In one of the many interviews I had with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, he said he hoped death would surprise him with a pen in his hand. I can’t say whether that dream came true, but what is certain is that Llosa likely had little left to write — the world had already been captured in his books.
Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025) died on April 13 in Lima. And with him, one of the most lucid, courageous, and brilliant voices — not only of the Spanish language but of all humanity — has left us.
Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, will be remembered for many things. But I’ll remember him for his courage above all else, which was exemplified by his defiance of the dominant trends of his time.
More Than a Novelist
Born in Arequipa in 1936 and raised in Cochabamba, Vargas Llosa had little chance of becoming one of the most important writers in the world. In his autobiographical work A Fish in the Water, he said that as a child, he dreamed of being a sailor, not a writer. But the loneliness of the military school in Lima, where his strict father forced him to enroll, led him to take refuge in books.
“Marito,” as he was called in his youth, began doing business with his writing at a very early age. He sold his first “little novels” for cigarettes to his classmates. He also wrote love letters on commission for other cadets, and the money he earned allowed him to enjoy small pleasures on weekends.
Like many young people in Latin America during the post-war era, Mario Vargas Llosa found himself increasingly drawn to Marxist ideas. In his autobiography, the Peruvian writer describes how, while studying at San Marcos University — the first university founded in continental America and a breeding ground for Marxist movements in the South American nation — he joined discussion groups that viewed communism as the ultimate solution to the world’s problems. He wrote:
We were chatting in the courtyards of San Marcos […] and we talked about very serious things: the abuses of the dictatorship, the great ethical, political, economic, scientific, and cultural changes that were being forged over there in the USSR, or in that China of Mao Zedong that had been visited and about which that French writer — Claude Roy — had written so many wonders in Keys to China, a book we believed word for word.
After several trips to Cuba, however, he came to understand the horror behind communism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not turn a blind eye. He broke with the revolution and dared to say out loud what others only whispered in private: that there was no freedom on the island, that the regime persecuted dissidents, imprisoned homosexuals, and executed opponents.
Vargas Llosa was never just a novelist — and that was his power. He could build entire worlds through fiction, then turn around and write essays that cut to the core of human nature and political delusion. He understood power. He understood the tyranny of collectivism, which made him not merely a dissident, but a heretic in a literary world steeped in political orthodoxy and the romance of revolution.
He had once been seduced by the myth of Castro’s Cuba. But he woke up — sharply, irrevocably — when reality revealed its face.
A Breaking Point
The Padilla affair was the breaking point. Poets being imprisoned by the government was too much for Llosa. It was the moment he stopped writing for the tribe and started thinking for himself. And in literary circles — just as in Hollywood today — that kind of freedom comes at a price. He was attacked by his former friends from the “Latin American Boom” — that literary club which, in the name of “intellectualism,” devoted itself to justifying dictatorships.
It was not an isolated event. Llosa clashed with García Márquez. He confronted Mario Benedetti. They called him a traitor, a bourgeois, a sellout to imperialism. All for the crime of rejecting totalitarianism.
While his old friends applauded Castro, Chávez, Evo Morales, and Daniel Ortega, Vargas Llosa exposed them one by one. He denounced authoritarianism disguised as benevolent socialism, and the misery caused by planned economies full of bureaucrats and “wealth redistribution.”
His ideological evolution was not opportunistic — as claimed by those who have never read Hayek or Popper — but deeply rational. Llosa understood that liberalism is not just another ideology, but the only system that guarantees respect for human dignity, private property, and freedom of thought. He made that clear in his essay The Call of the Tribe, a book that should be required reading in every university in the West.
In The Call of the Tribe, Vargas Llosa skillfully explored the ideas of Adam Smith, Hayek, Popper, Berlin, Aron, Revel, and Ortega y Gasset. In them, he found the intellectual tools to build a coherent defense of the individual against the collectivist Leviathan. In that essay — perhaps one of his most important — he made it clear that liberalism is not a closed ideology, but an open doctrine, always ready for debate, criticism, and constant refinement.
Beyond expressing his political views in essays and weekly columns, his novels also explored (some might say exposed) human nature and the harsh realities of a region plagued by centralism, collectivism, poverty, and authoritarianism. In Conversation in the Cathedral, he opens with a question: “At what precise moment had Peru f*cked itself up?” In The Feast of the Goat, he takes us to the Dominican Republic to tell the story of dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo — a work that could easily describe many of the dictatorships in Latin America, where some men play at being gods and end up becoming demons.
For these reasons, Vargas Llosa distanced himself from the Latin American Boom — a literary movement that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s and included fellow Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. He broke away from this literary elite, which, despite earning international acclaim and awards, often justified the executions ordered by Castro and Che Guevara, as well as the regimes that followed in their wake. The Peruvian writer chose to be a free man rather than an ornamental intellectual. He opted to focus on the people oppressed by the state, not the oppressors with their “inclusive” rhetoric. He decided to write from a place of truth, not propaganda.
A Giant on a ‘Fragile Good’
Mario Vargas Llosa died as what he truly was: a great man — free, honest, morally unblemished, and proudly reborn as a classical liberal without complexes. He was a moral giant in an age of ideological dwarfs.
What remains is his work, his example, and the urgent task of continuing the battle he never abandoned. Because as Vargas Llosa himself said: “Freedom is a fragile good that only prospers if it is defended every day.”
Today, more than ever, we must defend it.
