Miguel Ángel Bustos

Miguel Ángel Bustos (1932-1976) was a major poet of the Argentine Generation of 1960, an illustrator, and a literary critic. During his lifetime, he published Cuatro Murales [Four murals] (1957), Corazón de piel afuera [Heart of outside skin] (1959), Fragmentos fantásticos [Fantastic fragments] (1965), Visión de los hijos del mal [Vision of the children of evil] (1967), winner of the second Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for Poetry, and El Himalaya o la moral de los pájaros [The Himalayas or the morals of birds] (1970). His poetry was included in many contemporaneous anthologies of the Generation of 1960, and in 1998 Alberto Szpunberg published the anthology of his poetry Despedida de los ángeles [The angels' farewell]. Bustos studied painting with Juan Battle Planas in the 1960s and had a solo exhibition of his artworks in 1970, with a catalog written by Aldo Pellegrini. In 2014, Miguel Ángel Bustos and Emiliano Bustos had a joint exhibition of their paintings and drawings at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires. During the 1970s, Bustos worked primarily as a literary critic for Siete Días, Panorama, La Opinión, and El Cronista Comercial, and his collected prose was published in 2007. His collected poetry was published in 2008, the first time it had appeared in print in more than thirty years. On May 30, 1976, Bustos was arrested by military police and for decades remained “disappeared,” his work censored. In 2014, Bustos’s remains were identified by forensic anthropologists. It is now known that he was executed by firing squad on June 20, 1976.