The Government Grants Dominican Citizenship to Writer Mario Vargas Llosa daily menu

The Dominican Republic will grant citizenship to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize for Literature, as announced this afternoon by President Luis Abenader.

The Dominican president said the award-winning writer has decided to spend most of his time in the Dominican Republic. “I asked him to accept Dominican citizenship and he accepted that citizenship,” the president told reporters at the National Palace, accompanied by the writer.

Vargas Llosa said immediately that he would very much like to spend extended periods of time in the Dominican Republic. “I think the Dominican Republic is going in the right direction and is a good example in Latin America,” he said.

The writer said that Latin America is going through very difficult times and that perhaps no time in history is as complex as the one it is going through. “And I am very happy that the Dominican Republic, with an intelligent and rational government, has promoted this country. I think it is an example of problems that have a solution and I would like, since I had some difficult moments in the Dominican Republic, to also have a period of exaltation and real achievement.”

Vargas Llosa noted that he had many friends in the country, many people who collaborated on the novels she wrote about the Dominican Republic. “So it’s not surprising that I feel at home on my periods,” he said.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Among his most famous titles Conversation in the cathedral and goat festival, The latter focused on the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo Molina.

The Dominican government, in 2016, opposed awarding a literary prize to the writer for his positions before the 168-13 ruling, of the Constitutional Court, which set limits on access to Dominican citizenship, and Vargas Llosa was harshly criticized for understanding that stripping thousands of Haitian immigrants of citizenship.

“It is an inappropriate decision to award this award” to Vargas Llosa, who was considered by the Minister of the Presidency, Gustavo Montalvo in 2016, in a statement from the Dominican government.

conflicts

On November 2, 2013, Vargas Llosa wrote an article in the newspaper El País titled Los parias del Caribe, in which he points out that the Constitutional Court ruling in the case of Juliana Diego Pierre was wrongly depriving children of immigrants of citizenship. .

“… directly inspired by Hitler’s famous 1930s laws passed by Nazi Germany’s judges to deny German citizenship to Jews”.

After the article was published, the Dominican Republic demanded compensation from the Spanish newspaper for publishing a map of the island with a Nazi flag superimposed on it.

The Dominican ambassadors to Spain and the United Kingdom, César Medina and Federico Coelho Camilo, complained to the newspaper for publishing the article.

The clerk then asked Pope Francis to remove from office Cardinal Nicholas de Jesús López Rodríguez, who had spoken in favor of the ruling.

In 2016, the Ministry of Culture announced Vargas Llosa the winner of the 2016 International Pedro Henríquez Ureña Prize and the central figure of the book fair to be held that year.

The Prize is an award presented by an independent panel of Dominican and foreign intellectuals, which rewards “literary productivity, criticism and thought creation in the work of a lifetime.” The book has been handed out every year since 2013 by the Ministry of Culture at the opening of the Santo Domingo International Book Fair.

When he learned of the award, Vargas Llosa wrote to the commissioner of the award and told him that “a few years ago, I was very critical of the government’s policy regarding immigration of Haitians, which led to a lot of criticism from Dominican journalists and politicians. Despite this background, my award of this The award speaks to a lot of the democratic spirit, tolerance and openness that fortunately seems to prevail in the country.”

Then the Dominican government, in the voice of its Minister of the Presidency, said that it understood that it was an inappropriate decision to award him that award, because it was someone who “at a time when the Dominican Republic was defending itself against an international campaign against him, made aggressive and misleading statements about the laws and their application in the country.”

“The humanistic, Latin American, pluralistic and progressive sensibility of our work Pedro Henriquez Urena has no continuity in the disrespectful and offensive manner in which Mario Vargas Llosa treated the Dominican nation. A nation that gave him so much, from themes for his novels, to awarding him the Heraldic Order to Christopher Columbus in the Degree of the Cross The Grand Placa de Plata de Plata in 2010″. .