In 1974, after nearly two decades of living in Paris, London, and Barcelona, Vargas Llosa moved back to Peru and, shocking many fans in the literary world, declared his adherence to neoliberalism. He endorsed its emphasis on individual rights, a free market, and a small government, despite the fact that neoliberalism had been forcefully applied by military regimes across Latin America. (He had become an admirer of the conservative economic policies of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.) In the late nineteen-eighties, he went a step further and founded a political party, Movimiento Libertad, in opposition to President Alan García’s attempt to nationalize the banking system. In the 1990 elections, he ran for President against Alberto Fujimori, campaigning on austerity programs and the privatization of state-owned industries.
!neolibs we get to claim an artist for once
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Vargas Llosa has been right wing since the 1980s, is just that he always opposed the military dictatorships in Latam, basically he’s not a wingcuck, he even supported the leftist Ollanta Humala against Keiko Fujimori in 2011 and only supported Fujimori in 2021’s second round because the other candidate was an ignorant commie with ties to the shining path. The journo behind this article is either blind or an r-slur.
I love his books by the way. Conversación en la Catedral is a masterpiece
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is the translation still worth it?
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I have no idea because I read it in Spanish, so I can’t attest the quality of the translation, but possibly yes, the story is very interesting and he transports you into 1950s and 1960s Lima. Is set during the dictatorship of general Manuel Odría. The main character is a contrarian mediocre upper class student who becomes a commie because of a girl and then leaves the party after been arrested. It is also about his father’s driver, a black peruvian and the housemaid, more information and I’ll spoil you.
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