Vargas Llosa’s drift to right leaves former admirers dismayed

Ever since his failed bid in 1990 to become his country’s president Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has never shied away from engagement with Latin America’s turbulent politics.

These interventions usually attract attention when not controversy. This is a reflection of his status as the region’s only living Nobel laureate for literature but also its best known advocate of liberalism in a part of the world where the political creed is held in great suspicion by left and right.

But even after a drift to the right recently, which saw him endorse illiberal candidates as the best chance of keeping out the left, he dismayed many admirers when earlier last month [May] he told an audience in Uruguay he would prefer far-right president Jair Bolsonaro over his left-wing predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s presidential election in October.

What shocked most was Vargas Llosa saying despite Bolsonaro’s “buffooneries” he still preferred him to Lula, thus downplaying the devastation visited on Brazil’s institutions, environment and society by a corrupt, obscurantist administration led by a man with a violent world-view who is openly preparing the ground for a coup should he fail to get re-elected in October.

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Though not minor, the crimes committed when Lula was president (and governing as a moderate) pale in comparison. In recent years some in Lima’s intelligentsia have suggested Mario is just out of touch with Latin American realities, having lived in Madrid too long where he has become overly close to the leadership of Spain’s conservative People’s Party.

He also seems trapped in a Cold War mentality. Before he became Latin America’s most famous liberal he was a Marxist, breaking with the left over the increasingly repressive nature of the Cuban revolution. Since then he has always denounced the authoritarianism of left and right, though you sense he sees the former as the greater threat.

This might cloud his ability to fully assess the menace posed to liberal principles by the new illiberal right as represented by Bolsonaro. Vargas Llosa’s political evolution is also another example of self-styled liberals obsessing over supposed threats posed by the left to economic freedom instead of upholding a broader interpretation of their philosophy.

Thus the Peruvian now finds himself backing political leaders who while free marketeers must abhor progressive positions he has defended for years on gay rights, euthanasia and the decriminalisation of abortion and drugs.

In the case of Bolsonaro even his liberal economic agenda is a farce, his Chicago Boy economics minister little more than an office gofer in a government busy pillaging and dismantling the state. In stating the need for certain restrictions on individual freedoms one of Vargas Llosa’s liberal heroes Isaiah Berlin warned that “total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs”. The motto for Bolsonaro’s version of liberty could well be ‘Death to Lambs’.

Drift to right

In many ways Vargas Llosa has more in common with the democratic left. But instead of engaging with it he drifts further right, increasingly draining his liberal advocacy of credibility. It is remarkable that the author of Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat, two of his greatest novels, which examine the moral corrosion of Latin American societies caused by the dictatorships of military men, would prefer a thuggish ex-army captain openly calling on his supporters to arm themselves ahead of October’s election over a flawed but genuine democrat.

Sadly this makes it likely that more space will now be given to those critics who argue the Nobel laureate’s fiction was always reactionary. That would be a pity given how rich and sophisticated the novels are when engaging with Latin American realities. In truth Vargas Llosa the public intellectual was always a less sophisticated interpreter of these than Vargas Llosa the novelist, something he might acknowledge himself.

In an interview last year with the Estado de SPaulo newspaper he was asked about the “debatable politics” of two of the great Latin American writers from the generation that preceded his, Jorge Luis Borges, sympathetic to some of the region’s murderous military dictatorships, and Pablo Neruda, a trenchant admirer of Stalin. He responded: “[W]riters have to be original, inventive, but not lucid in politics or in social matters, which are not necessarily their job. Many get it wrong.”