On the media patina and ethics and aesthetics of airbrushing

Is it just me or has the whole world become airbrushed? At least in the way we perceive it through the lens of media. The rampant manipulation of pixels and layout is rendering reality more manageable, more slick, and more ... "glossy" is the word that comes to mind. This isn't coincidental, since the glossies, monthly magazines, were progenitors of this now generalized glossifying tendency. This visual sanitizing distorts the manner in which the world is absorbed by many of us.

Consider the front page of The New York Times, whether it is in digital or print format. For sure, a more beautiful and aesthetically assured representation of the world isn't possible. I admit I myself visit the webpage of The New York Times at least once a day on average, maybe some days I skip it, but I can't deny its attractiveness as a narrative and a representation of all the "news that fits to print." A more visually satisfying arrangement representing the state of the world as of yesterday (or a few hours ago, on the Web) is hardly fathomable. Whether it's word choice in the headlines, or the headlines' relative size one to the other, or whether it's in the arrangement of the page elements, or the mere abundance of the words, images and columns cascading on the well-designed page-- the point is the overall impression transmitted is of harmony: chaos contained, reality reined in by master designers and wordsmiths.

I wonder if reading the newspaper these days is less about being informed and educating oneself and more about feeling relief in seeing that someone is taking all the chaos of the world and painting it over with order. Oftentimes the cover photographs on The New York Times front page will correspond to one another like clothing accessories in a Spring fashion show-- they will somehow match, even if depicting utterly different scenarios: an earthquake in China, a U.S. presidential campaign, a societal trend in Japan. Perhaps a spot of color in each of the photos will resonate, or a compositional element will be repeated. There is a master hand at work. The New York Times (and other newspapers, although I would argue that the Times is more guilty of this wannabe omnipotency than other dailies), is like God interpreting the world. It says: look at all this chaos, and see how I make sense out of it, make something palatable and even aesthetically pleasing out of it. Much of this effect is rendered by the beautiful photographs of death and disaster and political stagecraft that are reproduced, but again, the word choice, the play of fonts and column space, sub-headlines, etc.-- all these elements play a role, as does the reassuring retro quality of newspaper mastheads.

In The New York Times, even the most horrific war is made pretty. It's true that individual reporters (I remember Steven Erlanger's visceral reports from the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s) will go out of their way to describe in graphic detail the impacts of war. But often not only is their prose too gorgeous, but so is the work of the designers and the photographers framing their words. It may be useful to recall that the best books about war might be singled out for their tendency toward dissonant, understated or lackluster prose. This is true about The Red and the Black, The Naked and the Dead, War and Peace (which has more than just a dollop of grotesqueness, off kilter description, and jerky movement in every battle scene), The Red Badge of Courage, and Farewell to Arms. These are books that ring true about war not because of over-revved description, but because of a mass of detail that seems right because it is so odd.

In the magazine world, the warm aesthetic bath effect is the rule. Of course, unlike newspapers, magazines have always been more about serving up fantasy than reality. So we shouldn't be surprised to read an extensive profile in The New Yorker (which itself specializes in being a factory of pretty, authoritative, and effective prose, in serving up a certain sterile and safe view of the world, as bien pensant as anything else, even when its journalism is at its most potent and critical) about a pixel specialist who is hired by fashion magazines and other glossies to doctor images in their ads, shoots and photo spreads, in order to render each of them as visually appealing as possible. After the treatment applied by this magician of the 21st Century's benday dots (if Roy Lichtenstein were alive today, he might find a way to show up the layers of hypocrisy and complacency compacted into your average magazine cover image), there is nothing amiss in any of the images in the magazine's pages. Your eyes glide right over them-- satisfied. All is seamless, an imperturbable patina applied over everything, an inevitable varnish of "as it is," except it's not what it is at all.

Likewise, it seems to me, the better written a magazine article is, especially if the subject is something that should get citizens up in arms, then the less likely that it will have any impact at all.

A friend and I would often talk with one another about the "patina" that coats everything in prosperous communities. The patina is a result of comfort, affluence, and a certain self-satisfied assurance that enlightenment is in fact an abundant quality in one's very fortunate community. The patina means: clean environments, attractive facades, new appliances, slick packaging, intelligent signage, smooth transitions, etc. There is nothing jagged, nothing too obviously out of step, nothing jarring. This patina is the environment of The New York Times (perhaps ironically, smaller and less prestigious newspapers don't achieve it to quite the same degree), the shopping mall, the average Hollywood film, TV in general, mass circulation magazines, etc.

I remember a few years ago there was a controversy about a Reuters photograph of Israeli bombing in Lebanon because it turned out it was retouched beyond acceptable ethical standards: the smoke was made blacker and more voluminous, the sky lightened to bring out the contrast, etc. But I would argue this kind of digital and design tinkering is done everyday, in our media, and in our visual culture generally, in less blatant ways, and the aim is not at all to make reality sensationalist-- but instead to create a cocoon-like, reassuring visual environment. Look around you: especially in areas and media designed for general consumption and mass observance. Doesn't everything seem too cleanly made? And it's not a question of publishing photos with dead bodies and blood, or "shock" strategies of any sort, or punching holes in walls or throwing rocks through chain store windows. The element that is missing isn't blood or a healthy streak of yellow journalism, or overt protest, it's the willingness to indulge in the incongruent message, the dissonant image, the un-resolvable juxtaposition, the friction of images that don't and won't respond to the eye's and brain's addiction to sense-making.

I would argue that most visual art today, especially in the rich nations, in part lacks any real power because it doesn't truly address these facts, and instead of seeking actively to rupture the cocoon of an airbrushed visual culture falls into the trap of also seeking seamlessness, flawless craftsmanship, some brand of slickness.

As a counterexample to the bumpless texture of our visual culture, I submit the political cartoons of Carlos Latuff, a Brazilian cartoonist. Apparently, his website has been repeatedly visited by U.S. government agencies like the Pentagon, State Department and individual military branches, because of his cartoons' popularity in the Arab world. To me, it is irrelevant whether you support the Iraq War or not, what his cartoons do (and I haven't even reproduced some of his more controversial ones) is thrust us directly into the heart of the matter, without making us wade through the overstuffed prose and analysis of newspapers and websites, and without having to distill tragedy from the flawless composition of a newspaper's front page photo, which may be showing a bombing casualty's funeral, whether it is a U.S. victim or an Iraqi, but which for some reason has to strive to emulate the compositional mastery and deft lighting effects of a Caravaggio. In our visual culture, that amounts to a trivialization of the subject (a war death, a civilian death, a soldier's death) and only an aggrandizement of the newspaper's and the photographer's ego.

Probably it's not coincidental that the winning image in the World Press Photo awards recently was of voyeurism amidst the ruins after Israel's bombings of Beirut (one of the photo's subjects holds a handkerchief to her nose, she can't stand the smell; meanwhile another takes a photo of the ruins with her cell phone, and another looks out from behind gold-plated sunglasses; it wasn't the only image of its kind to become famous in the wake of this news event: another widely-reproduced photo was of two comfortable-looking Lebanese on a rooftop taking pictures of surrounding smoke and destruction, also via a cellphone).

It's my theory the World Press Photo award-winning image didn't strike a chord necessarily as a statement on Lebanese society, but because of its depiction of our voyeur culture, and how we've become spectators inclined to see even the most destructive and morbid events as shows.

So it's media's job now not to indulge us. Before, it may have been necessary to pull a reader in with a well-made, narrative-rich image, a beautiful shot with classic composition, well distributed light and color. Now, it may be that visual culture will be that much more effective in terms of forging a vital connection when it breaks the rules, when it jars and becomes jagged, or grainy, sufficiently illegible-- at least slightly abrasive, maybe even a bit heavy-handed (like Latuff's work).

Today, there's nothing more surprising to our eyes than that which purports to represent reality but has some loose ends, some crooked flaps, some dissonant element. The media is educating our eyes, and words and images seem to wash over us, unless there is something in them that might stick into our skin. We need the barbs so that something might poke us and linger, and not merely slip away with the rest of the media bath, down the drain of daily forgetting.





Political cartoons by Carlos Latuff

Latin America's food problem

I've been interested lately in the big changes I see in Brazil and Mexico. Kind of like in China, large sectors of the underclass have come to access more prosperous and stable lifestyles, including everything from home ownership to private education and home computers, and in general opportunities that they were formerly marginalized from. But now global economic crises like the food panic and the spiking price of oil threaten that fragile but I think very positive change in these societies. The article is published below, with thanks to New America Media.

I have recently rejoined New America Media as a New York-based contributing editor. I'll be writing about Latin America, Latin Americans in the United States, politics, culture, media, etc. New America Media produces, aggregates and disseminates multimedia content for and from the youth, immigrant and ethnic media sectors on a national level.

Here's the story:

Food Crisis Reverses Middle Class Trend in Latin America

Editor’s Note: The food crisis in Latin America is eroding the spending power of the new middle class, and with it, their optimism in the future of the region’s economy, writes NAM contributing editor Marcelo Ballvé.

In Latin America, the global food crisis has done more than just trigger protests and force governments to scramble for stopgap solutions. The crisis has begun to reverse the most positive regional trend of recent years: the decline of poverty and the nascent emergence of a new middle class.

Boosted by consistent economic growth, low inflation and government social spending, working poor people across Latin America –especially in Brazil and Mexico – saw their spending power climb during the last five years, until they achieved the trappings of a middle class lifestyle. They began to enjoy expanded access to consumer goods, home ownership and credit, as well as more stable jobs and careers.

In Brazil, this phenomenon was dubbed the "China effect," since like in China it seemed as if a new consumer class had been created overnight.

The advent of a new middle-income sector (in reality a post-industrial working class or lower-middle class tied to the services industry) was widely hailed as a sign that Latin America was finally turning the corner in its struggle against poverty and inequality. As recently as late last year, The Economist published a long feature on the theme, headlined, "Adiós to Poverty, Hola to Consumption."

For a time it seemed as if there were no clouds on the horizon, and the economic rise of these households couldn't be checked. But now the food crisis is unraveling their spending power, the basis of their new opportunities. In every country in the region, inflation has reared its head again, mainly because of the spiraling upward trend of oil and food prices. Pay raises, if there are any, are not keeping pace, and the end result may be that millions slip back into poverty, their incomes slowly gnawed away by grocery bills.

One study, released April 18, estimates that the food crisis will cause up to 15 million Latin Americans to fall – or return to their former place – below the poverty line.

"This is a dramatic situation for a large number of people," said José Luis Machinea, director of the U.N.'s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, which released the study.

Many Latin American leaders have raced to limit or regulate grain out-shipments (Argentina's government has slapped a 27 percent tax on soybean exports), instill price controls, or promise government-financed food stockpiles. But after decades of deregulations, privatizations and free trade agreements such as NAFTA (which led to the liberalization of Mexico's corn market), it seems unlikely that state-directed efforts will turn out to be more than improvised defenses against the tide of price pressures.

What's certain is that the crisis is inflating the prices of Latin America's most emblematic and widely consumed foods.

In Mexico, an alliance of farm groups recently sent a strongly worded message to President Felipe Calderón, the subtext of which was this: It's the price of tortillas, stupid. It was their attempt to shake his administration out of what they believe to be its complacency in the face of the food crisis, which in Mexico has caused the price of staples like eggs, milk and corn to shoot up.

Their communiqué said that within months the price of corn-based tortillas would likely reach the psychological significant threshold of 11 pesos a kilo, or roughly the equivalent of one U.S. dollar. For over a year now, since the January 2007 protests against tortilla price-hikes dubbed "the tortilla wars," Mexicans have feared the advent of the one-dollar kilo. If it arrives, a return of the tortilla wars seems likely.

But instead of racing to implement concrete solutions, Mexico's government "has assumed a calming attitude of 'there's nothing wrong here,'" said Victor Suárez Carrera, head of the Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras de Productores del Campo (ANEC), an association of small and medium-sized farms.

Although the government assures Mexicans that there will be no food shortages, "they don't say at what prices or with what economic consequences," Suárez added.

In Brazil, the trouble lies with beans and rice. For most Brazilians, it is the side dish – and sometimes the main course – of every meal. Delivering a report on inflation last month, Brazil's finance minister Guido Mantega said that if it wasn't for the "fiejãozinho" Brazilians eat every day (deploying the affectionate diminutive in reference to “fiejão,” or beans), then the projected inflation for this year would be significantly lower than the official figure of nearly 5 percent.

However, Brazilian media were quick to respond that inflation was worrisome precisely because it was being increased by the soaring price of everyday staples like beans.

As in Mexico, Brazilian leaders have tried to sound upbeat. Because their country is an agricultural powerhouse, one of the world's top producers of foods like corn, soybeans and rice (the only non-Asian country in the rice-producing top 10), government ministers have been quick to sound a positive note and hint at Brazil's invulnerability.

"If there's a country that can reposition itself quickly in order to increase its food production, it's Brazil," said Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva has gone on a counterattack, blaming rich countries' agricultural subsidies and corn-based biofuels (as opposed to Brazil's own sugarcane-based ethanol) for the food panic.

The reality is that despite Brazil's aggressive diplomacy on the subsidies issue and self-perception as the world's tropical food basket, it can do little in the short term to control the commodity markets, which are driven by speculation based on a variety of factors, including the spiking demand of India and China.

Meanwhile, hunger and riots are not precisely what Latin America's governments should be worried about. The food crisis threatens the region with something more corrosive: a creeping erosion of the optimism and belief in participative democracy that accompanied families' emergence out of the grind of poverty.

P.S.
I also wrote a related article recently for World Politics Review, on how this new working middle class was leading to precedent-setting statistics in Internet usage and home computer ownership in Brazil.

Nasty resurgent nationalism and the regional antidote

Where do you live? I live in the Hudson River Delta, on the largest of the islands washed by the river's effluence: Long Island, precisely on its far-western bulge, coursed and carved here and there by sounds and channels-- and run-off, much of it put underground by the city. Notice that I have not mentioned political geographies, by which I mean nation and other arbitrary divisions such as provinces or states or counties. Cities also are arbitrary at least in terms of their official limits, because metropolises spread stain-like across their territory, brooking no attempts to contain them, conquering even geographical divides, such as mountains or rivers (as is seen in images of the world at night, depicting the diamond-like sprinkle of lights clustered in highly urbanized regions, such as the Hudson River Delta and surrounding shores).

When most of us imagine the world, we imagine it politically. I suspect most of us are still more familiar with the political map of the world, its multi-colored patchwork of countries, and can bring this representation of the world to the mind's eye more easily than the physical map with its large swaths of green and expanses of brown, its relatively un-parceled look. We know nation is a fiction. Yet we cling to it very firmly, and the imagination latches onto it, drunk on the romance, the sentiment, the emotion of being a patriot, a lover, a belonger, a devotee of a certain arbitrarily determined parcel of land.

As of late nation has been making a comeback. We were fascinated with the idea that the world's borders were being erased, but as connections between nations multiply-- as immigrants, ideas and guns and money flow back and forth and squiggle through borders, illicitly or not-- the reaction is a palpable re-entrenchment of nationalisms. It has occurred previously, this nationalistic reaction to openness and an era of intense exchange. The 19th Century's last years were heady with the idea of cosmopolitan simmering, chock-full of trade and huddled masses of moving peoples and steam engines sprouting here and there, and this lasted until: World War I, when Europe's nations dug themselves into trenches for mutual massacres in order to gain a few paces in a field. OK, perhaps it amounted to more than a few paces, I mean the land at stake, but really, whether a border was here or there, or whether Alsace and Lorraine or this or that entity ended up on this side or that side, that wasn't the point, really. The point of course was to affirm nation.

When nation is threatened its fangs come out, and they do so in the form of jingoism, ultra-patriots, watchmen of all sorts, walls, trenches, fences. When nation is threatened it becomes nasty. Globalization does not mean the end of nation, but the morphing of it into something more vicious: a normalized jingoism.

It has become fashionable to speak of the rising nationalism of the Chinese, the Brazilians (flush from their recent oil finds and rising agribusiness potency) or the Russians (less so lately the Indians, but when the South Asian nuclear race activates again, the Indians will join this axis ). Yet clearly it is the United States that has been flailing its national dragon tail around with the most aggressive intent. "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," goes the proverb. No, we are not at war with China, Russia or India, but perhaps the unspoken aim of all this warring against terror is to send them a message, in the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were messages to the Soviet Union. I remember very well a pre September 11, 2001 essay I read on the nature of U.S. power, and which made a good case that it's not so much an exercise in quelling rogue nations, but a constant gamesmanship in which Europe, East Asia and Russia are continually intimidated so that they will play cards at a rhythm dictated by the big dog at the baccarat table.


After Sept. 11, 2001, it's all about stopping terrorists, and nukes in suitcases, etc., but terrorists may just be convenient foils for the desperate need of nation to confirm its reason for existence, seizing on an opportunity to produce jugfuls of patriotic antibodies. The terrorist, seen from this perspective, isn't just a threat and a murderer of civilians, which he most definitely is, but also a reason for the state's existence. I do not believe Sept. 11, 2001 conspiracy theories. I do not believe that world leaders in their heart of hearts welcome terrorists in order to prop up their crumbling nations, I simply observe that nationalism is on the rise, not coincidentally at a time of a global Dirty War against terror, in an age when here in the United States we've begun to build a high-tech border wall across thousands of miles to cleave ourselves from a peaceful, friendly neighbor to the south.

The counterweight to this nasty nationalism cannot be globalization, because globalization is too insubstantial. This is where the free marketeers and anti-globalization protesters have both gone wrong. You cannot be for or against globalization because in effect it does not exist. It is vapor, something in the air. It is like saying you are for the speeding up or the slowing down of history or time; it can't be done. Certain things can be accomplished, reforms and wholesale rejiggerings of systems can be achieved, whether your aim is to deregulate or to control certain aspects of economic and social change, but to either stop or fully unleash the forces of globalization is absurd, because like nationalism and other abstractions that humans become enamored of and are willing to fight and die over, it does not in fact exist.

That is why region might save us. I mean a regionalism based on the tangible realities of landscape and natural resources, and an ethic, probably, of stewardship, with regards to both human inhabitants and non-human entities. Also, the creation of a responsible built environment. There is a fellow who writes out of Louisiana named Max Cafard who in the 1990s published something called the Surre(gion)alist Manifesto. In it, he identifies himself as an inhabitant of the Mesechabe Delta, meaning the area around New Orleans, and offers a eerily prescient analysis (given Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath) of how the city's cavalier way of dealing with nature and landscape made the city vulnerable and, he hints, its continuity precarious. Interestingly, the most defining characteristic of region, as Cafard points out, may be its very undefinability, not because it does not exist and is only an abstraction, but because it is impossible to tell exactly where it ends or begins. Where does the Hudson River Delta end and begin? Where do the Everglades begin and end, or the U.S. South, or the Caribbean? Who can draw a boundary around the Sonoran Desert?

Cities are real, more real at least than provinces or nations, which are completely arbitrary, but what is not real is the politically-determined geographical entity that represents a city. Its metropolitan area is always only a fragment of the total urban weave, which has incommensurable tentacular offshoots and spokes and scattered spores. A city is like water: it loves to fill a vacuum.

Regionalists are able to see beyond the fool's gold of nation, province, county and metro area, and understand that all the complexity on which their life depends is ultimately tied in to concrete cycles of energy exchange that begin and end with nature, and ultimately, the sun itself. Everything depends on our relative location on this orb floating in space, and the contours of the land around us. Each place, whether highly anthropomorphized or not, has its spirit, which is another way of referring to its zillions of characteristics that add up to make it into something unique, tangible, real. Region is rooted in landscape and climate, not anthems or slogans, and region can't be penned in by any border, imagined or real.

In many places around the world regionalism is beginning to enter into a symbiotic positive feedback loop with ecological thought. Regionalism is a natural ally to environmentalism because it encourages thought and lifestyle based on natural systems such as a watershed, a mountain range or the idiosyncrasies of desert or rainforest. This points to what may be the saving grace of the fact that some of the most critical environmental problems are in poor countries with weak central governments, which can exercise only limited power in ecologically critical regions. If regional identities, like the caboclo culture of Amazonia, can be properly collaborated with, and local wisdom be well-tapped, then regionalists, and not capital city nationalists, could become the main protagonists in regional moves toward sustainability sprung from the grassroots.

In Latin America, and in many other parts of the world that have been shaped by weak nations, we are accustomed to think in terms of region: Llanos, Pampas, Cerrado, Amazonia, Altiplano, Costa, Sertão, Patagonia, Yungas, Chaco, etc. It is probably because of this that in Latin America we have produced so many regionalist authors of international relevance: Ricardo Palma, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, Jõao Guimaraes Rosa, Romulo Gallegos, Juan José Saer. Other Latin American authors have taken the very concept of region and have made it a subject of their books, molding fictional areas that are not stand-ins for a real region as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County was, but a sort of ur-region, in which the very mind-frame of rooting oneself in a region is investigated (Alejandro Rossi).

In Exile's Return, his collective biography of U.S. writers of the 1920s, Malcolm Cowley says the emergence of the self-consciously separate "Lost Generation" of artists and writers was in part due to the jettisoning of regional identities that had tethered creators to land or region in the past (the New England Transcendentalists, etc.)

I think that soon, in art and literature, region will return. Eco-ethics, regionalism, and a healthy obliviousness to nationalism might coalesce into a new, morally rigorous, clear-eyed, non-sentimental and scientifically exacting regionalist style that might serve as the antidote to so much art and literature that is excessively national, fixated on the myths of nation, whether it is to critique them or elevate them. Our new Gods, someone has said, will be more intimate. It's true, they may be nearer to us than we think, they may reside in our own watershed, in the clefts between our hills, in the local forest that has shadowed generations.

Top photo: Martin Dürrschnabel

The Latin American right-wing intellectual is a flourishing but misguided species

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)