At the end of the 20th century, three Latin Americans – the Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner and the Peruvian writer Álvaro Vargas Llosa, son of the famous novelist, collaborated to produce a book entitled Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.
The work was an epic denunciation of the cult of the Latin American messianic strongman and its supporters, at home and abroad. Referring to the book 10 years later, Álvaro Vargas Llosa wrote: “The ‘Idiot’ species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs – revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law – derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex.”
Vargas Llosa gave that analysis in an article he wrote in 2009, in recognition of a renewed wave of leftist strongmen in Latin America, entitled The Return of the Idiot. He identified two leading idiots in contemporary Latin America: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia. He denounced their obsession with the figure of the caudillo, the traditional Latin American strongman, based on personality cult, ranting against foreign influences and indulging in economic illiteracy.
When I interviewed Vargas Llosa around that time, it seemed to me he had by far the best understanding of any commentator of the problems of his subcontinent, though the extent to which he reposed faith in capitalism as a cure might appear a little optimistic today, since capitalism itself has followed its own path of deterioration, in tandem with the decline of societies such as Venezuela. The importance of Vargas Llosa’s thesis is that, besides his penetrating analysis of economic problems, he also traces the origins of the Latin American malaise to deep-rooted cultural and psychological flaws, notably the “inferiority complex” he identifies as underlying the political primitivism.
We should bear those issues in mind when considering problems such as the current crisis in Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro, the former bus driver promoted to succeed Hugo Chávez, a more charismatic Idiot, as Venezuelan dictator, is attempting to deny the outcome of a presidential election he lost by two-to-one in the proportion of votes cast and to retain power, against the wishes of the population, as expressed at the ballot box.
