My Writing Work on “Sendero Rojo: The Path of Blood” #1 The setting.

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Richard H. McBee Jr.

Although this is an action/adventure novel it is also a novel of historical fiction about the Cocaine drug wars, the lives of the narcotraficantes, the local peoples and the DEA and military men and women who spend their lives trying to hunt down these destroyers of lives and nations.

The history side of the book comes from the sixty or so Latin American newspaper articles that I personally collected from the 1970’s through 2006 while living in South America. These documents describe incidents of drug manufacturing, drug running, drug interdiction and drug slavery in a variety of localities of Latin America. The incidents form the framework upon which I built my story, set in the terrorist ridden mountains, cities and jungles of Peru during the late 1980’s.

This is a period with which I am quite familiar in that I, my wife and two children lived, traveled and worked there from 1986 through 1990.

The fictional side of the book comes through the linking of these separate incidents with fictional characters, localities and modifications so that they fit into a logical story line and are fleshed out by my imagination to make them whole. The characters within the book are totally of my imagination and bear no relation to any persons in real life. Readers who are well acquainted with certain aspects of the geography of Peru may note that I take some liberties with places in order to tell my story. Hopefully these liberties occur smoothly enough so that only the keenest of observers will pick up on them.

The other Latin American areas woven into the story, including Chile, Ecudaor and Venezuela are also areas wher I and my family have lived, worked and traveled considerably. My hypotheses linking all of the incidents together formed gradually during these years to give a bird’s eye view of the world of international drug trade.

And so the story begins with the innocent life of a young girl living in the high Andes near Huraz, Peru. This life is shattered by the kidnpping of her father and fiance by terrorists to be taken as slaves to work in the jungles making basic cocaine paste at a drug camp.

The young girl is then forced to leave her home and flee to the metropolis of Lima where she ekes out a living as she attempts to find a way to bring about the release of her fiance and father from their bondage.