By Richard McColl
BOGOTA
The image of Colombian Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez will be featured on new banknotes and coins after Congress approved the measure late Tuesday.
“The initiative, in addition to paying homage to him, seeks to ensure that future generations know about this great Colombian, humanist, literary great and democrat,” said congressman Antenor Duran in an interview with El Espectador newspaper.
“Gabo has left an extraordinary literary and journalistic legacy, whose diffusion, reading and study of should be actively promoted, and his name represents an enormous potential for the present and future of the Colombia in terms of cultural and touristic recognition,” added Duran, who led the project to get García Márquez on the Colombia peso.
García Márquez, who is affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America, was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 but had been poor of health in recent years, having suffered from lymphatic cancer and Alzheimer’s disease before his death in April.
Following his death, events across Colombia were held to commemorate the life of the author of such notable tomes as “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” “Love in the time of the Cholera,” “News of a Kidnapping” and various collections of journalism.
Gabo was born March 6, 1927, in the small town of Aracataca, just 56 miles south of the Caribbean city of Santa Marta and his writing and journalism were greatly influenced by his upbringing amongst the banana plantations on the Colombian coast.
The author and journalist had been in living in Mexico City, where he was a resident for more than 30 years.
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