- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 May 2009 12.46 BST
Mario Benedetti in 2005. Photograph: Marcelo Casacuberta/AP
For a few years in the 1960s, the tiny South American country of Uruguay saw itself as the cradle of revolution in Latin America. Che Guevara was welcomed there as a hero during a brief visit; the home-grown Tupamaro guerrillas seemed to offer an urban alternative to peasant revolt; and writers on the magazine Marcha and elsewhere busily supplied the theory to back up revolutionary practice. Mario Benedetti, who has died aged 88, was the poet of that moment, becoming famous throughout Latin America for the direct style of his verses of love, anger, and resistance.
Benedetti was born in the small town of Paso de los Toros. Like many Uruguayans, he came from Italian immigrant stock and, following the Italian custom, was given no less than five first names: Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno. His father was a pharmacist, but the family fortunes collapsed when he was swindled out of a business, after which Mario was taken to live in Montevideo at the age of four. Benedetti recalls his mother having to sell all the family crockery and silver, and the three of them living in a shack for a number of years, until his father, like a large number of other Uruguayans, was able to find a job working for the state.
The young Benedetti decided early on that he would like to be a writer, even though he had to undertake a variety of jobs to survive financially. After several years spent in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, he returned to Montevideo in the early 1940s and launched himself as a poet – with La víspera indeleble (The Indelible Night Before, 1945) – and as a journalist, joining Marcha in 1945.
The first book that earned him a reputation in Uruguay was a collection of short stories, Montevideanos, similar in spirit to James Joyce's Dubliners. Here, as in his first popular book of poetry, Poemas de la oficina (Poems from the Office, 1956), Benedetti shows his sympathetic understanding of the slow, unspectacular life of the Montevideo middle classes, caught up in their small world of everyday struggles and tensions. In 1960 he published La Tregua (The Truce), by far his most successful novel, which was made into a film that was nominated for an Oscar in 1974.
The stability of the Uruguayan society Benedetti had written about came under increasing pressure in the 1960s. He wrote political articles in Marcha calling for radical change, and was instrumental in helping set up the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) movement, which sought to bring together all the leftwing groups in Uruguay.
Early in the 1970s, however, as in other countries of the southern cone of Latin America, the threat of revolutionary change led the military to step in and begin a political repression previously unheard-of in a peaceful country such as Uruguay. In 1973, Benedetti was forced to leave the country, and when he crossed the River Plate to seek refuge in Argentina, was immediately threatened by a rightwing paramilitary death squad and forced to move on again. He next tried to settle in Peru, but was deported after six months. Eventually he settled in Cuba, where he worked for the Casa de las Américas publishing house, and also began to visit post-Franco Spain.
This experience of exile strongly marked the second half of Benedetti's life. Although he acknowledged positive aspects of it – meeting new people, exploring different surroundings and achieving a wider reputation, he felt he could never return home. "When you are out of your country, you feel wounded, alien, and when you return you still feel exiled, because you have changed and the country has changed," he once said. He explored the pain and challenge of exile in return in one of his most moving books, El desexilio y otras conjeturas (Dis-exile and other Conjectures, 1984).
In 1983 he moved back to Montevideo, alternating periods of living there and long spells in Madrid. As he grew older, chronic asthma began to take its toll on his health, but the most serious blow came in 2006 when Luz López, the woman he had married in 1946, died after a long period suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
Benedetti continued to write poems, novels and short stories. In Latin America and Spain, he is remembered above all as a poet who sought to speak of love and political commitment as directly and passionately as possible. By the end of his life, he had published more than 80 books, and in one of his last poems he gave the instructions: "When I'm buried/ don't forget to put a Biro in my coffin."
- Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti, writer, born 14 September 1920; died 17 May 2009
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