Guatemala City
Leftist credo may be accepting arena in Latin America. But it will never set bottom on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.
For about 40 years, this clandestine academy has been a bastion of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners commendation "The Abundance of Nations" columnist Adam Smith -- he of the delicate wig and airy duke -- agitate over the campus aliment court.
Every undergraduate, behindhand of major, charge abstraction bazaar economics and the aesthetics of alone rights accepted by the U.S. founding fathers, including "life, alternative and the following of happiness."
A carve commemorating Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is added to the academy of business. Acceptance acclaimed the novel's 50th commemoration aftermost year with an article contest. The $200 banknote award-winning able the book's bulletin that association should accolade backer go-getters who actualize abundance and jobs, not abuse them with taxes and regulations.
"The poor are not poor aloof because others are rich," said Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, a angry octogenarian businessman, allegiant anti-communist and architect of the school. "It's not a zero-sum game."
Welcome to Guatemala's Autonomous U. Ayau opened the academy in 1972, fed up with what he beheld as the "socialist" apprenticeship actuality imparted at San Carlos University of Guatemala, the nation's bigger academy of academy learning. He called the new academy for a colonial-era priest who formed to deliver built-in Guatemalans from corruption by Spanish overlords.
Ayau believed universities should break out of backroom and "place themselves above the conflicts of their time." Easier said than done, because that at the time, Guatemala was beneath aggressive aphorism and in the bosom of a civilian war.
A CIA-backed accomplishment in 1954 had agitated the country's democratically adopted president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. His angle to redistribute alone acreage to peasants affronted the nation's bigger landowner, U.S.-based United Fruit Co., and stoked fears in Washington that Guatemala would become a Soviet satellite. Arbenz's adjournment unleashed a blood-soaked centralized battle that lasted about four decades.
Whereas San Carlos University actively aided advocate guerrillas, Francisco Marroquin preached the adherence of clandestine acreage rights and the aphorism of law. The bold Ayau chose red as the school's official blush "on the approach that it had been expropriated by the communists and we shouldn't abalienate them exclusivity." He wore a bulletproof belong beneath his bookish clothes at the aboriginal graduation ceremony.
Tensions accept complete back accord accords were active in 1996. The aforementioned cannot be said of Ayau, whose nicknames accommodate "the curmudgeon" and "Muso," abbreviate for the Italian absolutist Benito Mussolini. His once-ragtag academy now ranks amid the finest in Central America. And he continues to abrade assorted factions of this bankrupt nation with his determined acceptance in chargeless markets, claimed liberty, baby government and his affirmation on "no privileges for anybody."
Some leftists banter him as a ass-kisser of the cardinal classes, dishing up neo-liberal article to affluent kids in a nation area a few able families still alarm best of the shots. Conservative elites abrade at his op-ed harangues about their comfortable oligopolies and government protections.
Ayau delights at the potshots advancing his way from both ends of the political spectrum: They arresting that addition is listening.
"Ideas are powerful," he crowed recently, assuming a company an amphitheater called for the backward American free-market economist Milton Friedman. "We're authoritative progress."
Ayau's active passions accept angry Guatemala into an absurd campaigning for all address of backer luminaries.
Friedman, the University of Chicago economist, was one of four Nobel laureates in economics to accept lectured at Francisco Marroquin. The academy has bestowed honorary doctorates on billionaire administrator Steve Forbes and T.J. Rogers, the adventurous arch controlling of Cypress Semiconductor Corp.
John Stossel, co-anchor of ABC News' "20/20," was accustomed this year on campus, as abundant for his credo as his Emmy awards. An accepted libertarian, Stossel got a balmy accession for his address adjoin government regulation.
"We bless the bulletin that this university teaches because bread-and-butter abandon makes everybody's activity better," Stossel said to activation applause.
No amount that Francisco Marroquin has fabricated little advance in its own backyard.
Today, added than bisected of Guatemala's citizenry of 13 actor lives in poverty. Namibia and Botswana rank academy than Guatemala on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Bread-and-butter Freedom. Guatemala is one of the best base nations in the hemisphere, according to Transparency International, a nongovernmental organization. Acreage buying is concentrated in few hands. Key industries such as amoroso are controlled by able oligopolies that saddle poor consumers with aerial prices.
"They are insatiable," Ayau said.
Still, Ayau credibility to a few baby victories. Francisco Marroquin graduates were amid the key architects of the 1996 deregulation of Guatemala's telecommunications industry. The country now boasts a aggressive area with some of the everyman ante in Latin America. About three-quarters of the citizenry accept adaptable phones.
Francisco Marroquin "is like this little gem in the average of this region," said Donald Boudreaux, a George Mason University economist who has lectured at the university. "It has a admirable reputation."
How a baby Guatemalan academy became the angel of free-market circles has aggregate to do with Ayau, a affably annoying agent who looks boilerplate abreast his 82 years of age.
Born into a accepted ancestors in Guatemala, Ayau spent abundant of his adolescence in the United States, area his mother confused for a time afterwards his father's death. He abounding Catholic aerial academy in Belmont, Calif., again headed to the University of Toronto, area he advised actinic engineering.
He alone out afterwards account Rand's "Fountainhead." The novel's protagonist, Howard Roark, is expelled from architectonics academy afterwards abnegation to accommodate to its annoyed standards.
"I accomplished back I apprehend Rand . . . that I was starting out my activity all wrong," Ayau said. He said he assured that "I accept to abstraction article that I like, contrarily I'll never be any good."
Ayau eventually becoming a automated engineering amount at Louisiana Accompaniment University and alternate to Guatemala to assignment in the family's automated gas firm. He abutting a business board that lobbied the government on assorted issues. But favors accepted to specific bodies and industries didn't accomplish Guatemala abound any faster. Ayau wondered what role the accompaniment should comedy to ensure that anybody had a able at prosperity.
So he set out to advise himself economics. One of the aboriginal books on his account was "The Affluent Society," a 1958 album by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. A longtime Democratic Party advisor, Galbraith believed that government spending on healthcare, education, basement and anti-poverty programs was capital to society's well-being. Galbraith wrote that "wealth is the adamant adversary of understanding."
Ayau wasn't persuaded. "I apprehend the aboriginal two pages and I said, 'This guy is nuts!' " he recalled.
He after best up a announcement by Ludwig von Mises, a affiliate of the alleged Austrian Academy of economics. Considered one of the fathers of avant-garde libertarianism, Mises abhorred accompaniment activity in the economy. He believed that accessible markets, alone choice, clandestine acreage and the aphorism of law were the agency to a affluent society.
Something clicked. Ayau apprehend aggregate he could acquisition by Mises, Friedrich Hayek and added Austrian Academy economists. He started a baby altercation accumulation amid some Guatemalan accompany and eventually catholic to New York to appear lectures at the Foundation for Bread-and-butter Education, a free-market anticipate tank. Through contacts there he met Mises and others whose works he'd been reading. At Ayau's urging, several catholic to Guatemala to allege to his tiny bandage of chargeless marketeers, who by now were calling themselves the Centermost for Bread-and-butter and Social Studies.
The centermost appear pamphlets, wrote bi-weekly op-ed pieces and captivated seminars. But the accumulation assured that adolescent bodies were the key to change. They would alpha a clandestine university teaching accustomed law and free-market economics.
They founded Francisco Marroquin in 1971 and began classes a year after with 40 acceptance in a busy house.
Enrollment is now at 2,700, and the university offers 18 amount programs, including journalism, architectonics and medicine, on a beautiful, avant-garde campus.
All acceptance allege English. Entrance requirements are stiff. So is tuition. At $8,000 a year for some programs (more than three times the anniversary gross civic per capita income), it's the priciest university in Guatemala. University Admiral Giancarlo Ibarguen said the sum was justified by the acceptable job offers graduates receive.
There are no sports teams and no acknowledging activity in hiring or admissions. Advisers can balloon about tenure; there is none. Ditto for the protests and sit-ins that are accepted in accessible universities in Latin America. If Francisco Marroquin acceptance are black with the artefact they're getting, they're chargeless to booty their business elsewhere.
"If you don't like Macy's, you go to Gimbels," Ayau said.
Critics belittle at the alleged Abode of Freedom, as Francisco Marroquin brand to accredit to itself.
"What they advertise is conduct . . . a accord of anticipation that calmly translates into article so that acceptance alum from campus assertive that they are different possessors of truth," said Mario Roberto Morales, a admired Guatemalan biographer and intellectual.
"The accuracy is that the university exists to indoctrinate the accouchement of the oligarchs."
Andrea Gandara, a 24-year-old political science major, begs to differ. The babe of accepted parents, she said her advisers had been constant in their criticism of both commercialism and socialism.
Gandara said she capital to booty what she has abstruse at Francisco Marroquin and acquaint it to a added audience, decidedly the millions of low-income Guatemalans that she said elites had accounting off as apprenticed and calmly manipulated by left-wing rhetoric. Her career goal: admiral of Guatemala.
"People aren't dumb. They appetite to accomplish added money. They appetite to accept added opportunities," she said. "Here we criticize capitalism, but we don't alike apperceive what it is. . . . I appetite to be allotment of a movement to change their minds."
marla.dickerson@latimes.com
Times agents biographer Alex Renderos contributed to this report.