Mario Benedetti: Poet who revolutionized Latin America with his pen (+birthday)

Published at: 14/09/2025 09:05 AM

On September 14, 1920, the poet, essayist, novelist, storyteller, playwright and art critic, Mario Benedetti, was born in Paso de los Toros, department of Tacuarembó, Uruguay, who embodied in his literary work a social influence that he absorbed from the first years of his life and whose poem The South Also Exists has gone around the world and was often quoted by the Eternal Commander Hugo Chávez.

Benedetti worked in multiple professions before 1945, when he began his activity as a journalist for La Mañana, El Diario, Tribuna Popular and the weekly Marcha, among others. In his work, two periods marked by social and political changes in Uruguay and the rest of Latin America can be differentiated. In the first, Benedetti developed a realistic literature on public bureaucracy and the petty-bourgeois spirit that animates it, and in the second, he reflected the anguish and hope of large social sectors to find socialist solutions to a Latin America subjugated by military repressions.

His most famous works with the greatest social content are The Straw Cola Country (1960), The Truce (1960), Juan Ángel's Birthday (1971), Spring with a Broken Corner (1982), among others. He dealt with themes such as exile, torture and different cultural and political problems in the works The House and the Brick (1977), Winds of Exile (1982), Geographies (1984) and The Loneliness of Babel (1991). After the coup d'etat that occurred in his homeland in 1973, he went into exile in Argentina, Cuba and Peru.

In 1986 he received the Jristo Botev Prize in Bulgaria for his poetic and essayistic work. In 1987, he was awarded Amnesty International's Golden Flame Award in Brussels for his novel Spring with a Broken Corner. Benedetti maintained a progressive political stance throughout his life, and his first militant action was his active participation in the Uruguayan Movement against the Military Treaty with the United States in 1953.

Mazo News Team