BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA — Last week I attended a conference in
Rosario, Argentina, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the think
tank Fundacion Libertad. The event brought together a motley crew
of classical liberal historians, philosophers, journalists,
novelists, scholars, and politicians from almost 40 countries. The
writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Carlos
Alberto Montaner were among the distinguished speakers.
Rosario is the city where Ernesto Che Guevara was born. Since
1989, it’s been governed by a series of socialist administrations.
On Friday afternoon, as we left a luncheon at the city Chamber of
Commerce, I ended up on a bus seated next to Vargas Llosa. I gushed
to him about how much his books had meant to me. In response, he
didn’t speak of himself or his work. Instead, he asked my name,
what I had studied, what I did for a living, what had led me to
writing.
Then the bus stopped abruptly. We had reached the Plaza de la
Cooperacion, popularly referred to as “Che’s Plaza” for the
revolutionary portrait that adorns it. The vehicle stopped because
we were trapped by an angry mob of 150 people, who began raining
down stones on us.
The passengers on the bus drew the curtains. Our security escort
began frantically calling people on his cell phone, but no one
answered. Then his phone lost reception. The rioters broke a window
and we heard pieces of glass falling. Three more windows were
smashed in rapid succession and someone hollered that they’d broken
the driver’s window.
I got down on the floor with my head under the seat, but Vargas
Llosa remained seated calmly to my left. From this awkward
position, I asked him if he was always received in this manner. Not
always, he said, but frequently.
About that time, the mob tried force the bus door open. But
thankfully the driver finally managed to back the bus out and make
a hasty exit.
WHEN I TOLD MY Ecuadorian family and friends what had happened,
several of them wondered, “Why do they hate him?” I thought of
Ortega y Gasset: “The mass…does not wish to share life with those
not of it. It hates to death everything that is not itself.”
Vargas Llosa has devoted most of his life to writing a nd
traveling around the world extolling the virtues of liberty.
Decades ago he believed in armed revolution, but his experiences
and a series of reconsiderations led him to new realizations. Ever
since, Vargas Llosa has usually been received with stones by
extreme Latin American leftists.
Though the differences among those at the Fundacion Libertad
conference were significant, we all agreed on basic principles:
equality under the law and protection of private property rights as
a mechanism to secure liberty and thus, life.
No one can speak of liberty, democracy and human rights while
throwing stones at someone for only having voiced a different
opinion. After all, none of these three things can exist where
there is no tolerance.
