GUATEMALA CITY — It’s like some fevered left-wing conspiracy theory come to life. Hidden away in Guatemala, surrounded by tall jungle trees, is a crawling nest of neo-liberalism.
Francisco Marroquin University has been turning out free-marketeers for 45 years. Its guiding doctrines are immanent in its architecture. The buildings are named after F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian School economists. There is a Plaza Adam Smith, with the awkward Scotsman’s profile looming above various of his writings. You can barely turn a corner without coming across an aphorism (in Spanish) by some libertarian philosopher or other.
One of the buildings is adorned with a massive sculpture of Atlas holding the world aloft — a homage to that vinegary anti-collectivist Ayn Rand. She would have approved of the way that lecturers must bid for teaching aids according to an internal market, with prices rising at popular times.
Francisco Marroquin — named after the first Bishop of Guatemala, who translated several of the indigenous languages — is one of the best universities in Latin America. Its fees are at the upper end of the range, and it sets stiff entrance criteria, including a required fluency in English. All its undergraduates, whether they are studying law, medicine or architecture, are given a basic grounding in the principles of personal liberty and limited government.
Does that sound like indoctrination? Perhaps it is. But only in the sense that all universities indoctrinate their students. We expect our places of learning to uphold certain standards: Respect for truth, decency towards others, self-restraint.
What makes Francisco Marroquin unusual is not that it seeks to inculcate values. Rather, it’s that those values are not the leftist ones prevalent in almost every other institution of higher education. Instead of promoting anti-racism as the supreme political value, Francisco Marroquin promotes freedom. Safe spaces, micro-aggressions and trigger warnings have no place in these handsome buildings. Students are constantly exhorted to think for themselves.
To leftists, the place must seem like a Bond villain’s lair. Although it’s surrounded by Guatemala City, you wouldn’t think so when you’re there. The campus is in a ravine, overshadowed by the viridian spray of its arboretum — the university governors take pride in the fact that, unlike some ecologists, they are engaging in practical conservation work rather than demanding that politicians do it for them. A socialist who stumbled upon the place would surely conclude that he had uncovered some “Boys From Brazil” type plot.
The free-market liberalism taught here has a samizdat feel. Most undergraduates are as opposed to the big-government paternalism that passes for conservatism in Latin America as they are to the Left.
Which is why the best hope for the region lies in these young people. With the partial exceptions of Chile and Colombia, open markets have never really been tried in Latin America. During the Cold War, the choice was between two types of ugly authoritarianism, each justifying itself on grounds that it wasn’t the other. From the late 1980s, as democracy spread across the continent, many hoped that South America might finally catch up with North America. Sadly, the largely rightist governments of that era presided over crony capitalism, nepotism and stagnation.
By the end of the 1990s, a different kind of politics was sweeping the region: the angry populism of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and his mimics. In country after country, leftist caudillos would follow the same path: having been more or less fairly elected, they would summon conventions, rewrite their constitutions and dismantle every check on their power: the national assembly, the opposition media, the supreme court.
These autocrats have now failed in their turn, inflicting the worst pain on the masses who supported them. Now they, too, are being ousted, from Venezuela to Argentina. And yet Latin America’s underlying problem remains unaddressed.
That problem is simply stated. Governments are simultaneously too large and too small. Too large in the sense that they aim to control industries, dictate wages, set prices. Too small in the sense that they fail to operate impartial legal systems through which private citizens can claim redress. If you have a dispute with your neighbor, you don’t rely on the courts: you phone your friend who knows a minister.
After seeing what they could achieve, I pleaded with the governors of Francisco Marroquin to attract more students from Spanish-speaking countries. Just as the London School of Economics educated a generation of post-colonial leaders in Asia and Africa, with dire consequences, so there is now a crying need in Latin America for leaders who understand the difference between being pro-business and being pro-market. Every alternative has failed.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
