I remember reading Lew’s column a few weeks back about how the lawless situation in Guatemuala was unfairly blamed on Manuel Ayau and his private university.
I remembered the name, so I wanted to look up who he was.
Wow!
It turns out that he was an engineer who started businesses for huge infrastructural development projects in Guatemuala. In a poor country like his, where knowledge of complicated industrial activities was rare, he was consulted frequently on how businesses could get modern manufacturing up and running in his country. Basically, he played his own tiny part in starting to bring slightly higher standards of living in tiny remote Guatemuala.
Of course, Guatemuala was and still is a very poor country, and this engineer was eventually inspired by a lot of American and European economists to start bringing an environment of contractual enforcement and legal property recognition. Wealth could be brought into Guatemuala and allocated in various industrial ventures to allow the division of labour and specialization by which people worked less for more.
Hence he entered politics and started a university to promote these things. Neither really made a major difference really - Third World countries are known for general dishonesty and giant rentier public sectors and bureaucracies. He couldn’t have done anything, no matter how many seminars and parliamentary speeches he made.
None of that stopped the American embassy from blaming Ayau and his university for “anti-government sentiment” when violent riots broke out, as Rockwell explained. Astonishing, especially how the American embassy sees itself as in charge of things in Guatemuala and sees itself fit to say what’s what about Guatemualans. Ayau and his university were just a tiny fringe. What does he have to do with millions of working class people torching down the capital, most of whom don’t even go to universities? Whether it is thieving bureaucrats or violent public mobs, the problem was Guatemualans themselves.
All in all, it was a shameless attack, on a man who never did any wrong, by a shameless foreign government.