I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Alejandro Chafuen 83
My grandparents challenged their world. Antonio Rismondo, from my mother’s side,
graduated from the University of Vienna, and his proud Genovese and cultured upbringing
helped him view with contempt the barbaric motives and customs of the socialist hordes.
My Nona, or grandmother, Maria Pezzi, who followed him to my native Argentina, was
brought up in Sivenic, a Croatian town on the coast of the culturally rich Veneto region of
the Austrian-Hungarian empire. She was a woman of faith until the end. Antonio looked
up to culture but down on all earthly powers. He died before I was born. My Nona helped
my mother raise my three sisters and me. I have no doubts that her rosaries, usually prayed
at 5:00 am, played a role in my conversion from Randianism.
Ergasto Chafuen’s individualism was more anarchist, and he was as stubborn as Antonio.
My surname is his legacy, and although I worked for liberty in almost 40 countries, I never
found a person with the same surname in the local yellow pages. He invested part of his
inheritance on graduate studies at McGill University in Canada, and became an outstanding
orthodontist. I was young when he died, but I recall many funny stories that described
a strong individualistic spirit. I think I still have to atone for his extreme anticlericalism.
He used to send the maids to sweep the walkways after nuns passed by. As dentist to the
elite, when a snob would introduce himself as “Hello, I am Mr. Armando Urquiza de Vedia
y La Fuente” (which in the U.S. culture would sound like “I am John D. Rockefeller the IV”),
my granddad would fake a noble posture and with a poker face would answer “Hello, I am
Mr. Chafuen de la Zanja” (which translates as “I am Chafuen from the Ditch, the III”). I
remember less about his wife Stella Dougall. She also had faith, but this is not the place to
focus on the many tragic circumstances which affected her, her loved ones, and that left
an imprint on my life.
It is not surprising that, with such an upbringing, I would have a father and mother
who, although apolitical, shared the same disgust with the populist culture that has dominated
Argentina since the mid-1940s. General Juan Domingo Perón, and all that Peronism
represents, had enough bad traits to create disgust in the views of Jackie, my father, influenced
by an Anglo-Saxon notion of liberty, and my mother Lydia, influenced by an
“Austrian-Hungarian” virtue-based approach.
My liberalism sprung from my anti-Peronist family. It was only a matter of having
someone, or myself, come up with something positive to replace the “anti” in my political
philosophy. Being always against something, in this case Peronism, is not enough to provide
direction.
The first positive, strong, liberal, ideological impact in my life came from Alberto
Pavón, the father of Albertito (or Alberto Jr.), who at the time was my tennis enemy and
closest friend. We alternated as tennis champions of the Buenos Aires Rowing Club. Our
court battles did not hinder our shared views about economics and politics. Alberto Jr. gave
me a couple of booklets written by his dad, based on the writings of Juan Bautista Alberdi,
the nineteenth century Argentine mixture of Madison-Jefferson, and Ludwig von Mises.
Pavon’s writings opened the door to this wonderful mansion of a liberty lived under the
guidance of truth, which has been my house ever since.
I was only 17 and I started looking for other champions of Alberdi and Mises. My
search led me to the Centro de Estudios Sobre la Libertad (Center for the Study of Liberty)