This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. Mario Vargas Yosa's literary works have earned him a Nobel Prize in literature.

Yosa's anti-authoritarian themes in decades long public opposition to Latin dictators

makes him a natural friend of the Cato Institute.

Yosa has also authored essays published by Cato.

Ian Vasquez, director of the Cato Institute's

Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Friend to Mario. and one of the most well-known public figures in Latin America, certainly among the top two or three public

intellectuals in Latin America.

But he's also a classical liberal. He's a libertarian that comes from the

literary world, which doesn't, isn't typically sympathetic to views that dispose are principles of free markets and limited

government and private property rights.

So based on his tremendous prestige in the literary world, he has a great ability to influence wide audiences and he's been doing that for decades now.

He started in the 1960s very sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and so on, but he has had since then an intellectual

evolution beginning in the 70s away from that and away from all forms of statism to become a libertarian and the foremost advocate of

democratic capitalism in Latin America.

And as such, he's opened the eyes of millions of Latin Americans over that period of time.

I would say that in many ways over the past three decades, he's been setting the ideological agenda or at the very least setting the parameters of the debate in Latin America.

He was extremely critical of a lot of the moves made by Hugo Chavez.

He's been critical of Hugo Chavez from the very beginning.

Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999.

I remember actually traveling with him on the same flight from the US to Caracas in 1999.

When Chavez knew we were coming for an event and was already threatening the so-called

neoliberal's and to receive us with lead which is a sort of a bellicose way of

...