Venezuela Protests Update: Mario Vargas Llosa To Visit Country In Support Of Opposition Protesters

Mario Vargas Llosa, the novelist and one-time Peruvian presidential candidate who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, says he plans to travel to Venezuela in mid-April to attend a conference hosted by a conservative opposition think tank, the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Knowledge (CEDICE). "I feel the need to go and demonstrate on the site, to join a movement intended to secure freedom, not only in Venezuela, but also in Latin America," Vargas Llosa told Peru’s Canal N.

BBC notes that Vargas Llosa accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of trying to establish a “Cuban-inspired dictatorship” in Venezuela and warned that freedoms in the whole of Latin America could be threatened if he succeeded. El Universal writes that the novelist, whose turn to the right in the early 1970s coincided with the increasingly illiberality of a Cuban government he once supported, lamented that the government of Peruvian President Ollanta Humala had not “led in Latin America the protest against the virtual disappearance of democracy in Venezuela”.

Colombia’s El Heraldo writes that the conference held in Caracas by CEDICE, called “Latin America, freedom is the future”, will be attended by a host of other centrist and conservative intellectuals from Latin American countries, including Mexican historian Enrique Krauze and former Mexican secretary of foreign affairs Jorge Castañeda. Vargas Llosa said the free-market foundation had been “putting up a heroic battle with the Venezuelan opposition”.