Fernando Benitez; Mexican Author, Journalist

Fernando Benitez, believed to have been 90, an author and journalist famed for a four-volume study of Mexico’s Indian cultures and his sponsorship of generations of other writers. Various sources listed his birth as January 1910, 1911 or 1912. Benitez began his career as a reporter in 1934 and continued to write brief columns last year for the daily La Jornada. He also had been Mexico’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic from 1990 to 1994. His most famous work was “The Indians of Mexico,” published in 1967, which reported sympathetically on Indian peoples throughout the country. The work has been repeatedly reprinted in recent years. “Though some of us have white skin, our heart is Indian; we are mestizos, a mixture of Indian and Spanish, an identity linked with being Mexican,” he said in 1992 when receiving an award for his writing. For decades, Benitez edited the cultural section of newspapers such as El Nacional, Novedades and Unomasuno. Among his many books were “In the Footsteps of Cortes,” “Hallucinogenic Mushrooms” and “The Battle of Cuba.” On Monday in Mexico City, of heart failure.