Mario Vargas Llosa in Chile: why the Neoconservative Writer supports the Pinochet party's candidate Sebastian Piñera

Ultra right-wing writer Mario Vargas Llosa declared in Santiago its public support for Sebastian Piñera, the candidate of dictator Pinochet followers party.

The controversial Peruvian Hispanic novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has used his recent visit to Chile, to declare an open support for the corrupt businessman Sebastian Piñera, one of the two candidates in the presidential elections to be held next Sunday January 17. Vargas Llosa said about his support for Piñera: "There is a fatigue [in Chile] in a 20 years regime that is not renewed.

Peruvian Hispanic writer Mario Vargas Llosa is pictured at his home in Madrid on October 7, 2009. Photo Getty Images

How ironic that Vargas, a representative of the obsolete elites of Lima, is talking about political renewal. The conservative writer was invited to Santiago by the Chilean government, for the inauguration of the "Museum of Memory and Human Rights" in honor of the victims of the terror, death, disappearances and torture that Chileans suffered during the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Piñera is a declared admirer of the dictator Pinochet and his current team includes former members of the dictatorship. It makes sense that Vargas Llosa supports the candidate of the genocidal right –wing Chilean parties, mainly because the genocidal government of Alan Garcia has appointed the novelist as chairman of the committee for the future Museum of the Memory in Lima. Disgusting Latin American rightists.

We have to ask Mario Vargas Llosa who appointed him as international elector and a spokesman for the masses. Since when being a novelist, gives him authority and the right to make political campaigns in any given country. The cynicism of Vargas is terrible, people without decency moves around money.

But Chileans are not dumb. The support for Piñera has produced opposite effects and the recklessness of the writer has sparked controversy in Chile. Just yesterday there was a protest against the visit of Vargas, during the meeting between the two right-wingers in the National Library in Santiago. This is the translation of a note posted by La Nacion:

A group of leaders from the cultural and leftist political sectors denounced the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa as "the unofficial foreign minister" of Sebastian Piñera in moments when the intellectual declared his support for the rightist candidate.

The group protesting in front of the National Library building, where the writer held a meeting with the candidate as part of a seminar, declared that Vargas Llosa is a "known right-wing and reactionary political activist.”

Carrying a banner with the slogan "more democracy ... not to the right-wing" the demonstrators said that “those who advocate deregulation, the weakening of governments and peoples' rights to favor the markets and the power of money, have an ally in Vargas Llosa and a central spokesman.”

They added that "his unofficial marriage as chancellor of Piñera shows that if the right wins, nothing good can wait to Chile and its international relations in Latin America and the Caribbean."

In Twitter there were also some negative reactions, with questions about why a Peruvian writer gets involved in Chilean politics, some asked if Vargas thought that Piñera was a product of one of his fiction novels?

Sore loser

Mario Vargas Llosa lost the presidential election bid in Peru in 1990, after an embarrassing campaign with a shameful waste of money, as the elitist arrogance of the writer and the opportunism of his allies stripped the deluded Euro-centric elite of Lima, so desperate to make Peru a satellite of the U.S. and Europe capitalism, something that they have eventually succeeded.

After the humiliating defeat, the writer left Lima in the silence, almost furtively, without saying bye. He went to his beloved Spain, the medieval monarchy that supported fascist Franco and which is now ruled by pseudo leftist presidents. There Vargas Llosa became a Hispanic citizen, angry at his Peru, the uncivilized third-world country full of so many Indigenous peoples, like the father he denies according to some.

Since then, Mario Vargas Llosa has received many "literary" awards in Spain and United States, thanks to his connections with powerful groups in those countries, but he never won the Nobel Prize despite several attempts. Vargas is now awarded and admired everywhere where there is strong influence of the international economic and political right, and because of his neoconservative speeches he has become a luminary, regardless of his mediocrity and talent for copying. Vargas Llosa is a favorite of outdated monarchies and racist intellectuals who think that everything European is simply superior, and therefore a section of Lima loves him like an icon of the history and culture of Peru.

As a candidate, Vargas’ political platform in 1990 was an unabashed neo-liberal rightist program, requiring privatization of government companies, needed to extend the influence of multinational corporations in Peru. At least he was very honest about those plans, which frightened the Peruvian electorate that was already punished by the first government of Alan Garcia, and decayed in the midst of a violent escalation by the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla group.

The misery of Peruvians was then slapped with a multimillion-dollar campaign which flooded television and newspapers in Lima, with opportunists trying to get a congressional seat in what was thought to be a sure election victory. Then Alberto Fujimori appeared as the candidate "surprise". Fujimori was the candidate of APRA's corrupt right-wing sector, a sector of the Peruvian military, and the Peruvian and foreign oil business groups and miners.

A true mafia was born in Peruvian politics; this allowed Fujimori to implement the neoliberal economic program of Vargas Llosa, selling Peru's natural resources to foreign corporations. It was a big business deal, Fujimori snatched it to Vargas.

The same corporations, who benefited from neoliberalism, count with the support from the governments of the United States and Europe, and they work for benefit sharing. That's why they are so excited upon the candidate Sebastian Piñera in Chile. The capitalists, who are destroying the planet, also celebrate the visit of the Hispanic Peruvian novelist to Santiago.

Spokesperson of colonialism

In recent years, Mario Vargas Llosa and his son Alvaro -a mediocre analyst who works for a think tank in Washington, DC- have become the official spokesmen for the groups in power in the U.S. and Europe, the Hispanic and American conservatives, and the multinational corporations that continue to expand their domains in countries with weak democracy like Peru, Chile, Colombia. There people have little to say in politics, for example in Chile about 35% of voting age citizens, will not participate in this presidential election.

Fearing that a good example could be further imitated, Vargas Llosa attacks the leftist governments of Latin America, saying some things as daring as that Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma -descendant of one of the oldest native civilizations in South America- is not a if not an Indigenous man, but a half-breed Hispanic because his surname is Morales. He says this with hatred, contempt, arrogance.

A true racist, Vargas Llosa Morales hates the Indigenous leader because he is removing the postcolonial system of racist abuse in Bolivia, the closest country to Peru. So Vargas scattered to the winds the false idea that the Andean country is going through a bad time. On the contrary, the Bolivians are recovering their territory for themselves, while in Peru the natural resources are plundered almost without control by foreign corporations, in the name of development.

Vargas Llosa likes to talk about "freedom, democracy, progress, life" but only for the wealthy and corrupt elites of Latin America. He has remained silent during the massacres of Indigenous peoples in Peru, such as Bagua for example. According to the novelist, Indigenous people movements are opposed to progress, and our ideas are outdated, obsolete. Vargas Llosa talks boldly of our Indigenous people as if we were his inferiors.

Vargas Llosa recently traveled to Venezuela to support the defeated Venezuelan right-wing, so demoralized against the immense popular support enjoyed by Hugo Chavez. The Venezuelan opposition have got to their knees asking for support to Washington, DC, hoping that one day the streets of Caracas will be filled with U.S. Marines. Thus, Vargas Llosa comes to a country where he is a foreigner and demands Venezuelans to stop their innovative and inspiring revolution. Even worse, he had an illusory demand to be treated perhaps as a Spanish king, as he complained to the international press when Venezuelan authorities withheld his passport at the Caracas airport.

The novelist hypocrisy is sickening. He likes to talk of democracy and justice, but he is a liar who covered the crimes against humanity committed by the Peruvian military [paramilitaries] that killed eight Peruvian journalists and two civilians in Uchuraccay in 1983. He has remained silent about the 102 civilians that the current Peruvian government of Alan Garcia has been killed since 2006 alone.

Vargas calls Hugo Chavez an enemy of democracy. I have to breathe a bit before continuing. How can the enemy of democracy be a reelected president who has received his people’s support several times, especially after the failed U.S. backed coup in 2002? Chavez allows direct participation of citizens in the successful social programs in education, health, infrastructure, culture, economics, etc. that the Venezuelan government has implemented boldly. Chavez is the enemy of the corrupt and racist elites that Vargas defends, actually.

The ultra rightist speech of Vargas arrived to Santiago disguised as alleged defense of "freedom and democracy" in the same style of liar George W. Bush. Vargas wants for Chile to have a president like Alvaro Uribe, Felipe Calderon, or Roberto Micheletti. Those are the leaders of the same racist and corrupt elites that have made of Latin America, the most inequitable region in the world.

Meanwhile, his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes from Washington, DC, an article published by a center-right newspaper in Canada, the country with more mining companies in the world. In his note of hatred against Hugo Chavez, Alvaro Vargas said that the recent rightist victory in Panama is the first one of future right-wing governments in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Peru. He highlights the continuity of the corrupt Uribe’s party in Colombia, and celebrates the rigged elections of Micheletti in Honduras.

He says nothing of the Communist victory in Uruguay, the Bolivia's Indigenous revolution, the popularity of socialism in Venezuela, the political continuity of Cuba and its influence in the world, the political process of Nicaragua, the Indigenous movement in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia Guatemala, Mexico. Nothing.

Mario Vargas Llosa's support to Piñera has exposed the true mask of a frustrated novelist. We Peruvians already knew of his dirty intentions against our people and that is why we didn’t elect him, but now many Chileans are annoyed by his intrusion and interference in the internal affairs of their country.

The writer thinks he can vote in Chile or he doesn’t know where to vote anymore, is almost like he is an outcast without a country, but he sure goes where money and capitalist selfishness would send him.


.