The anecdote emerged on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre of dozens of Algerian demonstrators in Paris on October 17, 1961. The Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez was said to have been one of some 12,000 people arrested that evening by the police. by Maurice Papon.
The Algerian Courier relates this anecdote, which has already been running for ten years: ” Even foreigners not originally from Algeria were arrested and brutalized during that night, because of their facies, the best known case being that of the Colombian, future Nobel Prize winner for literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Another daily, Algerian Evening, tells the same story.
However, if the Nobel Prize winner for literature lived well in Paris at the end of the Fifties, it is impossible that Gabriel Garcia Márquez stayed there in the fall of 1961. Two of his biographers assure Désintox that he was then in Mexico , after leaving New York in mid-1961. ” This story is completely wrong », Says Stephen Minta, author of Garcia Márquez: writer from Colombia.
This intox, however, does not start from nothing. The writer has well recounted having been arrested by the French police in Paris, during the Algerian war, because he was of the Algerian type. In an account published by El País in 1982, he recounts his arrival in Paris in December 1955, the loving couples kissing in the streets, the atmosphere of Saint-Germain, the arrests of North Africans, and his own. arraignment one evening. But there is no mention of 1961. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s proximity to the Algerian cause probably helped to transform the anecdote somewhat, by linking it, wrongly, to the tragic and symbolic episode of October 17.
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