Uruguay's Benedetti dies

His story, "Left Wing," about a soccer player who takes a bribe to throw a game but just cannot help scoring a goal, has been called the foundation of Latin American sports literature.

Born to Italian immigrants on September 14, 1920, in northern Uruguay, Benedetti was educated in Montevideo and worked as a stenographer and journalist. Luz Lopez, his wife of 60 years, died in 2006.

He was active in a leftist movement in the early 1970s and wrote political editorials. His politics put his life in danger after the 1973 military coup in Uruguay, so he went into exile and lived in Argentina, Peru, Cuba and Spain.

"An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet," he said at a conference in 1997.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Avila in Montevideo; Editing by Chris Wilson)