“The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa died on 13 April, in Lima. He was 89. Best known for his role in Latin American literature’s revival, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 2010, Vargas Llosa was also a political activist. After a brief period of communist involvement as a student, he made a U-turn and used his literary influence to mount a defence of neoliberalism. In 1990 he ran for president, and in 2021 he supported far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori against left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo.” (Le Monde Diplomatique)
Neocon with a Nobel
By Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2010
In Llosa's El Sueno del Celta, the hero, Roger Casement, 1864-1916, “was an outstanding historical figure. As a British consul in Africa, he was the first to condemn, as early as 1908, the atrocities of Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State… Vargas Llosa’s novel has rescued Casement from oblivion, as ‘one of the first Europeans to have formed a very clear idea of the nature of colonialism and its abominations’.
“Vargas Llosa, despite his opposition to indigenous movements in Latin America, shares that idea. ‘No barbarism is comparable to colonialism’, he says, blocking any debate on the ‘benefits’ of colonisation: ‘Africa has never been able to recover from its aftermath. Colonialisation has left nothing positive behind’.
“In a manifesto supporting the Peruvian guerrilleros, Vargas Llosa said that to change things, ‘the only recourse is armed struggle’.
“He spoke of solidarity with the Cuban revolution. ‘In 10, 20 or 50 years,’ he said on 4 August 1967 in Caracas, ‘the hour of social justice will arrive in our countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it, from the forces that now insult and repress it. I hope that this hour arrives as soon as possible, and that Latin America enters, once and for all, into dignity and modern life, and that socialism will free us from our anachronism and our horror’.
“In the early 1970s, his perspective was changed by The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper, especially the latter. ‘I consider Karl Popper as the most important thinker of our time. I have devoted the greater part of the two last decades to reading his work and, if I were asked to name this century’s most important philosophical book, I would not hesitate for a moment in choosing The Open Society and Its Enemies’.
“He ceased to support the Cuban revolution, disowned his past as a ‘leftwing intellectual' and, with the zeal of a convert, became an ardent advocate of neoliberalism. His new heroes were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; she was a symbol of the 'conservative revolution' and he felt for her 'a boundless admiration and a scarcely less than filial reverence which I have never felt for any other living political leader'. Inspired by this, he moved to London, and when she was deposed in 1990, sent her flowers with the message: “Madam, there will never be enough words in the dictionary for me to thank you for what you have done for the cause of freedom’.
“The programme he proposed when he ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 was Thatcherite. But he was severely defeated by Alberto Fujimori. He then went into exile, and even renounced his citizenship on the pretext that Peruvians did not deserve him. He focused his admiration on José María Aznar, the neo-liberal Spanish prime minister from 1996 to 2004, an ally of George W Bush in the Iraq invasion: Aznar is now on Rupert Murdoch’s payroll at News Corporation, and has just been classified by the US magazine Foreign Policy as one of the world’s five worst leaders. Vargas Llosa thinks 'historians of the future' will recognise him as one of history’s greatest statesmen’. He also admires Nicolas Sarkozy’s 'charismatic personality' and Silvio Berlusconi’s 'outstanding political talent'.
“Vargas Llosa has a dual personality. He can captivate readers from his first line and plunge them into breathtaking plots in which one intrigue follows another, each full of passions, humour, cruelty and eroticism. Yet the seductive mask of his novels conceals an ardent partisan who, for nearly 40 years, has spent most of his time in the spotlight, and haranguing and sermonising at international conventions, repeating his ideological credo. Vargas Llosa – active member of the Trilateral Commission, chairman of the International Liberty Foundation, recipient of the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research – is a professional neo-con. He has tried to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the June 2009 coup in Honduras.
“The French pro-Reagan essayist Guy Sorman said in October [2010]: ‘We often encounter each other on the same podium in Latin America, where Mario is a militant who, in France, would be labelled an 'ultra-liberal'. He has never stopped fighting Castro, Morales, Chávez, Kirchner and any programme that is the least bit social-democratic.' Vargas Llosa has insisted that he received the Nobel Prize as much for his ideas as for his skills as a writer: 'If my political opinions have been taken into account, so much the better. I’m thrilled'.”
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