Mario Monteforte Toledo, 91; Playwright, Author in Guatemala

Celebrated Guatemalan author, playwright and political crusader Mario Monteforte Toledo, considered the country’s most important living writer, died Thursday of complications from heart disease. He was 91.

Born on Sept. 15, 1911, Monteforte Toledo was trained as an attorney and sociologist, but said he had dreamed of becoming a writer since the day he learned how to read. He completed his first formal novel while living in Haiti in 1938, but it wasn’t published in Guatemala until 10 years later.

In 1946, Monteforte Toledo was elected senator and chosen by his colleagues to head the one-house legislature during the government of leftist revolutionary Rafael Arevalo.

Arevalo’s successor, socialist President Jacobo Arbenz, made him Guatemala’s representative before the United Nations in 1951.

In 1952, Monteforte Toledo published perhaps his most famous novel, “En Donde Acaban los Caminos” (Where the Roads End). At the time of his death, he was working on a screenplay for a movie version of the book.

After Arbenz’s government was toppled by a CIA-backed coup in 1954, Monteforte Toledo lived in exile in France, England, Ecuador, Mexico and the United States, where he continued to write novels, essays and plays.

When he returned to Guatemala in 1986, the author famously quipped, “The thing that pains me most is all the women that I loved are old and in love with other men.”