In the shimmering sun of Guatemala City, I find myself once again drawn to the elegant courtyards of Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM). This marks my fifth return to this remarkable institution, both as a speaker and as one cultivating the delicate bloom of intellectual kinship.
The occasion is the 49th gathering of the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE), a distinguished assembly of academic luminaries, policy architects, and public philosophers dedicated to the examination of free enterprise. My love for UFM has deepened through numerous encounters in recent years, beginning with a Mont Pelerin Society meeting during those strange, suspended days when the coronavirus still held the world in its grip.
I recall with exciting clarity broadcasting from my hotel suite in Guatemala City for Fox & Friends not long ago. More recently, last autumn brought the privilege of assisting my dear colleague Jesús María Alvarado Andrade in establishing a Law & Liberty Circle within UFM’s legal academy.
Established in 1971 by Manuel F. Ayau, colloquially known as “Muso,” this institution bears the name of an early Guatemalan bishop who, with ecclesiastical authority, championed indigenous rights when such advocacy was neither fashionable nor without risk. Were he alive today, Muso would be 100 years old.
What renders UFM so singularly precious, so utterly essential today? Not merely its architectural splendor and tropical beauty but the intellectual audacity of its conception.
Confronted with Guatemala’s endemic poverty, Muso and his friends, prosperous businessmen, read economics together, eschewing the conventional progressive remedies of redistribution and instead immersed themselves in the corpus of classical liberalism. They became, in essence, scholarly entrepreneurs, translating and disseminating these works throughout Latin America with pamphlets designed for mass appeal.
The university’s provenance can be traced to the Center for Economic and Social Studies, established in 1958, a time when much of the continent was captivated by collectivist fantasies. With an initial capitalization of $40,000 and a student body of 125, UFM emerged as an intellectual citadel influenced by the ideas of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Deliberating between launching a political party, establishing a newspaper, or founding a university, these men – possessed of both commercial acumen and intellectual seriousness – chose the cultivation of minds.
Muso’s simultaneous tenure in Guatemala’s congress (1970-1974) and his leadership in establishing UFM occurred against a backdrop of threats from radical leftist guerrillas – a testament to the revolutionary nature of ideas when set against the revolutionary pretensions of violence.
The university’s mission statement – “the teaching and dissemination of the ethical, legal, and economic principles of a society of free and responsible people” – reflects a philosophical clarity. UFM’s governance structure constitutes a robust challenge to academic convention. Against the sinecure of tenure that often breeds intellectual complacency, UFM operates as a private business. Its board of trustees, comprised not of academics but of pragmatic businesspeople, ensures fidelity to the institution’s founding principles.
The campus itself stands as a physical testament to intellectual lineage: the Ludwig von Mises Library contains the papers of economic giants such as Gordon Tullock; auditoriums bear the names of Hayek and Friedman; even a terrace honors Rose Friedman, whose contributions to economic thought are often overshadowed by those of her husband. Five Nobel laureates – Hayek, Friedman, James Buchanan, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Vernon Smith – have accepted honorary degrees, validating UFM’s intellectual seriousness.
Perhaps most striking is UFM’s curricular insistence: all students engage with economic principles through the Henry Hazlitt Center. This requirement reflects a belief that economic literacy is a prerequisite for informed citizenship, a proposition that, if more widely adopted, might elevate our public discourse above its current impoverishment.
By remaining small, UFM cultivates an excellent cadre of students drawn from Guatemala’s most promising minds and from throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Departments operate not as faculty fiefdoms but as competitive enterprises subject to marketplace discipline, each required to demonstrate fiscal viability in a manner utterly foreign to the subsidized inefficiencies of conventional academia.
The institution’s pedagogical model exhibits remarkable efficiency. Students transition with unusual celerity from learners to instructors, often assuming teaching assistant responsibilities in their junior and senior years. Many continue into the university’s graduate programs and shortly thereafter find themselves full members of the teaching faculty – a compressed professional trajectory unlike the protracted path of academic advancement in the United States.
As American strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere face unprecedented challenges from revisionist powers, UFM presents us with an opportunity. While Russia and China aggressively court Latin American nations with infrastructure investments, debt diplomacy, and military cooperation agreements, UFM has spent half a century cultivating a generation of leaders steeped in principles fundamentally aligned with our historical values and ideals.
This matters profoundly. Beijing and Moscow seek to establish influence and an alternative model of governance in a region that has historically been within the United States’ sphere of influence. Their courtship is accompanied by intellectual as well as financial incentives, which are often offered to societies where economic frustration has bred receptiveness to collectivist solutions.
UFM’s rigorous commitment to market economics and limited government makes it a natural intellectual ally in this contest of ideas. Its graduates, now occupying positions of influence throughout Central America and beyond, represent a constituency inherently skeptical of state-dominated development models promoted by these authoritarian powers.
We would be well-advised to recognize UFM as a strategic partner in the increasingly complex ideological landscape of Latin America. Supporting its work through academic exchanges, research partnerships, and diplomatic recognition would strengthen an intellectual counterweight to the increasingly sophisticated illiberal alternatives being marketed throughout the region.
Allen Mendenhall is Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor in the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University and Executive Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
Don't miss out! Subscribe to our newsletter and get our top stories every weekday morning.
