Gabriel García Márquez

Photo by Colita

Interview

Gabriel García Márquez: 'I felt close to him immediately'

This article is more than 10 years oldSusanna Rustin

Translator Edith Grossman believes Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the great novels of the 20th century

Susanna Rustin

Saturday 26 April 2026

In Memory of My Parents / The Late Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha

 

Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha

In Memory of My Parents, 

the Late Gabriel García Márquez and 

Mercedes Barcha

Rodrigo Garcia Shares Formative Memories 

of His Mother and Father

By Rodrigo García

August 2, 2021

Most of my father’s drafts of work-in-progress were salvaged by my mother behind his back, because he was strictly against showing or preserving unfinished work. Many times during our childhood, my brother and I were summoned to sit on the floor of his study and help him rip up entire previous versions and throw them out—an unhappy image, I am sure, for collectors and students of his process. His papers and his reference library went to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and my mom took great pleasure in the opening ceremonies of that collection. Both my brother’s family and mine were there, and she enjoyed and took shelter in the company of her grandchildren. 

 

Gabriel García Márquez

Who is Susana Cato, with whom Gabriel García Márquez had a daughter?

BIOGRAPHYJanuary 17, 2022

The journalist Gustavo Tatis confirmed the information that was revealed about the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had a daughter, Indira Cato, daughter also of the writer Susana Cato, the young woman studied Dramatic Literature and Theater at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

García Márquez Had Secret Mexican Daughter

Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian Author García Márquez Had Secret Mexican Daughter

Márquez died in Mexico City in 2014, where thousands of his readers lined up to see his casket in a concert hall

BIOGRAPHY

Astrid Suárez

January 17, 2022

For decades renowned Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez kept the public from knowing about an intimate aspect of his life: He had a daughter with a Mexican writer, with whom he had an extramarital affair in the early 1990s.

Rodrigo García / A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes / Review

 

A warm homage filled with both fond and painful memories.

An account of the days of a remarkable couple.

In a slender, affectionate memoir, film director and screenwriter Garcia pays tribute to his father, Nobel Prize–winning author Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), and his mother, Mercedes Barcha, who died in 2020. His father’s life, Garcia reflects, seemed to him “one of the most fortunate and privileged” ever enjoyed by a Latin American. Yet Garcia was impelled to make “a deliberate, if unconscious choice” to distance himself from his father’s fame by living and working in Los Angeles. He traveled frequently to Mexico during his father’s final years, when García Márquez descended into dementia, able to recall only those whom he saw daily—a secretary, driver, cook, and, of course, his beloved wife. When Garcia and his brother visited, he looked at them “with uninhibited curiosity” but no recognition. The man they were speaking to, though welcoming, was “hardly there at all.” However, his death, while expected, still felt like a shock. “Beyond the sadness,” Garcia writes, “is the disbelief that such an exuberant, expansive man, forever intoxicated with life and with the travails of the living, has been extinguished.” When his mother died six years later, the sense of loss was compounded. “The death of the second parent is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that has always been there,” he writes. “It has vanished, with its religion, its customs, its own peculiar habits and rituals, big and small. The echo remains.” Although his parents were determined to keep their personal lives private from inquiring journalists and literary fans, Garcia recounts in sensitive detail his father’s last days. “My father,” he writes, “complained that one of the things he hated most about death was that it was the only aspect of his life he would not be able to write about.” His son sensitively completes the story, and he includes family photos.

A warm homage filled with both fond and painful memories.

KIRKUS

Mercedes Barcha, Gabriel García Márquez, Gonzalo and Rodrigo.

 

A Letter to My Father, Gabriel García Márquez

Not a day goes by that I don’t come across a reference to your novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It’s impossible not to speculate about what you would have made of all this.

Carta a mi padre, Gabriel García Márquez

Gabo,

April 17 was the sixth anniversary of your death, and the world has gone on largely as it always has, with human beings behaving with stunning and creative cruelty, sublime generosity and sacrifice, and everything in between.

Michael Jacobs's top 10 Colombian stories

The author recommends books to better understand a country whose traumatic history is balanced by life-affirming exuberance

Michael Jacobs
Wed 5 Dec 2012 13.01 GMT

Alife-long passion for the Hispanic world first led me to Colombia, together with a fascination with the early explorers of the New World, from the conquistadors to the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The latter conveyed for me a sense of wonder and awe I would later find in the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, whose novels encouraged my belief in travel literature as a poetic transformation of reality.

Top 10 books about Colombia

There is more to this rich and varied country than Gabriel García Márquez, coffee and its violent past. Novelist Julianne Pachico shares her favourite books about her childhood home

 

Julianne Pachico
Wednesday 5 May 2011

G

rowing up in Colombia in the 1990s, I rarely saw any tourists. That has changed dramatically in the past decade, especially following a historic peace deal with the Farc in 2016. My novel The Anthill examines the transformation of Medellín from a war-torn city wracked by violence into a trendy, rapidly gentrifying destination for digital nomads, bitcoin investors and self-righteous religious groups. But the past is never easily shed.

The Incredible Adventures of Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez

Paco Junquera

The Incredible Adventures 

of Gabriel García Márquez

BY LINDA RODRIGUEZ MCROBBIE
MARCH 6, 2018

Gabriel García Márquez (the subject of today's Google Doodle) was born 91 years ago—on March 6, 1927—and grew up in Aracataca, Colombia, a hardscrabble banana town that was barely a stop on the railway. His father, an undereducated telegraph operator, had fallen in love with a girl beyond his status—the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía. Her family vigorously opposed their union, but that only strengthened the couple's resolve to marry. They maintained a secret relationship, communicating by telegraph and passed notes and stealing moments together at Mass. In 1926, after a priest lobbied the family on their behalf, the pair finally married. They had their first child, Gabriel, in 1927. Only a few months later, they left him to live with his grandparents while they moved to the port city of Barranquilla to open a pharmacy.

Living With Gabriel García Márquez’s Ghost

García Márquez in Barcelona

Living With 

Gabriel García 

Márquez’s Ghost

When You Discover Gabo Once Inhabited Your Barcelona Apartment

Lucia Benavices
June 12, 2018

It wasn’t until a year after moving into my Barcelona apartment that I learned Gabriel García Márquez once lived here too.

It was early March, on what would have been his 91st birthday. A journalist friend was doing research for a piece about the years García Márquez spent in Barcelona when she came across an old 2014 article that mentioned the two homes he lived in during his time here. My phone buzzed with the news.

García Márquez / Love and Solitude

Love and Solitude

On the eve of the publication of his latest novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez—Gabo, as he’s known—talks to Pete Hamill in Cuba about fame, power, solitude, love, an his best friend, Fidel Castro.


BY PETE HAMILL

JULY 14, 2011

In the lobby of the Hotel Capri, the ghosts of fifties gangsters are moving among the delegates of the ninth Havana film festival. The bulletin board announces screenings of movies about political torture. A Havanatur kiosk offers day-trips to the Hemingway Museum and Lenin Park. From the tourist shop which sells cigars and needlepoint portraits of Che Guevara, a compact man a few months short of sixty emerges with newspapers under his arm. He glances at his watch, then starts across the lobby.

“Gabo. . .”

Remembering Mercedes Barcha, partner and muse of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha

Remembering Mercedes Barcha, 

partner and muse of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She passed away on Saturday at the age of 87

Web Desk

August 16, 2020 20:56 IST

Mercedes Barcha Pardo, widow of renowned Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, passed away on Saturday at the age of 87. Garcia Marquez's nephew, Gabriel Torres Garcia, confirmed the news.

Mercedes and Garcia Marquez—affectionately called as Gabo or Gabito—were married for 56 years, until he passed away at the age of 87, in 2014. The couple had two sons—Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha.

Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos (l) and his Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto (r) stand next to the urn containing the ashes of late Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico City. EDGARD GARRIDO / REUTERS

Thousands turn out to give “Gabo” a final farewell

Even in death, author Gabriel García Márquez was able to bring world leaders together

Juan Cruz / Juan Diego Quesada

Mexico City, 22 April 2014

Family members, friends and politicians bade a fond farewell to the man considered the most important Spanish-language author of the 20th century in Mexico City on Monday.

Mercedes Barcha, the widow of Gabriel García Márquez, who died on Thursday at age 87, arrived at the capital's Palace of Fine Arts with her husband’s ashes shortly after 4pm. The audience – all wearing yellow roses, his personal favorite – broke out into spontaneous applause as soon as she entered carrying the cherrywood urn. The ovation lasted for four minutes, a tribute to the affection held for Colombian-born literary genius.

A group of musicians began strumming a vallenato tune – Colombian Caribbean folk music that he was typically fond of – as people swayed and danced in their seats. At the entrance, about 10,000 fans and devotees who had waited for hours to say goodbye cheered: “Long live Gabo.”

Even in death, this universal Colombian, who made Mexico City his home for decades but never gave up his nationality, broke down barriers. In the Palace of Fine Arts he was awarded honors that had previously only been reserved for Mexico’s most illustrious children: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Cantinflas and María Félix all had their official funerals here.

Gabo, as he was known, also accomplished in death what he set out to do in life: bring heads of state together, especially from countries with differences. In this case, no major controversies exist between Mexico and Colombia – both are solid trading partners – but his funeral marked the first time that two sitting heads of state had come together for such a solemn ceremony at the Palace of Fine Arts.

“What a privilege it is to call him a compatriot,” said Colombian President Santos

Both arriving late – something that García Márquez would never have tolerated – Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto and Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos stood momentarily next to the urn containing the ashes of the late Nobel Prize laureate. García Márquez had made Mexico City his home in the 1960s and it was here that he wrote his greatest work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in the early part of that decade.

Flanking the author’s widow during the non-religious ceremony, the two presidents took their places.

“What a privilege it is to call him a compatriot,” Santos said, describing him as the “most Colombian of all Colombians.”

“May this person who gave us the most glory have eternal glory,” he said.

But it was Peña Nieto’s address that drew the most expectation. It is still fresh in many Mexicans’ minds how their president stumbled a few years back when he was asked by a reporter to list the last three books that had influenced his life. The interview occurred during the International Book Fair in Guadalajara at the height of the presidential campaign – Peña Nieto had trouble naming one.

This time the Mexican president did not slip up. In fact, his remarks were peppered with anecdotes. Calling the writer “the greatest Latin American novelist of all time,” he pointed out that García Márquez died on the same day as 17th-century writer Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz.

“García Márquez held the best conversations through his books,” noted one admirer

Gabriel García Márquez died on Holy Thursday April 17 at his home in Mexico City where he had been receiving palliative care. He was surrounded by his family.

Even though he died far from his birthplace, he never forgot Aracataca, Colombia. Besides Mexico, he also lived in exile in Barcelona and Paris and traveled the world with his wife, who was always by his side.

People began gathering outside the Palace of Fine Arts early Monday morning for the public viewing of the ashes. The entrance was flanked by two gigantic black and white posters of the Colombian author together with the dates: 1927-2014.

Liliana Aguilar, an engineering student, was one of the first to arrive. Visibly saddened by García Márquez’s death, she forgot her own grief for a moment to recall how the novelist was able to capture “that Latin American sadness” in his works.

Husband and wife Eleoní Rivera and Flor Cabrera also arrived early. In his honor, they both wore guayaberas –a formal shirt worn in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean that Gabo customarily donned. They recalled how they ran into García Márquez on January 1, 2009 in Havana during the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. It was at the ballet and Rivera went up to greet Gabo who was surrounded by photographers and journalists. What did he tell him?

“Not much,” recalled Rivera, “but he held the best conversations through his books.”

The group Guatapurí de Valledupar broke the solemnity by adding a festive note with their vallenato numbers. The music even brought smiles to the faces of the grieving family. It is what Gabriel García Márquez would have wanted.

EL PAÍS

Gabriel García Márquez speaks to reporters outside his home in Mexico City on his birthday March 6, 2014.EDGARD GARRIDO / REUTERS

The last days of García Márquez

The family of the Nobel Prize-winning author fiercely guarded his private life to the end

Juan Cruz
Mexico City, 21 April 2014

It was 12.08pm on Holy Thursday when the literary world lost Gabriel García Márquez. The official cause of his death was a heart attack, but the Nobel Prize-winning author had been in poor health for some time.

Just a week prior to his passing, García Márquez was admitted to a Mexico City hospital suffering from a lung infection. After his doctors treated him for bronchitis, they recommended that his family take him home and begin administering palliative care. During this period, a physician visited him three times a day. And when the moment came, he was surrounded by his wife, Mercedes Barcha, two sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, and five grandchildren.

Despite ongoing speculation about the real causes of his death, the family has chosen to remain silent. This was “Gabo,” a private man whose wishes no doubt are being respected by his widow; Gabriel García Márquez died at 87, and that is all that needs to be said.

He celebrated his last birthday on March 6 when he appeared in public for the final time. In 1999, the Colombian-born literary great was treated for cancer in Los Angeles where his son, Rodrigo, a filmmaker, lives. There was much speculation then; his memory also seemed to be failing him at times. Was it because he was suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia? With the rumors circulating, his family went on with their lives. García Márquez continued to attend literary gatherings and weddings (he recently showed up at the inauguration of a bowling alley built by a friend), and accompanied Mercedes to music concerts and recitals.

García Márquez died, and that is all that needs to be said

And each year – as had been his custom since 2006 when he turned 80, and when he would begin to admit that he was forgetting things – García Márquez, with a yellow rose on his lapel, emerged from his Mexico City home on his birthday to celebrate with neighbors.

Throughout his later years, García Márquez – surrounded by admirers as well as gawkers – was always present in the most festive environments in both Cartagena, Colombia and Mexico City. He drew in others who may not have been familiar with his works and, as he had with his fans, won their affection, perhaps because of his Caribbean-style wit and humor. At times he would read his works aloud, as if he were trying to restructure them. And then he would ask someone nearby: “You think I was stoned when I wrote this?”, before bursting out laughing.

By this time, the frivolity of fame that came with One Hundred Years of Solitude was no longer important. As he once told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in his work The Fragrance of Guava: “My life nearly fell to pieces […] the sense of reality seemed to bother me, perhaps just as much as having power; at the same time, your private life is constantly under threat. Tragically, no one realizes this until it happens to them.”

The frivolity of fame that came with ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was no longer important

García Márquez sought refuge inside the biggest home he had ever owned, on 144 Calle Fuego in Mexico City’s San Ángel suburb. A few days before his death, a close family friend confirmed his frail health: “I don’t wish to survive him.”

Little by little, the illness and its effects, as well as the recurring memory lapses, helped prepare Gabo for his long farewell. He withdrew from the commitments he enjoyed most, such as writing and working with the organization he founded 20 years ago dedicated to Spanish-language journalism, the New Journalism Foundation; he retired on his own terms.

On Monday, thousands of Mexicans and Colombians will gather to say goodbye to one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in an unprecedented ceremony at Mexico City’s prestigious Palace of Fine Arts where two sitting presidents from two nations will pay their respects.

García Márquez once said: “The worst thing about death is that it is forever.” But his life and works remain immortal.

EL PAÍS

Gabriel García Márquez’s passport in 1955. HARRY RANSOM CENTER

When Gabriel García Márquez wanted to be a foreign correspondent in Madrid

BIOGRAPHY

English version by Asia London Paloma

J.A. Aunion

Bogotá, 26 April 2019

When the young journalist Gabriel García Márquez was forced to leave Colombia in 1955 – he had upset the government of dictator Rojas Pinilla with a series of articles linking smuggling to a boat accident that involved members of the military – he was forced to live in exile in Europe, wandering through cities such as Geneva, Rome and Paris, according to his biographer Dasso Saldívar.

It appears that García Márquez could have established himself professionally in Madrid

ÁLVARO SANTANA ACUÑA,  RESEARCHER AT WHITMAN COLLEGE

In 1955, a young García Márquez also traveled to Madrid, which at the time was the capital of the Francisco Franco dictatorship, and asked El Espectador, a newspaper in the Colombian capital Bogotá, if he could remain as a foreign correspondent.

“It was one of the ideas he proposed to his bosses in Colombia at that time. It’s still a little unclear and needs to be studied more, but it appears that García Márquez could have established himself professionally in Madrid,” explains Álvaro Santana Acuña, a researcher at the Whitman College in Washington.

Gabriel García Márquez in May 1996 in Madrid. SANTI BURGOS

Gabriel García Márquez’s attention to detail, remembered 20 years on

Journalist who worked with the Nobel winner on ‘News of a Kidnapping’ recalls making of the book

English version by Heather Galloway

Javier Lafuente
Bogotá, 30 September 2016

Darío Arizmendi, director of Caracol Radio’s morning show 6AM, got hold of Luzangela Arteaga, who was scarcely 30 years old at the time, hauled her out of the production studio and told her: “I am a great friend of Gabo, he’s working on something special, I don’t know what, but he asked me if I could find him someone who’s good on detail, who is reserved, someone special. I thought of you. You’re going to Cartagena tomorrow.”

“Just like that, out of the blue, the master storyteller came into my life,” says Arteaga.

Alberto Salcedo Ramos / Macondo in the Soul

CHRONICLE

Macondo in the Soul

By Alberto Salcedo Ramos

Translated by Arthur Dixon
Alberto Salcedo / Macondo en el alma

May 2018

The Casa del Hielo, at the corner of Barrio Boston, Aracataca. I begin the story of the real Macondo at the same point where the story of the fictional Macondo begins. Travelers from all over the world visit this place from time to time, admirers of Gabriel García Márquez who hope to find here, in the town where he was born, tangible elements of his literary universe.

Alberto Salcedo Ramos / Popular Culture, the Colombian Chronicle, and North American Journalism

Colombian journalist Alberto Salcedo Ramos on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.

Alberto Salcedo Ramos: Popular Culture, the Colombian Chronicle, and North American Journalism

A Conversation with Luvia Estrella Morales Rodríguez

Alberto Salcedo Ramos / Cultura popular, crónica colombiana y periodismo norteamericano

May 2018

Alberto Salcedo Ramos is intelligent, observant, and anchored in literature, as is demonstrated by this interview, which took place in Kaufman Hall, the designated building for learning modern languages, literatures, and linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. The conversation began in a spontaneous way during the beginning of the Tierra Tinta Conference where Salcedo Ramos participated as keynote speaker.  The questions are centered on his book El oro y la oscuridad: La vida gloriosa y trágica de Kid Pambelé [Gold and darkness: The glorious and tragic life of Kid Pambelé] (2005), which earned the chronicler Le Prix du Livre du Réel (2017), in France, awarded by Les Éditions Marchialy. It should be mentioned that the book in question served as the inspiration and basis for the television program Kid Pambelé (2017) by Channel RCN in Colombia. During the interview, the chronicler reveals his acute knowledge of popular culture, he tells about his methodology for writing chronicles, and he gives us the opportunity to get to know him as a man of letters.

Gabriel García Márquez / 'What a kind and always funny man he was'

'The story of his life and career is as beautifully shaped and fabular as one of his stories' – Goldman on García Márquez. Photograph: Atonatiuh Bracho/Viva Photography

Gabriel García Márquez: 'What a kind and always funny man he was' 

BIOGRAPHY

American novelist Francisco Goldman on how the life and work of the late Nobel-prizewinning author have inspired him


Francisco Goldman

Saturday 26 April 2014

I

was about 14, at home, sick from school, the day my mother came into my bedroom to read to me, in Spanish, from a novel that she said was one of the saddest novels she'd ever read. The book's title, Cien años de soledad, did sound pretty sad. The novel didn't exist in English yet, and while the translation I made in my head that day might have been the same literal one as the title, translated by Gregory Rabassa, that would become so famous, mine that day was something closer to "A hundred years of loneliness" – yeah, that sounds like my junior high-school life.

That would have been the first time I'd heard the name Gabriel García Márquez. I don't remember what passage my mother read. The novel was sad, but also exciting to her, because Macondo, the fictional town in the novel inspired by the Colombian one that García Márquez was from, reminded her of her family's village on the Guatemalan south coast. Thanks to Cien años de soledad, my mother discovered a mythological grandeur in her family's backwater roots and misfortune, because from then on she relished those stories in a new way: the deaf-dumb fortuneteller who'd induced my penniless Spanish-immigrant grandfather to become a cattle rustler; "the most beautiful Indian girl in the village" who became his adolescent bride and died in childbirth and from whom we are all descended, though her name has somehow been forgotten …

Years later, when I began to hear people speaking, sometimes bitterly, about García Márquez's magical realism as if it were kind of frivolous literary confection, "fairy dust", mocking his "flying grandmothers", I would wonder what they were talking about. Why didn't they understand or had forgotten that his novels, for all their enchantment and occasional extravagance, were also, as my mother had first taught me, among the saddest ever written? But I understood where the anger came from, though none of it was García Márquez's fault. Europe and the United States had turned "magical realism" into an absurd cartoon, the supposedly "authentic" way that Latin Americans were supposed to write if they wanted to be read outside of Latin America, resulting in an act of cultural vandalism against all the other serious Spanish-language writers who came after García Márquez and who didn't write that way. In the US, even our Latino writers were held hostage to that stereotype. No wonder that magical realism became practically a dirty word among Spanish-language writers at the same time that it influenced and inspired writers in other languages all over the world.

 García Márquez with Fidel Castro. Photograph: Jose Goitia/AP

Over the last few days, since Gabo's death, I've had one conversation after the other, some actually face to face instead of via social media, with old friends, newer ones, and with the young Latin American writers living in New York whom I met the night he died, about García Márquez and his books. Across the generations, the same notes are repeatedly sounded. Everyone remembers what they felt upon first reading him, usually in adolescence, and long to read him that way again. What came between García Márquez and his readers? Fame, first, to an outlandish degree. When we see political criminals like the former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari reminiscing about his friendship with "Gabo" in the pages of El País, that intimate communication between reader and author, conducted within the pages of his books, a space we want to keep pure if not innocent, feels, however unfairly, sullied. I've never been bothered by Gabo's close friendship with Fidel Castro – two icons, great men in the old sense, of a vanished era; even if you consider the comandante politically reprehensible, you can't deny that he has a historical weightiness that no novelist should need to justify being fascinated by. If it's true that you couldn't pay me even to have a cup of coffee with the current Mexican president, maybe that's more indicative of something regrettable in my own spirit than of anything else. I felt chastened when I read what Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto, who knew Gabo well, wrote a few days ago: "Drawn to power? Yes, without a doubt: hypnotised by power, unquestionably and unaccountably, openly. Everything attracted his voracious curiosity and hunger for the world." I got to know Gabo just well enough to know that that last phrase is true. Gabo and his wife Mercedes, as Alma also writes in El País, could also be tireless partyers. Only a few years ago I saw them, accompanied by their friends, charging in and out of Cartagena bars, practically doing the rumba, at three in the morning.When I was in my early 20s, I passed up a two-year scholarship on a prestigious MFA in creative writing programme – practically a guarantee in the US to a secure and peaceful university-tenured writing life – to accept the commission of one freelance journalism article in Central America, then descending into its long decade of cold war-fanned warfare. I was looking for my own place in the world and knew that would be a place I was going to need, in certain ways, to invent on my own, fusing the two parts of my world, the US and Central America, into a single "place" that I could write about. But I wanted, also, to be like García Márquez – to write fiction, but to be engaged in the world too, and to be a journalist, like Gabo. Being a reporter was the best profession in the world, he liked to say, and also that journalism should be practised as "another branch of literature".

Coming of age in the shadow of literary titans who were also romantic cheerleaders for the revolutionary left, not just García Márquez, but Neruda, Cortázar, Fuentes and so on, my generation of Latin American writers would be more characterised by political disillusionment. The greatest of us, Roberto Bolaño, born a year before me, scorned those who led young idealists into tragic militancy that inevitably resulted in death or exile. "We fought for parties," wrote Bolaño, "that, had they emerged victorious, would have immediately sent us to a forced-labour camp." Very early on, during my Central American education, leftist derision of Jorge Luis Borges provided an early inoculation against the fanaticism of the left that never wore off. The murder of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton by his fellow guerrillas was an early lesson in nihilistic treachery.

Whatever controversies Gabo's cold war politics once engendered feel beside the point now. None of those politicised writers, on the left or on the Thatcher-Reagan right, had a formula for solving Latin America's social ills. Nowadays, probably most Latin American writers reject the public political intellectual role, and I don't think that's wrong either. Cuba's repression of some personal freedoms is abhorrent; but to be poor in Cuba is to have a much better quality of life than a poor person in Guatemala, that's for sure, or even in Mexico. Every day, the US looks more like a 1980s Latin American oligarchy than a modern democracy. All the arguments go on chasing their tails. Chile's new generation of rising young leftists is doing just fine without any literary celebrity attached to their cause.

 Gabriel García Márquez with a fan in Colombia, in 2007. Photograph: Ballesteros/EPA

García Márquez's truest political legacy is the journalism school, the New Journalism Foundation (FNPI), that he founded in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1994, and that has, ever since, been bringing together young journalists from all over Latin America. If the crónica – long-form journalism – is currently one of Latin America's most vital literary genres, the FNPI has played a fomenting role in that. As one of the best of those alumni, the young Salvadoran Óscar Martínez, author of the precocious masterpiece, The Beast, wrote a few days ago on the foundation's Facebook page: "Never forget that many of we journalists working our beats here and there are who we are in great measure thanks to what you've done with Gabo's legacy." It's significant that the FNPI has taken workshops all over Latin America, but never to Cuba. I've had the privilege of teaching a few workshops there, and an administrator once confided to me that they had decided, for all of Gabo's closeness to Fidel, that to bring the school to Cuba would be a betrayal of its role as uncompromising advocate of a free press. Gabo once said to me: "The world is in such a mess that only good journalists can save it." I believe that this, certainly in the final decades of his life, was his most abiding political conviction.

There is a book – a fat, dishevelled paperback held together with tape – that I value more than any other I own. In some ways, this book is what I had instead of an MFA programme. And it came to me at just the right time, during my first year or so in Guatemala, writing freelance journalism and trying to begin a novel, when my fledgling writing had ground to a halt. How to transform so much violence, injustice, tragedy, sadness, anger and guilt into fiction, and why even try? It's a crazy, obsessive, 650‑page book written by one young literary genius who was determined to understand the genius of another somewhat older writer, to take that genius apart by hand like a fabulous clock and put it back together again in words. It has never been translated into English, probably because the two writers later had a falling out, and the younger is maybe embarrassed now by its occasionally fawning and breathless tone. I bought it in a Guatemala City bookstore around 1980, Mario Vargas Llosa's García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio – The story of a deicide. I took it with me when I went up to Lake Atitlán to be alone for a few days, and I remember sprawling on the lakeside outside my hotel until it became too dark to read. It describes the young Gabo's struggles with "the historical demon" of Colombia's horrific political violence – a period known as la violencia, when 300,000 people were killed in less than 10 years – and the pressure he and other writers were under to write in a politically "responsible" and "realistic" way. If he were to follow those prescriptions, he wrote, his fiction would be "a catalogue of cadavers". The book is packed full of nuggets of writerly wisdom, many formulated by a young García Márquez exploring his own vocation. In 1960, in a magazine essay titled "One or two things about the novel of la violencia", he wrote that the novelists writing as "witnesses" of la violencia had so far failed because "they were in the presence of a great novel, but they didn't have the serenity or patience, not even the astuteness to take the time they needed to learn to write it." And he continued: "Probably the most common mistake made by those who've tried to write about la violencia was to have tried – out of inexperience or voraciousness – to grab the radish by the leaves," filling their fiction with descriptions of "the decapitated, the castrated, raped women, mutilated genitals and disembowelments", forgetting that "the novel isn't found in the dead … but in the living sweating ice in their hiding places."

"I write every day," says Gabo in the book, "even on Sundays, from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon … While the work lasts – and One Hundred Years of Solitude took more than 18 months – there is not one minute of the day or night that I think of any other thing." The real work of a novel is the search, through patient word and structural craft, for a form that, Vargas Llosa emphasises, transforms reality, replaces reality with an autonomous one of its own. In his epigraph to the book, Vargas Llosa cites Conrad, "circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric … a mad art attempting the inconceivable". Perhaps there, with that combination of artistic discipline and impossible but ceaseless quest in mind, we find the García Márquez that still feels modern, as much as Borges and Bolaño still, and seemingly forever, do.

But what a kind and always funny man he was. Unexpectedly, I was pulled into his orbit when, in Mexico City, his nearly lifelong friend, Alvaro Mutis – who died last year – became a sort of mentor and, along with his wife Carmen, a friend to me. Eventually, also in Mexico City, long before I ever met his father, Gabo's son Gonzalo became one of my closest friends, so much so that he was a best man at my wedding to Aura in 2005. When my father died, in 2003, Gonzalo sent me a boxed edition of Living to Tell the Tale, drolly signed by Gabo, "From someone who also writes". In 2008, at a time when his health was beginning to weaken, Gabo appeared by my side at the Guadalajara Book Fair to announce the literary prize my friends and I were founding in honor of Aura, who had died in a swimming accident in 2007, and it was Gabo's participation that put the prize on the map in Mexico.

He was a beguiling mixture of garrulous raconteur and shy, childlike spirit. How gentle and also, to my surprise, fragile he seemed to me when I first met him, with his head of grey curls, his soft voice and sensitive yet direct gaze; his hands seemingly always moving, skittishly elegant. He created an air, especially when he was with his family, of bemused, affectionate calm around him. My favourite memory will probably always be of an afternoon, about 10 years ago, with Gonzalo, Alvaro Mutis and Gabo, the two elders teasing each other about old age like a pair of old Rat Pack comedians – "Jaja, looking at your droopy old man's ass!" – and entertaining each other, for hours, reciting poetry, first the often corny and ornate poetry they'd been made to memorise as students in Colombia, and then Golden Age poetry, and finishing off with an encore of García Lorca sonnets. "Listen," said Gabo, "to the mysterious density that every great sonnet has, the way every two lines seem to enclose a separate poem." I sat, listening, stunned and humbled by the prodigious memories and passion of those two great maestros.

THE GUARDIAN