I'm John Baxter with my colleague Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College.

Reuters, Peru's government declared Monday, Monday of this week, a national day of morning,

calling the passing of Vargas Yosa, a figure of national acclaim.

There were flowers laid at his apartment in Lima's Barancoe residential district,

noblest and author of several novels about the culture and politics and dreams of the Americas.

In particular, I'm pointed to a novel I've not read, the end of the world,

about Brazil. And my colleague Ernesto Arousso, former foreign minister of Brazil, a young man,

pointed out to me that that was very important to him and his education, talking about a small

war that Brazil got involved in, that is revelatory

of the Brazilian spirit and the spirit of the whole of the Americas. Professor, we have a couple of

minutes. What did Yosa mean to you, to your students at the Army War College, and to the Americas?

John, to me, Yosa's long life and the many things that he did and wrote, it's important,

I think, to recognize both what he accomplished in terms of his role in literature and especially

in the Spanish language in Latin America, but also what he stood for as he became increasingly

political leader in his life. And so, again,

a long series of things where he basically talked about, you know, the human condition and questioned

authority. He started out his career identifying with Fidel Castro and other things, but then

unlike some of his fellow Latin American intellectuals, he turned increasingly conservative,

or I think as he would have said, the espousing of liberal values. But as you pointed out, just some of his notable accomplishments, some of his

famous works, one of his earlier ones at the time of the hero, or in Spanish, a very different

title, Lissidae Los Peros, talking about experience of cadets in a military academy, but really

about it for a broader thing. But aside from his works, which got

...