Mario Vargas Llosa: “Latin America must understand that communism has disappeared”

The writer Mario Vargas Llosa He urged Latin Americans across the continent to understand the “extraordinary wealth” that the concept of “freedom” possesses and to understand that “Communism is gone”, after having received in Quito the Medal of National Merit of the Ecuadorian State.

In homage to the Palais Carondelet, The 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature declared that there are still “compatriots” on the continent who “have not understood” that communism is “a fantasy” which “has disappeared due to the absolute inability to satisfy the most basic needs of the people who believed in it. “.

And he added that he’s not even in Russia (a regime of “buddy capitalism”), nor in China (“Capitalist country of businessmen who remain speechless in the face of the absurdities of power”), nor in Cuba (“Where thousands of people take to the streets to demand food and work that they do not have in defiance of the prison”).

Nor in Venezuela, “One of the richest countries, which now expels five million something so that they don’t starve to death”, not even Nicaragua of “Commander Ortega”, who “wins the elections because he puts all his opponents in prison”.

So at the same time welcomed the progress made by Ecuador in electing Guillermo Lasso as President, He hopes that all Latin Americans who still believe in this “ghost” will find out soon, because “Then they will get to work on this everyday reality in which things can change.”

The writer spoke after receiving the medal of the National Order of Merit in the rank of Grand Cross that the Ecuadorian president, personal friend and colleague, presented to him and who described Vargas Llosa as a “universal Latin American” who, as a “liberal”, is in “rebellion”.

A tribute for his contribution to letters and to the world of universal culture, according to the granting decree, although Lasso, not wanting to go through “literature specialist“, He also praised his position as defender of the democratic values.

“I am not the one who will present the literary journey of Mario Vargas Llosa. I don’t want to make the mistake of sounding like an expert in literature. I am simply a politician but, like Mario, I was also a citizen who entered public life with a clear objective: to defend freedom “, he claimed.

And he recalled in this sense, that the writer was one of his “Referents in this fight for freedom”, because like him, he said: “I also felt I had to rebel against a certain status quo that continues to dominate both our politics and our culture.”

The event, whose capacity is limited due to pandemic conditions, brought together members of government and public institutions, as well as representatives of the world of letters and the two children of the winner: lvaro and Morgana.

A minute of silence was also observed during the ceremony in memory of the recently deceased Ecuadorian writers. Jorge Velasco Mackenzie and Eliécer Cárdenas.

The Ecuadorian president praised Vargas Llosa’s struggle for “stay different“”, “always iconoclastic“”, “companies in his thought ”, when“ many of his contemporaries accommodated regimes clearly contrary to the ideals of freedom and change ”and established “A police of political truth.

“Mario, by not conforming, by maintaining his independence, exercised a real rebellion”, he affirmed, insisting on the fact that with his arrival in the government in May, “Ecuador has recovered its institutional framework and its fundamental democratic values”.

An argument supported by the author of “Pantaleón and the Visitors” or “The City and the Dogs”, among his many works, stating that Ecuador, “One of the smallest countries in Latin America”, will be “big and powerful with Lasso in power”, if “They let him make it the country he has in his dreams.”

Vargas Llosa arrived in Ecuador on Monday from Mexico, where the IV Biennial of the Novel which took place in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, and tonight he was planning to leave the city.

(With information from EFE)

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