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The epidemic of drug-fueled violence that afflicted Medellín, Colombia during the late 1980s and early 1990s is by now infamous. During this period Colombia's national homicide rate was seven or eight times higher than that of the US, while Medellín's rate more than quintupled that of Bogotá. In 1993, at the end of the Pablo Escobar era, Medellín was identified by Human Rights Watch International as the most dangerous city in the world.1 The extraordinary history of this period has subsequently become the subject of a number of remarkable fictional and semi-fictional works by artists such as director Victor Gaviria and novelist Fernando Vallejo, many of which fall into a category designated by Héctor Abad Faciolince as the sicaresca, in reference to the sicarios or teenage hitmen who won national attention through a serious of spectacular assassinations of national political and judicial figures during this period.2 In 2005, the film Rosario Tijeras became the most commercially successful of these narratives of the sicariato, breaking domestic box office records by attracting 1.2 million viewers in its first year of release in a country of approximately 44 million inhabitants, and becoming possibly the highest grossing Colombian film of all time (Holland, Lira). Rosario Tijeras is a three-and-a-half million dollar, five-country co-production that adapts Jorge Franco Ramos's 1999 novel of the same name.
Franco's novel sold out its first edition in one week and by some accounts has since become the second-best selling Colombian novel of all time, after Cien años de soledad (Valbuena). In a recent article on the current visibility of Colombian narrators in international markets, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola has cited Franco's Rosario Tijeras as a prime example of "un tipo de best-seller basado en novelar las penurias sociales latinoamericanas y ofrecer personajes marginales aptos para el consumo masivo" (43). Questioning the impact of Rosario Tijeras and other novels by Vallejo, Mario Mendoza and Laura Restrepo on Latin America's signification within a transnational cultural imaginary, Herrero-Olaizola writes as follows:
El mercado editorial, que es obviamente partícipe de las políticas económicas globales, perpetúa la comercialización de estos márgenes y promueve cierta exotización de una realidad latinoamericana "cruda" dirigida a un público más atento e instruido [sic] en cuestiones socio-políticas de América Latina y ansioso de leer algo nuevo,...