Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez still has a secret to reveal — a daughter he had in Mexico with journalist Susana Cato. This was revealed on Sunday, Jan. 16 in an exclusive article by journalist Gustavo Tatis in Cartagena's El Universal newspaper, after confirming existing rumors with García Márquez's biographer, Dassault Saldivar, and his close friend, Guillermo Angulo.

In the report in El Universal, Tatis writes that Angulo "feared that the secret would be revealed as a scandal among the world's pack of journalists. But we agreed that we had to assimilate it and 'tell it well, with a lot of respect from the beginning,'" so they also spoke beforehand with the daughter, Indira Cato, and her mother, writer Susana Cato.

According to Tatis, the writer of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the natural father of Indira Cato, of Mexican descent, named after the former minister of India, Indira Gandhi, the first person to call García Márquez to congratulate him on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

The article also confirms that he decided to take the nickname of his mother, Susana, with whom García Márquez wrote the script for the movie Con el amor no se juega (Love is not to be trifled with). Cato has also written scripts for Mexican Indigenous radio programs, short stories, theater for television and other multimedia projects.

"García Márquez's best-kept secret began to arrive as a rumor more than eight years ago," said Dasso Saldívar, shortly after his death in 2014, but the goal of a researcher and a biographer — in his case — was to confirm it. About eight years later, "a colleague of all solvency confirmed to me the existence of Indira, daughter of García Márquez," said Dasso, who had the privilege of knowing for the first time the touching photograph of the girl sitting on Gabo's lap. "Who is that girl looking at the gleam in the eyes of that autumnal man," he wondered. "It is the image of a loving and sweet father before his little girl," wrote Tatis in his article in El Universal. 

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was married for more than 60 years to Mercedes Barcha, with whom he had two sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo. According to Tatis, it is possible that Barcha "sensed what had happened between Susana and García Márquez, but until the end of his life he maintained discretion and silence. However, the revelation of Indira's existence was a family cataclysm that is only spoken of through the tense and complex realm of the law and lawyers."