One year on, a team of researchers uncovers the man behind the martyr and the economic roots of the Arab Spring.

BY HERNANDO DE SOTO | DECEMBER 16, 2011

One year ago, on Dec. 17, a humble, cowed fruit-seller in a small, provincial city in Tunisia doused himself in paint thinner and set himself alight. The flames that eventually took his life had an effect he could not have foreseen, even in his wildest dreams: Less than a month later, his country's long-ruling tyrant had fled to Saudi Arabia and a democratic revolution would soon sweep across the Middle East. His death made him famous, an icon whose face adorns postage stamps and whose name — Mohamed Bouazizi — now stands for the hopes of a generation.

As is so often the case with political martyrs, Bouazizi means strikingly different things to different people. To some he's a generic symbol of the resistance to injustice; to others an archetype of the fight against autocracy. Occupy Wall Street activists have even enlisted him as a spiritual ally of their struggle against the unholy alliance between Washington and corporate America.

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