Liberty for Latin America
How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $25
THIS IS THE MOST UNCOMPROMISING, insightful history of Latin America now available. Don't expect a routine discussion of presidents, caudillos, constitutions, and guerrilla wars, as important as those are in their way. Alvaro Vargas Llosa focuses on more basic and underlying matters.
He explains why Latin America is the most unequal region on earth, and why it will remain that way, muddling along on the backs of the majority, unless fundamental reforms are carried out. The author emphasizes the impact of both "cultural" factors ("values that determine human conduct") and "institutional" factors ("the rules by which individuals relate to each other"). These have derailed several efforts at major reforms undertaken since most of the countries gained their independence two centuries ago, most recently in the 1990s. There may be another chance in a decade or so, he suggests, and the key to making the reforms work next time will be understanding why they have failed in the past.
This book explains why they failed, and offers a program for success the next time around. The author is a journalist and analyst who, like his father the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, has engaged in politics in his native Peru. He coauthored the equally hard-hitting Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, a book that critiques Latin Americans who refuse to accept responsibility, but always seek scapegoats, for the region's conditions.
This book emphasizes five interrelated "principles of oppression" that have determined the lives of the region's people, from precolonial times to the present. They are: corporatism, state mercantilism, privilege, bottom-up wealth redistribution, and political law. In brief, state power was justified by "political law" and maintained by means of ideas and institutions that treated people as groups rather than individuals, emphasized extracting rather than producing wealth, and channeled that extracted wealth from the mass of workers who labored in the mines, fields, or factories to the ruling elites.
In his analysis of the past thousand years of Latin American history, Vargas Llosa shows that the principles of oppression always adapted to new conditions and challenges, and thus not only survived but, in altered forms, thrived. This prevented the flourishing of individual freedom and economies and representative governments that might benefit the vast majority of the people. Mexico's Nobel Laureate, Octavio Paz, put Latin America's problem this way: "Though Spanish-American civilization is to be admired on many counts, it reminds us of a construction of great solidity--built to last, not to change. In the long run, that construction became a confine, a prison."
Clearly, Vargas Llosa is not the first to notice the remarkable adaptability of the wardens of this "prison." Howard Wiarda also did so recently in The Soul of Latin America. But better than anyone before him, Vargas Llosa shows how this durability has thwarted efforts to fundamentally change things. Ironically, while one usually and understandably associates Latin America with instability--the presidential coups, revolutions, guerrilla wars, raging inflation, economic collapses, corruption (the litany of problems that make up Latin American news and history)--the overriding characteristic of the region, and its bane, has been its underlying super-stability. Nothing has really challenged the five forms of oppression. The opportunity for reform arises, Vargas Llosa argues, when those who live directly and those who live indirectly off the state's exploitation of the people come into conflict with each other. This happened in the 1990s, a period of hope and, ultimately, failure that is examined here in considerable detail. Many things did change then, he says, some for the better, including the curbing of inflation. But in the end most "reforms" turned out to be just a shuffling of elite winners and losers, generally at the expense of the majority. Even much-touted privatization efforts, which transferred assets without guaranteeing property rights to all citizens, ended up creating new elites and new government-owned enterprises, while real free-marketers took the blame for all failures.
Last year, the Economist had a special report on Argentina entitled "Becoming a serious country," and one of the comments on the streets in Quito, Ecuador, during the presidential upheaval of mid-April was the need to become "serious." But the inclination to reject real seriousness persists. Consider, for example, the reaction of Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) to the Times of London's recent survey of the world's top 200 universities. It was the only university in Latin America to make the list, and came in at number 195. UNAM promptly sent out a press release bragging that UNAM stood at the forefront of Latin American universities! The vanguard of the tail, as it were, so often the tragic story in Latin America.
One chapter is devoted to "friendly fire from the United States." While Vargas Llosa states unequivocally that Latin Americans themselves are primarily responsible for their conditions in the past and today, he argues that the United States, whether by meaning well or just looking out for its own interests, has seldom played a constructive role in the region. Relations have ranged from military interventions and Cold War compromises to the failed war on drugs. And even when Washington tries to support what it really thinks will bring constructive change, such as the reforms of the 1990s, it does so with such naiveté that it fails to promote the development of a prosperous region that could be a stable and productive trade and security partner.
No man of principle and conscience who so rejects the current state of affairs in the region could neglect to propose a way out. Vargas Llosa picks up on a persistent but secondary "individualist" tradition in the region, and advocates the liberation of every individual from the oppression that has limited most Latin Americans' access to secure property rights and equal opportunities for education, health care, and wealth creation. He proposes a "gentle landing" for those who have become dependent on the current state of affairs. This sweeping proposal is more institutional than cultural, he says, because postponing removal of the direct causes of oppression until more positive cultural values are accepted "will condemn us to impotence."
The problem, whatever questions one may have with individual ideas, is that the changes Llosa advocates fly in the face of the very cultural and institutional forces that he details so well, and that have always co-opted earlier challenges and turned them into little more than a reshuffling of power. Why will it be any different next time?
The difference will have to be the availability and broader acceptance of analyses like this one, and demands for real change. But how to get this perspective more widely accepted? This book will help, if it is taken seriously. Equally improbable things have happened: the recent United Nations-sponsored Arab human development reports, for example. Perhaps the United Nations could commission Vargas Llosa to head a similar study of Latin America, which would draw universal attention to the realities and what should be done.
Beginning this summer, he will be in charge of a new center at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California (funded by the Templeton Foundation and others), that will promote free markets in underdeveloped countries, especially in Latin America. But if programs like this one, and Vargas Llosa's message, do not get through, we may well have to continue relying on the assessment by northern South America's "liberator," Simon Bolivar. Almost two centuries ago he concluded that Latin America is "ungovernable," and that those who try to make real change there are "plowing the sea."
William Ratliff is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of China's "Lessons" for Cuba's Transition.