The inexhaustible Mario Vargas Llosa

If we have to look for an example of a life that was fully lived, he would certainly choose precisely that of Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa won the Prince of Asturias Prize in 1986, the Cervantes Prize in 1994, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, and entered the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and the French Academy in 2023. That is to say, Vargas Llosa achieved five of the highest honors that any writer can aspire to. In addition, he was pr…

The inexhaustible Mario Vargas Llosa

MEXICO CITY – Thinking of the Peruvian Nobel laureate author Mario Vargas Llosa just a few weeks before he died at the age of 89, I remembered a poem that has been sung at the Passover Seder since the ninth century. Titled “Dayenu” (“it would have been enough”), it expresses gratitude for the successive wonders that the Israelites experienced during their 40-year journey from bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land. Taken out of its religious cont…

Mario Vargas Llosa left an indelible mark on cultural and civic life. In Peru and Latin America. All, beyond, by the way, his remembered political incursion as a presidential candidate in 1990, when Fujimori defeated, later turned autocrat.

As he told in his autobiography, he was the grandson of a prefect, once organized a strike at his school, and was a member of a communist cell during his university years. Then, he was a writer of speeches for a candidate, a congressman and, on more than one occasion, he was offered to be Minister of State. On the ideological side, he went from being a sympathizer to an opponent of socialism, to establishing himself as a well-known liberal. Howe…

The liberal legacy of Mario Vargas Llosa

The Peruvian novelist was interested in the interpersonal and psychological struggles that ultimately drove politics.

EDITORIAL: Polarization and political brutalization are growing – which is why Mario Vargas Llosa's ideas about liberalism are so incredibly urgent.