Mexico spied on Garcia Marquez for pro-Cuban, pro-Soviet stance

Oct 19, 2009, 17:14 GMT

Mexico City - Mexican police opened a file on Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982, as 'pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet' and a 'propaganda agent' of communist Cuba, according to files published by Mexican daily El Universal on Monday.

The newspaper reported Sunday that the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude among many other works had been spied on by Mexico from the mid-1960s to at least the 1980s. The Colombian-born Garcia Marquez settled in Mexico in the early 1960s.

El Universal documented how in March 1982 - months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - a report pointed to Garcia Marquez's decision to give Cuban authorities the full rights over his work Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

'The above confirms that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, besides being pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet, is a propaganda agent in the service of the intelligence department of that country (Cuba),' according to the document issued by Mexico's old political police.

Another document records the arrival at Mexico City airport in the morning of April 30, 1980 of a Soviet-made plane that was coming in from Cuba to pick up 'Gabo.'

'This plane was sent to Mexico to especially to pick up Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian writer, under personal instructions of Fidel Castro Ruz, so he could attend the May 1 celebrations in Havana,' the report said.

Garcia Marquez requested asylum in Mexico in March 1981, but Mexico refused to grant it 'for lack of elements to consider that he was being persecuted by Colombian military authorities,' the documents said.

He was however granted protection by Mexican authorities.