José Palomo Fuentes – RIP
Skip to comments
Chilean cartoonist José “Palomo” Fuentes has passed away in Mexico where he spent most of his adult life in exile. He was 82.
Palomo, born in Santiago, Chile in 1943, began his professional life in Chile. He contributed cartoons to El Pingüino, and La Nación during the 1960s. The 1973 coup d’état that brought Augusto Pinochet to power sent Palomo and many Chilean artists into exile. Palomo settled in Mexico where he would spend the rest of his career.
In 1977, he created what would become his signature work, a comic strip called El Cuarto Reich (The Fourth Reich) featuring a fictional, tiny U.S. backed dictator for UnoMásUno. His contemporaries included Joaquín Salvador Lavado Quino, Sergio Aragonés, Guillermo Mordillo, Roberto Fontanarrosa and Eduardo del Río Rius. This group were part of a new generation of politically engaged cartoonists in Mexico.
El Cuarto Reich ran for decades as a daily strip and collected volumes.
In 2009, he was awarded the lifetime achievement “La Catrina” Prize, an award honoring “prominent figures from the worlds of cartooning and comics.”
He is survived by his wife Zandra Reyes to whom he was married for 52 years, and Elías and Mateo Palomo Reyes. Of her husband, Zandra recounts:
“He believed in democracy as a primary source of life, and we felt that people have the right to hold their own ideas—and, through dialogue, to reach an agreement and be able to make this world a better place.”
Comments
Comments are closed.