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Arturo Fontaine Talavera:

Welcome to Centro de Estudios Públicos. It is a great honor for me and a reason of particular joy to receive Mario Vargas Llosa in our headquarters here at Centro de Estudios Públicos this afternoon.
I believe that since his early works, The City and the Dogs, for example, the writings of Vargas Llosa have expressed an ongoing concern for the issue of power and domination. That concern has persisted through his recent works, such as the case of that tall and thin character who always appeared on the sidelines, meaning the Minister in The War of the End of the World, that character who has become involved in a fight, who maintains his nobility despite the pathetic situation in which he is implicated. In "The Backwoods," the enemies are confused, the adversaries should be the allies if it were possible to be understood and an indissoluble union occurs between the elements of illusion and disillusion, failure and hope that are so present in the history of Latin American peoples.
I would say that for many of us, the works of Vargas Llosa have constituted a sort of map through which we have been able to imagine or envisage the contours of a difficult, conflictive, at times turbulent political struggle that we have lived in the town where we were born. This author, who amazes us with his fiction, a bit as if he were a character that were cut in paper from a page and included in the book and began to walk between the lines, is today the protagonist of an unusual political adventure and is becoming the crusade for a struggle to establish a democratic and capitalist order "a la peruana" in a country whose history is quite far from that, at least apparently.
For Karl Marx, Peru was one of the examples in which he investigated the method of Asian production, characterized since the time of the Incas by centralism and state control of the economy. The colonial order and its mercantilistic structure have continued to be the principal way of organizing the economy in Peru. Now what encourages the movement led by Vargas Llosa somewhat, as I understand, is not the idea of founding a democratic and capitalistic order but rather of making it appear so because it is at the bottom of that underlying society and underneath official structures.
David Gallagher and Mario Vargas Llosa met each other a bit more than 20 years ago. At that time, Vargas Llosa was writing Conversation in the Cathedral and David Gallagher was working as a professor of Literature at Oxford and a literary critic of the Times Literary Supplement and of the New York Review of Books. In his book Modern Latin American Literature that Oxford published in 1973, David Gallagher dedicated an entire chapter to the work of Vargas Llosa and since then has written about him, his books and his personality. The most recent of those articles appeared yesterday in his usual column in El Mercurio. The idea behind this conversation is not to have a defined structure of subjects but rather for David and Mario Vargas Llosa to converse informally and loosely.
I would like to once again thank Mario Vargas Llosa and David Gallagher for their presence here and in particular Mr. Vargas Llosa and his wife for the privilege they have granted us by spending the last few hours of their stay in Chile with us. Many thanks.