traffic.

When I was 11, Pablo Escobar had a minister of justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, murdered. And this was the event that just changed the whole situation. After that, this war between Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel and the Colombian states began. And it shaped my whole adolescence. Bombings were going off every day, political killings - but also indiscriminate killings of citizens, as you say. And that went on until Pablo Escobar himself was killed in 1993. I was 20.

So for a whole decade, my private life was organized around this idea that we were living with unpredictable violence and that any time, a bomb could go off in a shopping mall, on a plane, in any kind of building - and that was that.

BRIGER: Well, it sounds like you, yourself, narrowly escaped being killed in one of these bombs. There was a car bomb that went off right next to a stationery store that you were going into to look for a book, that killed many parents and their children buying school supplies.

VASQUEZ: Yes. I had just turned 20. This was January of '93. And I was studying law and already had decided that my law studies didn't interest me in the least because I wanted to become a novelist. And so what I did with my time in downtown Bogota was walk around and visit the many secondhand bookstores that downtown Bogota was filled with. And in one of those excursions, I had the intention of visiting this stationery shop which had a small bookstore at the end.

And that day, I went by the stationery shop, and it was filled with mothers and their children because it was the first day of school. And they were all buying their school materials. So there was - there were too many people. It was too much noise, too much movement. And I decided I would just go around the block to another place that I liked to visit, another secondhand bookshop.

Just as I was turning the corner, about maybe a minute or a couple of minutes after passing in front of the stationery shop, a bomb went off, a bomb that Pablo Escobar had placed in front of the building next door or across the street, which was a public building. So he was - that was his whole campaign against the Colombian state. That bomb killed 20, 23 people, and many of them were children and mothers who were in the stationery shop. So we all - I mean, we all - in Colombia, we all have that kind of anecdote. We all escaped a moment of unpredictable violence, as I say, in one way or another.

BRIGER: Well, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, thanks so much.

VASQUEZ: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

GROSS: Juan Gabriel Vasquez is the author of the new novel "The Shape Of The Ruins." He spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger. Our music critic Ken Tucker - excuse me; sorry. Our music critic Ken Tucker will review the new album by the country trio Pistol Annies after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE WESTERLIES' "HOME")

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The Pistol Annies is a trio of three country music artists - Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley. Each has a solo career, and Lambert is one of the biggest stars in country. But rock critic Ken Tucker says that when they get together as a group, their collaborations yield songs that aren't typical of any of them individually. Their new album is called "Interstate Gospel." Here's Ken's review.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "INTERSTATE GOSPEL")

PISTOL ANNIES: (Singing) Jesus is the bread of life. Without him, you're toast. Hallelujah, y'all. I've found the Holy Ghost. To be almost saved only means that you're lost. Sins are expensive, and Jesus paid the cost. These church signs...

KEN TUCKER, BYLINE: The Pistol Annies could have been a vanity project, an indulgence for three pals with enough music industry clout to score a record deal. Instead, over the course of three albums since 2011, Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley have turned the Pistol Annies into something special - a way to make strong music with a sense of humor, a sense of righteousness and a sense of drama.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEST YEARS OF MY LIFE")

PISTOL ANNIES: (Singing) I picked a good day for a recreational Percocet. I've got an itch to just get high. I'm in the middle of the worst of it. These are the best years of my life. I've got the hankering for intellectual emptiness. I've got the need to ease my mind. I'll watch some reruns on the TV set. These are the best years of my life. I was looking forward to staying here forever 'cause you asked me to - didn't think that I could do better, so I settled down in this 10-cent town. It's about to break me. I'm gonna mix a drink and try…

TUCKER: That's "Best Years Of My Life," a lovely ballad with some sting in its tail. It recounts a day in the life of a woman who seems overwhelmed by work and responsibilities. Reminding herself that these are the best years of her life is intended both as a reality check and an irony along the lines of - if these are the good times, why do I feel so bad? You don't hear country music about a woman drowning her depression in pills and booze very often. The Pistol Annies pursue their moods wherever they take them, as on this song about the lies women can tell themselves about marriage on "When I Was His Wife."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN I WAS HIS WIFE")

PISTOL ANNIES: (Singing) He'd never cheat, he'd never lie. He'll love me forever till the day that we die. He'll never take me for granted, I said that too when I was his wife. God, he looks handsome in the bright morning light. His smile can light up your world for a while. His love is enough to keep me satisfied. I said that too when I was his wife. When you're blinded by diamonds and driven by lust, hon, you can't build a mansion with a piece of sawdust. Holy matrimony, best day of your life, I said that too when I was his wife.

TUCKER: In recent interviews, Lambert has taken to ticking off what she calls the Pistol Annies' stats. She says, we have two husbands, two ex-husbands, two babies, one on the way and 25 animals. These women are also not above playing with whatever knowledge their fans might have of their personal lives. Lambert was in the tabloids when her marriage to country star Blake Shelton broke up a while back. That situation and other Annies events are alluded to in this song, "Got My Name Changed Back."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOT MY NAME CHANGED BACK")

PISTOL ANNIES: (Singing) It takes a judge to get married, takes a judge to get divorced. Well, the last couple years, spent a lot of time in court. Got my name changed back. I got my name changed back. Well, I wanted something new, then I wanted what I had. I got my name changed back. Well, I got me an ex...

TUCKER: There's an impressive range of musical styles here, starting with the gospel of the title song. That last tune I just played is a throwback to the kind of twangy novelty songs country music produced in profusion in the 1970s. At other times, the Pistol Annies put their feminist stamp on the traditionally masculine outlaw country genre. The Annies' harmonies have been compared to the Andrews Sisters from the 1940s, even as they also make the sort of country pop that's very much in vogue these days. Then there's a song like "Masterpiece," which is just a timeless torch song.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MASTERPIECE")

PISTOL ANNIES: (Singing) Baby, we were just a masterpiece, up there on the wall for all to see. We were body and soul, we were talked about. Once you've been framed you can't get out. Who's brave enough to take it down? Who's fool enough to lose the crown? We're just another thing they'll all forget about. They'll be standing around laughing like nothing ever happened.

TUCKER: The Pistol Annies recently described some of their new songs as sounding, quote, "a lot like dumping out a girl's purse." That's both a joke about their brand of brash confessionalism and a dead-serious assertion that this kind of emotional spilling is art as sure as any country music being made right now.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is critic-at-large for Yahoo TV. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we'll talk about the war in Yemen. You may not think of it as an American war, but many Yemenis do, in part because some of the bombs being dropped on Yemen are American bombs that were sold to the Saudis. My guest will be Robert Worth, whose latest New York Times Magazine article is about how the war in Yemen became the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. His latest trip there was in September. I hope you'll join us.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STOP DROP AND ROLL ONE")

PISTOL ANNIES: (Singing) We're on fire, I think, so stop, drop and roll one. Takes one to grow one. We're one of a kind. We're right on the brink burned out like the prom queen. We're all mirrors and smoke rings...

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.