![]() In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one – more than have been born in Europe since 1970. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God’s name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. Since then, the Europeans of good will – and sometimes those of bad, as well – have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. The statue to General Francisco Morazán erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.Įleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold. One founder’s lust for gold beset us until recently. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. ![]() In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. Share via Email: Gabriel García Márquez – Nobel Lecture Share this content via EmailĪntonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy.Share on LinkedIn: Gabriel García Márquez – Nobel Lecture Share this content on LinkedIn.Tweet: Gabriel García Márquez – Nobel Lecture Share this content on Twitter.Share on Facebook: Gabriel García Márquez – Nobel Lecture Share this content on Facebook.
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