This is Liberty Plaza, the physical and cultural heart of campus at Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala City.

Translating from the concepto page on its web site, Liberty Plaza and its adjacent museums and event center exist as "an homage to the human betterment that liberty provides by allowing man to think, to create, to act, to live, to be expressed…"

What is a libertarian cultural center doing on a university campus in the heart of a socialist country? Perhaps a question that motivates this L.A. Times feature on Manuel Ayau and Francisco Marroquin University, which he founded in 1971.

"The poor are not poor just because others are rich," said Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, a feisty octogenarian businessman, staunch anti-communist and founder of the school. "It's not a zero-sum game."

Welcome to Guatemala's Libertarian U. Ayau opened the college in 1972, fed up with what he viewed as the "socialist" instruction being imparted at San Carlos University of Guatemala, the nation's largest institution of higher learning. He named the new school for a colonial-era priest who worked to liberate native Guatemalans from exploitation by Spanish overlords.
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Some leftists deride him as a lackey of the ruling classes, dishing up neo-liberal dogma to rich kids in a nation where a few powerful families still call most of the shots. Conservative elites chafe at his op-ed harangues about their cozy oligopolies and government protections.

Ayau delights at the potshots coming his way from both ends of the political spectrum: They signal that someone is listening.

"Ideas are powerful," he crowed recently, showing a visitor an auditorium named for the late American free-market economist Milton Friedman. "We're making progress."

I've visited UFM several times. Its beatiful campus of red brick sculpted into lush green lawns is reminiscent of what Howard Roark might design. Every undergraduate student takes an economics course, with Mises and Hayek being the focus of the syllabus. The University has a center for the study of public choice economics, and a Henry Hazlitt Center for study of Austrian economics. Many of the faculty have their own talk-radio programs, broadcast nationally. And its current president, economist Giancarlo Ibarguen, was a key figure in Guatemala's 1996 privatization of the frequency spectrum (see, among others, Giancarlo's papers here and here). UFM's use of technology is cutting edge (easily surpassing "most wired" campuses in the U.S.). Check out the scores of videos at their New Media Center, which includes the entire Free to Choose video series among lots more.