Mexican agency spied on Nobel laureate author Márquez

Márquez

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Mexico’s defunct Dirección Federal de Seguridad  (DFS) intelligence agency spied on Colombian-born Nobel laureate author Gabriel García Márquez, according to revelations published in El Universal newspaper. The Mexican daily aired declassified documents allegedly showing that the DFS tapped the author’s home telephone, systematically monitored his whereabouts, and kept a “bulging file” on him spanning several decades. The monitoring began in 1967, when Márquez moved from Colombia to Mexico, and continued until at least 1985. The apparent reason for the spying is that the Mexican state considered the best-selling author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude to be a communist sympathizer and even “a Cuban agent”. In 1982, the year Márquez won the Nobel prize for literature, a DFS document cited his friendship with longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his frequent visits to Cuba, in concluding that “Gabriel García Márquez, besides being pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet, is a propaganda agent at the service of the intelligence agency of that country”. Gabriel García Márquez was not the only prominent Latin American author monitored by the DFS, which in 1989 was renamed Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISN). The agency appears to have also kept tabs on Octavio Paz, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1990, and Salvador Novo, among other intellectuals.