It is an impossible love story and also the portrait of a town that has gone to pieces, in just 30 years, which is the time that the narrator was away. He comes back to see all his values of his childhood changed that everything he grew up with is destroyed, what created him. He's appalled by the noise, the vulgarity, and the fact that if you get a gun you get the power over everything. Decent people can't go out on the street. Young people with guns and gangs with guns, decide everything.
People have to shut up if they want to stay alive.
This is not only about Colombia. Colombia is at the vanguard of things that are going to happen in the rest of the world. Neither in Sodom, nor Gomorrah, nor in Medell n, nor Colombia are there any innocent people. Here everything that lives is guilty, and if it reproduces, even more. The poor produce more poor, and misery more misery.