Word: alejandro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Speaking at the Center for International Affairs, Alejandro Martinez, Nicaragua's Minister of Foreign Trade, took issue with Reagan's attempt to portray Nicaragua as a Soviet pawn. Martinez said that the Nicaraguan government has only sought help from the Soviet Union when it felt that "the U.S. was trying to kill...
...provinces, government forces supported by U.S. Marines battle insurgents backed by the Soviet Union, Cuba and Bolivia. But it is the past that is central to the book. Its narrator is a Vargas Llosa-like writer in search of information for a novel about his former Marxist classmate Alejandro Mayta. Was he a hero or just a "forty-year-old man with flat feet, who's spent his life in the catacombs of theoretical revolution...
...Alejandro is an illusive character because his friends and enemies tell contradictory stories about him, but more important because the narrator repeatedly reminds the reader that his investigations are a preparation for lying, for conjuring a fiction. Such modernist hugger-mugger has great potential for tedium. But Vargas Llosa's lucid intellect and technical gifts allow him to toy with uncertainty and shuffle time with deceptive ease. A good deal of Peru's mournful history and wretched present are economically conveyed. Leaving the Museum of the Inquisition, the narrator is confronted by a score of beggars. "They constitute a sort...
This and similarly graphic scenes serve to frame the novel's artfully related subjects: the fiction writer's need to acknowledge the deceitful nature of his craft, and the political activist's need to convince himself that his ideology is the only truth. The tragedy of Alejandro Mayta is that the give-and-take of public affairs is too perplexing for his blind faith. Like the narrator, he cannot escape the comic ironies that respect no certitudes. When free as an Andean condor, Mayta is a dedicated Communist. Imprisoned, he is a revolutionary whose zeal leads to reforming the convicts...
...Among economists who do history he's one of the most outstanding," said John Womack Jr. '59, Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics. Womack added that instructors of Diaz-Alejandro's qualifications are a rare commodity among North American universities, since most experts in Latin American economic teach in South America