[1] A prolific author despite his early death, El Amauta (from Quechua: hamawt'a, "teacher," a name by which he is also known in his country) is considered one of the greatest scholars of Latin America.

For the sociologist and philosopher Michael Löwy, Mariátegui is "undoubtedly the most vigorous and original Marxist thinker that Latin America has ever known.

In 1909, Mariátegui joined the newspaper La Prensa to perform auxiliary tasks, first as a rejones (folder) and then as a linotypist's assistant.

Using the pseudonym Juan Croniqueur, he ridiculed Lima's frivolity and exhibited a vast self-taught culture, which brought him closer to the avant-garde intellectual and artistic nuclei.

Around that time (which he later contemptuously called his "stone age"), he enthusiastically cultivated poetry but never published his announced collection of poems, Sadness.

Together with the journalist César Falcón and Félix del Valle, he founded the magazine Nuestra Época, in which he criticized militarism and traditional politics but of which only two issues came out.

This newspaper did not have a long life either and was closed by the government of President Augusto B. Leguía, officially for having expressed contempt for members of parliament, although it was most likely due to the growing popular demands that it encouraged.

The researcher Sylvers Malcolm claims that both traveled as "overseas propagandists" of the Leguía government; that both belonged to the Foreign Relations sector; and that they were paid and on scholarships, as was believed for a time.

He linked up with leading writers, studied languages, inquired about new intellectual and artistic concerns, and attended international conferences and meetings.

He was put in charge of the direction of Claridad magazine when its founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the future leader of APRA, was expelled to Mexico as an exile.

At the end of that same year he announced the publication of Vanguardia: Revista Semanal de Renovación Ideológica, co-directed with Félix del Valle, a project that was not carried out but later became the magazine Amauta.

In 1926 he founded the magazine Amauta (wise or teacher in Quechua), which united a broad generation of intellectuals around a new appreciation of national life and gave impetus to the indigenous movement in art and literature.

They were attended by the Peruvian Socialist Party with five delegates who carry Mariátegui's approach: Hugo Pesce, Julio Portocarrero, José Bracamonte (pilot of the National Merchant Marine, founder of the Federation of Crewmen of Peru), Juan Peves (peasant leader of Ica, founder of the Federation of Yanacones) and Carlos Saldías (textile leader).

At the end of March 1930, Mariátegui was admitted to an emergency hospital accompanied by his friends, including Diego San Román Zeballos (creator of the magazine El Poeta Hereje).

In 1955, commemorating the 25th anniversary of his death, he was transferred to a new mausoleum in the same cemetery (a granite mound by the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Gastelu Macho).

Independence is then decided by the needs of capitalist development, in that sense, England played a fundamental role in supporting the nascent American nations.

The official who persists in imposing it would be abandoned and sacrificed by the central power, near which the influences of gamonalism are always omnipotent, acting directly or through parliament, both ways with the same efficiency.

Latin America sold its natural resources and bought manufactured products from Europe, generating a system that mainly benefited the European nations.

Since his return from Europe, Mariátegui subscribed to Marxism, in the Leninist version of the Third International, finding remarkable similarities with the thought of Antonio Gramsci, especially with regard to the importance of the cultural superstructure not as a mere "reflection," but from the assessment of its revolutionary potentialities to generate counter-hegemony.

A tireless critic of the reformism of the Second International and of social democracy, Mariátegui is considered the first Marxist in Latin America, by emphasizing the role of the indigenous masses as the continent's authentic "proletariat" and proclaiming the need for socialist revolution, influenced by the radical syndicalism of Georges Sorel.

Mariátegui argued that fascism was not an "exception" in Italy or a "cataclysm", but an international phenomenon "possible within the logic of History" of the development of monopolies in imperialism and its need to defeat the struggle of the proletariat.

He saw fascism as big capital's response to a profound social crisis, an expression that the ruling class no longer felt sufficiently defended by its democratic institutions, for which it blames all the ills of the country before the masses, to the parliamentary system.

And he bet on the revolutionary struggle, unleashing the cult of violence against the new order of the fascist state, conceived as a vertical authoritarian structure of corporations.

In different ways, organizations like Shining Path, and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and the Peruvian Communist Party all look to Mariátegui and his writings.