Prof Scores Llosa Novel For Not Slamming U.S. Hegemony Of Latin America

“Harsh Times,” Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, is a didactic book. Set before and after the US-orchestrated coup that toppled Guatemala’s socialist President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, its message is spelled out repeatedly across some 300 pages, and then again—as though the reader were in danger of missing the point—in its final paragraph: “When all is said and done, the North American invasion of Guatemala held up the continent’s democratization for decades at the cost of thousands of lives, as it helped popularize the myth of armed struggle and socialism throughout Latin America.”

Photo Insert: Author Mario Vargas Llosa

For all the endless debates over the proper role of politics in literature, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a stark example of what might be called liberal realism.

Vargas Llosa has long been an outspoken member of the market-friendly center-right—so much so that in 2014 he was awarded membership in the Mont Pelerin Society, the organization founded by economist Friedrich Hayek in 1947 to combat left-wing ideas in academia and government, Lucas Iberico Lozada, a writer and teacher who lives in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, wrote for Foreign Policy on Jan. 10, 2022. Lozada is a Dornsife fellow in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Yet “Harsh Times” is no paean to the free market: The novel is largely an acid denunciation of the extent to which the role of corporate interests in the establishment of the US superpower has come at a steep social and political cost. Yet, Llosa is not denouncing the US itself for its counterrevolutionary actions. Revolutions are based on material conditions and certainly are not myths.

This is not the first time Vargas Llosa has fictionalized watershed historical events in Latin America. But in reducing the ideological battles of the Cold War into little more than “tragic” deviations from a democratic ideal, the novel—though written by a literary genius—frequently teeters on the edge of reducing its real-life characters to stand-ins for a morality play designed for the Davos set.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic