Luis Vidales (26 July 1904 – 14 June 1990) was a Colombian poet, writer, statistician and politician. Born in

Calarcá Calarcá is a municipality in the eastern part of the department of Quindío Department, Quindío, Colombia. It is located 4 km east of the departmental capital Armenia, Colombia, Armenia. Its nickname is ''La Villa del Cacique'' in homage o ...

, Quindío,

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

. In

Bogotá Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city of Colombia, and one of the larges ...

, he was a founding member of the literary group Los Nuevos, where he participated in various literary and political gatherings with Luis Tejada, Ricardo Rendon,

León de Greiff Francisco de Asís León Bogislao de Greiff Haeusler (July 22, 1895 – July 11, 1976), was a Colombian poet known for his stylistic innovations and deliberately eclectic use of obscure lexicon. Best known simply as León de Greiff, he often us ...

, José Mar and others.

Biography

From 1930 Vidales began militancy in the Colombian Communist Party, holding the role of general secretary between 1932 and 1934 . He worked regularly in newspapers such as El Espectador and El Tiempo. In 1932 he assumed the post of editor-in-chief of the daily ''Tierra'', an official organ of the Communist Party, under the leadership of Guillermo Rodríguez Hernández. As an editor, Vidales waged a vigorous campaign against the Colombian-Peruvian War, calling on soldiers from both nations to fraternize at the front and 'turn their weapons against their own officers. After the assassination of

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala (23 January 1903 – 9 April 1948) was a left-wing Colombian politician and charismatic leader of the Liberal Party. He served as the mayor of Bogotá from 1936–37, the national Education Minister from 1940 ...

in 1948, Luis Vidales and his family were subject to persecution by the right-wing regime and went into exile in Chile. They returned to Colombia in 1958 with the invitation of president Alberto Lleras Camargo. Vidales then took over the management of the National Administrative Department of Statistics. After leaving the civil service in 1978, he again returned to the political struggle as an activist of the Communist Party. In 1979, during the reign of Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala, military units raided his residence, illegally detaining the poet and his wife under the pretext of obtaining a warrant for the arrest of another person and searching for weapons from the

M-19 M19, M.19, or M-19 most commonly refers to: * May 19th Communist Organization (M19), an American far-left female-led terrorist group active during the 1970s–1980s * 19th of April Movement (M-19), a former Colombian guerrilla movement and politica ...

guerrilla group. This caused outrage in national and international public opinion; among the signatories of the protest notes was the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. However, he initially refused to come out of prison and demanded that the workers detained with him also be released, and therefore went on a hunger strike. In 1982 he won the National Poetry Prize and in 1985 the

Lenin Peace Prize The International Lenin Peace Prize (russian: международная Ленинская премия мира, ''mezhdunarodnaya Leninskaya premiya mira)'' was a Soviet Union award named in honor of Vladimir Lenin. It was awarded by a pane ...

Selected works

Poetry

1904 births 1990 deaths 20th-century Colombian poets Colombian male poets People from Quindío Department Recipients of the Lenin Peace Prize * ''Suenan timbres'' (1926). * ''La Obreriada'' (1978). * ''Poemas del abominable hombre del Barrio Las Nieves'' (1985). * ''Antología poética'' (1985). * ''El libro de los fantasmas'' (1986). * Cuadrito en movimiento (1987)

Essays

* ''Tratado de estética'' (1945). * ''La insurrección desplomada'' (1948). * ''La circunstancia social en el arte'' (1973). {{Colombia-writer-stub