Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza’s Journey

One of Latin America’s greatest journalists has just passed away at the age of 95. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the Colombian with whom I had the honor of coauthoring four books (along with a third author, Carlos Alberto Montaner, who has also passed away), embodied both the tragedy and the promise of the region to which he belonged.

The son of a lawyer and a prominent leader of the Liberal Party—one of the country’s two historic political forces—Plinio was active in the revolutionary left; embraced the Cuban Revolution, whose official news agency, Prensa Libre, he headed in his home country; and, during his long stay in Paris, belonged to the international leftist movement that, from the City of Light, supported all anti-American and pro-socialist causes around the world. In Colombia, he was close to armed resistance groups and the famous priest Camilo Torres, who died fighting in the communist guerrilla movement.

But what set Plinio apart is that, nearly alone among Latin American intellectuals, he had the courage to break with the left and advocate liberal democracy, the rule of law, free enterprise, and republican values. He did this decades before it was in vogue to do so and when it entailed a high price: being shut out of journalism and publishing, cultural marginalization, and perhaps assassination. 

In fact, years later, the National Liberation Army (ELN in Spanish) tried to kill him with a letter bomb. But far from being intimidated, he redoubled his solitary struggle against the revolutionary utopias that had plunged Latin America into bloodshed, had helped bring far-right military dictatorships to power, and had channeled the energies of generations of young people toward violence and impoverishing ideas.

Married to the outstanding painter Patricia Tavera (his second wife), he and I attended conferences and symposia and engaged in private conversations on both sides of the Atlantic. I always admired him for the fact that so many years of frustrating struggles had not dampened his good humor, his warm-heartedness, and, above all, his hope for his region’s prosperity. His prose continued to be brilliant. (Although he wrote three novels, his chronicles, feature articles, and autobiographical texts were the genre in which he excelled.) 

To say that his struggle ended in defeat would be unfair, but to say that he triumphed would not be true. What can be said is that time proved him right. One need only look at the horrors that Cuba and Chavista Venezuela have become to know this, and at everything that came to light after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This does not mean that the ideas he fought against with such valor have been defeated, or that there aren’t setbacks every time things seem to be improving. Just look at Colombia, where, for four years before the recent change in government, a delusional former revolutionary, Gustavo Petro, ruled after winning an election despite the lessons voters had supposedly learned from the experience of neighboring Venezuela. (Two million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia in recent years.)

In deciding to give Petro the chance to govern, Colombians had lost sight of the fact that in the previous 50 years, the country, endowed with plenty of natural resources—oil, coal, gold, cobalt, agricultural land that produces world-famous flowers, coffee, etc.—had gone from a per capita gross domestic product (in terms of purchasing power parity) of US$3,000 to US$23,000. Unlike other Latin American countries, liberal democratic Colombia—despite its many imperfections and amid terrorist violence and organized crime—had endured. The economy, though without major achievements, had progressed little by little. 

Colombians put all of that at risk by electing Petro, whose ideas, unlike those of Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, never evolved. Petro did not destroy the country because Colombia’s institutions are more resilient than Venezuela’s, but he damaged it and threw the state’s finances into disarray. Colombia has one of the worst fiscal deficits in the world. All of this makes the challenge facing the new government a titanic one.

Plinio will not see what happens, but if his country and the region prosper in the coming decades, he will have been, along with a small group of visionary intellectuals, one of the major contributors to that happy ending.