ABSTRACT
One of the earliest collections for children to be published in Latin America is Uruguayan Horacio Silvestre Quiroga's Cuentos de la selva, which he wrote for his own two children and subtitled para los ninos. Since the 1980s, undoubtedly as a result of the overall rise in respectability in the academy regarding the study of children's literature, more scholarly notice has been paid to this collection as well as to other stories that Quiroga wrote for children. Quiroga demonstrates the advantages of forming or calling upon strategic alliances to resist attack or exploitation by inherently superior forces. These strategic and often unusual friendships, which in his stories often form between species, that is, between humans and animals or between different kinds of animals who under ordinary circumstances may be natural enemies. The strategic alliance between the yacares and their enemy, the surubi, like the friendships between species in the other stories, is a key to the resolution of the conflict.
