The Great Communist Lie

This remarkable work by Axel Kaiser and Gloria Alvarez is a forceful denunciation of an enemy of citizens' rights and freedoms: populism. Seen from Spain, the text has an additional merit, because it undermines the usual European paternalism when analysing Latin America, a paternalism through which in Europe we would never accept that here someone would pretend to change society without democracy and shooting, but many are fascinated by Che Guevara... in Cuba. It is as if the distance and the painter mitigate his criminal and totalitarian vocation. The following pages put the finger on the sore point: it is not true that populism is a virtually genetic and exclusive peculiarity of Latin Americans, derived from poor institutionality and therefore with no possibility of taking root in the old and civilised Europe. This is absolutely false: we have populists in several European countries, and in Spain, to top it all off, we have them in power, in a methodical upward race whose end cannot be foreseen. On the other hand, in supposedly backward Latin America, the people have recently turned their backs on populism in countries so emblematically associated with it as Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina.