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Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot
By Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa, trans. Michaela Lajda Ames. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, $24.95, 218 pp.
Reviewed by Lauren Weiner
The battle for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans rages on. Guide to the Perfect LatinAmerican Idiot,published in Barcelona in 1996 and now out in English translation, is a bitter and sometimes witty salvo in that conflict. This joint effort of Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, CarlosAlberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa systematically demolishes the Marxist and anti-Western ideology that has for so long animated Latin intellectuals, and that has survived the death of Soviet communism and the simultaneous trend toward free-market economics and democratic elections in the Western hemisphere.
The three co-authors are prominent Latin American journalists-Apuleyo Mendoza is from Colombia, Montaner from Cuba, and Vargas Llosa from Peru. One senses that the underlying motive for this broadside is an impulse to defend today's experiments in pro-capitalist governance by attacking their attackers. This is not the most effective way to make converts in a political debate. Marred, furthermore, by a choppy texture (probably committee-bred), a poor translation, and an inexcusable lack of an index, this book will probably be most useful in shoring up the views of those who already reject what the perfect Latin American idiot has to offer.
The golden era of MarxismLeninism in Latin America was the 1960s and 1970s, as the authors note. Despite the passage of time, far too many of the educated in LatinAmerica have yet to let go of Marxist thought and the other parts of the left-wing package-the mechanistic dependency theories, the infantile antiAmericanism, the guerrilla chic, and the fanatical belief that"only the state, by vigorously intervening in the economy, can get development to yield social benefits that favor the people" (66).
Fanatical is not too strong a word, given the resolute nonappearance of these social benefits where Marxist, socialistic, or even Christian Democratic governments have held sway. The book describes left-wing governments from Alan Garcia's Peru to Juan Peron'sArgentina to Castro's Cuba and Sandinista-run Nicaragua, all of which brought ruin in the form of dismal productivity, soaring prices, depressed wages, inefficient public services, corruption, capital flight, fiscal deficits, and runaway inflation. The victims...