MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
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intellectual and academic elites, or marginal, unassimilable sectors - can
still cause much harm, though each day they appear more and more cut
off from popular support.
What is really new is that perhaps for the first time, here and there
in Latin America, in the midst of the great economic crisis that confronts
us, and perhaps as a consequence of it, encouraging signs of pragmatism
and modemity have appeared. With few exceptions - such as Peru, much
to our dismay - hardly any governments dare to persist in the
"Cepalist"· and Keynesian model of the fifties and sixties that still causes
such .havoc. And a renewed liberalism, in the classical meaning of the
term, is opening up a path through the whole continent.
It
is a salutary
response to the models of "development from within" and the famous
politics of "substitution of imports" of lamented memory. Almost all the
new governments, some enthusiastically, others hesitantly, and others
without giving proper due to the reason things happen, are taking the
right steps, great or small, to attack the roots of the evil of poverty. It is
an evil that has become curable these days (the great accomplishment of
our age compared to those past), a condition of which the affiicted
countries want to cure themselves. This means, in social and economic
terms, that a country can increase technology and get rid of corruption,
reducing the state to its proper proportions, in order to guarantee order,
justice, and freedom. It means that the right to create wealth, in an open
system based on competence, with no privileges or bureaucratic interfer–
ence, can be transferred to civil society. This does not, of course, imply
that the state should give up the deployment of its every imaginable
force, in order that each generation enjoy the foundation, next to
freedom, of every social democracy: the equality of opportunity, a level
playing field for all those who undertake what is expressed by the horri–
ble Darwinian metaphor - the struggle for life. So, in Latin America,
little by little, one sees that a government "distributes" more intelligently
if it offers an outstanding public education than if it discourages private
enterprise with suffocating taxes, and that it works better when private
property is accessible to most people than when those who are already
owners are fought against.
Economic nationalism - with cultural nationalism, one of the most
stubborn aberrations of our history - is, however timidly, beginning to
recede, after having contributed very effectively to continental underde–
velopment. We finally understand that well-being will not come about
through strengthening borders, but in opening them wide to win mar-
·CEPAL is the Spanish acronym for United Nations Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean.
