For a while now Mario Vargas Llosa, who as a younger man wrote so many wonderful novels (Conversación en La Catedral, La Tía Julia y el Escribidor, etc.), has seriously been getting on my nerves. For decades, he's been busy promoting his simplistic political ideas to anyone who will give him the time of day, and creating foundations and think tanks in order to spread the gospel of free markets, political freedom, and free trade. Vargas Llosa is the president of the Fundación Internacional Para la Libertad (International Foundation for Freedom). What an original name, huh? Yes, anything that customarily has the word "free" attached to it, he's for it, and will let you know it through the reams of editorials he writes for anyone that will publish them (as we all know, a long time ago, before he ran for president in Perú and was defeated, Vargas Llosa was so far on the other end of the political spectrum, he vacillated between idolizing Camus or Sartre, and wrote a whole book about it): now it's free, free, free. Since he's still got a halo of literary artistry around his head, though, Vargas Llosa is respected and listened to, and so is his son Álvaro Vargas Llosa, who has set himself up as a respected analyst and thinker on international political and economic issues, particularly if they have anything to do with Latin America.
Vargas Llosa Jr., along with other somewhat well-known intellectuals, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Carlos Alberto Montaner, co-wrote The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, which is basically a manual devoted to hunting down and stamping out any remnants of romantic leftist sentiment surviving in the region, and trying to blame the left for all the bad things that have ever occurred in Latin America.
Here are the first couple of paragraphs from the book, which contain, in a nutshell, all its theses:
"The perfect idiot's political tutelage included, in addition to connivings and resentments, a mixture of the most varied and confusing ingredients. First, of course, there is a lot of the Marxist vulgate from his university years. In those years, various introductory-level Marxist brochures and leaflets provided him with a simple and complete explanation of the world and history. All was duly explained as class struggle. History advanced according to a preordained script (from slavery to feudalism to capitalism and then socialism, the threshold of a truly egalitarian society). Those guilty of our countries' poverty and backwardness were two disastrous allies: the bourgeoise and imperialism. Such ideas of historic materialism provided him a stew in which he could later brew up a strange mixture of Third World theses, outbreaks of nationalism and populist demagogy, and one vehement reference or another to compassion, almost always comically quoted from some emblematic strongman of his country ... "
Mario Vargas Llosa himself wrote the introduction to this book, which is available in English and already has had a sequel. In short, Vargas Llosa, father and son, along with Montaner, Mendoza and other intellectuals riding their coat-wings, have established a franchise industry in promoting the cause of economic liberalism and free market democracy in Latin America while exterminating, with a vengeance, any leftover affection for lefty institutions like the Cuban Revolution, student movements, state-run industries, social assistance programs, free health care and education, etc.
Now, in league with right-wing Iraq War cheerleader and former Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Aznar, Mario Vargas Llosa and company are spreading their message through a network of well-funded think tanks scattered across Europe and the Americas. And between March 26 and March 28, Rosario, Argentina, a riverside city four hours north of Buenos Aires, will host all the aforementioned writers and intellectuals, along with Mexican Jorge Castañeda (once a lefty, now a new convert) and other "luminaries" such as former Mexican President Vicente Fox, one of the most unpopular in Mexico's history, and Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri (a Daddy's boy who won the vote with money from his family's tradition of trucking with all of Argentina's unsavory governments, from the military junta to Carlos Saul Menem's kleptocracy). I found out about the conference on the Nacla News website, in an article by Argentine congressman Miguel Bonasso.
The conference, sponsored by the Argentine franchise of Vargas Llosa's umbrella foundation (in Argentina it's called Fundación Libertad), is called "The Challenges Facing Latin America," and as a sort of oddball convention bringing together right-leaning intellectuals and politicians in all shapes and sizes, it might be labeled the Star Trek convention for nerdy Latin American right-wingers.
The main problem I have with Vargas Llosa's championing of his political and economic theories is that they're superfluous. The fact is that without his help, and despite its continuing influence in Latin America's public university systems, the old school Marxist left is really not very influential in Latin America. Even Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, or Evo Morales's Bolivia, represent something other than the Worker-run, centrally-organized, bureaucracy-directed states that Marxist orthodoxy once dreamed of. They are leftist governments, but leftist in a way that Vargas Llosa's stubborn attacks on lefty "Latin American idiots" don't take into account. They are political movements with deep social roots beyond workers, unions, or classic leftist constituencies. In fact, in Venezuela, students and labor are among Chávez's main opponents.
Basically, they are populisms built on the attempts-- misguided, demagogic, or not-- to enfranchise members of the global underclass, who either by systemic poverty or ethnic marginalization have been cut out of any benefits from the globalist economic project making inroads in Latin America. Vargas Llosa's arguments really only apply to Cuba these days, and he needs to update his rhetorical bag of tricks if he's going to make any headway in his project to build a coalition of right-wing intellectuals. In other words, he must explain why Latin America produces and reproduces poverty, a tendency that is at the foundation of the political movements he criticizes. It's not the fault of a few Latin American idiots in berets reading Trotsky. It's the poor, uneducated majorities who are creating and re-creating populist governments (headed by caudillos, of whatever political stripe). Students' and intellectuals' longstanding romance with Marxism has little to do with it. Mario Vargas Llosa and Co. have picked the wrong enemy: they shouldn't aim for the Latin American left, which doesn't really exist as a political entity anymore, they should aim for the center, because if they're ever to apply their program for Latin America, they need to rid the political map of all the moderates like President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva in Brazil and President Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay who believe in buffering the poor from the worst excesses of globalist development, even while they race to sign trade deals and promote all of Wall Street's darling projects for the hemisphere. If the "freedom fighters" like Vargas Llosa really want their way, they should take a page out of U.S. President George W. Bush's play-book and figure out how to implement a political razed-earth program in order to be able to hijack governments with their simplistic balls-to-the-wall free market ideology. But unless they radicalize, they're irrelevant. And I for one hope they don't smarten up, because they're annoying enough as it is.
(Photo: Mario Vargas Llosa, Wikicommons photo)
