As every year, the Bogotá Book Fair (FILBo) brought together the best names in Colombian and Latin American journalism. AL DÍA News wanted to highlight three titles available in the United States so that the American reader can understand the Colombian reality.

Lost Stories of the Panama Canal, by Marixa Lasso
(Grupo Planeta)

As is well known, the Panama Canal meant a new development for Central America by joining the two oceans, however, that idea of progress that the world has counted as a milestone left out thousands of people who lost everything. However, its history has never been told from a Panamanian point of view.

Both Colombians and North Americans have written books, but Dr. Marixa Lasso manages to give an account of an erasure that went unnoticed by official history: 40,000 residents of villages were displaced and their places of origin razed to the ground by the construction of the transoceanic canal. 

Through rigorous archival research and personal sources, Lasso describes in great detail and prose the story of the people who were there and displaced. This also resulted in the destruction of a commercial and environmental culture that was based there. A culture that was omitted by the race to finish the great work of the twentieth century and conceive a new American aesthetic and culture. 

The Impunity of Power, by Ramón Jimeno
(Penguin Random House)

Journalist Ramón Jimeno, winner of several Simón Bolívar and India Catalina national journalism awards, recounts the lives of two Colombians who have known no alternative to honesty: a pair of flesh-and-blood citizens who share both the Velasquez surname and the need to do their duty no matter what the cost, and in the dirtiest, bloodiest, most villain-plagued and nemesis-ridden moments of Colombia's recent history.

The first Velasquez is the colonel who in spite of everything, against all odds and amidst the bullets, headed the Search Bloc that in the early 1990s demonstrated that drug traffickers were part of the State's organization chart. The second Velasquez is the magistrate who is celebrating thirty years of exposing the way in which criminality is becoming entrenched, invited by the excessive ambitions of the elites, in the institutions of the State.

If one cannot stop reading it is because Jimeno is not only a brilliant journalist, but a storyteller who has been through it all. His expertise and skill are evident.
 
Los presidenciables, by La Silla Vacía
(Penguin Random House)

Presented on April 27 at the Bogotá Book Fair, and less than two months before the first round of the presidential elections in Colombia, Los Presidenciables is the first book written by the journalists of La Silla Vacía.

The book includes profiles of the main presidential candidates in these Colombian elections. Profiles that, in the best La Silla style, tell in depth their public and private lives. From their childhood, their influences, their performance in key positions and their character traits that allow us to anticipate how they would govern.

For years, La Silla Vacía has covered elections with great skill. On this occasion, led by Juanita León, it presents readers with the stories of David Barguil, Íngrid Betancourt, Sergio Fajardo, Juan Manuel Galán, Alejandro Gaviria, Federico Gutiérrez, Rodolfo Hernández, Francia Márquez, Enrique Peñalosa and Gustavo Petro.

This will give readers a broader idea of how important it is not to vote blindly, because "electing a president takes a few minutes, but the consequences of that instant when you vote will last seven years, and maybe more.