The liberal legacy of Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa left an indelible mark on cultural and civic life. In Peru and Latin America. All, beyond, by the way, his remembered political incursion as a presidential candidate in 1990, when Fujimori defeated, later turned autocrat.

As he told in his autobiography, he was the grandson of a prefect, once organized a strike at his school, and was a member of a communist cell during his university years. Then, he was a writer of speeches for a candidate, a congressman and, on more than one occasion, he was offered to be Minister of State. On the ideological side, he went from being a sympathizer to an opponent of socialism, to establishing himself as a well-known liberal. Howe…

The liberal legacy of Mario Vargas Llosa

The Peruvian novelist was interested in the interpersonal and psychological struggles that ultimately drove politics.

EDITORIAL: Polarization and political brutalization are growing – which is why Mario Vargas Llosa's ideas about liberalism are so incredibly urgent.

I never knew Vargas Llosa in person, although I would have liked him. My closest meeting was to be in Bogotá when he was in Bogotá, in some of the times he will have come to this city. But I remember a lot when he started to come with some frequency, over there in the early 1990s. I was part of a group of university students who were gravitating around liberal ideas.

I remember that, at seventeen years old, lost in a pre-university academy, I studied to be a doctor because I felt an urgent revenge for my mother’s early death due to cancer. In the background, I knew that Medicine was not my way and, like most teenagers, I did not find my place in the world. Until I read “The City and the Dogs” by Mario Vargas Llosa, in a second-hand edition, bought in Amazonas at ten suns, with a brown cover and with no desig…