Perfecting Dictatorship: Vargas Llosa’s Confrontation with the Mexican PRI

Perfecting dictatorship is a fascistic strategy aimed at co-opting rhetorics of change under rhetorics of permanence. In México City on September 1st, 1990, a group of Latin American intellectuals gathered under the banner “El Siglo XX: La Experiencia de la Libertad” to analyze the state of Latin American politics. Under the lights of the television set, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel laureate Peruvian writer asserted that México could not be exonerated from the dictatorial tradition of Latin America. “I hope not to sound too inelegant for what I am about to say,” he started. The perfect dictatorship “was not communism, was not the Soviet Union, was not Fidel Castro, it was México because it was the dictatorship in camouflage, in such a way that appears not to be a dictatorship … it has the permanency, not of one person, but of the party.” How does one political party mainain power in a “democracy” for nearly 70 years? Learn more below in this chapter published in the book Rhetoric of Fascism.