Mario Luis Rodríguez Cobos (6 January 1938 – 16 September 2010),[a] also known by the mononym Silo,[1] was an Argentine writer and founder of the international volunteer organisation Humanist Movement.

An active speaker, he wrote books, short stories, articles and studies related to politics, society, psychology, spirituality and other topics.

He undertook primary and secondary education with the Maristas Brotherhood, achieving excellent grades, while practising gymnastics and specializing in the pommel horse and reaching high positions in the regional rankings.

By 1960 – following "a rearrangement of his inner truths" as a newspaper slogan of the time reported – he began to present his proposals, while still forming study groups in Argentina and Chile.

With members of these groups he organized a public talk, which was initially banned by the military government but later was permitted in the mountains, away from the centres of population.

So, on 4 May 1969, Silo spoke to some two hundred people gathered in Punta de Vacas (Province of Mendoza), in the high Andes mountains near Mount Aconcagua, and gave his first public exposition of the ideas, that in time, would form the basis of the Humanist Movement.

On 6 October 1993 in Moscow, Silo was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

[6] Among his more recent projects he gave impetus to the construction of complexes known as Parks of Study and Reflection in Argentina, Chile, Spain, USA, Italy, India and Egypt, among other geographical locations.

During the first decade of the 21st century he returned to speak at Punta de Vacas on several occasions with proposals of reconciliation, access to the profound and the sacred of human being, accepting invitations to speak about his Message and going to more humble places, like family homes, or small halls (salitas) in the same neighbourhood of Mendoza, and in greater Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Quito (Ecuador).

Furthermore, as well as organising Halls of the Message and Parks of Study and Reflection around his works, Silo attended various opening ceremonies in places such as in La Reja (Buenos Aires), Las Manantiales (Santiago de Chile), Carcarañá (Rosario, Argentina), Toledo (Spain), Attigliano (Rome, Italy), etc.

[10] There exist few interviews and reports in the media on the life of Silo, however, the most numerous were carried out in Chile in the early nineties (with the return to democracy) from the major talk shows on television.

In it he made a differentiation between sensation, perception and imagination: understanding feeling as the register obtained when detecting a stimulus from the external or internal environment and the variation in the tone of work of the sense involved.

It is a “body” of representation, or—if you prefer—a “spatial referential background.” Silo differentiates himself further from the academic ambits with a conception of the human being which led to the formation of the Humanist Movement.

Today, moreover, human beings have begun to penetrate into the interior of their own bodies, transplanting organs, intervening in their neurochemistry, practicing in vitro fertilization, and even manipulating their genes.

Yet human life entails the additional need to foresee future necessities, based on past experience and the intention to improve the present situation.

Each time that individuals or human groups violently impose themselves on others, they succeed in detaining history, turning their victims into “natural” objects.

The Message takes on the difficulties of openly examining the fundamental beliefs, clashing with the censorship and self-censorship that inhibit freedom of thought and good conscience.

The different positions taken with respect to the themes of immortality and the sacred should not be simply “tolerated,” but rather genuinely respected.All these books are translated and published in the most common major languages.

In a journal of anthropology and American studies in the early 1970s,[13] sections of the left began a campaign against Silo and his followers, who were accused of fascism and of being a reactionary movement.

The latter refers to Silo as the "founder of a philosophy that came to gather a million followers in over 100 countries" and "a strange character for the West, one who could have been born in the East.

Ha partido del Planeta tierra y nos deja para la eternidad invaluables enseñanzas y una visión de nuevos y amplios horizontes que por impredecibles y vastos resulta difícil mesurar.