When I interviewed Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa last week, I was most surprised by his renewed optimism about Latin America, and by his confidence that Chavismo — the region’s authoritarian populist movement — is rapidly losing ground.
Vargas Llosa, probably Latin America’s most talked-about public intellectual these days, has just published a new novel set in Peru, El Héroe Discreto, (The Discreet Hero). It tells the story of a businessman in the northwestern city of Piura who has benefited from his country’s economic prosperity, and who decides to stand up against corruption when anonymous criminals demand that he pay them protection money.
It may be his most “optimistic” novel, he says, in the sense that it takes place amid Peru’s growing economic affluence. While the