Abstract
“Tiempos recios” (advertised in English as “Fierce Times” and likely be the title of the English version) is not a typical scholarly book on strategic communication or public relations. It is a political novel by 2010 Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, which, among other topics, deals with the role Edward Bernays played in the American coup d’etat in Guatemala during the 50s. Vargas Llosa pulls from historical facts to craft a fictional talk where Bernays is responsible for the campaign that blamed Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s president, for welcoming Soviet communism to Latin America.
As a Peruvian author, Vargas Llosa’s interest in communication is not new. He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 but was defeated by Alberto Fujimori. An account of this experience is in his memoir, “A fish in the water” (“El pez en el agua,” Vargas Llosa, 1994), where he portrayed first-hand the difficulties of reconciling political marketing and substance in a political campaign. More recently he wrote “Notes on the death of culture: Essays on spectacle and society” (“La civilización del espectáculo,” Vargas Llosa, 2016) where, among other things, Vargas Llosa diagnosed a sacrificing of ideas by journalists and intellectuals in an effort to become part of the entertainment industry.
It is rare to find a work by a prominent author that talks about the role of public relations or an emblematic figure such as Bernays. Vargas Llosa considers Bernays a man who would take, at the expense of Guatemala, public relations to “unimaginable heights, making of it the main political, social and economic weapon of the 20th century” (Vargas Llosa, 2019: 15). While this statement may sound flattering for scholars and practitioners due to the power and social relevance conferred, the truth is that reading this novel helps us envision how popular culture perceives public relations today as well as lasting stigmas. Vargas Llosa (2019: 17) describes Bernays as “a refined publicist who thought of himself as an academic and intellectual,” making an implicit distinction (almost contradiction) between the two concepts, or in other words, the impossibility of being at the same time a publicist and a free thinker. Nonetheless, he acknowledges Bernays’ elevated public relations as a high-level intellectual discipline, “presenting its profession as the most representative of the 20th century, synonymous with modernity and progress” (p. 17). In sum, there is in Vargas Llosa a mix of admiration and condescension in his view of public relations and the figure of Bernays.
This book offers great potential for use in public relations classes to generate debate about ethical issues and the role of PR in modern history. It encourages students and scholars to pay attention to the ethical consequences of their own work. After all, Bernays and a well-orchestrated public relations campaign are made responsible for slandering and dismissing a government that intended to become an average American-style capitalist democracy in Latin America. All this was to defend the particular interests of one company, United Fruit, which aimed to maintain its privileges. Other considerations go beyond corporate pecuniary interests and have to do with deep racist attitudes. An example of this is this rethorical question that the author, who consulted the minutes of the United Fruit Board of Director meetings in Boston, attributes to Bernays concerning, “how a country of three million inhabitants could become a modern democracy, seventy percent of whom are illiterate Indians who have barely left paganism, or are still in it, and where for every doctor there must be three or four shamans?” (Vargas Llosa, 2019: 22).
For its use in the classroom, one of the limitations of the book is that the part specifically concerning public relations and Bernays is 14-page (one chapter), yet the spirit of Bernays is found through the book and its political plot, told as a fictionalization of real facts, can indeed be taken as a consequence of Bernays’ campaign. This could also be considered a virtue because the 14-page chapter can be used independently as a class reading, moving away from the rigidity and coldness of textbooks. A reading of the entire book can also be an excellent idea for students who want to gain extra credit, adding value for their peers.
“Tiempos recios” narrates one of the first examples of fake news on a great scale in the United States. This is profoundly relevant in the era of Donald J. Trump, Brexit and Covid-19, where disinformation and fake news spread faster than virus. We see how countries that seemed to be democratic like the United States or Great Britain have suddenly fallen into the hands of rulers who do not hesitate to lie to pursue their objectives. This book teaches us to be alert. In his day, Bernays even had the complicity of the progressive press. He took liberal journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, gave them dossiers, and introduced them to the right people. And that is how the myth emerged that Guatemala was already a Soviet satellite in a country whose Constitution prohibited diplomatic relations between Guatemala and communist countries.
In sum, this novel offers an alternative viewpoint to the traditional public relations theory textbooks outlining traditional approaches on forming dominant coalitions, controlling stakeholders, and maintaining hegemony and power. It permits an appreciation for serious public relations’ implications and emphasizes the importance of taking a critical approach to their work in order to become better professionals.