Rezo Kiknadze, a 26-year-old detained during anti-government protests in Tbilisi in December, faces six years in prison. In a Georgian court, Kiknadze addressed the judge and quoted Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Feast of the Goat: “This book is about a tyrant’s end — in the end, everyone leaves the dictator and he dies alone.”
It’s proof that Vargas Llosa’s critiques of authoritarianism will continue to inspire long after his death. The 89-year-old writer died on April 13, in his home in Peru.
In The Feast of the Goat, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner vividly described the final days of Rafael Trujillo’s rule in the Dominican Republic. He did so by showing both the violence of the regime, its corruption of society, and the way in which power affected the dictator himself.
Vargas Llosa shows Trujillo as a military man obsessed with control — over his image, his clothes, his health, and everyone around him. The dictator wakes early, follows strict routines, and demands absolute loyalty. “He needed to feel feared in order to exist,” Vargas Llosa writes. The book examines the silence, the terror, and the people who choose to look away. And how these dynamics keep Trujillo in power. “In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime”, he observes. Vargas Llosa’s Trujillo could be every authoritarian of today.
Initially attracted to Marxist ideology as a young writer, Vargas Llosa openly supported the Cuban Revolution, joining other leftist intellectuals who embraced Fidel Castro. But disillusionment soon followed. The critical turning point came in 1971, when Castro imprisoned poet Heberto Padilla. Vargas Llosa, outraged by Castro’s authoritarian suppression of dissent, radically shifted his political stance. He abandoned communism, became a vocal advocate for liberal democracy, and embraced conservative figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — positions that were nearly unparalleled among prominent Latin American intellectuals.
Vargas Llosa also aligned himself intellectually with European and Anglo-American liberals like José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel. These thinkers championed individual freedom, critical thought, and political pluralism — not all of them belonged to the political right, but they shared one central idea — no progress can be built on suppression of liberties.
“I went from Sartre to Camus,” he said in one of his final interviews. “Camus was right — separating politics from morality leads inevitably to violence. Moral responsibility matters just as much as political responsibility,” he added. Jean-Paul Sartre, for years, defended Moscow’s repression or ignored it. Albert Camus refused. For Vargas Llosa, no ideology could justify murdering millions, gulags, show trials, or state terrorism.
Indeed, Vargas Llosa’s first novel, The Time of the Hero, was censored in the Soviet Union — sections were removed without his permission. Furious, he demanded the book be pulled from circulation entirely, albeit unsuccessfully. “Had I been a Russian, I would have been a dissident in that country (that is, a pariah) or I would have been rotting in the Gulag,” he said.
This moral courage distinguished Vargas Llosa from many of his contemporaries, who often glossed over the excesses and crimes of left-wing regimes. Unlike Gabriel García Márquez or Julio Cortázar, Vargas Llosa did not justify the brutality of left-wing regimes as byproducts of revolutionary struggle. Instead, he condemned authoritarianism categorically. His stance cost him friendships, most famously with García Márquez. Their bond took a dramatic blow in 1976 when Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez during an argument in a movie theater.
IF THEY DON’T MAKE A DEAL THERE WILL BE BOMBING
This principled ideological stance brought Vargas Llosa both praise and controversy. In Latin America, the political left frequently perceived his support for Thatcher and Reagan as a betrayal. Nevertheless, he remained committed to defending liberties and saw a key power of literature in the manner that authoritarian regimes tried to control or silence it. “You discover when you lose freedom that literature is an instrument to defend it”, he said, probably reflecting on his own journey in his native Peru.
His magnum opus, 1969 book, Conversation in the Cathedral, opens with a line: “At what precise moment did Peru f*** itself up?” — a question that has echoed far beyond Lima, including perhaps in the mind of Rezo Kiknadze.