Mario Vargas Llosa, A Champion of Freedom (1936-2025)

The famous Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away on April 10, 2025, eleven months shy of his 90th birthday. He was one of our era’s greatest literary talents – and greatest advocates for human liberty.

Mario Vargas Llosa was serving Atlas Network in an honorary role—giving speeches as its Templeton Leadership Fellow—at the time that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. It was thrilling to see Vargas Llosa recognized on a global stage for what his Latin American fans always knew: no modern author has written as lucidly and persuasively as Vargas Llosa to denounce authoritarianism and to give voice to otherwise silent victims of oppression. La Fiesta del Chivo, for example, is a brilliant exposé on the horrors of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

Classical liberalism’s central focus on the dignity of each individual person shines through Vargas Llosa’s best selling novels, essays, short stories, and plays, as well as the political commentary he published in a syndicated weekly column in Spain’s El País. Indeed, Mario Vargas Llosa was an active voice in the freedom movement, undertaking a run for president in his native Perú in 1990, losing in a runoff election to Albertu Fujimori, who eventually held a coup and tried to install a dictatorship. This story is chronicled in El Pez en el Agua.

In 2018, he penned La Llamada de la Tribu (The Call of the Tribe), an intellectual autobiography that details his journey in the world of ideas, from his early advocacy of socialism to his later “conversion” with classical liberalism, including his conversations with prominent figures such as Jean-François Revel, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and F.A. Hayek.

Mario Vargas Llosa became closer to the worldwide freedom movement in 2002, when he founded the Fundación Internacional para la Libertad (FIL), a global think tank that brought together leading classical liberal intellectuals from across Ibero-America. FIL remains a powerful voice in the struggle against dictatorship and the defense of open markets, tolerance and liberal democracy.

FIL’s annual Foro Atlántico, held every summer in Madrid, features the most distinguished proponents of the ideas of liberty in literature, academia, policy activism and politics, and Atlas Network has been proud to be a co-organizer. Other events held in Mexico, Perú, Colombia, Miami, Argentina, Chile, and even Venezuela, have leveraged Mario Vargas Llosa’s public reputation to gain a better hearing for classical liberal perspectives to challenges across the Americas.

Two recent initiatives highlight the importance of the relationship between Marío Vargas Llosa and Atlas Network—the support of FIL Futuro and the Young Journalism Prize. The former is a very encouraging initiative of mentorship and participation among new young voices of liberty, all who have been inspired and influenced by Mario Vargas Llosa’s literary legacy and pro-liberty activism. It includes new rising stars across the freedom movement in the Ibero-American region, now boasting over forty active voices, with the guidance of a council of mentors that includes his son Álvaro Vargas Llosa (a prominent public intellectual in his own right), Javier Férnandez-Lasquetty, and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, among others.

In 2020, amid health challenges of the pandemic and worldwide lockdowns, Atlas Network and FIL launched a Young Journalism Prize, to recognize young leaders in the field whose work contributed to a richer understanding of the ideas of liberty. The first prize was awarded in 2021, by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa himself, at the Freedom Dinner in the Marlin’s Stadium in Miami. The winner was Cuban refugee Carla Gloria Colomé, who was recognized for her brilliant lengthy chronicle of the rise of popular dissent in the summer of 2021, in Cuba, “11 de julio en San Antonio de los Baños: lo que se ve/lo que no se ve.”

The late, great Linda Whetstone jovially remarked to me, towards the end of this memorable evening, “you know, this is really cool!”

This prize later was renamed the Carlos Alberto Montaner Young Journalism Prize, in honor of the great journalist and distinguished Cuban public intellectual, also a close ally of Atlas Network, who chaired the jury of this initiative until his untimely death in 2023. The prize celebrated its fifth anniversary this year.

Mario Vargas Llosa shared the spirit of humility and open discourse championed in the tradition of classical liberalism. He was an ardent opponent of the “fatal conceit” of social engineering and also of ideologies that promote nationalism, which are often smokescreens for resentment and the politics of hate. But he never lost hope in the view that ideas have consequences.

Atlas Network’s community worldwide mourns the loss of one of its most committed and courageous spokespersons for the ideas of liberty. Yet, it also recognizes and celebrates the huge impact that Mario Vargas Llosa’s narratives had in the freedom movement, and now form part of a lasting legacy.

Roberto Salinas-León is Senior Fellow for Latin America at Atlas Network