Three Latin American figures—writer, Pope, and photographer—illuminate a continent’s search for dignity and meaning.

Two Latin American giants have died recently. One, an old-school public intellectual from Peru who later became also a Spaniard, the other a spiritual leader who wanted to be the voice of the disenfranchised, leaving Buenos Aires for the Vatican.

A third one, a Brazilian photographer, is alive and well, and we would have benefited in looking at those events from his perspective.

We imagine them old and at the apex of their power, commanding the authority of old knowledge and institutions and, at the same time, representing a departure from the old ways. They are not revolutionary figures, nor have Indigenous roots (on the contrary, they belong to some extent to a ruling class of European origin). And they all found their voice by projecting their particular point of view into old institutions.

The one who’s still with us is a singular, celebrated documentary photographer and photojournalist born in Brazil who left a promising career as an economist to portray pictures capable of showing the humane side of things. This photographer, Sebastião Salgado, could have pictured the man instead of the public figure, had he portrayed Mario Vargas Llosa and Pope Francis before their respective deaths.

An Argentinian, a Peruvian, and a Brazilian enter a bar

Mario Vargas Llosa, Pope Francis, and Sebastião Salgado are three giants from the same battered region of the world, often misunderstood and dismissed as a non-quite-Western, underdeveloped area of the Western hemisphere, despite being a by-product of the very origin of the concept. Their work and deeds show a similar concern about the future of diverse societies despite their belonging to the minority.

As for Salgado, the one alive and speaking Portuguese instead of Spanish, it would have been a treat for us to see the world of symbols that Vargas Llosa and Pope Francis leave through a series of pictures by him in a Life-Magazine-style photo report. Though the three of them are poised to be both men of flesh and immortal (through their work, their regard, and their actions) at the same time.

Through a lens like that of Salgado, this story would have started in a much different way. In the highlands of Bolivia, where the earth is red and the air cuts like glass, a child walks to school along a dusty path amid new, shiny buildings of colorful designs in a neo-indigenous contemporary style. In the favelas of Rio, a grandmother prepares breakfast before the sun touches the corrugated rooftops while watching the latest Netflix series of local production. And in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a fisherman in a dugout canoe checks his nets before dawn while dreaming of having his own cocoa plantation. These are the quiet acts that Sebastião Salgado photographs. Small, luminous gestures amid the shadows of a continent that has known suffering, and yet it practices dignity like no other place.

However, all these portraits seem to have faded while all the media and social media posts created in wealthy countries focused on the Darién Gap migrants and, lately, on gang members tossed in contemporary concentration camps in Central America, no-due-process zones that ultraconservative pundits celebrate against their very own long-term interests. We live in a strange reality.

Fade out of humanism

In a post-utopian and post-liberal era, when totalitarian gestures amass a big following, figures of integrity rise with a refreshed, timeless stature and symbolic strength. Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa died on April 13, 2025, at his home in Peru; Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2021.

Both represented public spheres that have lost their shine and influence in society, one speaking from the lectern, the other from the pulpit. However, compared to the public midgets grabbing public attention today, these figures are giants despite being from a part of the world that got used to being patronized by those now at risk of descending into their own credibility spiral of doom.

In the dim corners of a hospital room, in a slum church in Manila, or in a migrant camp along the Mediterranean, Pope Francis’s death is not breaking news. It is a quiet, almost private moment—like a grainy black-and-white photo of a hand on a shoulder, a priest lifting a child, or a bowl of soup passed between strangers. That’s the angle that photographers like Salgado would be interested in, yet our social media world seems to be more interested in boosting only superficial and/or controversial takes. All for the sake of engagement. But none of these attention seekers will dare to try to portray him as a person who lacked integrity or guts. We live in strange times when the Catholic Pope is in less of a cult than the civil representatives of the wealthiest country on Earth.

It didn’t surprise me when, thinking about how meaningful it would be to have Sebastião Salgado photograph Pope Francis, I saw that they had collaborated on a documentary film a few years back (I didn’t know this). Having read about the person behind the public role, the collaboration doesn’t surprise me. Called Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018), the documentary was directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, the man behind another documentary featuring the photographic work of Salgado and one of my favorites: The Salt of the Earth (2014).

I suspect Pope Francis, or Bergoglio, the man before the Pope, or both, very much liked that previous documentary by Wenders and the Salgados (Sebastião involved his son Juliano in both projects), which references in its title the phrase used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, regarding a parable on salt and light. To the readers who are past the phase of hope in humanity and see everything from a cynical perspective, this would be one documentary you want to watch.

Let’s meet at La Catedral

If somebody like Sebastião Salgado were to explain to us (poetically, only with his photographs) the death of Mario Vargas Llosa, he would not turn his lens to a red-carpeted funeral or the marble of the national academies where Vargas Llosa also belonged, his nice house in Madrid, or his late romance with jet setter Isabel Preysler (a member of Hola magazine instead of that of culture and literature).

Salgado would seek something quieter, more layered — the social landscapes that haunted and inspired Vargas Llosa’s work: the dusty streets of Arequipa, the harsh fluorescent light of a Peruvian newsroom, the invisible workers of Lima’s kitchens and printing presses. Perhaps Vargas Llosa’s fight with García Márquez: a show of the man behind the symbol.

Those are the lives that flicker in the background of the Peruvian writer’s fiction: the lives shaped by dictatorships, revolutions, and dreams of emigration: a boy reading by candlelight in a rural town; the cracked hands of an aging typesetter; a young writer at a bar like La Catedral in Lima, which inspired the title of one of his major works… Salgado would capture the contradictions and formality in the character, his very-Hispanic sense of decorum and honor, the Quixotic allure—the affected pedigree parodied in film The Princess Bride (1987) through the character Íñigo Montoya, who wants to avenge his father’s death, repeating just one line.

In an age where attention flits between screens and nuance gets lost in influencer opinion vlogs, Vargas Llosa was a remnant of an earlier, simpler time—when mass media had greater audiences and the word “influence” had a different meaning than in our days of influencers. Ideas and beliefs were debated in essays, novels, homilies, and public forums that weren’t optimized for maximum engagement.

To young vocational writers from Latin America like Vargas Llosa, European intellectuals like the couple Sartre-Beauvoir were an example to look up to, and so he lived in Paris, London, and Barcelona after his editor offered him a contract in exchange for complete dedication to his literary work. The Peruvian writer’s trajectory represents an evolution in which idealism fades with age and pragmatism sets in, from the Marxist left of his youth to classical liberalism and a refusal of authoritarian rule. He was given the chance to be published and evolve as a thinker, but he also chose to stand by his beliefs instead of “maximizing for engagement” like influencers do now. The intellectual integrity of today runs behind an analytics tool showing how one’s last words are performing in real-time, and hence monetizing.

A reality painted by Hieronymus Bosch

Conversely, Sebastião Salgado isn’t a photographer of the smartphone and Instagram era. He didn’t just “go” and took a few clicks and selfies in crazy places: instead, he dedicated his whole life, living among other cultures and people, deeply comprehending them, documenting their lives. He sacrificed everything for an instant that makes a photograph special. Years of living wars, death, famine, injustice. In his quest, he seems to have found and lost paradise a few times, and his effort can illuminate others like only gifted people can.

Back to Vargas Llosa. His independence paid off. Spain made him an honorable citizen, France recognized his status as a writer and intellectual by including his work in the collection La Pléiade (while he was still alive, also rare) and electing him to the Académie française, becoming the first non-French-speaking author to be inducted in the nearly 400-year history of the maximum cultural institution of La Francophonie.

Despite the influence and recognition, however, Vargas Llosa’s style was more difficult to translate than that of Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende, whose works became instant best sellers in English and many other languages.

As he stated in his novel The Feast of the Goat, where he describes the final days of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s regime, authoritarian promises perpetuate the very underdevelopment he tried to fight as a writer, first, and as a politician, losing a general election in his home country:

“The dictatorship had not only corrupted the institutions but had also perverted the very souls of its citizens, instilling fear and obedience in place of critical thought and moral courage.”​

So the Peruvian-Spanish writer must have been quite shocked from 2016 onwards, when the Anglo-Saxon world that he set as an example of so many aspirational things became a caricature of his very own caricatures. Or, as coined by the Generación del 98 dandy Spanish writer Valle-Inclán, the patronizers turned into the underdeveloped “esperpento.”

No wonder the writer had used his Nobel lecture, which he called In Praise of Reading and Fiction, to explain the role of literacy (and, ultimately, literature) in preparing people against tyranny:

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist.”

His work should matter now more than ever, though people don’t seem to care much anymore about books and reading (that is, reading more than a few paragraphs of something superficial). Societies would be doing better if people reflected more on Vargas Llosa’s topics: the intermingling of politics, power, and corruption; the need to conquer freedom of thought; the intersection of colonialism and cultural identity; human psychology and the need to stand by one’s moral compass. He saw these universal topics as something essential, since none of them were a given in his part of the world, for people had to fight for them every day.

Bergoglio and Borges

While the mature Vargas Llosa saw the salvation of the continent by advocating for rational skepticism, democratic capitalism, and individual liberty, Francis preached a collective, paternalistic care for the poor as a form of ultimate liberation. They might have desired similar outcomes for the region they came from, though they used different means to try to achieve them. The material impact of both may have been limited, though not their influence.

I’ll define my religious agnosticism with a recurrent story that runs as a joke in the family. Kirsten will attest that I will only claim my culturally Catholic upbringing (a secular, humanist, non-practicing version of it) when, atop an airplane, I half-jokingly cross myself when the plane is taking off or hitting a long stretch of turbulence in the middle of the Atlantic. Only half-jokingly. Over time, I’ve grown more comfortable with Spinoza’s “God, or Nature.”

My sense is that Vargas Llosa was, in essence, a man of formalities, a “cultural Catholic” like many people in the majority-Catholic world (like Southern Europe or Latin America) but deep inside a Spinozist after all (if not the pantheistic kind, a Spinozist as a believer in the power of reason to liberate people, and a developed critical thinking to fence off dogma, authoritarianism, and collective delusions).

This private mockery feud came to my mind as I read a note by the Argentinian newspaper Clarín apropos Pope Francis’ death. Like many of his fellow countrymen, he was an Argentinian of Italian origin, the first Latin American Pope, and also the first from the developing world.

The article quotes the deceased’s autobiography (Hope, January 2025), when he remembers Jorge Luis Borges:

“He was an agnostic who prayed an Our Father every night because he had promised his mother, and before he died, he received the sacraments.”

Borges, the anglophile with a mainly Victorian self-education thanks to his father’s extensive library and his English grandmother, didn’t differ much in his agnosticism from that of Bertrand Russell, for example, though he kept his ways, as any good-hearted reader of Don Quixote would have. Let’s call it Hispanic decorum and “saber estar” (a way to show poise, grace, or tact: knowing how to behave appropriately).

The Pope and the agnostic

Regarding the Pope’s appreciation for Borges, and his acknowledgment of the sage’s agnosticism, I’m a bit like Søren Kierkegaard in this matter: just the same way that the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher vindicated the human, fallible, mortal version of Christ, one that didn’t do magic but showed the person’s doubtless stature as a force of good, I’m more interested in young and clumsy Jorge Mario Bergoglio (born December 17, 1936, the eldest of five children of Italian immigrants) than in Pope Francis, the institution, the same way that Bergoglio saw the sage and the human in Borges and care little in “converting” him.

Above all, as a pope, old Bergoglio seemed to vindicate basic ideas of decency over claims of infallibility or supernatural authority, like Socrates trying to stick to the universal values of integrity and coherence that would keep him in Athens instead of fleeing and hence bring him death. Instead of pandering to the doctrine keepers and the powerful, he saw the Eucharist as a tool to welcome the outcast, “not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak,” as he put it once.

In that, he seemed to be, once again, with Søren Kierkegaard and others: give me Christ the man, the one of the gospels, and not the dusty, dogmatic institution that he represented. So, we would have shared our inclination for the good man doing deeds and not the deity, which seems clear given the name he chose to serve as a pope.

A Jesuit (traditionally, the intellectual elite) who decided to vindicate the first Franciscan and signed documents with no flair (unlike, say, the person you’re thinking of) and one single word: “Franciscus.” It says a lot about the old institution he represented that he was the first pope to do so, which could be seen as subversive if Catholicism held the same importance in the world it once did.

That’s why—Clarín explains—he appreciated the person’s character and stand towards “goodness” in the world (just like Socrates and Kierkegaard) and not the person’s loyalty to the Catholic church. Regarding the agnostic Borges, old Bergoglio (the Pope) quoted one of Borges’ parables:

“Only a man of spirituality could write words like these:

Cain and Abel met after the death of Abel. They were walking through the desert, and they recognized each other from afar, because both were very tall. The brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. They remained silent, as weary people do when the day is nearly over. In the sky, a star appeared that had not yet been named. By the light of the flames, Cain saw the mark of the stone on Abel’s forehead. He let the bread he was about to eat fall from his hand and asked for forgiveness for his crime.
Abel replied, ‘Did you kill me, or did I kill you? I don’t remember anymore. Here we are together, as we used to be.’
‘Now I know you’ve truly forgiven me,’ said Cain, ‘because forgetting is forgiving. I too will try to forget.’”

By including this in his autobiography, he tells the reader he cares about the person, not the denomination.

The provincial literature teacher and the big writer

If, following the Pope’s own advice, we care about the person behind the institution, Bergoglio seems to have been a pretty normal kid raised in a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, the son of a railway accountant and a homemaker. Liked soccer, danced tango, defended his ground against the toughies waiting at every ill-reputed corner that Borges describes in his poems, and had a girlfriend at one point. One imagines them walking in a park, sharing perhaps a mate.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s taste for Borges began early: he loved Dostoevsky and the Argentinian author from his early formative years. One has to wonder whether young Bergoglio had been struck by The Grand Inquisitor, a famous parable that Ivan Karamazov (an ideologue) tells his younger brother, the devout novice monk Aliosha, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

In the story, Christ returns to Earth without announcement and drops in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition; he performs miracles as in the Gospels, healing the sick and raising the death; however, the Grand Inquisitor, head of the institutional church erected in the name of Christ, has him arrested as a vagrant, decrying the fact that humans are too weak to be given free will and practice actual solidarity and compassion. What people really need (says the inquisitor) is bread and a sense of control, and not Jesus.

A serious illness at 21 led Bergoglio to a spiritual awakening and his decision to join the Jesuits in 1958, soon influenced by the figure of St. Ignatius Loyola, studying philosophy and psychology at Jesuit colleges. According to his own words, regarding his encounter with Borges:

“When, at barely twenty-seven years old, I became a teacher of Literature and Psychology at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción in Santa Fe, I taught a creative writing course for the students and decided to send, through his secretary—who had been my piano teacher—two stories written by the boys. I looked even younger than I was, so much so that the students had nicknamed me Carucha, and Borges, by contrast, was one of the most renowned authors of the 20th century. Nevertheless, he had the stories read to him—he was already almost completely blind—and what’s more, he really liked them.

“I even invited him to give a few classes on the theme of gauchos in literature, and he accepted; he could speak about anything, and he never put on airs. At sixty-six, he got on a bus and made the eight-hour journey from Buenos Aires to Santa Fe. On one of those occasions, we arrived late because, when I went to pick him up at the hotel, he asked me to help him shave.”

According to Clarín, a witness of that trip (the director of the school’s magazine at the time, Jorge González Manent), included a shave of the aging author, already almost blind back then. González Manent:

“I remember we were going to pick him up at the hotel. And one day, Bergoglio went up to his room and took longer than expected to get to the third floor. When they came down, I discreetly made a gesture asking, ‘What happened?’ And Jorge told me: ‘The old man asked me to shave him.’ That had been the reason for the delay,’ said Jorge González Manent, who was the director of the school’s magazine at the time.”

If Lamine Yamal, the young FC Barcelona star, was bathed by young Lionel Messi at a newspaper’s photoshoot in Barcelona, old Borges was shaved by the future pope when the latter was a young literature teacher in Santa Fe, Argentina. Some random events involving at least one Argentine seem to come from a world too fantastic to feel plausible.

Franciscus

Bergoglio, the young priest and teacher, was a supporter of San Lorenzo de Almagro, a soccer team from Buenos Aires that Argentinians nickname “Cuervos” (crows) in honor of Padre Massa, another catholic priest of Italian origin who was among the group who founded the club in 1908: priests wear black cassocks.

He was very aware of the crisis of faith that secular societies have experienced since the rise of science, ideologies, and nationalism as substitutes for organized religion across the world —or this was at least the diagnosis of existentialists like the mentioned Kierkegaard and others already in the mid-19th century. And then there was the anachronism of the institution, the pervasive sexual abuse of children by members of the church across the world, the corruption and misuse of funds by the Vatican and local dioceses, the declining church attendance and vocations, or the advance of Protestantism in Latin America —particularly evangelical and pentecostal Christianity.

To traditionalists, the Pope was “too woke;” to Protestants, he still was the ritualist fanatic of Rome’s bureaucracy; and to the secular world, he represented a backward institution, incapable of tackling the dogmas of celibacy and the marginal role of women within the church, still excluded from the priesthood and key roles.

All in all, talking about the institution feels like the cold marble laid on the never-ending Vatican halls that will echo the intrigues to choose the next Pope behind closed doors. Bergoglio, as remembered by the Pope himself or by the mentioned Clarín article, is another thing: the humane behind the role transubstantiated.

At the end of his life, very public and at times full of flair and pompous demeanors, Mario Vargas Llosa returned “home” to Lima, Peru, and his lifelong wife, Patricia Llosa; he didn’t want public ceremonies. His remains were cremated, with his ashes divided between the Pacific Ocean and Europe. Which is his origins, work, and life.

Pope Francis, or Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a San Lorenzo de Almagro supporter, requested to be buried on a side aisle between chapels instead of St. Peter’s Basilica, in a simple wooden coffin lined with zinc (cypress, lead, and oak). He expressed a desire for a simple burial, in earth (dirt) rather than in a sarcophagus, and with just one word inscribed: Franciscus.

His funeral is scheduled on April 26, 2025. Many powerful people, “devote Christians” on paper but antagonists of the original values of their religion that Kierkegaard (and Bergoglio, Vargas Llosa, or Salgado) like/d, have confirmed their assistance to the ceremony. Among them, perhaps Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.