Poetry and Action: Octavio Paz at 100

Poetry and Action: Octavio Paz at 100

By Joel Whitney - March 25, 2014

Was he conciliatory? Certainly not. Was this the problem with Paz? Almost two decades later, I emailed my former professor to see which veritable crimes on Paz’s part so stuck in his craw, even with the Cold War long over. It turns out it was Paz’s critiques of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, and his alleged apologia for the right. I asked Eliot Weinberger, too, what ignited the Latin American left’s disdain for Paz. Weinberger writes, “Because of his criticisms of the Sandinistas, [the Latin American left] thought he was supporting Reagan in the Contra war, and had a demonstration where his effigy was burned.”

So, what did Paz actually say? As he accepted the 1984 Prize of the Association of German Editors and Booksellers in Frankfurt, Paz defended an author he had published in Vuelta. Gabriel Zaid (who was also published in this magazine) had argued that it was time to submit “the Sandinista government to a popular vote in Nicaragua,” as Enrique Krauze recounts in Redeemers. The article was well received internationally, including in the New York Review of Books, “but [was] strongly attacked by many Mexican publications.”