Maybe there was something about art and literature that made it the fitting way to oppose dictatorship and nurture freedom. If you want to think freely but you’re surrounded by informants, it is not a bad idea to do so on the page, in meter and rhyme, or telling a story, or painting a picture. The dictatorship can’t reach into the paper while it sits between you and the desk. But the Paraguay of the post-dictatorship era of economic growth and democracy has a new center of power. I do not know what it is; I know it by its fruits. It is not a general. It is not even a person.

In a dictatorship, literature nurtures freedom.