Mario Vargas Llosa

The subverting of authors for shallow political purposes is a nauseating phenomenon of our times, and George Black continues the process (“1492 and the Burden of the White Man,” Column Left, July 9) with his vicious and untruthful attack on Peruvian novelist and former presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa.

Black’s feeble attempts to tar Vargas Llosa with the dreaded brush of “neoconservative,” “rightist” and “Thatcherite” smack of McCarthyish red-baiting. The facts are that Vargas Llosa was no more a “rightist” than his counterpart Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia: He sought to privatize major industries, create jobs, annihilate the stifling suppression and bureaucracy, not to mention corruption and graft, characterized by the Socialist government of former President Alan Garcia, and restore Peruvians’ pride and self-worth. Evidently the left’s definitions of democracy vary from country to country and from hemisphere to hemisphere.

As for Black’s complaints about big bad Western civilization, he needs to be reminded that only a rotten, racist, capitalist country like the United States possesses both the resource and the freedom of speech necessary to produce a newspaper like The Times, which allows his drivel to be published without censorship.

SYLVIA WEISER WENDEL, North Hollywood