"The Solitude of Latin America" (Spanish: La Soledad de América Latina) is the title of the speech given by Gabriel García Márquez on 8 December 1982 upon being awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
To get an idea of the mass number of people displaced by these wars, Marquez gives us this comparison, “…the country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway".
García Márquez wanted to raise awareness, with this speech, to the ongoing struggle of the Latin American people to have cultural respect from the rest of the hegemonic world.
An example of how much this social unrest affected these small Latin American countries is given in the speech, “…Uruguay…has lost to exile one out of every five citizens…the Civil War in El Salvador has produced one refugee every twenty minutes”.
"Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.