Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression

In Liberty for Latin America, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a native of Peru and son of Mario Vargas Llosa, offers an diagnosis of Latin America's political and economic woes, and gives a prescription for finally getting the region on the road to both genuine prosperity and the protection of human rights. He explains how the republics of the nineteenth century and the revolutions of the twentieth-populist uprisings, Marxist coups, state takeovers, and First World-sponsored privatization have all run up against the oligarchic legacy of statism. Illiberal elites backed by the United States and Europe have perpetuated what he calls the "five principles of oppression" in order to maintain their hold on power. The only way to change things in Latin America, Vargas Llosa argues, is to remove the five principles of oppression, genuinely reforming institutions and the underlying culture for the benefit of the disempowered public.