In your book, Rumbo a la libertad (Liberty for Latin America), you talk about Latin America as if it were a whole. But considering current and persistent animosities between countries like Venezuela and Colombia or Peru and Chile, what do you think needs to change to really integrate the region?

The book deals in specific details with various countries, but it tries to give a comprehensive vision regarding the basic structural problems that span the entire continent, especially institutional flaws that have been made worse by failed attempts at reform. The best way to integrate Latin America is to eliminate barriers that hamper the free flow of people, goods, services, and capital. Also, we need to let go of the historical conflicts and nationalistic rivalries that create so much bad blood between Chile and Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and even between Argentina and Brazil. Integration should not happen from the top down but from the bottom up.

One of the usual reasons given for Latin America's poor economic and social performance is the U.S. policy in the region. Why did you choose to overlook this factor when drafting your five principles of oppression?

The chapter titled "Friendly Fire" deals extensively with major foreign policy mistakes on the part of the United States. For instance, it is very critical of the war on drugs, which favors repression over persuasion, and of U.S. protectionism, which makes the case for free markets sound hypocritical. The United States has also turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in the past. But that country is not to blame for Latin America's underdevelopment. The essential fault lies in our own incapacity to overcome statism and authoritarianism. Anti-U.S. sentiment has often been a pretext for exercising our own kind of imperialism (against the Latin American population).

How viable is your final proposal—which involves reforming the political system in order to transfer power back to the individual— given the recent setbacks in countries like Venezuela or Colombia?

I think those setbacks have to do precisely with the lack of profound reform in those countries. Because Venezuela's democracy engaged in crony capitalism and corruption between 1958 and 1998, Chávez was able to win with a landslide and has been able to maintain a certain level of popularity despite the fact that poverty has risen under his rule. In the case of Colombia, the system has not really opened itself up to wider participation. To make matters worse, due in part to the failure of the war on drugs, the terrorist organizations have been able to obtain huge funding from the drug business and continue to pose an extremely serious threat to civilized life. Colombians direct a large portion of their resources and energy to fighting those groups rather than to creating wealth.

Editor's Note: Rumbo a la libertad is reviewed on p. 41. An English-language edition, Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression, is available from Farrar.