Tomás Eloy Martínez

He was born on July 16, 1934[1] in San Miguel de Tucumán and is generally considered an influential and innovative figure in Latin America both as journalist and a novelist.

He is credited as helping Latin American writings be know around the world, including the Gabriel García Márquez staple novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Panorama was the only publication in Buenos Aires that reported the correct story of the affair in Rawson, which differed significantly from the official version of the de facto Argentine government.

In his book The Memoirs of the General he recounts that he was threatened by the "Triple A", the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, and on one occasion, gunmen held a pistol to the head of his three-year-old son because they were witnesses to a crime Eloy Martínez believed to be an operation led by the far-right paramilitary group.

In 1991, he participated in the creation and launch of the daily newspaper Siglo 21 (November 8, 1991), owned by businessman Alfonso Dau and published by Jorge Zepeda Patterson in Guadalajara, Mexico, which ran for seven years, until December 1998.

The end of the 1990s saw him back in the United States, being entrusted as professor and director of the Latin American studies program at Rutgers University in New Jersey, although he maintained his collaboration with Latin American newspapers throughout this period, which was the inspiration as well for his last book Purgatory where he dealt with the sadness and melancholy of exile and the dire impact on the lives of the families of the "desaparecidos" (people that were kidnapped and presumed dead by the dictatorship known as "El Proceso").