Ezequiel Martínez Estrada

In 1933, responding to the 1930 Argentinian coup by José Félix Uriburu, Martínez Estrada published Radiografía de la pampa, the first of a series of rather pessimistic sociological-psychological-historical essays that would make his reputation.

After the fall of Perón, his health recovered, but still feeling himself a bit of a voice crying in the wilderness, he embarked on a series of writings he called his "catilinarias" (after Cicero's Catiline Orations), a series of acerbic writings directed at the Argentine elite, both in government and among the intellectuals, predicting that Argentina faced a century of "Pre-Peronism, Peronism, and Post-Peronism."

In September 1959, he went on to Mexico, where he remained for a year at the Institute of Political Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and wrote Diferencias y semejanzas entre los países de América Latina (Differences and resemblances among the Latin American countries), a long essay even broader than its title might suggest, in that it also drew parallels to Asia and Africa, and generally cast his lot with the emerging Third World-ist view, condemning imperialism and colonialism and expressing his admiration for the revolution then in progress in Cuba, which proved to be his next destination (although with some brief trips back to Argentina).

From September 1960 until November 1962, Martínez Estrada served as director of the Center for Latin American Studies of Cuba's Casa de las Américas.

With his health beginning to fail, with Cuba expelled from the OAS, and with a need to attend to his own economic affairs, he decided that he "would better serve the revolution from abroad."

The names Nietzsche, Montaigne, and Kafka presumably speak for themselves, but there is also a specifically Latin American theme of skepticism about certain aspects of modernity to be found in his writings.

Writing about 19th-century naturalist Guillermo Enrique Hudson, Martínez Estrada showed himself to be in sympathy with the idea of a return to a more paradisical natural world.