Ricardo Lafferriere

In February 2002, I finished my mission as Ambassador of my country, Argentina, in Spain.

At that moment I decided to end my active public life, after having served in my hometown of Nogoyá (Entre Ríos) in 1973/1976, having been imprisoned during the military process for defending freedom of expression and thought, and having served as Senator and National Deputy representing the UCR of my province from 1983 to 1999.

It was enough. He had entered the Senate as the youngest member - he was 33 years old in 1983 - and I felt that it was time to facilitate the generational change.

The country had a different agenda, just like the world, and the protagonists of the scene had to renew themselves.

Since my retirement, I have embraced the cause of defending the environment, publishing the first Spanish-language book on the "Clean Development Mechanism" of the Kyoto Protocol and disseminating that format in various spaces in Argentina.

The fall of my country into the growing institutional deterioration during the process led by the Kirchner couple led me to venture as a citizen into preaching democracy, through my weekly uninterrupted opinion columns from 2003 onwards.

And in the meantime, I poured those experiences into numerous books, some of which are available on Amazon in their electronic version.

It is the synthesis of a public life that began in 1968, as a reformist university militant and co-organizer of the Argentina Radical Youth and that culminates with citizen militancy for the conservation of the common home, the construction of a coexistence in harmony with the planet. and the full validity, throughout the world, of the fundamental rights inherent to the dignity of the human condition.

Although throughout my life I fought against populism, the resurgence in today's world of this atavistic distortion of coexistence led me to focus my intellectual task on responding to its fallacies. This is the purpose of two of my latest works, "Argentina - Conscious democracy or banal populism. An unresolved dilemma" and "What happened to us", where I try to interpret the causes that brought about the return of populism to power after the Cambiemos government.