Adam Ledezma, director of a news programme for Mundo Villa TV, a cable channel in a large slum in the centre of Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires, was stabbed to death on Saturday.

Ledezma, a 33-year-old Bolivian, was also a correspondent for the newspaper Mundo Villa. He had received threats, said his wife, Ruth.

Sources: Knight Centre In Spanish: Perfil/La Nación

Lynn Fogwill writes: In his obituary of the Argentinian author Rodolfo Fogwill (28 August), Nick Caistor wrote that: "Fogwill tried to convince me his surname was English, claiming he had ancestors in Fox Hill, in Sussex".

For the record, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill did indeed come from an English family. His grandfather, Samuel Henry Fogwill, left Devon in 1899 or 1900 for Argentina, where he married an Argentinian woman. Together they raised a family of 12 children. All of the more than 50 Fogwills in Argentina are descended from Samuel Fogwill of Kingskerswell, Devon.

Some of them continue to correspond with and visit their cousins in Devon as well as my family – Fogwills from the same family who came to Newfoundland in Canada. The Argentinian Fogwills are also connected to Fogwills in Burgess Hill, Sussex (not Fox Hill, Sussex), although they are not immediate family.

Samuel worked for a very large Argentinian landowner managing several large estancias (rural estates). When Edward, Prince of Wales, went to Argentina in the mid-1920s, Samuel acted as a translator between the prince and the landowner when the prince purchased several polo ponies which had been trained by Samuel.

Argentinian footballer and last survivor of the 1930 World Cup final

Francisco "Pancho" Varallo, who has died aged 100, was the last surviving player from the first World Cup final, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1930. Varallo, then aged 20 and the youngest footballer in the competition, was Argentina's inside-right in the final, which his team lost 4-2 to Uruguay. In Varallo's view, aside from Uruguay and Argentina, "all the teams were of a very feeble level" at the championship.

Varallo took part in Argentina's opening game against France, in which, despite injuries to their gallant goalkeeper, Alex Thépot, and their winger Lucien Laurent, the French went down by just a single goal, but Varallo believed that Argentina might have scored eight. That evening, Varallo recalled with pleasure, the celebrated tango singer, Carlos Gardel, came to the Argentinian footballers' hotel, to serenade them with his guitar. Varallo scored in Argentina's next game, a 6-3 victory against Mexico, and also played in their 3-1 win over Chile. He missed the semi-final, an easy 6-1 win over the Americans, with a knee injury that threatened to put him out of the final against the hosts and traditional River Plate rivals.

He said he was nervous playing before the impassioned crowd for the final, held on 30 July 1930: "The stadium was full and there was no barrier between the crowd and the players like today. We were afraid they would kill us."

Remembering the opposition, he said: "The Charrúas [Uruguayans] were pitiless and violent. They played with their knives between their teeth. At that time, they were already known for their rough play. We began the second half 2-1 up, but I was hurt in the movement when I nearly scored our third goal; I hit the bar. As we couldn't make substitutions, I went on to the wing and couldn't do much ... Luis Monti [an Argentinian-Italian player] was terrified, he was paralysed during the match, which meant that we were playing with nine men. That's why we were well beaten."

This was an unexpected insight indeed into the character of Monti, long renowned as one of the most brutal and ruthless footballers of his era, whose early injury against England in 1934, when he had to leave the field after only two minutes, provoked what came to be known as the Battle of Highbury, the Italian team for whom Monti then played running riot.

Even as late as 2002, Varallo said he still felt angry about that 1930 World Cup final. "We should have won that game. We broke off all relations with Uruguay afterwards."

Varallo was born in La Plata, Buenos Aires, where in later years he ran a lottery shop close to his home. At the stadium where Estudiantes de la Plata play, a ground is named after him. He played for the local club Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata and then for the better-known Boca Juniors of Buenos Aires. Gimnasia y Esgrima launched him when he was only 17 and he soon began to score goals.

Varallo was less of a technical footballer in the classic Argentinian style than a powerful, incisive attacker, although he was only 5ft 4in. Nicknamed El Cañoncito ("the little cannon"), he was a formidable striker on either foot. He was a crucial figure in Gimnasia y Esgrima's victory over Boca Juniors in the final of the 1929 amateur championship. The Buenos Aires club then paid a large sum of money for his transfer, just in time for the first professional league in Argentina.

They had no cause for regret. Boca Juniors won the Argentinian title in 1931, 1934 and 1935, Varallo scoring 181 times in 210 games. He also scored three goals for Argentina in their victory at the South American championship held in Buenos Aires in 1937. He could doubtless have gone on scoring for several more years were it not for a cartilage injury. As was all too common in those days, inadequate treatment made it impossible for him flourish in his career. By 1940 he had retired.

Modern football did not attract him; there were, he opined, too many fouls and a lack of the old camaraderie. Nor did the attackers shoot often enough at goal, whereas in his day, "they let fly bombs from over 30 yards. Sometimes I tell my wife, 'If they could see the goals from our era on television...' "

He continued to live in La Plata and received a Fifa Order of Merit award in 1994.

• Francisco Antonio "Pancho" Varallo, footballer, born 5 February 1910; died 30 August 2010

Outspoken writer who captured the violence and unpredictability of life in Argentina

Loud-mouthed, provocative, often downright rude, the writer Rodolfo Fogwill was a legendary figure in recent Argentinian literature. Fogwill, who has died aged 69, from pulmonary emphysema, probably exacerbated by his inveterate chain-smoking, quarrelled with everybody, was intolerant of any writing or behaviour that in his view smacked of political correctness or pretension, and yet wrote some of the most resonant short stories and novels in Argentina of the past 30 years.

The story surrounding the way he wrote one of his most important novels, Los Pichiciegos (1983), is typical. The book was a protest at the horror of the war fought between Britain and Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland islands in the South Atlantic, and at the stupidity of war in general. Fogwill claimed to have written the book in six days during June 1982, while the war was still going on, keeping himself going with vast amounts of cocaine and whisky.

A brilliant description of life underground during the conflict, Fogwill stressed that the book was above all a "mental experiment". "I knew how cold it was down there from my sailing days," he said. "I knew about youngsters because I had several of my own. I knew about the Argentine army because I did national service. Out of this I constructed a fictional experiment that was much closer to reality than if they had sent me to the islands with a tape recorder and a camera."

The novel (which I translated with Amanda Hopkinson) was his only work published in Britain, by Serpent's Tail in 2007, which gave it the title Malvinas Requiem, rather than its literal translation, The Armadillos. This enraged Fogwill, who saw it as lending a sanctimonious touch to what he wanted to be a condemnation of all ideologies in favour of the dreadful demands made of terrified youngsters on both sides of the war, whose only wish was to survive and get home safely.

Born in Bernal, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Fogwill tried to convince me his surname was English, claiming he had ancestors in Fox Hill, in Sussex. An only child, he studied medicine and sociology at the University of Buenos Aires. He began teaching there, but fell foul of the military regime that took power in 1966. "I was sacked for being a communist, the worst insult imaginable for the Trotskyist I was at the time."

This reversal took him into the world of advertising, where, he claimed, he made and lost several fortunes. His work again caused him problems during the military dictatorship at the end of the 1970s, when the authorities accused him of sending a subliminal message to a banned leftwing group in a TV commercial he had produced. The authorities closed his bank accounts and arrested him for "economic subversion". Thrown into jail, he could not pay his debts, and so eventually was tried for fraud.

When he came out, he wrote a story, Muchacha Punk (Punk Girl), which won a prize and led him to dedicate himself to literature. He founded his own publishing company, Tierra Baldía (Waste Land), where he published his poetry and stories, as well as that of young Argentine poets such as Osvaldo Lamborghini and Néstor Perlongher, and then began to write his own novels.

After Los Pichiciegos, which had to wait until the fall of the dictatorship to be published, Fogwill went on to produce around 20 books of novels and short stories, in which he successfully captured the violence and unpredictability of life in Argentina in the 80s-90s. His pronouncements on literature were always trenchant: "To write seems to me easier than trying to avoid the feeling of meaninglessness that not writing brings"; or "Literature doesn't tell stories, but ways to tell stories". His own preferred novels were Los Pichiciegos, Vivir Afuera (Living Outside, 1998) and En Otro Orden de Cosas (Something Else, 2004), the last of which won him the Argentinian national prize for literature.

Convinced that hypocrisy, double-dealing and empty populist slogans were what undermined Argentine society, he said exactly what he thought on every occasion. Over the years, he managed to fall out with almost everybody in the Argentinian literary world and beyond – though many young Argentinian writers have said how generous he could be in helping them in their careers.

He was married and had five children.

• Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, writer, born 15 July 1941; died 21 August 2010

Cristina Fernández seeks court ruling on newsprint producer Papel Prensa, alleging two newspapers forcibly bought company

Argentina's president yesterday moved to take over the country's only newsprint company, alleging two leading newspapers conspired with dictators to control it three decades ago to drive rivals out of business.

Cristina Fernández said the courts should decide whether Grupo Clarin and La Nación should face charges.

The companies, with which Fernández has been feuding for two years, deny any illegality in the acquisition of the newsprint firm, or other crimes. They accuse the president of trying to control the mechanisms needed to guarantee freedom of expression.

Speaking in a national broadcast, Fernández said she was defending those rights. She accused Grupo Clarin and La Nación of using the newsprint company, Papel Prensa SA, to impose media monopolies on Argentina and stifle other viewpoints by refusing to sell paper at fair prices to competitors.

She showed a headline from the Clarin newspaper saying "Who controls Papel Prensa controls the written word," and said she could not agree more.

"Papel Prensa is the only company that produces newsprint in this country," Fernández said, "and it's a vertically integrated monopoly. It determines who it sells to, how much it sells and at what price. And so yes, whoever controls it controls the written word in the Republic of Argentina."

Human rights groups, which have a prominent role in the government, accuse La Nación and Clarin of being conspicuously silent about "dirty war" crimes committed against leftists and other opponents of the 1976-83 dictatorship.

Fernández said the newspapers obtained Papel Prensa through a forced sale in 1976 at a time when the military junta was doing all it could to destroy the company's owner, David Graiver, a prominent banker who was secretly supporting the leftist Montonero guerrillas. Graiver died in a suspicious plane crash, sending his company into bankruptcy and leaving his widow, Lidia Papaleo, and parents to face the dictators.

"And five days after she signed [the papers selling the company] she was detained. And during her detention she was raped, tortured, beaten in the head. The same luck was suffered by her in-laws and other members of their company," the president said. "They had been forced to sell – and their detention was delayed so that the buyers could claim they obtained the company in good faith."

The owners of La Nación and Clarin deny the accusations, saying Papaleo freely sold the company and that she never formally alleged any forced sale or fraud.

"Never, in 27 years of democracy, has Papel Prensa faced an administrative or judicial question about its origin," they said in a joint statement yesterday.

Papaleo's brother said yesterday that his sister did not plan to comment, but that she supported the allegation the newspaper groups conspired with the junta to seize the company. Osvaldo Papaleo said in a radio interview that his sister had not come forward before out of fear and feels this is the first government to promise her protection.

Government lawyer Alberto Gonzalez Arzac said the Graivers had "suffered death threats, illegal pressure, kidnappings, illegal detention in clandestine places, the seizure of their property and torture".

He added: "It has been conclusively verified that the newspapers acted illegally as participants in the transfer of stock, and shows that the truth about Papel Prensa has surfaced in an undeniable manner."