Octavio Paz and his relationship with Latin American writers who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Abstract

The article examines the relationships Octavio Paz maintained with three Latin American Nobel Prize–winning authors—Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa—highlighting how political differences, intellectual affinities and historical contexts shaped their interactions over several decades. Through a descriptive-analytical approach based on interviews, memoirs, letters, critical commentary and press documents, the author reconstructs the key moments of friendship, conflict and ideological divergence among these writers. Paz’s early friendship with Neruda, formed during the 1937 Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers, deteriorated due to Neruda’s Stalinist sympathies, though the two reconciled emotionally shortly before the Chilean poet’s death. With García Márquez, Paz’s relationship was distant and marked by disagreements over the Padilla case, the direction of the magazine Libre and the Colombian writer’s support for the Cuban Revolution and his friendship with Fidel Castro. Paz’s ties with Vargas Llosa were notably closer: both shared critiques of authoritarian regimes, collaborated in intellectual projects and later engaged in a public debate about the Mexican political system during the 1990 event “The 20th Century: The Experience of Freedom.” The article concludes that these relationships reveal the extent to which writers function as political and cultural agents in Latin America, showing how ideological tensions and shared commitments influenced the region’s intellectual landscape.