Light on the Peruvian horizon
With the charming Nina heading off to Peru for a month, it's time to take a look at a country we've neglected here for far too long. And perfectly timed is this post titled Peru May Become Latin America's Next Success Story by Ian Vasquez over at the Cato Institute. "The center of Lima, notoriously crime-ridden and dirty, has become safe and attractive," Vasquez notes. This will certainly comfort visitors used to the sparkling and secure urbanities of Bavaria.
La Revolución Capitalista en el Perú by the excellent Peruvian journalist Jaime de Althaus is rightly praised by Vasquez, and what article about the country would be complete without a quote from Mario Vargas Llosa? The great writer has become more upbeat about his homeland because "something profound seems to have changed in the culture of the country. One would have to be blind not to see that."
No one can write about the region today, of course, without mentioning the rotund, red-faced hazard in Venezuela, and he pops up in Vasquez's post as well. We learn that Peru's market success has "become an embarrassment for Hugo Chávez, who has neighboring Bolivia and Ecuador as client states and is pouring a lot of resources into the Peruvian countryside in a campaign to promote his anti-capitalist ideology." By the way, speaking at a televised news conference on Wednesday, Chávez declared the opposition's referendum success on Sunday as "a shit victory". Won't be long now before he adopts the EU strategy of asking the same question until he gets the result that he wants.
Oh, seeing that we mentioned the father earlier, let's mention the son now: Alvaro Vargas Llosa. His superb article in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy, The Return of the Idiot, is a must-read for all those who have not been paying attention to what's going on in Latin America, and it segues neatly to the beautiful and brilliant Anne Applebaum because you should take a few minutes now to read The New Fellow Travelers, in which she excoriates the likes of Naomi Campbell and Sean Penn. Applebaum points out that for "the malcontents of Hollywood, academia and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called 'useful idiots' once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention and good photographs."
With luck, the people of Peru will be able to keep him at bay. And with even more luck we'll end up with a bottle of the pride of Tacama, which is made with the great Tannat grape. ¡Bien viaje!
