BajaNomad

Adios A Carlos Fuentes!

DavidE - 5-15-2012 at 04:55 PM

Just got the nofification on my uninoticias cellphone subscription.

A true Mexican. Another of my personal heroes.

Disfrute de Carlitos el cielo. Que cuelgan de color rojo, verde y banderas blancas para su llegada.

May they hang red, green and white banners for your arrival.

DENNIS - 5-15-2012 at 05:09 PM

DEP Carlos............I enjoyed your writing, but can't say as much for your politics. You made Karl Marx look like he was a board member of the John Birch Society.
If I ever get over to the left side of heaven, we'll have a beer together.....then, send me back where I belong.

DavidE - 5-15-2012 at 05:17 PM

Dennis,

Mira a billete de 500 pesos. A Las Dos Lados.

Bajatripper - 5-15-2012 at 08:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by DavidE
Just got the nofification on my uninoticias cellphone subscription.

A true Mexican. Another of my personal heroes.

Disfrute de Carlitos el cielo. Que cuelgan de color rojo, verde y banderas blancas para su llegada.

May they hang red, green and white banners for your arrival.


I read on Wikipedia that he was born in Panama, which surprised me. I attended a book signing of his once, a real interesting guy. RIP, Carlos.

bajajazz - 5-16-2012 at 10:27 AM

I found his fiction overblown, verbose and tiresome. However, his recounting of the Tletaloco (spelling?) massacre in 1968 was honest and right on the money, up there with the account written by Oriana Falacci, an Italian journalist who was wounded in the slaughter by the Mexican Army.

Mexico owes a debt of shame for that horrible event for which it has never been asked to pay a price.

DENNIS - 5-16-2012 at 10:33 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by bajajazz
I found his fiction overblown, verbose and tiresome. However, his recounting of the Tletaloco (spelling?) massacre in 1968 was honest and right on the money, up there with the account written by Oriana Falacci, an Italian journalist who was wounded in the slaughter by the Mexican Army.

Mexico owes a debt of shame for that horrible event for which it has never been asked to pay a price.


I thought it was Elena Poniatowska who wrote the definitive report on that event. It's the only one I ever read:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Poniatowska

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading writer and intellectual, died Tuesday

Gypsy Jan - 5-16-2012 at 12:42 PM

By JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA

MEXICO CITY-Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading writer and intellectual, died Tuesday, depriving the nation of its most internationally recognized voice.

“Mr. Fuentes, a novelist, poet, diplomat and essayist who wrote more than 30 books, died in a Mexico City hospital where he had gone for treatment for heart problems. He was 83 years old.

His death was first announced by President Felipe Calderón, who lauded him as a "universal Mexican," in a twitter message.

Mr. Fuentes' death inspired messages of admiration from writers and others around the world. "RIP Carlos my friend," wrote novelist Salman Rushdie on his twitter account.

Mr. Fuentes kept active until the very end, writing columns on political developments around the world. His last one, on the French elections, was published on Tuesday in Reforma, Mexico's most influential newspaper.

Mr. Fuentes seemed to despair for Mexico's future. He caused a furor when he called Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, who is widely expected to win the presidency in July elections, too "ignorant" to be president of Mexico.

In the final post on his twitter account last year he lamented "there must be something beyond massacres and barbarism to sustain the existence of the human race," an apparent reference to the drug violence that afflicts Mexico. The same day he wrote "The world is turning very dark."

Among Mr. Fuentes' most well known books are "The Death of Artemio Cruz," about a corrupt soldier, politician, journalist, tycoon and lover, and "The Most Transparent Region in the World," which profiled the new class which took power in Mexico after the Mexican Revolution of 1921. His first novel, "Where the Air is Clear," portrayed the dynamic hustle of an emerging Mexico City. Another novel, "The Old Gringo," was turned into a Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the Colombian writer and a close friend, who along with Mr. Fuentes and Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, helped introduce Latin American literature to a world audience, once said that Mr. Fuentes thought the ideal world would be made up solely of novelists.

"I met him 50 years ago, and we were friends all that time without anything impoverishing our friendship," said Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Nobel prize winning Peruvian journalist, in a statement. "He leaves an enormous body of work which is an eloquent testimony to our great political problems and the cultural realities of our time."

Francisco Goldman, a U.S. writer, remembers being inspired when he took a literature class with Mr. Fuentes at Columbia University in the 1970s. "He was just the most dazzling lecturer," Mr. Goldman said. "I remember him talking about being at the Prague cemetery where Kafka is buried and claiming he could hear the ghosts of demonic cats hissing and snarling."

Jorge Castañeda, an author and former Mexican foreign minister, said, "Mexico loses its voice in the world."

Mr. Fuentes' death signals the ending of an era of the intellectual as a central political actor-a role now largely filled by analysts and economists, rather than writers.

"The figure of the intellectual as beacon for society has been slowly fading," said Mexican intellectual Hector Aguilar Camín, who called Mr. Fuentes Mexico's best living writer, and one of the best in the Spanish world.

He said he planned to reread a few of Mr. Fuentes' books. "That's the ironic thing. In his death, his literature will be reborn as people reread his books again," he said.

Mr. Fuentes was born in 1928 to a diplomat father in Panama, and followed his footsteps into the diplomatic service after obtaining a law degree from Mexico's National Autonomous University.

He wrote novels as he served in Geneva, Switzerland, among other posts.

"He was one of the most important and versatile writers of the boom, and the most cultured," said Carlos Alberto Montaner, a Cuban-born writer and political analyst based in Miami.

Mr. Fuentes served as ambassador to England, where he had a home and spent much of his time. In 1968, he resigned from the Mexican diplomatic service to protest a student massacre. He rejoined the service and served as ambassador to France in 1975, resigning again when Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who had been president during the 1968 massacre was appointed ambassador to Madrid.

"He never toed a party line, any party line," Mr. Castañeda said.

Like many of his colleagues, Mr. Fuentes was an early backer of the Cuban Revolution and was for some years banned from coming to the U.S. During the 1980s, Mr. Fuentes was a strong critic of U.S. policy in Central America, where tens of thousands of people died in civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, as part of the U.S.' Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.

More recently, Mr. Fuentes criticized U.S. immigration policy, and the U.S. war on terrorism. But he has been equally unsparing on some left wing populists such as Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez.

"I am sad for Mexicans," said Deborah Holtz, a publisher in Mexico City. "He was one of the few Mexican voices heard internationally."

Elena P.

bajajazz - 5-16-2012 at 01:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by DENNIS
Quote:
Originally posted by bajajazz
I found his fiction overblown, verbose and tiresome. However, his recounting of the Tletaloco (spelling?) massacre in 1968 was honest and right on the money, up there with the account written by Oriana Falacci, an Italian journalist who was wounded in the slaughter by the Mexican Army.

Mexico owes a debt of shame for that horrible event for which it has never been asked to pay a price.


I thought it was Elena Poniatowska who wrote the definitive report
on that event. It's the only one I ever read:

Dennis -- I believe you're right, Elena P. was out there firstest with the mostest, at the time it took an enormous amount of sheer guts to blow the whistle on that tragedy. And she, I believe, is still going strong, a genuine hero. Falacci's best-known work was about Vietnam, titled, "Nothing, And So Be It."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Poniatowska

DavidE - 5-16-2012 at 01:14 PM

I wish somehow that the "untruth" about el ejército méxicano being involved in the massacre at Tlatelolco would go away, forever. It was garuras, nacos, private individuals, some cop, a few military, body guards, and remnants of los rurales who cowardly fired into the crowd. They were hired by hard-core dinosaures element of PRI.

The "students" who provoked the worst reactions were not peaceful protesters, they were front men for the KGB 4th department. They were not students. These were the agitators who forced students and teachers alike from their classrooms at UNAM. They hijacked city buses,harangued the passengers with marxist rhetoric, released them, and then set the vehicles afire, blocking entrances to the campus. They defaced walls doors and windows with messages like "Karl Marx Reading Room" "CCCP" and "overthrow the capitalist pigs".

Mexican officialdom went nuts and committed the 2nd sin. They over-reacted and started to beat and jail a lot of totally innocent students.

Residents of Mexico, became infuriated at the 2nd sin, and decided to protest at Tlatelolco.

The massacre was orchestrated by Marxists, and performed by evil men preying upon the Mexican near total paranoia of anarchy.

It would have been so easy to prevent Tlatelolco, as easy as it would have been to prevent Kent State.

But it wasn't prevented, and (they) happened.

DENNIS - 5-16-2012 at 01:23 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by DavidE
I wish somehow that the "untruth" about el ejército méxicano being involved in the massacre at Tlatelolco would go away, forever. It was garuras, nacos, private individuals, some cop, a few military, body guards, and remnants of los rurales who cowardly fired into the crowd. They were hired by hard-core dinosaures element of PRI.



And, who was flying the military choppers?
The only real job the military had prior to the drug war was to protect the president. That was their sole function.
Whether or not they performed this atrocity alone, or with hired thugs, they were there.
Diaz Ordaz did this. It was a day of monumental impunity and veiled dictatorship.

DENNIS - 5-16-2012 at 01:26 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Gypsy Jan
Jorge Castañeda, an author and former Mexican foreign minister, said, "Mexico loses its voice in the world."



Fuentes and Castañeda....Mutt and Jeff of the left in Mexico. :lol:

DavidE - 5-16-2012 at 01:35 PM

OK

Porfirio, Ordaz, and Salinas,

Larry, Curly and Moe of the "Right":o

[Edited on 5-16-2012 by DavidE]

DENNIS - 5-16-2012 at 01:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by DavidE
OK

Porfirio, Ordaz, and Salinas,

Larry, Curly and Moe of the "Right":o




Nah....ain't no Left or Right in a dictatorship. Only Alive and Dead.

DavidE - 5-16-2012 at 01:58 PM

They were all puppets on strings manipulated by ideology that had the welfare of the citizen's of Mexico not even appearing on their lista de los mandatos. I just get a little tired of experiencing a choosing of sides when two evils exist --- especially when the choice implies denial of the existence of the other evil, the partner.

For that, Señor Dennis, amigo, is a seedbed of bigotry, and ignorance.