Luis Alejandro Velasco, 66

[T.E. Goodell]

BOGOTA, Aug. 2 (Reuters) - A Colombian shipwreck survivor whose 10-day odyssey
adrift in the Caribbean inspired a novel by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia
Marquez that sold 22 million copies worldwide died on Wednesday, his wife said.

Former Navy sailor Luis Alejandro Velasco, who was 66, died after a long battle
with cancer at his home in Bogota, his wife Blanca told Reuters.

He first met Garcia Marquez, then a newspaper reporter, in early 1955 shortly
after he washed ashore on Colombia's northern beaches.

Velasco survived for 10 days aboard a fragile liferaft after he jumped
overboard from a sinking Navy warship. The vessel had been overloaded with
contraband electrical goods, allegedly being smuggled from the United States to
Colombia for the military high command.

Garcia Marquez, one of the greats of Latin American literature, wrote a series
of reports about Velasco in El Espectador, Colombia's oldest newspaper.

Then in 1970, he published a novel about the incident entitled ``Story Of A
Shipwreck Survivor'' (Relato de Un Naufrago). Velasco received about $26,000 in
royalties for the original Spanish language version, according to a recent
report in El Espectador.

Royalty payments stopped abruptly in the mid-1980s after Velasco unsuccessfully
sued Garcia Marquez for rights to sales of the book translated into 36 other
languages.

Garcia Marquez won the Nobel prize for literature in 1982. With the 1967
publication of his seminal work ``One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' Garcia
Marquez staked his claim as one of the prime exponents of ``magic realism,'' a
genre that in his own words encompasses ``myth, magic and other extraordinary
phenomena.''

Garcia Marquez, now 73, received treatment for lymphatic cancer last year.

21:33 08-02-00