structural:reformatting
Mexico

A month after losing the election, at the invitation of Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa attended a conference in Mexico entitled, "The 20th Century: The Experience of Freedom". Focused on the collapse of communist rule in central and eastern Europe, it was broadcast on Mexican television from 27 August to 2 September. Addressing the conference on 30 August 1990, Vargas Llosa embarrassed his hosts by condemning the Mexican system of power based on the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had been in power for 61 years. Criticizing the PRI by name, he commented, "I don't believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety." He declared, "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the USSR, not Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship." The statement, "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship" became a cliché in Mexico and internationally, until the PRI fell from power in 2000.