Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression

Alvaro Vargas Llosa

may 2015 · Distribuido por Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Latin America's Foremost Political Journalist Makes a Brilliant and Passionate Argument for Real Reform In the Economically Crippled Continent

In Liberty for Latin America, Alvaro Vargas Llosa offers an incisive diagnosis of Latin America's woes--and a prescription for finally getting the region on the road to both genuine prosperity and the protection of human rights.
When the economy in Argentina--at one time a model of free-market reform--collapsed in 2002, experts of all persuasions asked: What went wrong? Vargas Llosa shows that what went wrong in Argentina has in fact gone wrong all over the continent for over five hundred years. He explains how the republics of the nineteenth century and the revolutions of the twentieth-populist uprisings, Marxist coops, state takeovers, and First World-sponsored privatization-have all run up against the oligarchic legacy of statism. Illiberal elites backed by the United States and Europe have perpetuated what he calls the "five principles of oppression" in order to maintain their hold on power. The region has become "a laboratory for political and economic suicide," while comparable countries in Asia and Eastern Europe have prospered.
The only way to change things in Latin America, Vargas Llosa argues, is to remove the five principles of oppression, genuinely reforming institutions and the underlying culture for the benefit of the disempowered public. In Liberty for Latin America, he explains how, offering hope as well as insight for all those who care for the future of this troubled region.

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A native of Peru, ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA was trained at the London School of Economics and has worked as a journalist in Latin America, Europe, and the United States for fifteen years. He is a fellow of the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.