David Unger - The Mastermind

Guillermo doesn’t want to argue. “I don’t abhor poverty, I just don’t want to live in poverty. Poor people sicken me.”

“So now I understand why we have Indians and guerrillas fighting together in the mountains of Guatemala — because they have chosen to be poor? And you feel that Europe is a tired continent with lots of museums. Is that what you think?”

“Europe is worse than Guatemala,” he tells his dad. “At least here there is hope of change. There are only fossils over there.”

Günter Rosensweig is exasperated. He turns on his heels and starts walking out stoop-shouldered. Guillermo recognizes this posture as the same his father uses on customers, which he believes will result in sales. But this time there is no sale in sight. The customer will never call him back.

“I don’t want to wear an apron every day,” says Guillermo, his voice cracking.

Günter turns around. Guillermo is holding his breath. Again he has tears in his eyes. The father understands how his son sees him. In an apron. Like a maid.

“Come here, son.”

Guillermo runs into Günter’s open arms. For months he has been holding in his frustration, his sense of utter failure. He hates his emotions and promises himself that he will never be so weak as to lean on anyone again. He doesn’t want to wound his father — he isn’t sadistic — but he doesn’t want to be trapped in a life he finds repellent.

Günter strokes his son’s head as his own tears come flowing out. Yet they are crying for different reasons. Guillermo wishes he could stop, but he can’t. Maybe this is what happens when you tell your father that the work he does is demeaning, or maybe it’s because it has been months since another human being has touched him with something resembling love.

* * *

It is 1980 and a very dangerous time in Guatemala. Most of Guillermo’s high school friends decide to stay abroad, taking courses, working, or traveling over the summer. They are advised not to come home. Their parents must tend to their stores and offices, risking being kidnapped, but why should their children put themselves in danger? The mother of a Colegio Americano friend is kidnapped, and when the family fails to pay the million-dollar ransom quickly enough, she is shot five times and left on the side of the road by Chimaltenango, with her jewelry still on her.

The message is quite clear: Pay up, and pay up well, or die .

Guillermo is nineteen and President Lucas García claims the country has never been safer. This is the real stupidity, to speak of order and the rule of law as if history has ever been civilized. Guillermo remembers that the Mayan golden age offered the seventh century a vicious hierarchy, superstition, and the yanking out of still-beating hearts, not to mention slavery and constant warfare. And the Romans and the Gauls let thousands of their soldiers die in futile combat.

It was a butcher shop then, and so it is now. In Guatemala City, businessmen are hiring twenty-year-olds with automatic rifles, buzz cuts, and bench-pressed muscles to determine who lives and who dies with the flick of a wrist.

His father sells lamps. In high school Guillermo was just another boy who dreamed of kissing the girl who barely knew he existed, but smiled through him just the same. The girl knew that his father sold lamps, while her own father owned factories, had three white convertible Impalas in the garage, membership at the Mayan Golf Club in Amatitlán, and a house in Likín with a motorboat and skis. Without saying a word to their daughters, they knew they would never date anyone with a background like his.

* * *

So Guillermo finally tells his father he wants to be rich, filthy rich, so he won’t ever have to hesitate at a restaurant before ordering steak or lobster. And he will never touch a lamp again, unless it is to turn the switch.

Since he only spent two thousand of the four thousand quetzales that his father had given him for his trip, he has enough money to pay for a semester’s worth of courses at Universidad Marroquín, where Juancho is now studying. His friend insists that he start taking summer courses immediately, not to wait for the fall term.

The Chicago school of economics is the rage at Marroquín. Everyone prays to the god of capitalism and that god is named Milton Friedman. The theory is simple — reduce or eliminate taxes and let money do what it has always done: create more money. Somewhere down the line the quetzales will trickle down to the bootblack or the street sweeper.

There’s no place for guilt about inequities or the gap between the rich and the poor, because economic policy rewards those who take initiative. Allow the merchant class to make money freely and they will use their profits to further fertilize the fields of bounty. The Promised Land will have glass buildings, streets paved with gold, papaya and avocado trees growing in the backyard of every house. It will be paradise on earth.

Guillermo has no trouble with this philosophy. In fact, he embraces it. Soon enough he is reciting Friedman quotes — sculpted into the wooden signs at the entrance to the library and the other buildings on campus — by heart. A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. But his favorite quote is, He moves fastest who moves alone .

“John Maynard Keynes” and “federal government” are bad words. The university is filled with serious young men planning to be millionaires by the time they turn thirty. Guillermo has become one of them — but since he is a loner, he does not join any clubs.

He believes that free enterprise is king.

He plunges into his studies. He hates his literature and philosophy courses, where the idea of economic success is, if not belittled, then considered an obstacle to social equity. The novels he is forced to read and the philosophy he is obliged to study all stress the negative, but Guillermo is now interested in emulating systems that allow unfettered wealth and happiness.

In high school, everyone read existentialist literature voraciously. His classmates thought that Camus’s The Stranger was the greatest novel ever written: a man who feels nothing when his mother dies, who kills another person for no apparent reason, who refuses to repent for his sins, who not only doesn’t believe in God but spits in His face, and who happily awaits his execution hoping that a big noisy crowd will be there to see him hanged. They loved the novel because it had nothing to do with their actual lives.

His courses in macro- and microeconomics, organizational management, propensity theory, business economics, and motivational factors in economic growth, however, are too theoretical and dry. He realizes that what he likes most now is not studying and memorizing economic concepts but arguing with his fellow students. He has become an acolyte to capitalism, his new religion, but even more so, he’s become a skilled debater. He is convinced that he can actually win a debate defending the position of either Marx or Engels.

Marroquín counts among its students the sons of the wealthy: the Paizes, the Sotos, the Halfons, the Habers. No matter what political or economic positions his fellow students stake out, Guillermo always goes one step further to the right. While his classmates fear a Communist takeover, many of them consider Ríos Montt’s military coup against Romeo Lucas García regrettable because it involves a distortion of the rule of law. Guillermo, however, alone among his classmates, happily applauds it.

“Are you going to sit on your hands while the guerrillas take over your father’s factories, kidnap your family, and ransom them for millions of dollars? When will it stop? When your parents are impoverished and your sisters sold into prostitution?”