Gregorio Selser: Memories

Abstract

Gregorio Selser was born in Buenos Aires on 12 July 1922. A militant of the Argentine Socialist Party and secretary to its veteran leader Alfredo Palacios, Selser was a prolific author who earned his keep as a journalist most regularly as a staffer at La Prensa but devoted his passion and intellect to writing some fifty scrupulously detailed and unashamedly committed books on modern Latin American history and politics. His most celebrated work was Sandino. General of Free Men, first published in Buenos Aires in 1955, subsequently a decisive influence on the young men who founded the Frente Sandinista, and still in print in its (condensed) English edition. Implacably opposed to dictatorship, Selser inevitably ran foul of many regimes, and in the mid-1970s he was exiled from his homeland on the ludicrous charge of being a guerrilla courier working out of Cuba. In Mexico 'Goyo' found work at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) to supplement a modest income gained from the publication of his invariably meticulous and usually extensive articles, which provoked almost as much irritation in Washington as they did in those regional capitals ruled by the generals or the boardrooms of those (many) corporations engaged in activity prejudicial to poor Latin Americans. He was writing afour-volume History of Foreign Intervention in Latin America when he discovered he had cancer and killed himself on 27 August 1991. His widow Marta and daughters are completing the final volumes in his memory J. C. D.