Remembering the great Mario Vargas Llosa

The great Peruvian novelist and classical liberal Mario Vargas Llosa passed away on April 13 in Lima, Peru. He was 89.

Vargas Llosa was a key figure driving the Latin American Boom of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, with classic works like “The Time of the Hero,” “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” and “Conversation in The Cathedral.”

He would go on to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature for his contributions to the written word, particularly “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

Like many Latin American intellectuals of his era, Vargas Llosa for a time was a leftist who supported Marxist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro in Cuba. With time, however, Vargas Llosa became disillusioned with the left and came to embrace classical liberalism and free markets.

Vargas Llosa even made a foray into politics, running for president of Peru in 1990 on a platform of deregulation and privatization. He was defeated by future despot Alberto Fujimori.

Still, Vargas Llosa remained engaged in politics, including writing a regular column for Spanish publication El País.

“The more the state grows and takes on greater influence in the life of nations, the more the freedoms of its citizens are diminished,” he wrote one of his more recent books, “The Call of the Tribe,” in which he detailed his intellectual journey.

As reflected in the title of that work, Vargas Llosa was a righteous skeptic of all manner of tribalism and collectivism, including nationalism and populism, which he viewed as corrosive to free and open societies.

With the threat of global communism in the rearview, Vargas Llosa came to view populism as the greatest threat to democracy.

In an address to the Cato Institute in 2018, he declared, “Populism is difficult to fight, because it’s not an ideology, it’s not a system with principles, with ideas that we can refute rationally.” Often it’s predicated on purely emotional appeals and seeking out scapegoats without actually solving anything and doing great long-term damage on even the most robust of democracies.

“You live in a world of fiction with populism, but it is a fiction that does not present itself as fiction, as in literature. That is why the fictions in literature help us to improve, and fictions in politics are absolutely negative and destructive.”

If only we heeded the lessons of Mario Vargas Llosa. May he rest in peace.