Vol. 15 No.4 (April 2005), pp.295-298

LIBERTY FOR LATIN AMERICA:  HOW TO UNDO FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF STATE OPPRESSION, by Alvaro Vargas Llosa. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005. 288pp.  Hardcover.  $25.00.  ISBN: 0-374-18574-3.

Reviewed by Matthew M. Taylor, Department of Government, Georgetown University. Email: taylormm@georgetown.edu

As the title suggests, this is an ambitious book, seeking ways to “undo five hundred years of state oppression” in a region marked by substantial historical, economic, social, demographic, and political differences. It is a tribute to Vargas Llosa’s talent as a writer that he is able to take on such a lofty project, and indeed, to sustain it throughout with a strong narrative and a crystal clear message. The result is a text that is journalistic in tone, with many interesting bits of data used to bolster the author’s overall argument that the solution to Latin America’s problems is greater market freedom. The book is argumentative, and as a result, despite the broad canvas of Latin American history it paints, it should be judged as a provocative thought piece rather than as a classroom text or as a background reference for someone unacquainted with the region.

Vargas Llosa was one of the co-authors of the GUIDE TO THE PERFECT LATIN AMERICAN IDIOT, the polemical critique of the Latin American Left first published in 1996. As one might anticipate from the strongly voiced opinions in that book, LIBERTY FOR LATIN AMERICA also has a strong point of view, although it is a response to the perceived failures of neoliberalism, rather than those of nationalist-statism.

The outline of Vargas Llosa’s argument is simple. To understand the failure of neoliberalism, Vargas Llosa goes back five centuries to the roots of historical oppression, tracing their persistence from pre-Columbian times through the present. In this quick, panoramic overview of Latin America’s post-colonial history, Vargas Llosa diagnoses the region’s woes as the outcome of five “principles of oppression”: corporatism, state mercantilism, privilege, wealth transfer, and political law. The definitions of these terms are quite quickly hewn, and even somewhat flexibly applied, perhaps so as to enable the author to generalize their existence and their permanence across five centuries and the more than 20-odd countries that are part of continental Latin America (or the 30-odd countries that make up the Americas outside of the U.S. and Canada).

In Vargas Llosa’s view, Latin America is caught in a perpetual trap. Even at its moments of greatest change, such as in the efforts to throw off the mantle of the oppressive 19th century state, change is rewarded with continuity: “the paradoxical result of the insurgence against tradition is the perseverance of tradition” (p.34). Because of the stubborn persistence of corporatism, state mercantilism, privilege, wealth transfer, and political law, development is almost unattainable; the outward [*296] trappings of development – such as investment, production, and growth – obscure the deeper permanence of power structures within society.

It need not have been that way, according to Vargas Llosa. There is a liberal, capitalist tradition in Latin America: trade was important in the pre-Columbian empires; an individualist streak was evident as early as the 16th Century in the School of Salamanca; the independence movement of the 19th Century was partly driven by demands for free trade and lower taxes; and a strong, if ultimately unsuccessful, culture of capitalism existed in Argentina during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Even today, the existence of a large informal economy is a sign of capitalist spirit, but one that is checked: “despite ritual gestures in favor of the informal economy . . . the legal country continues to exclude the other by imposing barrier after barrier against entry” (p.116). The larger problem with the informal economy is that its existence highlights the fact that the “contract society” has remained in the hands of a few powerful people.

A second major problem with the capitalism of Latin America is the emphasis given to results over process. By focusing on trade, investment, and access to capital as outward indicators of development, governments have ignored the fact that these indicators were not in fact precursors of development in Western Europe and North America, but instead the outcome of development. High growth under some Latin American dictatorships led to statistical improvements, but did not lead to development, and in fact may have “consolidated, not attenuated, traditional flaws”(p.136). In other words, no matter how well the numbers reflect changing economic conditions, they do not correctly reflect the underlying structure of society and its amenability to true capitalism.

Ultimately, the greatest contribution of this book comes from its diagnosis of Latin America’s problems, especially the manner in which it seeks to bridge institutional and cultural explanations of Latin America’s predicament. Yet because of its impressive breadth, political scientists and legal scholars may find it lacks the depth and complexity of many of the works Vargas Llosa draws on critically, including De Soto on property rights, Wiarda on corporatism, Karst and Rosenn on Latin legal systems, or Fukuyama on trust. The discussion of culture seems especially underdeveloped: while Vargas Llosa is at his best describing the origins and failures of positivism in Latin America, his discussion of the “capitalist spirit” seems almost romantic, as in the repeated reference to failed attempts by Latin Americans to “carve a little star in the thick night of oppression.” It is unclear why the various attempts are failures, other than by reference to the strength of the five forces of oppression. This is a book aimed at a non-academic audience, with no pretensions at historical or analytical comprehensiveness, but the vast generalizations beg for better or more specific examples, perhaps in a second tome.

In light of the strong opinions Vargas Llosa is trying to communicate to his reader, the symptoms of contemporary malaise in Latin America are perhaps understandably overwrought, or at the [*297] very least, over-generalized. Many of his insights seem to be drawn from the Andean region, and particularly, from the author’s native Peru, which indeed saw some of the largest economic and political failures of the past decade. But in trying to extend these arguments to Latin America’s largest economies – such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico – Vargas Llosa over-reaches and ignores the positive news that at the very least these countries have managed to preserve procedural democracy despite catastrophic economic crises, and have found ways – however slow or lackluster – to stabilize and reform their institutions over the two decades since the transition to democracy. Although it is not the subject of his book, the many mentions of Iberian culture as a root source of oppression also lead one to wonder about Vargas Llosa’s curious silence regarding post-Franco Spain, where dynamic growth and political stability offer an example that surpasses that of post-Allende Chile, whose experience he often favorably contrasts with the experiences of the rest of the continent.

While one can disagree with Vargas Llosa’s diagnosis, it is nonetheless ambitious and thought-provoking. The litany of policy prescriptions in the concluding chapter, however, is disappointingly unrefined in light of the tremendous effort that has gone into the preceding nine chapters. The author concludes correctly that “development cannot be decreed or legislated” (p.207), but then goes on to argue that the first mission of reformers should be cleansing the law: literally filtering through the whole body of laws and norms to “make sure that no law or norm contradicts what people do in real life” (p.209). Who is to do this filtering, or how they are to be empowered, is unclear. This makes it unlikely that “the process will set the individual free,” as Vargas Llosa claims (p.209), especially if power is indeed as self-perpetuating as earlier chapters claimed. It brings to mind the classic problem identified by Hammergren (1998) of creating an apolitical judiciary in a politically motivated reform, but offers no roadmap to resolving that dilemma.

The prescriptions regarding the “empowerment of the justice system” will be of most interest to the readers of the LAW & POLITICS BOOK REVIEW. Vargas Llosa claims that “[i]n Latin America, there is no justice system. There is an authoritarian political system and the courts are its instruments” (p.212). To resolve the problem he diagnoses, Vargas Llosa argues that the law should be displaced from the political sphere, and the justice system should be turned into one that “will adjudicate disputes based on those principles of law that, divorced from the political system, have become inalienable guarantees of the liberty of the people” (p.213). This prescription ignores the evidence of the political influence of the courts in many of Latin America’s new democracies (e.g., Arantes 1997), or even the signs of the courts’ contribution to democracy in the region. But it also seems to be a troublesome recommendation in light of the vast literature on the judicialization of politics even in more “developed” countries (Tate and Vallinder 1995), and the enormous difficulty of separating the legal from the political. Undoubtedly, judicial reform is a component of development: that much has been clear since long before the remarkable [*298] self-immolation of the law and development school three decades ago (Trubek and Galanter 1974). But the path to judicial reform, or even the content of such a reform – aside from a comment that the “common law is a much better tradition than legal codes” – is entirely lacking in Vargas Llosa’s prescriptions.

This reliance on mantra over concrete policy recommendations is even more pronounced in the remainder of the conclusions, which argue for a transition from “the dependency culture to the culture of responsibility” (p.218).  Despite the apparent failure of neoliberal reform noted by Vargas Llosa earlier in the book, his key prescription appears to be even more stringent neoliberalism: getting the government out of social services, including education and health care, lowering taxation, and reducing support to organized labor. In short, “everything that does not involve national defense, law enforcement, and the administration of justice easily falls under the rubric of predation” (p.215) and should presumably be stricken from the list of government responsibilities. But even if one buys this argument, there is no roadmap to be followed, and more importantly, no outline of the potential pitfalls, whether from the lessons of pension liberalization in Chile or the administrative performance reforms of New Zealand. In sum, LIBERTY FOR LATIN AMERICA is a provocative but ultimately frustrating call to action.

REFERENCES:

Arantes, Rogério Bastos. 1997.  JUDICIÁRIO E POLÍTICA NO BRASIL. [The Judiciary and Politics in Brazil]. São Paulo: IDESP.

Hammergren, Linn A. 1998. THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE AND JUSTICE REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA: THE PERUVIAN CASE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

Tate, C. Neal and Torbjörn Vallinder. 1995. “The Global Expansion of Judicial Power: The Judicialization of Politics,” in THE GLOBAL EXPANSION OF JUDICIAL POWER, C. Neal Tate and Torbjörn Vallinder (eds). New York: New York University Press.

Trubek, David M. and Marc Galanter. 1974.  “Scholars in Self-Estrangement: Some Reflections on the Crisis in Law and Development Studies in the United States.” 4 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW 1062-102.

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Matthew M. Taylor.