It was only a matter of time before Mario Vargas Llosa launched an attack on Edward Snowden, just as he did with Julian Assange. The fine novelist and Nobel Prize winner — who dubbed Esperanza Aguirre the Joan of Arc of liberalism — believes that the ex-CIA employee’s decision to blow the whistle on America’s global surveillance program makes Snowden a predator of the freedom he claims to defend. Just as he censured the founder of WikiLeaks, Vargas Llosa accuses Snowden of destroying legality, degrading and transmuting freedom and confusing freedom with licentiousness.
Now as ever, Vargas Llosa abhors those who dig up America’s dirty secrets, arguing that the United States is a democratic society governed by the rule of law and where sufficient channels exist — from a free press to independent legislative and judicial authorities — through which to denounce whatever abuses the government may be guilty of. There is therefore, he argues, no justification for blowing the whistle abroad and serving the spurious interests of authoritarian regimes like those of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia (all possible refuges for Snowden) and Ecuador, which has been sheltering Assange in its London embassy for over a year. If there is a constant in the writer’s phobias, it is his aversion to Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez (now succeeded by Nicolas Maduro). The mere fact that these countries might shelter Snowden is sufficient reason for Vargas Llosa to discredit a person whose “heroism,” according to the latter, consists of having violated the oath of confidentiality he swore to the nation that paid his salary.
Vargas Llosa is not saying that he approves of the U.S. spying indiscriminately on friends and enemies alike and implementing a network of planet-wide surveillance, aided enthusiastically by the United Kingdom and the pretty much forced collaboration of technological giants like Google, Facebook and YouTube. Far from it — if it comes to a vote to eradicate all surveillance, he says, just show him where to sign. But the thing is that Snowden, according to Vargas Llosa, has not revealed anything that everyone who isn’t stupid didn’t already know. And we are already too late if we hope to protect the right to privacy, he adds, for that right disappeared long ago in the wake of political disputes, sensationalist journalism and celebrity gossip magazines.
He may have a point — but not much of one, because the analogy pales before the scale of the intrigue that Snowden has brought to light. Vargas Llosa has not stopped to consider why, if what was uncovered is so irrelevant, the U.S. has launched a worldwide manhunt and even put pressure on China, Russia and a number of European allies to obstruct the fugitive from finding a safe haven. Where is the merit in distorting and disregarding diplomatic habits, making France, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Spain look foolish and compromising those countries’ relations with Bolivia and the whole of Latin America — all just to punish a person who has revealed what the whole world knew anyway?
Moreover, why is he so convinced that Snowden and Assange would receive a fair trial in the U.S.? As fair as that of the soldier Bradley Manning, alleged source of the documents leaked to WikiLeaks? As fair as those of the Guantánamo Bay detainees? Is it possible he doesn’t know how far the concept of justice can be distorted when the sacrosanct national security is allegedly at stake? Some time ago — even before 9/11 brought about the removal of legal safeguard after legal safeguard — the judicial system had ceased to be that ultimate ideal that, according to Hollywood, can be shaken up and threatened but always triumphs in the end.
Snowden and Assange may not be heroes, and there is no need to put one’s head on the block for Assange in the Swedish sexual assault allegations, but Vargas Llosa’s insistence on presenting them as villains comes across as sickening and deranged. For that reason it seems worth pointing out, once again, the incoherence of his stance when compared with the one he adopted in his treatment of Roger Casement in “The Dream of the Celt.” At enormous personal cost, Casement denounced the barbarous treatment of the native population in the rubber trade in Peru and, most famously, in the Congo, turned by Belgian King Leopold into his own personal property. Casement, an Irish nationalist, was eventually hanged by the British for high treason, and his name was dragged through the mud for his pedophilic practices. That did not, however, deter Vargas Llosa from paying him fervent tribute in his book and treating him as a hero worthy of having a whole book dedicated to him. It is a long way from being the same standard against which, in a shocking lack of impartiality, he now measures Assange and Snowden.
Notwithstanding his talents as a writer, especially when he writes fiction, Vargas Llosa is a repugnant piece of garbage of the kind that the world would be better off without. The fact that he is intelligent enough to know better makes him even that more repugnant.