Report: García Márquez had secret daughter

For decades, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez kept the public from knowing about an intimate aspect of his life: He had a daughter with a Mexican writer, with whom he had an extramarital affair in the early 1990s.

The closely guarded secret was published by the Colombian newspaper El Universal on Sunday and confirmed to The Associated Press by two relatives of the Nobel Prize-winning author of novels such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

García Márquez, who died in Mexico City in 2014 at the age of 87, was married for more than five decades to Mercedes Barcha and the couple had two children, Rodrigo and Gonzalo. They lived in Mexico City for much of their lives.

El Universal said that in the early 1990s García Márquez had a daughter with Susana Cato, a writer and journalist who worked with García Márquez on two movie scripts and who also interviewed him for a 1996 magazine story. Cato and García Márquez named their daughter Indira: She is now in her early 30s and uses her mother’s surname.

Shani García Márquez, one of the writer’s nieces, told the AP that she had known for years about her cousin Indira, but had not mentioned her to the media because her parents asked her to be discreet about her uncle’s personal life.

Gabriel Eligio Torres García, who is also a nephew of the Colombian writer, said he has been in touch with Indira Cato through social media, though he has never met her in person.

“My cousins Rodrigo and Gonzalo told me about her casually during a reunion,” he said.

Other members of García Márquez’s family, cited by El Universal, said they had not spoken about the writer’s daughter previously out of “respect” for Mercedes Barcha, who died in 2020.

Indira Cato is now a documentary producer in Mexico City. She won several awards for a 2014 documentary on migrants passing through Mexico.