Critical Review: A Capitalist Revolution in Latin America?

CIAO DATE: 03/02

Critical Review

Winter–Spring 1998 (Vol.12 Nos.1–2)

A Capitalist Revolution in Latin America?

By Alvaro Vargas Llosa _*

Abstract

While it is true, as Paul Craig Roberts and Karen Lafollete maintain in The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, that Latin America has begun to break away from its statist tradition, the basic culture of mercantilism, corporatism, and interventionism remains, underpinned by the positivist tradition that has made public policy and legislation a substitute for the rule of law, as reflected in a schema of essential rights. The confusion between a private-enterprise economy and a free economy is at the heart of the failure of Latin America to create a truly competitive, privilege-free, and institutionally adequate economic environment, while the divorce of market economics from the rule of law has led to an authoritarianism that has undermined the transition from a state-led to a private-enterprise economy.

In almost two hundred years of independent life, Latin America has achieved a great deal of note, but, with the exception of Argentina’s extraordinary capitalist expansion between the 1870s and the 1920s, its successes have not been economic. Now, however, things look different. There is an apparent continental trend in favor of “economic modernity,” there is an intellectual undercurrent sustaining this trend, there are some impressive results, and there is positive feedback from the economic capitals of the world.

Paul Craig Roberts and Karen Lafollete capture this mood very well in their account of The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), exploring in detail the reforms undertaken in the most significant countries; discussing the ideological, political, and economic reasons this part of the world has failed, hitherto, to create prosperous societies; and lashing out with devastating force against the contribution made by the developed world to that failure. The book exudes the kind of optimism that has been (at least until recently) present in the financial institutions, the political and journalistic circles, and the business community of Latin America. My opinion, however, is that this optimism is premature, ill-informed, and superficial, and could easily become our worst enemy—a new way of encouraging the failure of Latin America.

If we consider the rule of law as the foundation of true progress, including economic progress, and view development as an institutional and cultural process of which economic prosperity is an offshoot, Latin America is very far from the point where fashionable opinion has placed it. We have not yet, in fact, even abandoned mercantilism—the system that prevailed in the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which economic progress is only possible in the orbit of the State and the economy remains the fiefdom of a privileged elite. Our societies still treat the law as an instrument of power—a power whose authoritarian nature varies from place to place, but is present, in some form, almost anywhere. Failure to see this amounts to mistaking a private economy for a free one. If having fewer public enterprises, reducing inflation, and letting in private foreign investment were enough to bring about stability and prosperity, Latin America—which has grown on average 5 percent every year since 1940, or more than Europe in the same period—would have been prosperous a long time ago.

One must, of course, begin by recognizing that something is changing, that not every reform is a mirage, and that a certain set of ideas, a certain mentality, which accounts for its chronic economic failure has been partially defeated in Latin America. The statist, corporatist, and socialist traditions have suffered a heavy blow. That, in itself, is quite an achievement, because these traditions are very old. They did not start in the 1960s and 70s with the massive wave of nationalizations; they were present in ancient cultures—the Inca state was in many ways a totalitarian one—they were present in the colonial period, and they lived on after independence, whose heroes liberated the region from Spain but not from a centralized way of organizing political and economic institutions.

As Roberts and Lafollette quite rightly recall, economic activity in the Spanish colonies was devoted to “rent seeking”—the very antithesis of capitalism. There were no real markets for commodities or manufactures, although there was a market for public offices, which were bought and sold openly. Every sector of the economy was under a monopoly or some form of protection—gold, silver, sugarcane, cacao, wood, in Latin America; and olive and textile products in Spain itself. There was also, of course, slavery and forced labor, and, as is inevitable in any such economy, a huge underground sector (by 1686, contraband represented two-thirds of colonial commerce). Independence compounded these problems with new ones. Military values were strengthened; authoritarianism and nationalism combined to prevent the emergence of free institutions and to perpetuate the rent-seeking mercantilist system. Fashionable Comtean positivism spread throughout the continent, and from it was derived the notion that the government had the moral responsibility for the well-being of the people, to be achieved by means of social engineering. Even liberals—in the classical sense—were impregnated with Comtean positivism, and its offspring, juridical positivism, and assumed that the deliberate actions of “liberal” governments, and not the spontaneous and voluntary action of liberal societies, would bring about progress (Véliz 1994).

One answer to the question of why independence was economically so unsuccessful came in the form of a critique of the Spanish inheritance. Francisco Bilbao, an anti-Catholic Chilean writer, argued that progress would only come if the new republics broke with the inflexible, authoritarian, and corporatist colonial tradition (Bilbao 1897–98), a perspective that was developed in Argentina by Faustino Sarmiento in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sarmiento ([1974]) thought the cultural factor was decisive in Latin American underdevelopment, and added to his condemnation of Spanish influence a critique of the institutions and customs of the native Indian population. To borrow Claudio Véliz’s recent dichotomy, Sarmiento proposed substituting the “Gothic fox” for the “Baroque hedgehog” model of society (Véliz 1994).

The man who produced the single most important Latin American political work of the nineteenth century, Juan Bautista Alberdi, was also responsible for the prosperity the Argentinean population enjoyed from the 1870s to the 1920s. His Bases y puntos de partida para la constitución política de la República Argentina (1852), which became the basis of the 1853 Argentine constitution, is a work of prodigious lucidity about the kind of political and economic institutions that form the basis of civilization and prosperity. Although demography loomed large in his work (Alberdi believed it was necessary to populate the underpopulated countries of Latin America with European immigrants), the essence of his thought lay in his understanding of free institutions. He wrote with irony that “glory is the plague of this poor Latin America of ours,” and then, in what was a sacrilegious questioning of the values of the independent republics, predicted: “The fatherland owes much to its noble hearts and to those spirits highly cultivated in moral sciences; but it will owe more, in future, in economic matters, to simple traders and practical economists, born out of the world of business” (Alberdi 1852, 38).

Unfortunately, Alberdi was not heeded outside of Argentina—and even there, his compatriots eventually threw away the enormous progress brought about by the triumph of his ideas in the previous century. In their place grew the flattering notion that Latin America constituted a kind of spiritual reserve against the materialism of the United States. The French-born author of Del Plata al Niágara ([1980]), Paul Croussac, and, more famously, Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, author of Ariel (1900), inaugurated a rapprochement with the Spanish inheritance, finding in it a bastion against the perverse influence of the North. Their followers built a new, anti-imperialist Weltanschauung that was to dominate Latin American culture in the nineteenth century and provide, in its degenerate form, the intellectual underpinning for the anticapitalist states of the region. Uruguay stands out for promulgating the first “Latin American welfare state” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was the Mexican Revolution, however, that became the focal point of anti-imperialist thinking and provided the agrarian outlook that was to dominate revolutionary and “progressive” intellectual life, imbued as it was with nationalism. This influence is still present today in Mexico, where “modernization” coexists with the idea that the nation-state is sacrosanct. The Bolshevik Revolution also served as a beacon that gave a Marxist direction to Latin American thought. Two Peruvians—José Carlos Mariátegui (1976), on the Marxist side, and Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1976–77), on the socialist and nationalist side—exercised a significant influence on the region’s political outlook in the first half of this century. They symbolized, in many ways, the ideological empire of the left in its two guises. Marxism and socialist nationalism dominated the consciousness of many Latin American intellectuals and governments of both the left and the right for decades. With the exception of the Venezuelan Carlos Rangel, author of Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario (1976), there has been, until recent years, a notorious absence of thinkers on the side of both the rule of law and free-market capitalism in Latin America.

Given this tradition, we can only view as something extraordinary the current movement against statism in Latin America. The administrations of, among others, Alan García in Perú, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Siles Suazo in Bolivia, and Raúl Alfonsín in Argentina (a man who is, nonetheless, rightly credited with the triumph of political democracy in his country) created the kind of massive social frustration from which radical political change is born. And violence helped push people’s desperation to the limit, making radical change easier to implement.

In the last few years many governments have privatized state-owned companies, brought down trade barriers, liberalized various aspects of the financial, commercial, industrial, and agricultural sectors, and undertaken more disciplined fiscal and monetary policies than in the past. The average rate of inflation in the region was 17.7 percent in 1996, compared to 200 percent in 1991, and per-capita income has increased every year since 1990 (except for one year), while it fell by 10 percent in the 1980s. In 1996, the net inflow of private capital amounted to almost 50 billion dollars. Of the top 500 companies, currently 148 are foreign owned, 285 are owned locally, and 67 belong to the state sector. Five years ago, 140 were foreign-owned, 268 were owned locally, and 92 belonged to the state sector, which means that now, more foreign companies are doing well, more local companies are doing well, and the state sector is becoming less significant. The fact that no more than eight of the top 20 companies deal in natural resources is a sign that there is some diversification, as well (see América Economía 1996/97, 92; Edwards 1997, 3–5; Financial Times 1997; Linowitz 1997). Mexico, Chile, and Argentina—the three countries on which The Capitalist Revolution chooses to focus—have made impressive moves toward privatization. There were 1,155 state-owned companies in Mexico in 1982, and half of the country’s production was in the public sector. By 1993, $24 billion worth of state assets had been sold and the corporate and maximum individual tax rates had been brought down to 35 percent, a reasonable level by international standards. In Chile, privatization—which started much earlier than in the rest of the continent—has revolutionized “untouchable” sectors such as pensions and health. Almost $25 billion worth of retirement funds have boosted savings rates, expanded the local capital base dramatically, and brought enormous improvements in people’s retirement benefits, which have increased their value by 14 percent per year since 1981. More than one-third of the workforce has acquired private health insurance after the state gave people the choice of opting out of the state system, requiring only that they contribute a minimum of 7 per cent of their salary to private insurers. And other countries have also privatized. In Peru, almost a hundred companies have been sold off, a figure approaching half the number of state-owned companies under the socialist military dictatorship of the 1970s (Linowitz 1997, 8–17).

Almost a decade after this process began, however, both the results and the quality of the reforms leave much to be desired. Latin American economies grew an average of 3 percent a year in this period, three times the level of the 1980s but half the level of the 1970s and much less than the 8 percent-a-year level of East Asia. Only Chile and El Salvador have performed much more strongly than the regional norm. In most countries, real wages are lower than they were in 1980. Unemployment has increased since 1991 in (inter alia) Mexico, Argentina, and Peru, although Chile has brought down its unemployment figure to 4.5 percent. The number of very poor people, who live on less than $1 a day, has increased since 1990 in Latin America from 23 to 25 percent, while in East Asia it has fallen from 17 to 13 percent (Linowitz 1997, 8–17).

Foreign investment in Latin America is at around 20 percent, which is nearly half the level of East Asia. While foreign investment is at record levels, very little of it is in the form of direct investment, since investors are sufficiently insecure about Latin America to prefer readily liquid forms of investment there. Direct foreign investment levels are about a third of those registered in East Asia. The volatility of speculative investment was seen clearly during the peso crisis in Mexico at the end of 1994 and, more recently, in Brazil, in the third week of July 1997, when the Rio stock exchange fell by 16 percent (Linowitz 1997, 8–17). Latin America has begun exporting more, but not nearly enough, especially if we take into account that a small economy grows at about half the rate of its exports. And the region is still heavily dependent on natural resources (this is true even of Chile).

What accounts for this relatively unimpressive performance may be a conflation of private enterprise with free-market capitalism, and of macroeconomic management with the rule of law. It is true that Mexico has distanced itself considerably from the policies of Lázaro Cárdenas and other famous populists of the PRI. But what kind of “capitalist” revolution could take place within a political structure that is as authoritarian as ever and in which, for instance, the $24 billion of state subsidies channelled by the Banco Nacional de Crédito Rural to peasants over the past 20 years has only strengthened local bureaucracies and corrupt politicians, sowing the seeds of guerrilla violence? In Argentina, Carlos Menem has gone a long way toward getting rid of the heritage of the founder of his party, Juan Peron. But in hailing Argentina’s reforms Roberts and Lafollette seem to forget that public spending has gone up by 100 percent since the beginning of the 1990s, forcing the new Finance Minister, Roque Fernández, to undertake a “shock” therapy that causes the popular mind to equate free markets with sudden price increases of 40 percent for diesel fuel and 10 percent for oil (Bongiovanni 1996, 13). Mexico’s bottomless pit of rural subsidies and Argentina’s huge public expenditure exemplify how incomplete reform has been and how little it has displayed the overall coherence that could come only from awareness of how free societies work.

Privatization is, in fact, often nothing more than the replacement of public monopolies with legally enforced private ones. The ownership of certain sectors of the economy has been transferred to private hands while markets remain protected, fueling corruption and scandal. When the state divests itself of ownership but continues regulation, the result is usually not free competition but new opportunities for profitable deals of a mercantilist kind and for enhancing state revenues. People in Peru understandably complain about the huge telephone bills and poor service brought about by privatization of the telephone company, which continues to be protected from competition. In Argentina the state telephone monopoly was merely broken up into regional private monopolies. In Buenos Aires public transportation is now privately owned, but each route is monopolized by one company, and state-enforced monopoly is now equated with a free market.

Around the continent, meanwhile, privatization is not even contemplated in certain “strategic” sectors, such as oil in Mexico and Venezuela. Roberts and Lafollete give a devastating account of the way the PRI corrupted the state-owned Mexican oil company, PEMEX, from top to bottom, yet they consider the continued existence of PEMEX a small matter that does not bring into question the “capitalist revolution” in Mexico. Venezuelans, for their part, have not benefited in any way from the phenomenal $250 billion generated in the last 20 years by their state-owned oil company, yet the suggestion of privatizing it is met with hysteria in that country. Even in Chile, the “strategic” value of copper keeps that industry, a sort of national totem, in state hands. In Brazil, the economic giant of Latin America, there are still almost 150 companies in public hands. President Cardoso has been much busier trying to amend the Constitution to get himself reelected than privatizing companies.

Even where privatization has occurred, moreover, ownership has been concentrated in a few hands. Whereas in Great Britain and, more recently, in Central European countries, privatization was used as an opportunity to spread share ownership widely among the population, in Latin America, workers have by and large been excluded from the process. Apart from the benefits workers may have obtained as consumers in terms of some quality improvement, their main relationship with the process of privatization has been unemployment and higher prices. In Peru, one in four people have lost their jobs as a result of privatization, and “capitalism” has come to mean little more than mass layoffs. In the absence of open and competitive markets—the prerequisite for the huge advantages of privatization—privatization has served primarily to relieve the state of money-losing enterprises and to multiply the forms of corruption.

The perception that liberalization means giving out privileges to the rich and powerful is spreading throughout Latin America. Free-market capitalism, which is in its very essence the negation of privilege and which disperses power throughout society, forcing even the most successful people to serve social needs or lose income, is beginning to look, in the eyes of ordinary Latin Americans, like the preserve of an oligarchy. Of the 15 Mexicans featured in Forbes’s 1996 list of the richest people in the world, there is not one who has not benefitted from state-granted privileges, whether financial, commercial, or monopolistic. In Colombia, FEDERCAFE, the national federation of coffee growers, is so intertwined with government—it is even represented in the executive branch—that it determines policy, as Roberts and Lafollete point out quite convincingly while extolling the “capitalist revolution.”

Above all, institutional and structural reform have been lacking. Latin American legal codes are replete with regulations specifically designed to benefit some at the expense of others. The result is that many Latin Americans can only engage in economic activities illegally, producing a huge “informal” economy. In countries like Peru this economy comprises half the country’s working population. In every area—from commerce to urban development—the cost of the law is such that the law becomes a privilege in itself. Registering a small manufacturing workshop in Lima takes 289 days, costs more than $1,200, and requires several bribes, whereas this process takes place in Tampa, Florida, in a matter of 3 hours. Once a small industrial company is registered in Peru and is operating legally, complying with regulations, taxes, and bureaucratic procedures costs three times the average profit. A fifth of this cost goes toward paying myriad different taxes, but nearly 70 percent goes toward obeying regulations. If all of the creative energy and entrepreneurial drive that constitutes the “informal” economy instead operated inside the legal system, it has been suggested that GDP would grow by more than 50 percent (de Soto 1989).

In Peru and other Latin American countries, the positivist confusion between law and legislation has meant that in practice, whatever the constitutions say, there is no basic law to preserve essential rights—only legislation that changes according to the whim of those in government, both those at the very top and those in the lower ranks of the executive branch (98 percent of legal rules are promulgated by the executive power in Peru, and just under 2 percent by Congress) (92–93). Every norm, every piece of legislation produces privilege and discrimination. The particularization of law extends beyond the legal protection of such private commercial monopolies as Telefónica and Aeroperu in Peru. Less visibly, the Peruvian National Assembly of University Presidents, for example, has been given such powers that potential competitors to the existing universities are severely hindered and often totally prevented from establishing themselves.

Douglass North and Robert Paul Thomas (1973) have demonstrated the impact that the establishment of security in property rights, contracts, civil liability, and the administration of justice had on the Industrial Revolution. Latin America has seen no such change, which would amount to a true revolution. The corrupt and politically manipulated Latin American system of justice remains in almost the same state it was in a decade ago, when reform began.

It should be noted that the rule of law is not the same thing as democracy, and that the latter can be as much of a threat to the former as can authoritarianism. Indeed, authoritarianism and democracy often work together. In Peru, the authoritarian government was able to bolster its popularity by imposing price controls on electricity. This action slashed the expected profits in this industry by 40 percent overnight. Prices that were artificially high because of monopoly conditions suddenly became artificially low because of price controls. Not only does this incident typify the process by which new forms of state control are added in compensation for the failure of previous forms; it illustrates the economic instability that flows from the confusion of changeable, particular public policies with firmly protected, universally applicable general laws. In Argentina, a number of industries were exempted by the reformist government of President Raúl Menem from paying the VAT, while others had to pay as much as 21 percent. Suddenly, in 1998, the exemptions were repealed and new ones were created. No coherent explanation was given and the economy was thrown into confusion. This sort of thing happens, of course, in all the nations of the world. But in Latin America there is little pressure against such arbitrary expressions of authoritarian or popular will, because there is neither an independent, uncorrupted judiciary nor the intellectual background that would make the rule of law a compelling ideal, however much it might be eroded in practice.

A further effect of the absence of the rule of law is the scarcity of personal and property rights and the vulnerability of those that exist to being withdrawn outright—not merely overburdened with regulations and taxes. As Hernando de Soto (1989) has shown, during the 1980s, Peruvian peasants silently privatized 60 percent of the land that had been collectivized by the socialist agrarian reform of the seventies. Yet property titles still have not been conferred on the 4 million parcelero families of the Peruvian Andes. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, in 1997, Baruch Ivcher, a Jewish businessman, was stripped of his Peruvian nationality by Fujimori’s government in order to expropriate his TV station, which had just revealed that the phones of 200 prominent Peruvians, including many pro-Fujimori businessmen, had been tapped by Fujimori’s intelligence service. Nobody is safe in Peru because no rights are treated as immune from being overridden by the state.

In Mexico, the much-welcomed reform of the collectively-owned ejido has not translated into property rights for peasants. By 1991, thanks to Carlos Salinas’s “Solidarity” program, 63 percent of village governments had their own public works budget. The Chiapas revolt indicates that this money did not go to peasants but to caciques of the ruling party. According to the Mexican economist Oscar Vera Ferrer (1987), CONASUPO, the agricultural supply company, channeled only 14 percent of government subsidies to those for whom they were intended. PRI reforms have not touched the cacique structure, which accounts for a great portion of Mexico’s underdevelopment. In 1992, Salinas amended the Constitution to allow private companies to own and develop rural land for agricultural purposes. But firms were limited to owning no more than 2,500 hectares, and the state was still the real owner of the land. Article 27 of the Constitution states that the “nation” is the collective owner of land and water. Private property thereby becomes a concession, not a right. Article 25 gives the state the right to “plan, conduct, orient and run” the economy. No wonder most foreign dollars go into short-term, speculative investments.

The superficiality of Latin America’s so-called capitalist revolution shows that political reform is the foundation of economic reform. The political and institutional framework is the context in which the economy, whether closed or open, operates. The historical roots of capitalism are, of course, subject to intense disagreement, but it can safely be stated that in the most successful capitalist countries the rule of law, often a byproduct of political decentralization, was a precondition of economic development. It is also clear that politics very soon becomes an obstacle to the growth and functioning of capitalism in authoritarian or populist environments. This has proved to be the case in East Asia, where the recent financial crisis can be read as a symptom of the weakness of market economies that operate in relatively closed polities, but we also have good examples in Latin America. Chile’s economy was never as robust, stable, and confident under Pinochet as it has been since the democratic transition almost a decade ago. The corruption, abuse of power, and loss of business confidence evident in Peru indicate how dictatorship, which is by definition the opposite of the rule of law, becomes the worst enemy of capitalism, which hinges on the security of property and person. Peru’s stock exchange fell 5 percent the week that Fujimori stripped Ivcher of his nationality. One could not ask for a better emblem of the connection between capitalism and the rule of law.

When Roberts and Lafollette claim that one of the lessons of Latin America is “the importance of promoting effective economic reform ahead of political reform in order to protect the former from special interest groups,” they are getting things backward. Where people can be exiled, imprisoned, tortured, and even killed by the state and where the law is used to benefit some interests and discriminate against others, economic reform can hardly be protected from special interest groups. In most of Latin America, the real trust that is foundational for thriving economies continues to be threatened by the control of the state by interest groups that can bend the rules the way they like. Roberts and Lafollette would do well to remember the dinner party at the mansion of Ortiz Mena, in February of 1993, at which President Salinas (endlessly praised in The Capitalist Revolution) asked 30 top Mexican businessmen for political contributions, resulting in pledges of $25 million each. Present at that dinner were some of the main beneficiaries of the transfer of monopolies to the private sector, including the man who won the bid to privatize the national telephone monopoly (Oppenheimer 1996, ch. 5). The absence of political reform in Mexico, as in other parts of Latin America, has meant that economic reform, while expanding the scope of the private economy and reducing that of direct state intervention, has also multiplied the mercantilist practices that Roberts and Lafollete blame for Latin American misery. If capitalism simply means private ownership, then the notion of a capitalist revolution in Latin America makes sense. However, if we define capitalism as a system of private enterprise and individual rights in which the market and not the government defines economic success, then this notion is grossly wide of the mark.

The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America quotes Douglass North’s definition of institutions as “the rules of the game.” These include the law, the cultural attitudes, and the other constraints that form the framework of human interaction. “The path of institutional change,” North argues, “determines the level of economic opportunity in a society” (quoted, 6). But Roberts and Lafollete seem to understand “institutions” as primarily cultural traditions, not political ones. Thus, they point out that “the region is at last shedding the cultural attitude hostile to commerce, trade and work that made it more socially acceptable to court privilege and peddle influence than to compete in markets” (6), as if this itself signals the end of Latin American economic stagnation. To believe this is to overlook the source of the old, antimarket cultural attitudes in a political system that rewarded nonmarket, rent-seeking behavior. That Latin Americans can overcome such attitudes even in the face of the institutions that spawned them is evident from the fact that, in the informal Latin American economy, tens of millions of people have created a market system in spite of the law. Even though people may want government to redistribute pieces of a pie they assume already exists and thus does not need to be baked, as it were, by civil society, most people have come to realize from personal experience that redistributive wishes produce little in the way of tangible benefits for them, and that in practice the state is a barrier to their efforts to improve their position. Many, therefore, choose to become illegal entrepreneurs. Today, the survival of more than half of Peru’s population rests on the shoulders of such furtive capitalists (93). But in thus throwing off old cultural “institutions,” the politically powerless capitalists of Latin America have not managed to dislodge the political institutions that fostered these attitudes in the first place.

These political institutions contradict the rule of law. The rule of law provides guarantees of institutional impartiality and personal protection that make it possible to embark on the long-term investments that produce economic growth. Bolivia and Costa Rica, prime economic success stories in recent Latin American history, have successfully encouraged both foreign and domestic investment that has reduced poverty. Arguably the chief reason is that constitutional democracy in these countries has produced trust and long-term stability. Elsewhere in the region, however, Simon Bolivar’s assertion that “the new states of formerly Spanish America need kings with the name of presidents” (quoted in Alberdi 1852, 72) expresses the spirit of Latin American politics. Until this changes, there will be no capitalist revolution deserving of the name.

References

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Oppenheimer, Andres. 1996. Bordering on Chaos. New York: Little, Brown.

Rangel, Carlos. 1976. Del buen salvage al buen revolucionario. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores.

Roberts, Paul Craig, and Karen Lafollete. 1997. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Endotes

*: Alvaro Vargas Llosa is the author of Diablo en campaña (El Pais/Aguilar 1991), The Madness of Things Peruvian (Planeta, 1993), El Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano (Plaza and Janés, 1996), and El exilio indomable (Plaza and Janés 1998). Back.