EFE reports that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos plans to travel to Mexico City on Monday to attend a tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel laureate who died on Thursday at age 87. Santos published a series of comments on Twitter shortly after the news broke, calling García Márquez “the most beloved and admired countryman of all time” and “the Colombian who carried the name of our fatherland farther and higher than anyone in the history of our country."
“A thousand years of solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” Santos wrote, according to El Colombiano. “Solidarity and condolences to 'la Gaba' and family.” On Wednesday, Santos also rejected accounts that cancer had landed the novelist in the Mexico City hospital from which he had recently checked out, saying, “I reiterate and back what the family said…it’s not true that his cancer has been revived and that it’s spread. He suffered a bout of pneumonia at an advanced age, that pneumonia is controlled, he’s at home and of course we’re all praying for him to recover completely and very soon.”
The Mexican government announced that it would hold the tribute to García Márquez -- who lived in Mexico City for over fifty years and even composed his best-known work, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, in his home there -- in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Meanwhile, the Colombian president has declared a three day period of mourning for “a writer who changed the life of his readers, opened doors and horizons within literature and sketched fantastic characters and stories with his pen."
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