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Sources

'Gringo' Who Ran Costa Rican Sex Slave Operation Still At Large

LA NACIÓN (Costa Rica)

SAN JOSE - An American man accused of running a sex slave operation in Costa Rica is on the lam while his associates – a Colombian, a Costa Rican and an Egyptian man – are now behind bars following a series of raids this past week.

Police in San Jose, the Costa Rican capital, had been investigating the operation since 2008. The case "was later put on hold because the victims were able to leave the country, but it was relaunched in 2010," Jorge Rojas, head of the country's national detective agency, told La Nación.

Rojas said the prostitutes, who hailed from Colombia, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Russia, came to Costa Rica on the assumption they would work as dancers in a San Jose night club. Upon arriving, though, the club operators took away their passports and forced them into prostitution.

Police believe the owner of the club, an American man identified as "Scott," was also the ringleader of the operation. They suspect he may be hiding out somewhere in the United States.

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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