Jorge Ibargüengoitia Antillón ( born January 22 , 1928 in Guanajuato , Mexico ; died November 27 , 1983 in Mejorada del Campo , Madrid , Spain ) was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular and critical success with his satires , three of which have appeared in English : '' Las Muertas '' ( '' The Dead Girls '' ) , '' Dos Crímenes '' ( '' Two Crimes '' ) , and '' Los Relámpagos de Agosto '' ( '' The Lightning of August '' ) . His plays include '' Susana y los Jóvenes '' and '' Ante varias esfinges '' , both dating from the 1950s . In 1955 , Ibarguengoitia received a Rockefeller grant to study in New York City ; five years later he received the Mexico City literary award . He died in Avianca Flight 011 on route Frankfurt via Paris , Madrid , and Caracas to Bogotá that crashed on November 27 , 1983 . Often , in his fiction , he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical , sardonic treatment . Thus , '' Los Relámpagos de Agosto '' ( 1964 ) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution 's heroic myths ; improbably it won for its author the '' Premio Casa de las Américas '' , despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused . For '' Las Muertas '' ( 1977 ) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state : the brothel-keepers Delfina and María de Jesús González , whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964 . Ibarguengoitia himself met a tragic end , on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history : departing from his then home in Paris , he perished along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza , Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama , Argentinian academic Marta Traba , and 177 others in the crash of Avianca Flight 011 on 27 November 1983
Avianca Flight 011
Avianca Flight 011
Jorge Ibargüengoitia