 In 1967 during a meeting with Alejo Carpentier , Julio Cortázar , and Miguel Otero Silva , the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes launched a project consisting of a series of biographies depicting Latin American dictators , which was to be called Los Padres de la Patria ( The Fathers of the Fatherland ) . After reading Edmund Wilson 's portraits of the American Civil War in Patriotic Gore , Fuentes recounts , " Sitting in a pub in Hampstead , we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America . An imaginary portrait gallery immediately stepped forward , demanding incarnation : the Latin American dictators . " Vargas Llosa was to write about Manuel A. Odría , Jorge Edwards about José Manuel Balmaceda , José Donoso about Mariano <unk> , and Julio Cortázar about Eva Perón . As M. Mar <unk> Pizarro observes , the project was never completed , but it helped inspire a series of novels written by important authors during the Latin American literary boom , such as Alejo Carpentier , Augusto Roa Bastos , Gabriel García Márquez , and Mario Vargas Llosa . 
