Torrijos

The Man and The Myth

By Gabriel García Márquez

2007

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

112

Number of Pages

3H25M

Audio Length

In the annals of Latin American politics, Omar Torrijos of Panama was a David against Goliath, a charismatic leader who challenged the landed oligarchy and redistributed land and wealth. He died tragically in a 1981 plane crash widely rumored to be the work of the CIA. This unique, intensely personal homage by two giant talents—the great Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide and the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez—shows Torrijos as the man behind the story. Never-before-published photographs and never-before-told personal reminiscences offer up candles of memory and understanding and a correction to history. Torrijos’ friend describes a moody, lonely president drinking whiskey all night, and in pre-dawn, summoning one of six different women he knew to keep away the demons. In their eyes, Torrijos is understood not as a dictator who silenced opposition, closed the media, ran up debt, and turned a blind eye to corruption, but as a flawed hero in the footsteps of Simon the first leader to advocate for the poor, yet an innovator in schools and jobs who lured foreign investment to create a regional financial center, and a historical giant whose greatest legacy to his people was the Canal Treaty, signed with President Jimmy Carter in 1977.This is a memoir about a man ahead of his time. Graciela Iturbide has received many honors, including a W. Eugene Smith Grant in 1987 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988, published numerous books, and has held major exhibitions around the world. One of the world’s greatest writers and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth-century literature, Colombian-born Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Author

Gabriel García Márquez

Author · 128 books

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. García Márquez, familiarly known as "Gabo" in his native country, was considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He studied at the University of Bogotá and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best-known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in order to explain real experiences. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo, and most of them express the theme of solitude. Having previously written shorter fiction and screenplays, García Márquez sequestered himself away in his Mexico City home for an extended period of time to complete his novel Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. The author drew international acclaim for the work, which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. García Márquez is credited with helping introduce an array of readers to magical realism, a genre that combines more conventional storytelling forms with vivid, layers of fantasy. Another one of his novels, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), or Love in the Time of Cholera, drew a large global audience as well. The work was partially based on his parents' courtship and was adapted into a 2007 film starring Javier Bardem. García Márquez wrote seven novels during his life, with additional titles that include El general en su laberinto (1989), or The General in His Labyrinth, and Del amor y otros demonios (1994), or Of Love and Other Demons. (Arabic: جابرييل جارسيا ماركيز) (Hebrew: גבריאל גארסיה מרקס)