It was in Mexico City in 1990, at a conference organized by Octavio Paz to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Mario Vargas Llosa, fresh from defeat in the Peruvian presidential elections, denounced Mexico as a “perfect dictatorship.” It was a shocking moment. The word ‘perfect’ said so clearly that the Mexican regime had co-opted its intellectuals without even having to use the vulgar methods — imprisonment, torture, and exile — that had kept some Eastern European intellectuals in line, while forcing others, like Havel and Michnik, into courageous but costly defiance. Paz, a longtime enemy of totalitarian regimes but also hoping that the extraordinary conference would assist his own campaign to win the Nobel Prize, listened in stony silence, while his close friend, the editor and writer Enrique Krauze, sitting opposite Mario, looked aghast.
Mario’s intervention created an uproar, a media sensation. The conference, after all, had the support of the PRI, the Mexican ruling party, and President Salinas Gortari of the PRI had invited those of us speaking at the conference, who included the editor of this journal, to the presidential palace for a dignified lunch. The conference was broadcast live throughout Mexico and Latin America on Televisa. Only Mario dared to say that we were celebrating the downfall of dictatorship in Eastern Europe while remaining silent about our own co-optation at the hands of a Latin American dictatorship.
The formidable figures who came to the conference — Czeslaw Milosz, Leszek Kolakowski, Daniel Bell, Cornelius Castoriadis, Leszek Kolakowski, Irving Howe, Hugh Trevor-Roper — were hardly likely to serve as willing or even unwitting stooges of any regime, so they weren’t necessarily delighted by Mario’s attack. As for the Mexican regime, it was furious. It declared him persona non grata, and I remember him exiting the vast conference hall, with the television cameras following him out the door. As for me, I was exhilarated. It was one of those moments which taught me what it was to be an honest man: to say what has to be said when others are keeping silent.
We met in London in the early 1990s, when we were both working in that wonderful haven for scholars, the London Library in Saint James’ Square. We went for lunch in a trattoria, and Mario, being a sober but snappy dresser, admired the fabulous shop windows along Jermyn Street displaying shirts, ties, belts and shoes for London’s well-heeled gentlemen. Our encounter in the trattoria contradicted everything I expected from a famous man. Instead of monopolizing the conversation, he listened more than he talked, and those writer’s eyes stayed trained upon me.
Later we made a television program together about the chaos of the post-1989 world order. Those were unbelievably exciting years, but Mario brought a shrewd and illusion-free sense of reality to the discussion. I understood why he had sought the presidency of his country. He was probably the most intensely political intellectual I ever met, and as his Nobel Prize citation said, his fiction made him ‘a cartographer of the structures of power”. He was a liberal, all the way down, but his literary imagination was too wild, humorous and extravagant to allow his politics to congeal into an ideological groove.
While other intellectuals chose justice or revolution as their guiding value, Mario chose liberty, and choosing liberty makes it difficult for a political conscience to go to sleep. People on the left didn’t like his politics, and even I could never figure out why he came to prefer Bolsonaro to Lula in Brazil, but Mario had fought the totalitarian left from the 1970’s onwards. Castro in Cuba, Garcia in Peru, and the nightmarish terrorist Abigail Guzman and his Shining Path were all adversaries worthy of his anger.
We shared something else, because in 2005 I went into Canadian politics and led its Liberal Party into a national election. Six years later I came out bruised and defeated. In those wounded hours the book that helped me most to understand why I had risked everything to do it, and why I should never regret the price I paid, was Mario’s Fish in the Water, his memoir of his own experience in national politics, with its unforgettable evocation of the speeches he gave to thousands of poor people in the dying sunlight in Cuzco. I know of no other book that conveys what it is like to live with the illusion of victory and then come awake to the reality of defeat.
I remember visiting him in Madrid, in his wonderful labyrinth of an apartment in a quiet square in the center of the city, next to a marvelous antiquarian bookstore, where he talked, with pride, surprise, and weariness, of winning the Nobel Prize. It came late and as a surprise to many of his friends, because we had assumed that his hostility to the left would disqualify him from the honor. But the greatness of his work was finally undeniable. You couldn’t imagine, he said, the volume of correspondence, the number of requests for his time, his endorsement, his opinions. When that prize honors you, he seemed to be saying, it locks you in a gilded cage. Instead of surrendering to honorific imprisonment, however, he kept writing, deep and lively novels about love and about politics, and a hugely influential column in the Spanish press and he kept struggling to establish an honest strain of liberal politics in his country.
I had published a biography of Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher whom he admired, and in 2015 I flew out to Lima to talk to a big gathering he had organized to build support for liberal politics. I remember the skydivers leaping off the cliffs of Lima, flying their contraptions over the sea, better than I remember what was said at the conference. The best and brightest of Lima, its most fashionable citizens, came to hear him and hang on every word, but I had the feeling that they were honoring him but no longer taking his message to heart. It was the beginning of the post-liberal era that we are now living through and the slow slide of Peru into political decay.
When, in 2017, Viktor Orban of Hungary attacked Central European University, the institution founded by George Soros that I was leading in Budapest, I asked Mario to fly out from Madrid and give a speech about intellectual freedom. He came and told a packed house of students and faculty that universities like ours existed to create citizens, “with a culture that doesn’t allow them to be manipulated, that doesn’t allow them to be persuaded by the powers that be that they live in the best of all possible worlds.” Our battle to save our place of learning from Orban, he told us, was a battle against “the temptations of the tribe”, and what was at stake was nothing less than the future of European freedom itself.
On the morning his death was announced, I looked at his stirring speech again. It was instant proof that the world has grown darker since 2017. CEU is no longer in Budapest, but in exile in Vienna, and the attacks on academic freedom have now become ferocious, especially in America. The plight of his brand of liberal politics, and mine, is desperate. But I can imagine him giving me a mocking smile, raising those black eyebrows and saying: come now, don’t give up. Those who know how to use power of words to defend freedom must never cease answering those who use that same power to destroy freedom. In a long life in which he bore witness to tyrannies and atrocities and persecutions all over the world, Mario never abandoned the fight.