Source: Foreign Policy
by Andrea Moncada
“In his acceptance speech for the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on April 13 at the age of 89, noted that he learned from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that ‘words are acts’ — that writing about the politics of the present and the opportunities to shift direction can, in Vargas Llosa’s words, ‘change the course of history.’ Vargas Llosa’s literature, fueled by a passionate commitment to individual liberty, aimed to do just that. The author of more than 50 books over a span of six decades, Vargas Llosa was a household name in Latin America. He will be remembered as a staunch defender of liberalism and the free market — indeed, that may be his enduring mark on history — yet in his youth he was animated by leftist ideology, discovering then what he called his first ‘utopian illusion’: communism.” (04/14/25)