Gabriel Gárcia MárquezGabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a city in northern Colombia, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a house filled with countless aunts and rumors of ghosts. But to better understand García Márquez's life, it helps to first understand something about both Colombia's history and his family's unusual background.ColombiaColombia gained independence from Spain in 1810, technically making it one of the oldest cities in America Latin. democracies, but the sad fact is that this "democracy" has rarely known peace and justice. In the beginning there was of course Spain and the Indians, who happily hated each other as the Spanish ravaged the land in search of gold, El Dorado, religious converts and political power. The English also played their part, with Drake attacking Riohachi in 1568 and the countless colonial squabbles of the following centuries. Having declared itself independent from Spain when Napoleon overthrew the Spanish king in 1810, the new country enjoyed a brief period of freedom only to be quickly reconquered in 1815 by General Murillo's unpleasant and bloody campaigns. Their internal squabbles allowed their nascent country to fall to Murillo's sword, so much so that the period is immortalized in Colombian history with the colorful name of la Patria Boba, or "La Patria Booby." The second round, however, fell to the Colombians, when Simón Bolívar liberated the country in 1820 and became its first president. By 1849, the country had advanced enough to materialize their squabbles in the form of two political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, which still exist today. These two parties form the political structure of much of García Márquez's fiction, and understanding their true nature is both a key to his writing and, unfortunately, an important insight into Latin American politics in general. Although initially formed around the core of two distinct parties and different ideologies, long years of bloody conflict served to significantly erode the distinctions between the parties. Conservatives and liberals are more like warring factions or clans than any party with firmly established and radically different ideologies. Both tend to be repressive, both are corrupt, and both...... middle of paper...... and in the same year he wrote Viva Sandino, a screenplay about the Sandanistas and the Nicaraguan revolution. Politics, however, would be far from his thoughts for his next work of fiction, which would be a love story. Turning again to his rich past for inspiration and material, he has reworked his parents' strange courtship as a narrative that spans a decade. The story would be about two frustrated lovers and the long time that passed between their second courtship, and in 1986 Love in the Time of Cholera was revealed to the anxious world. The reception was very positive and there was no doubt that García Márquez had become a writer with universal appeal. Now one of the most famous writers in the world, he dedicated himself to a lifestyle of writing, teaching and political activism. With residencies in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Paris, Barcelona, ​​and Barranquilla, he ended the decade by releasing The General in his Labyrinth in 1990, and two years later Strange Pilgrims was born. In 1994 he published his most recent work of fiction, Love and Other Demons. Today García Márquez lives with Mercedes in Mexico City, where he has stopped smoking and is in a perpetual state of "writing a novel"."