“The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers — and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” said President Obama in a statement, and called the author “a representative and voice for the people of the Americas.” President Obama is absolutely right about this: in his long career as a writer Márquez has always sided with the less fortunate and against those who abuse them.

In his Nobel acceptance presentation Márquez elaborated on some of the topics that haunted him. He talked about two presidents that were suspiciously killed in airplane accidents, the reasons for which were never discovered. One of them, Jaime Roldós Aguilera, a president of Ecuador known for his firm stance on human rights, died in a plane crash on May 24, 1981, together with his assistants and their spouses.

John Perkins, former economist at the World Bank and author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, believes that Roldós was assassinated because his plan to reorganize his country’s hydrocarbon sector would have threatened U.S. interests. Months after Roldós death, another Latin American leader and close friend of Márquez, General Omar Torrijos, Panamá’s President, also died in a suspicious plane crash. John Perkins believes that it was the result of a CIA-conducted assassination.

Márquez also refers in his lecture to three countries in Central America, punished by long and bloody wars. “Because they tried to change this state of things,” he said, “nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvadorand Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.”