MEXICO CITY – Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez was spied on by the secret service of Mexico, where he has lived since the 1960s, and was described as a “propaganda agent” for Cuba in 1982, the year the author received the Nobel Prize, the El Universal newspaper reported over the weekend.

Garcia Marquez was the target of espionage by the now-defunct DFS spy agency since 1967, and the declassified documents of that institution continue up to 1985, the newspaper said, adding that all the later information remains secret.

The DFS provided espionage services in Mexico as part of the 1960-1980 “Dirty War” in search of subversive elements aligned with leftist ideologies.

The DFS, Mexico’s equivalent of the CIA or the KGB, extended its investigations to a number of artists and intellectuals, including the writers Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990, and Salvador Novo.

A wiretapped conversation between Garcia Marquez and the director of Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency, Jorge Timossi, reveals that the author made over the publishing rights for his book, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” to the Cuban government.

“The above proves that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, besides being pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet, is a propaganda agent at the service of the intelligence agency of that country,” a DFS document said.

The writer moved to Mexico at the beginning of the 1960s and, though he has lived for long periods in other places since then, he currently lives in Mexico City.

He was under surveillance from the 1970s during the 1970-1976 administration of President Luis Echeverria and President Jose Lopez Portillo’s 1976-1982 administration.

The spies never managed to penetrate the group of Gabo’s closest associates, but it did identify his family members and friends and wiretapped his telephone.

One of the most extensive files refers to the role of the writer as a mediator between movements of the Latin American left and Francois Miterrand, who was president of France from 1981 to 1995. EFE