In 2005 Mario Vargas Llosa delivered his lecture "Confessions of a Liberal" for the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. A summation of Vargas Llosa's intellectual evolution since the 1960s, the lecture confirmed his claim to the mantle of Latin American liberal par excellence. Plotted in opposition to ideology as "an open, evolving doctrine that yields to reality instead of trying to force reality to do the yielding," Vargas Llosa's liberalism rests on a number of familiar precepts: political democracy; private property; the free market; and the rule of law in productive tension with "the defense of individual interests over those of the state" ("Confessions of a Liberal"). For Vargas Llosa, moreover, liberalism also signifies "tolerance and respect for others, and especially for those who think differently from ourselves, who practice other customs and worship another god or who are non-believers," hence his support for the 'separation between church and state" and "the decriminalization of abortion and gay marriage" ("Confessions of a Liberal"). Given Vargas Llosa's shift from the Left to the Right of the political spectrum and his well-publicized impatience with political agendas opposed to his own, the argumentation here was somewhat disingenuous. Equally disingenuous was Vargas Llosa's celebration of a liberal "natural lack of trust in power, in all powers' ("Confessions of a Liberal").