The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

How I Became a Liberal

by Alejandro Chafuen
by Alejandro Chafuen

When I look back into my history to find the reasons I fell in love with liberty, I have to start with my blood heritage and upbringing. My teenage sons have had ample time to mess up their lives, but they already are finding their road to liberty, and for good and bad, I see how their parent’s heritage is affecting them. Looking back, I see that my ancestors also influenced my views.

My grandparents challenged their world. Antonio Rismondo, from my mother’s side, graduated from the University of Vienna, and his proud Genovese and cultured upbringing helped him view with contempt the barbaric motives and customs of the socialist hordes. My Nona or grandmother, Maria Pezzi, who followed him to my native Argentina, was brought up in Sivenic, a Croatian town in the coast of the culturally rich Veneto region of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. She was a woman of faith until the end. Antonio looked up on culture but down on all earthly powers. He died before I was born. My Nona helped my mother raise my three sisters and me. I have no doubts that her rosaries, usually prayed at 5:00 am, played a role in my conversion from Randianism.

Ergasto Chafuen’s individualism was more anarchist, and he was as stubborn as Antonio. My surname is his legacy, and although I worked for liberty in almost 40 countries, I never found a person with the same surname in the local yellow pages. He invested part of his inheritance on graduate studies at McGill University in Canada, and became an outstanding orthodontist. I was young when he died but I recall many funny stories that described a strong individualistic spirit. I think I still have to atone for his extreme anticlericalism. He used to send the maids to sweep the walkways after nuns passed by. As dentist to the elite, when a snob would introduce himself as "Hello, I am Mr. Armando Urquiza de Vedia y La Fuente," (which in the US culture would sound like "I am John D. Rockefeller the IV") my granddad would fake a noble posture and with a poker face would answer "Hello, I am Mr. Chafuen de la Zanja" (which translates as "I am Chafuen from the Ditch, the III"). I remember less about his wife Stella Dougall. She also had faith, but this is not the place to focus on the many tragic circumstances which affected her, her loved ones, and that left an imprint on my life.

It is not surprising that with such upbringing I would have a father and mother who, although apolitical, shared the same disgust with the populist culture that has dominated Argentina since the mid-1940s. General Juan Domingo Perón, and all that Peronism represents, had enough bad traits to create disgust in the views of Jackie, my father, influenced by an Anglo Saxon notion of liberty, and my mother Lydia, influenced by an "Austrian-Hungarian" virtue-based approach.

My liberalism sprung from my anti-Peronist family. It was only a matter of having someone, or myself, coming out with something positive to replace the "anti" in my political philosophy. Being always against something, in this case Peronism, is not enough to provide direction.

The first positive strong liberal ideological impact in my life came from Alberto Pavón, the father of Albertito (or Alberto Jr.), who at the time was my tennis enemy and closest friend. We both alternated as tennis champions of the Buenos Aires Rowing Club. Our court battles did not hinder our shared views about economics and politics. Alberto Jr. gave me a couple of booklets written by his dad, based on the writings of Juan Bautista Alberdi, the nineteenth century Argentine mixture of Madison-Jefferson, and Ludwig von Mises. Pavon’s writings opened the door to this wonderful mansion of a liberty, lived under the guidance of truth, which has been my house ever since.

I was only 17 and I started looking for other champions of Alberdi and Von Mises. My search led me to the Centro de Estudios Sobre la Libertad (Center for the Study of Liberty) which was founded in the mid 1950s and soon after presided by Alberto Benegas Lynch Sr. Benegas Lynch had led the center in the direction of the Foundation of Economic Education (FEE), in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Benegas invited Mises, who I never met, and then F. A. Hayek, Benjamin Rogge, Leonard E. Read, and Hans F. Sennholz, to Argentina. All of the above, each in a different way, had a profound influence on my life. I cherish the gentle and humble demeanor of both Hayek and Rogge, but it would be Leonard Read and Sennholz who were to have the biggest influence on my road to liberty.

When I met them, as a late teenager, I had read all the books, or at least 90%, of the books published and disseminated by FEE. A small group of Argentines have been carrying the FEE torch in Argentina. To all of them, dead and alive, I owe part of my liberal vocation. I know that I will forget some, but let me list Norberto Carca, Rodolfo Vinelli, Enrique Loncan, Enrique Polledo, Admiral Carlos Sánchez Sanudo, and Meir Zylberberg. They were all much older than me, and the only young liberal accompanying me in the trenches was Eduardo Marty. Eduardo, unlike myself, never left Randianism, and he has been a giant champion of liberty. Although we both cherished our mutual support, we were, and are! so confident of ourselves, that even if we would not have met I assume we would have still been freedom fighters.

In 1976 Benegas Lynch asked me if I would be willing to translate for Dr. Sennholz at several private speaking events. I was happy to volunteer my services. During one of those conversations, Dr. Sennholz asked me about my goal in life. I answered that I wanted to be a tennis pro in order to earn enough money to keep disseminating the values of the free society. Hans asked me "why don’t I teach." I laughed. Totalitarians of all different styles had a firm grip on the academic arena. The low pay of university professors was not enough to sustain anyone trying to make a living out of education.

With support from the military and friendly segments of the civil society, Argentines were able to prevent a Communist takeover of the country. The military, not without fault or sin, provided some space to liberals who, from a different angle, shared their same determination to stop left-wing terror. Professors at my Catholic University became "gentler" and despite my battles with Keynesians, I was able to graduate as planned. I even became a teaching assistant and young professor.

During that time I had become the first president of the Youth Libertarian Circles. I recall that the number of young liberals in the country could be counted with both hands, and with fingers to spare. I was able to recommend that all of them be given the same scholarship that I received, thanks to Hans Sennholz via Benegas Lynch, to study at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. That story deserves an entire book and I will not tell it here. I, as well as other young Argentines, returned from Grove City to teach at the best Argentine universities.

My first "defeats" as a human being, mostly in love rather than tennis, had weakened my faith in the Randian dogmas. Luckily I reacted well to defeats, not blaming others but trying to learn to be a little better each day. My very slow learning process also showed me a huge unexplored reservoir of human capital that not only Rand, but also my great teachers had neglected.

The Centro de Estudios Sobre la Libertad published a booklet written by Ayn Rand in defense of individualism. Since that moment, I tried to read everything she wrote. Her novels had a magnetic effect on me. Once I started reading one I could not drop it. Thanks to her writing, I began reading more philosophy, and became more open to the Aristotelic-Thomistic tradition that dominated my Catholic University. Slowly but steadily I kept finding precursors of Rand who had written similar things as her but whose views did not contradict my return to my Catholic roots. I kept reading her works even after my return to Christianity. I believe that it was in 1978 when I asked Bettina Bien Greaves and Bob Anderson, then at FEE, if they could give me her address so I could go and see her. They looked at me strangely and told me "we do not recommend doing this." I asked why. "Because you wear a moustache, and she thinks that men who have hair on their face are trying to hide something." I heard a similar story about Margaret Thatcher, but she was always charming and generous with me, even that apart from my moustache I am a native Argentinean. Not only that, Ayn Rand changed her surname to the brand of her typewriter "Rand." Since then, however, I began to drift away from some of her views and focus more on some of the ideas I find lacking in "her" philosophy. I remain a strong admirer of her work and influence and, although I enjoy debating some of her more dogmatic followers, when someone attacks her writings I have even more fun defending her. Randians believe in objective truth and, as such, will always be close to my own philosophical "realism."

In 1980, Dr. Benegas Lynch Jr., who had been influenced not only by his father but also by the Guatemalan intellectual entrepreneurs, invited me to the Mont Pelerin Society meeting at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. After that meeting, Leonard Read, and Manuel Ayau (then president of the society) nominated me for membership. At 26 years of age, I believe I became the youngest member in the history of the society.

I think I should stop here. At that time I knew it all, or almost all, at least that is what I believed. I "know" much less now, when I am approaching 50, than when I was half my present age. Another time I will have time to write about how so many friends, masters and "godfathers" such as Milton Friedman, Sir Antony Fisher, Pete Peters, Miguel de Oromí, Murray Rothbard, Gordon StAngelo, Michael Novak, Leonard Liggio, Sir John Templeton, and others, weakened my pride and helped hone, through their words and example, my liberal views.

If understanding liberty helped my sense of purpose, the joy in my life came from a different discovery. More than discovery, a gift. I learned to see that a virtue without joy is a debased virtue. Leonard Read was fond of quotations and some of them led me to Emerson and Thoreau. Their transcendental beliefs showed me that there was something more than matter. After gaining an understanding of spiritual essence, my search led me to a new kind of understanding. I first fell in love with liberty; I then fell in love with God. Soon thereafter, I learned that they were the same thing, the true Liberty.

Following liberty has been a challenging and rewarding journey. I hope it never ends.

December 19, 2003

Alejandro (Alex) Chafuen [send him mail] is President of the Atlas Foundation, an organization active in promoting liberty around the world. It has helped set up free enterprise think tanks in almost 40 nations in the last few decades.

Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com