Vargas Llosa backs Chile's billionaire frontrunner

Vargas Llosa backs Chile's billionaire frontrunner
AFP
January 9, 2010, 9:12 am

SANTIAGO (AFP) - Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa on Friday backed Chile's right-wing presidential candidate Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire seeking to overturn two decades of leftist rule.

Vargas Llosa said that outgoing Chilean President Michelle Bachelet's Concertacion coalition, which has held power since the end of General Augusto Pinochet's 17-year military dictatorship, had "lost dynamism."

"It has lost dynamism, it has lost energy and I think that the best proof of that is the result of the first round," Vargas Llosa said at an event in Chile.
Bachelet's chosen successor, former president Eduardo Frei, garnered just 30 percent of the first round vote on December 13, while 44 percent went to Pinera.

Pinera "represents a modern center-right... which will promote Chile's development," Vargas Llosa said.
Bachelet's government invited the Latin American writer to Chile to take part in Monday's inauguration of a museum honoring victims of the country's military regime.

Pinera said Friday that he would not rule out working with former employees of Pinochet's regime if he won the election.
"The truth is that the fact of having worked for a government, including the military government, is not a sin, nor a crime. What is a sin is those who committed crimes," Pinera said in an interview on national television.

Pinera's right-wing alliance includes former Pinochet collaborators.

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Mario Vargas Llosa

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Mario Vargas Llosa???? It can't be!! Freeps quote him!

are not exactly BFFs.

I wonder if this will help or hurt Pinera.

other than his books. I checked out his wikipedia page and he clearly moved far to the right. Of course, he did go to a military academy in Lima, which was the subject of La ciudad y los perros, which I read in school. He probably knows a lot of generals.

I hope Chilean voters wake up before they lose everything they've gained, and start the spiral downward on the corpo-fascist skids, into militarism and massive looting by the rich, like the U.S., like Honduras--the U.S. in miniature. Or yet worse, like Colombia, where vast poverty and displacement are enforced by rightwing death squads.

This is something that Condi Rice could not accomplish--turning Chile. But it appears that Hillary Clinton might be a more effective shill for our corporate rulers' ambitions in the "southern cone."

after WWII, as they similarly infested Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, etc. You may recall in Chile, the two German communities created by the former Nazi (ex-Luftwaffe medic, Baptist minister, and child molester) Paul Schaeffer one of them, Colonia Dignidad becoming a place which handled torture and murders of political prisoners for Nixon's puppet butcher, Augusto Pinochet, after the destruction, financed by US taxpayers (without their knowledge) of the democratically elected Salvador Allende.

Looks as if their right-wingers there believe there are enough idealogues left there to elect this regressive, anal Chilean mega-materialist.

Your point on the past and previous Secretaries of State is painfully likely . The more we see of the is one, the more humane, and civilized the previous one looks, the woman for whom a major oil company named a tanker. This couldn't be further from what many people had logically expected for our transformed foreign policy with our new President, who's hailed as a radical leftist by home grown US American fascists.