Almost at the same time they finished two lives that had crossed in the opposite direction. Mario Vargas Llosa had criticized Pope Francis, but never aggressively. And it is likely that, before the brutal leadership that grew with the ultraconservative wave that runs through the world, it would have valued more to the Catholic leader who radiated goodness, humility, compassion and respect for the different and those who think and feel different.
These features of the Pontiff contrasted with the aggressive intolerance and the supremacist arrogance of leaders who despise weakness in all their forms and treat any criticism against their absolute convictions as heresy.
In the twilight twilight of his life, it is possible that Vargas Llosa came to the conclusion that these ultraconservative leaderships so in the antipodes of what the Argentine Pope radiated to the world, is the worst threat against democracies in this section of history.
In short, it was his aversion to authoritarianism that led him to literature. Reading was, in childhood, where he took refuge from a tyrannical father. From there he described in his first story the authoritarian culture as intrinsically unfair. Upon receiving the Nobel, he said that literature is the most powerful weapon to combat injustice and tyranny. And it was in his literary work where he consistently traveled the distinctive feature of his political position.
Mario Vargas Llosa has essentially been an enemy of authoritarianism.
The question that leaves his death is whether that essential feature would have also made him a hard critic of the ultra-conservatism, which grows in the world of these days with characters like Trump and the leaders who align with him.
While the lefts turn from collectivism to Chinese capitalism, where the authoritarian state generated megamillionaires and also scientific and technological development, taking out the bulk of the rural poverty society, the extreme right that grows in the West attacks against the rule of law so that nothing limits the power of millionaires.
The difference with the Chinese model is that Western ultraconservatism does not want to invest in science or universities, so it faces them as Trump to Harvard and its admirers to science and the educational system in their respective countries.
The White House Chief attacks the judicial system and marginalizes the Legislative Power. The same do the leaders of the right in the boom. Like all populism, it tries to demolish institutional containments to its power, while attacking criticism, finances press addicts and disqualifies everything that is outside its ideological radio.
Those same instruments were used by leftist autocrats such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, and they continue to do it Maduro and Daniel Ortega, all rightly criticized by Vargas Llosa. The debatable thing is that, although as a minor evil, he has encouraged the vote to ultraconservatives to “face populism.”
Perhaps, if the fragility that separated him from public life in recent years was delayed, today he would be pointing his lucidity against this wave that sees in democracy an obstacle.
In short, it was he who said that “the most mediocre of democracies is preferable to the most perfect of dictatorships, whether from Pinochet or Fidel.”
That is the governing principle of his political thinking; what remained intact from its leftist youth to its maturity and liberal old age: the abomination of authoritarianism.
“During the Odriista Ochenio, my hatred of the dictators of any genre was born, one of the few invariable constants in my political behavior,” he explained in the call of the tribe, a book in which he analyzed great liberal philosophers, from Adam Smith to Jean-Francois Revel, passing through Ortega and Gasset, Frederich Hayek, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin Berlin and Karl Popper.
For Vargas Llosa, authoritarianism is the enemy of freedom. He raised it, better than in interviews and conferences, in the field that made him a world celebrity: literature.
He was twelve in 1948, when Manuel Odría overthrew President José Bustamante. In his first story he recounts his experience in the Military Lyceum by promoting a strike against authoritarianism of the authorities.
In the puppies the criticism of that dictatorship and in the city began and the dogs question again the military discipline and the program of the Leoncio Prado High School, for instilling “values” that actually obstruct a good human formation.
The deeper criticism of the General Odría regime and the brands he left, is in conversation in the cathedral. The novel in which he analyzes the story of the APRA and in whose first paragraphs he asks “when Peru fucking.”
Until then, the target of his questions were the Lyceum and the Odría dictatorship. But it was the leftist derivation of the first APRA government, headed by Alan García and was cautious, which made Aunt Julia’s author and the writer into a candidate of the coalition led by the Belaunde Terry party.
Fujimori defeated him in the ballotage, prevailing during the 1990s with an authoritarian regime that led Peru towards the free market, a model that Vargas Llosa defended. Even so, Fujimori’s authoritarianism had it as a staunch enemy.
His literature continued to grow and there continued to diving Latin American history. With two novels of his maturity he denounced right -wing dictatorships. In the goat party he becomes a paradigm of the tyrant abject to the Dominican Rafael Trujillo, while RECIOS TIMES explains how the United Fruit company deceived Washington and managed to overthre the CIA to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, starting in Guatemala the drift of Central America and the Caribbean.
In Celta’s dream, the villain is the exploiting colonialism of Leopold II in the Congo, and the hero is Roger Cassement, British homosexual diplomat that defended Irish separatism and showed the world the oppression imposed by the Belgian king in rubber farms.
He admired Thatcher and Reagan but did not support the dictatorships they supported. He also shocked conservatives defending feminism, the right to abortion, the legalization of drugs and recognition and respect for sexual diversity. But while the target in his books were right -wing dictators, in interviews and conferences he supported ultra -rightist such as Bolsonaro and defenestrated center -left leaders as if they were exacerbated populisms.
In those spills Rosó to Francisco I, whom perhaps, before the remarkable contrast between the humble humanism that radiated with the violent vulgarity of ultraconservative leaderships, today I would invite to talk in the cathedral.
