October 12, 2010 1:50PM # Johan Norberg: The Left and Vargas Llosa By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to liberal writer Mario Vargas Llosa engendered [much praise from libertarians](http://www.google.com/cse?cx=013437057244929004279:dgwn6gqvy48&ie=UTF-8&q=vargas+llosa+nobel&sa=Search&siteurl=www.google.com/cse/home%3Fcx%3D013437057244929004279%253Adgwn6gqvy48) and very little criticism that I’ve noticed. But I wasn’t reading the Swedish newspapers, where, [according to Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg](http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9776), lefties went ballistic at the awarding of the prize to a non-leftist: > In Sweden’s biggest newspaper, *Aftonbladet*, three writers ripped him to pieces on the first day after the announcement of the Nobel Prize. One wrote that the prize was a victory for the Swedish right; one said it was a victory for the Latin American authoritarian right; one accused him of being not just ‘neo-liberal’ but also ‘macho’ (what Vargas Llosa did not know is that it is only acceptable for female authors to write about sex nowadays; when men do it, apparently, it is chauvinist and distasteful). > > > *Aftonbladet*’s Martin Ezpeleta even claimed that the prize was a victory for racists, because Vargas Llosa once wrote an essay attacking the ideology of multiculturalism. That the same essay also called for a more open immigration policy meant nothing to Ezpeleta – until others called his bluff and he quietly omitted the charge of ‘racism’ from his article and pretended that it had never been there.… > > > The attempts to portray Vargas Llosa as a supporter of the authoritarian, conservative right in Latin America are just embarrassing. The only piece of evidence in the *Aftonbladet*article was that he supported Sebastián Piñera in Chile’s last presidential election – which doesn’t make sense in any way since Piñera is a moderate, democratic politician who has attacked the authoritarian tradition of Chile’s right and voted against Pinochet in the referendum on his rule in 1988. > > > Vargas Llosa’s attempt to hold all rulers to the same standards is what makes the claim that he betrayed the left so revealing. A lot of intellectuals have condemned rightist dictatorships in Peru and Chile, and a lot of intellectuals have condemned leftist dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua, but few have, like Vargas Llosa, condemned them both.… [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).