The man with the typewriter
On 9 April 1948, the Colombian politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán stepped out of his office with a group of friends to walk to Bogotá’s Hotel Continental for lunch. An assassin confronted him in the street and shot him three times in the face and chest. He died shortly afterwards. His supporters caught the 20-year-old culprit, […]
Fidel and Gabo
A review of Fidel & Gabo: A portrait of a legendary friendship, by Angel Esteban and Stephanie Panichelli Two of the best-known Latin American figures of the twentieth century, Fidel Castro and Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Gabo) were close friends. This book claims to be the story of their relationship, but does it do it justice? […]
The discoverer of the New World
A review of ‘The Invention of Nature’ by Andrea Wulf On 16 July 1799 a revolutionary thinker arrived in Latin America. Unlike most Europeans who had preceded him to the continent, he didn’t believe in slavery and he promoted the rights of indigenous people. He saw mining for gold and silver for the exploitation it […]
The General in his Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
I revisited this novel after reading the new biography of Simon Bolívar by Marie Arana, because after her factual description of what is known about the last weeks of Bolívar’s life, it seemed only appropriate to see them as re-imagined by García Márquez. I would strongly recommend the combination of books for anyone interested in […]
Utopias?
Shangri-La and El Dorado: hoped-for earthly utopias, searched for but never quite found. Last month offered glimpses of the real stories of both, through the debut of the restored version of John Noel’s 1924 film The Epic of Everest and the British Museum’s exhibition Beyond El Dorado. Though separated by almost 400 years, the searches […]
The Robber of Memories
The Robber of Memories by Michael Jacobs, Granta, 2012. Colombia’s Magdalena River could claim to be the second most important in South America after the Amazon. In some ways it’s more important, if a judgement hinges on the Spanish conquest and its aftermath, since the Magdalena allowed the invaders to reach the Andean regions where […]
‘Don’t let them take it’
On 28 May six men, some of them armed, arrived at a farm in the Bolívar province of Colombia, called Finca Alemania, asking for Julia Torres. A few days before, men dressed in black had been seen crossing the farm. In rural Colombia, such warning signs are taken very seriously. Julia’s husband, Rogelio Martinez, was […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on