Ayn Rand's Influence in Latin America, Part I......by Alan Tucker

(1) The Genesis
The history and legend of Ayn Rand is a monumental story, much of it, still being played out in many parts of the world outside the United States. While Michael Paxton’s award-winning documentary Sense of Life illustrates her heroic struggle in the face of a hostile world, we find that beyond her own efforts, the legend of Ayn Rand is a living and functioning part of life that has a power of its own—separate from what Ayn Rand was as an individual and an intellectual.

The tremendous power of Ayn Rand’s novels and ideas to form and shape a culture is apparent to many Americans who witnessed the birth and growth of Objectivism, and its increasing influence on American culture. I saw much of this with my own eyes, and experienced like many others, the various attitudes amongst people, vacillating from rabid hostility, to moderate acceptance, to outright love and admiration.

Like many, I thought of Ayn Rand and Objectivism as an American phenomenon, perhaps a New York phenomenon. Then, one day in Buenos Aires, Argentina, all of these views were challenged. Very much by accident, I saw that Atlas Shrugged had arrived with a force and flair to the southern cone of Latin America—the land of Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia.


Strolling Along One Of The Main pedestrian walkways in Buenos Aires, Argentina in January, 2004, I saw Atlas Shrugged in its Spanish version, called La Rebelión de Atlas, in the window of a one of the main bookstore chains. It was a pleasant shock to see the book, and I had to reorient myself to make sure I wasn’t manufacturing reality instead of witnessing it. The long plane trip had tired me; I hadn’t slept much the night before; and hence, I was somewhat suspicious of my sense faculties and what I was seeing. All of this suspicion was aided by the fact that I had no idea that a new Spanish-language edition of Atlas Shrugged had arrived in Argentina—a new edition to replace the older, very flawed edition that originated in Spain under the fascist regime of Francisco Franco.

With the passing of the days and as I covered more and more of the city, I was to experience that initial shock over and over again. I would see Atlas Shrugged time and time again in the windows of bookstores. I realized that the appearance of Atlas Shrugged was no freak accident, but rather could be described as a cultural phenomenon—like so much of the Ayn Rand legend—mostly ignored and uncovered in the media, but yet very real to the thousands of independent thinkers seeking a different, more radical view of the world.

At Distal Libros, one of the main bookstore chains in Argentina, Atlas Shrugged was prominently displayed at all the branches that I witnessed, perhaps more than ten in the central Buenos Aires area.

Cuspide Libros had a tower display of Atlas Shrugged in many of its stores, a double stack of books starting on the floor and rising to chest level of a man the size of John Galt.

At El Ateneo bookstore in fashionable Recoleta, a former theatre now converted into a giant bookstore, Atlas Shrugged was listed as number seven on the best-seller list. All of the other best sellers were paperback editions and sold in the area of 25 pesos, eight dollars. Atlas Shrugged sold for 87 pesos, or just under 30 dollars.

As one entered the store, there was a huge island of Atlas Shrugged books sitting on wooden liners, row after row stacked approximately fifteen books high and fifteen books wide. I estimated the island in the area of at least 1000 books and perhaps much more. At close to $30 a book, in a country suffering a major economic crisis, I saw the phenomenon as another reality-defying story that could be added to the incredible Ayn Rand legend.

At Cuspide Libros in up-scale Recoleta Village, a movie complex and plaza of stores and restaurants, Atlas Shrugged was displayed in the best-seller section, copies stacked prominently against the wall.

In fact, if one discounted the socialist-oriented or religious bookstores in Buenos Aires, Atlas Shrugged was prominently displayed in the windows or best-seller sections of most of Buenos Aires' major bookstores.


A Few Months Previous To This, while doing research for my trip to Argentina, I ran across a reference to Ayn Rand from a newspaper in Rosario, Argentina that was beyond a normal smear. It was an intellectual carpet bombing of everything that she was about with not even an attempt to get any of the facts straight. Right out of a Marxist primer text, the article accused her of being a spokesperson for the Talibanes of capitalism--contending that she aimed not to impoverish the working people but to rule them by subjugating them to the power of the dollar.

At that time, I was mystified in trying to understand how Ayn Rand arrived to Rosario, Argentina—the birthplace of Che Guevara—and why the local newspaper would headline an article about her if nobody there who she was. With this in mind, I responded to the feedback part of the paper and wrote them an email. The article had put in quotes attributed to Ayn Rand the part about subjugating the people to the power of the dollar, a quote anyone familiar with Ayn Rand, would know she would never say. In the email, I challenged them to offer proof of her quote and alluded to the New York Times scandal, fresh in memory at that time, of a reporter making up quotes and stories.

A week after I wrote the email, the link to the article disappeared from the internet. The incident dropped from my mind and it wasn’t until I learned that Atlas Shrugged was a best seller in Buenos Aires that the connection was made, and the light bulb of recognition went off. Without a doubt, I realized that the legend of Ayn Rand was imposing itself in the territory of Che Guevara and Juan Domingo Perón.

(2) The Publishers
The entrance of Ayn Rand into the land of Juan Domingo Perón was made possible by new editions of both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The people responsible for all this are Rosa Peltz and her son Fredy Kofman, Argentinians of Buenos Aires, who bought the rights to the Spanish translation several years ago, hired a team of six translators and editors for an entirely new edition, and bought the book to light in August of 2003, after an absence of 40 years in the Spanish-speaking world. (1)

Previous to this, the man responsible for introducing Objectivism to Argentina in the early 1980's was Manfred Schieder, who wrote a series of articles in Argentine newspapers and magazines as well as giving conferences and lectures. Schieder translated The Virtue of Selfishness (La Virtud del Egoismo) into Spanish, which is now available from Grito Sagrado. Presently, Schieder is working on a translation of Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology into Spanish, which will be when finished, a monumental achievement in laying the philosophical groundwork in Spanish for Ayn Rand's novels. Schieder is the author of such articles as "Ayn Rand and the Fences"and "Ayn Rand and the Degradation of Art" which appear in the Spanish speaking world.

Before the Grito Sagrado translations, Atlas Shrugged had been published in Spain by Planeta Publishing and was considered to be a mediocre translation at best with parts of the book missing, suffering from the lingering effects of Franco’s censorship, his stiff Catholic morality and dislike of all things liberal.

As anyone familiar with different languages, the new translation was a monumental undertaking, especially one that aims to capture the tone and spirit of Ayn Rand. I have read sections of the Spanish version of The Fountainhead and found it to be an excellent translation. Ayn Rand’s voice is immediately apparent, the philosophy of individualism jumps out from every page, and the tone and content are solidly in place and reminiscent of the English edition. The prologue by Leonard Peikoff is an excellent translation of the English introduction to the book.

Kofman, an economist who studied under Milton Friedman, first read Atlas Shrugged on the recommendation of one of his teachers, who told Kofman he would love to be in the position of reading Atlas Shrugged again for the first time. Taking the book with him on a plane trip from Denver, Colorado to Amsterdam, Holland, Kofman was totally absorbed and captivated by the book right from the beginning, and knew he couldn’t rest until he finished. He went 30 hours straight, totally focused on his new world, until he finished the book in his hotel in Amsterdam. He describes the experience as mentally and emotionally captivating like "drinking from a fire hose." The experience was so powerful that it changed his life. He relates that from that experience, he judges life from a different viewpoint: the world previous to Atlas Shrugged and the world after reading the book.

Born and raised in Argentina, Kofman thought about the power that a Spanish version would have for a world that vacillates between military dictatorships, collectivist social-justice governments and weak corrupt democracies with no long-range goals or plans but only the immediate pragmatism of public opinion.

Besides Atlas Shrugged, Kofman bought the rights to The Fountainhead and The Virtue of Selfishness. The name of their company is Grito Sagrado, or Sacred Shout.

Atlas Shrugged was published in Buenos Aires in 2003. At a time when financial collapse and political chaos were prevalent and jobs were scarce, Atlas Shrugged made its reappearance in the Spanish-speaking world. The book cost close to $30 American money—87 pesos in Argentine terms that at the old exchange rate would mean 87 dollars. Financially, the book was a long shot. Without a doubt, there is similarity here to The Fountainhead that emerged during the beginning of World War II, a lonely misfit striving to survive during the insanity of a world war.

In 2004, the Spanish-language translation of the The Fountainhead, El Manantial was published and distributed to bookstores in Buenos Aires, and the rest of Latin America. Previous to this, the movie version of the book circulated in Latin America on television and VHS format.

Other than this, and with the exception of those bilingual people who introduced copies of her books in English throughout Latin America, the other major appearance of Ayn Rand in Latin America, previous to the Grito Sagrado publications, was a negative one: the movie version loosely based on Barbara Branden’s book, The Passion of Ayn Rand

Around 2002, when I was travelling throughout Latin America, I noticed that the movie was playing repeatedly on the Hallmark Cable Channel in different countries. Actually, contrary to the movie being based on Barbara Branden’s book, it would be more accurate to say the movie is based on the director, Christopher Menaul’s, doctored view of Barbara Branden’s book. It is an interpretation based on emotional bias, absent a rigorous interpretation of reality-based facts. From the opening where Barbara Branden is supposedly attending Ayn Rand’s funeral, to the middle where Nathaniel Branden finds Frank O’Conner drunk in a phone booth, to the end where she puts the flowers on Ayn Rand’s grave with the New York skyline in the background, the movie is a fictional distortion of Ayn Rand’s life, and a slanderous distortion of Frank O’Connor’s character.

In Latin America, without a corresponding wealth of information about Ayn Rand similar to what one sees in the United States, the movie only served to distort the image of Ayn Rand. While Objectivism was growing in the United States during the sixties and seventies, Ayn Rand was able to counter much of the slander aimed against her by appearing in person and in the electronic media in order to let people know the power and truth of her personality and message. In Latin America, this component is missing. A negative movie that runs with small Spanish subtitles, and is billed as based on her life with her name on the title will only serve to distort her image, especially amongst those who are peripheral viewers. With the sound in English and the fleeting subtitles running across the screen, many Spanish-language viewers will be influenced greatly by the images and the tone of the movie, rather than the real life of Ayn Rand.

In Buenos Aires, I experienced a very strong example of this. Once while talking to a well-educated, professional woman who was helping me with a Spanish translation, I mentioned The Fountainhead in Spanish and asked her if she was familiar with the book and with Ayn Rand. She told me she had heard of Ayn Rand and had seen parts of the movie. She made a slightly disgusted face and said, “Una mujer torcida, verdad?”

The word “torcida” means twisted and perhaps is an apt description of what one sees in the movie. The woman who made the comment was smart, intelligent, efficacious and geared toward a very rational view of the world. Yet, what she saw in the movie and the conclusion she drew from it was a different matter.

But this was not an isolated incident. Other well-educated and intelligent people, unfamiliar with Ayn Rand, have commented in a similar context to the above example. Without a reality-based knowledge of Ayn Rand—without Spanish language translations of her writings or perhaps a Spanish version of the documentary Sense of Life—how would any person be able to make a rational decision of the truth or falsehood of what she was?

Fortunately, Fredy Kofman, many years earlier was hit by the Ayn Rand thunderbolt that changed his life, and now, in Latin America, the monumental power and presence of Ayn Rand is a reality, and millions of readers will be able to see for themselves the power and originality of the author of Atlas Shrugged.