 COVID-19 was disastrous for Latin America, not only because of a death rate eight times higher than in the world at large. The pandemic has also created the preconditions for a resurgence of left-wing populism that poses a threat to personal freedom and economic well-being throughout the region. Following months of violent protests in Colombia, Gustavo Petro became the leading presidential candidate with proposals to raise taxes, seize private land, expand entitlements, and kneecap the oil and gas industries. In Peru, the socialist president Pedro Castillo was elected with the promise of weakening property rights and rewriting the constitution to allow for a dramatic expansion of state power. In Argentina, President Alberto Fernandez has responded to rapid inflation and a shrinking economy by imposing price controls, raising taxes, and growing the regulatory state. And in Chile, although poverty has plummeted in the last 20 years, voters opted to redraft the constitution, which could enshrine into law more government intervention in the economy while weakening private property rights. Antonello Marti is a 29-year-old Argentinian-born libertarian. The Atlas Network's Associate Director at the Center for Latin America and the author of four books about the region. In 2018, Marti had a televised debate with Juan Carlos Junio, a prominent communist political leader in Argentina, who exemplifies this problem of exalting political figures as saviors. This attitude was on display at a 2016 celebration of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Cuba was the island of utopia, and Fidel was the great utopic of the concrete reality of the American continent. One of the most terrible and infamous characters that Latin America has had is Fidel. Fidel inspires us to create the human being, not only rebel, but noble and solidary. The Castro regime impoverished the nation, drove over 1.4 million to flee, and murdered thousands of dissidents. The main enemy of the workers in Cuba was the U.S. military forces in the Soviet Union, the Gulags. So, with that question... In Cuba, there is a level of education and distribution of wealth that we don't have here. And Cuba is the country where doctors are moving. Doctors are moving. The women who were probably in engineering are probably on the streets. In the whole world, the Cuban doctors are the most prestigious in the world. They tend to reform the constitution. So, constantly manipulating the rules of play in favor of the same populists is another of the clear characteristics that define these messiahs and caudillos that promise a better present at the cost of sacrificing the future of the people. The concept of the creation of wealth is that one is rich because the other is poor. To finish the work with the capitalist values, I swear! In 2018, Marty debated Patricio del Corro, a socialist and congressional representative for the city of Buenos Aires. The poor are poor because the rich are rich. If that's something that is totally false... ...that is not understood by the generation of the rich. So, you're in favor of that. Eight people concentrate on the life of the rich. Because they create jobs, they generate jobs. How to say that the sick are sick because the healthy are healthy. They're two things that have nothing to do with it. This misconception that the rich are rich because the poor are poor, Marty says, traces back to the open veins of Latin America, five centuries of the pillage of a continent, published in 1971 by the Uruguayan writer Edward Galliano. It sold over a million copies and the Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chávez famously gifted it to President Obama at a 2009 summit. The winners happened to have won thanks to our losing, Galliano wrote. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others. Our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others. Unfortunately, that book fell with a lot of force throughout the entire region, always blaming the United States. Blaming the United States or blaming capitalism, blaming globalization, the free market. We went from that 85-90% of extreme poverty to a 9% today. And all of that is thanks to the free market. Communism took over 100 million victims in the world. How? Where do you put the victims of World War II, of the atomic bomb that the United States threw on Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Well, that death of Hiroshima and Nagasaki multiplied by five and they're the death that you, your bad ideology is called... The United States is protectionism. There are oranges and there are subsidies. Subsidies are the money that the producers of cars, of food, and so on. In fact, it is the country that is most subsidized in the world. In 2019, Mari debated the Colombian political scientist and aspiring politician Sergio Fernandez, who believes that the United States is the world's wealthiest country because of its protectionist policies and that Latin America should follow its example. The role of the state is to try to guarantee that national production does not end because with national production there are businessmen and with businessmen there is employment. And if the production is good, there are businessmen. Businessmen because it ends up seeing corruption when the state intervenes in the economy. The United States is very different from the direction that Latin America has taken because they precisely opted for very different ideas. Inspired and headed precisely by John Locke's ideas, the ideas of the division of power, the ideas of the state of law, of betting on the freedom of the market, of betting on religious freedom, freedom of expression, individual freedoms and civil rights in general. Yes, it has high levels. It has had high levels of protectionism in a certain sense. I think that does not come close. I think that does not come close. No, wait, because I think that does not come close at all to the ideas of freedom. But what the United States has sustained is the framework of the state of law, where the increase and growth of wealth arise. Precisely in countries that have solid institutions, liberal institutions, where free market is defended, where legal security is defended. That are at least two. One, we defend sovereignty in the country and two, we defend human rights. It is a right, you have to pay it to someone else. It is not a right, it is a privilege. No, no, no, it is a privilege. It is the opposite. Human right is right to life, right to private property. What you want is that someone pays the rest to other people. So what you say is to steal one to give it to others. That is what has been done. And the tax that is... And the tax that is... With that, we have to... We are going to try to land this discussion, Antonella. Well, liberalism is not something sought after. Liberalism, as we said, is precisely the equality of law, which is the only equality that exists. There is no other equality.