Thursday, December 04, 2003
In new documents provided by The National Security Archive, we come to know that Henry Kissinger supported the Argentinean militar dictatorship. He advised Videla, by then the dictator in charge, to be quick to torture and kill, otherwise the United States congress could be worried with human rights issues. More information (only in Spanish) here.
Monday, December 01, 2003
Vargas Llosa, from an interview:
García Márquez, Manuel Puig and Tomás Eloy Martínez they are all writers of inspired pretentiousness, but not in the derogatory sense. If there's something very Latinamerican, that is what in Perú we call guachafería, a certain popular distortion of installed values. Latinamerican literature has contributed its part with regard to this matter.
There's no way to disguise that "inspired pretentiousness" with the rest of the sentence. More if we think that Vargas Llosa and García Márquez no longer talk to each other, and the other two are minor writers. He also added:
My presidential candidacy [for Perú] was very incidental. I did it for civic and moral reasons.
It is pathetic how he wants to put some distance from what people perceive about him, namely his failure against an unknown inexperienced man of Japanese descent while running for the Perú presidence in 1990, and his affiliation to the Magical Realism school that equaled him to García Márquez.
On the one hand, Vargas Llosa worked for the presidence for two years (and Fujimori only three months) but he calls those years something merely incidental. On the other, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Madrid, with a doctoral dissertation about García Márquez. On early 1970s he wrote a book to defend García Márquez called "The story of a deicide". During the current year, politics again divided Vargas Llosa from the rest of his past world, speaking about (or better against) García Márquez:
(...) a writer who is a courtesan of Fidel Castro, whom the dictatorship holds up as an intellectual alibi. And he so far has come to accept very well all the abuses, the trampling of human rights that the Cuban dictatorship has committed, saying that secretly he helps some political prisoners get released. It is no secret to anyone that Fidel Castro hands over some political prisoners to his courtesans once in a while. That is how [García Márquez] keeps his conscience clean. To me it sounds more like repugnant cynicism.
From eulogy to mockery, Vargas Llosa deleted his past friendship (both as a political being and as a writer) with García Márquez, and also tried to hide the biggest humilliation of his life, when the Peruvians said "no" to his political views, dismissing his efforts as merely casual. Sure...
García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, when they were close friends
García Márquez, Manuel Puig and Tomás Eloy Martínez they are all writers of inspired pretentiousness, but not in the derogatory sense. If there's something very Latinamerican, that is what in Perú we call guachafería, a certain popular distortion of installed values. Latinamerican literature has contributed its part with regard to this matter.
There's no way to disguise that "inspired pretentiousness" with the rest of the sentence. More if we think that Vargas Llosa and García Márquez no longer talk to each other, and the other two are minor writers. He also added:
My presidential candidacy [for Perú] was very incidental. I did it for civic and moral reasons.
It is pathetic how he wants to put some distance from what people perceive about him, namely his failure against an unknown inexperienced man of Japanese descent while running for the Perú presidence in 1990, and his affiliation to the Magical Realism school that equaled him to García Márquez.
On the one hand, Vargas Llosa worked for the presidence for two years (and Fujimori only three months) but he calls those years something merely incidental. On the other, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Madrid, with a doctoral dissertation about García Márquez. On early 1970s he wrote a book to defend García Márquez called "The story of a deicide". During the current year, politics again divided Vargas Llosa from the rest of his past world, speaking about (or better against) García Márquez:
(...) a writer who is a courtesan of Fidel Castro, whom the dictatorship holds up as an intellectual alibi. And he so far has come to accept very well all the abuses, the trampling of human rights that the Cuban dictatorship has committed, saying that secretly he helps some political prisoners get released. It is no secret to anyone that Fidel Castro hands over some political prisoners to his courtesans once in a while. That is how [García Márquez] keeps his conscience clean. To me it sounds more like repugnant cynicism.
From eulogy to mockery, Vargas Llosa deleted his past friendship (both as a political being and as a writer) with García Márquez, and also tried to hide the biggest humilliation of his life, when the Peruvians said "no" to his political views, dismissing his efforts as merely casual. Sure...
García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, when they were close friends
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