TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040990/0409004.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.9 KB | 184 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 56

PERU

Politics Is Now His Muse


Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America's most famous
novelists, is on the verge of becoming President of Peru. And
you thought his fiction was surreal

By CRISTINA GARCIA/LIMA


    "It was true: that cancerous family of mine had every
expectation that I'd be a millionaire someday, or at the very
least President of the Republic."

    -- Mario Vargas Llosa,        Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter


    It's at least 100 degrees in the noonday sun. Mario Vargas
Llosa stands on an outdoor stage draped with sewn-together
sheets pinned with red and white paper flowers. He is in Bagua,
a dusty town in the north Peruvian jungle known more for its
rice growing than for its literary sophistication. As the
primarily Indian audience of several thousand watches, a
partially toothless man wearing sunglasses and a pale blue
guayabera hoarsely yells, "Mario, Presidente! Mario,
Presidente!" Then the candidate speaks, promising, if he is
elected this coming Sunday, to bring prosperity to the Amazonas
province. "In this region," he proclaims, "the future of Peru
is hidden!" As his words echo through the primitive
loudspeakers, the crowd reacts enthusiastically.

    What is one of Latin America's most famous -- and
controversial -- writers doing running for President? "Risking
everything! I wouldn't be doing this otherwise!" Vargas Llosa
says with a laugh. He is not exaggerating. Peru suffers from
an inflation rate of nearly 3,000% a year. Ten people are
killed daily in political violence in Peru, the majority by the
Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). The
average Peruvian's standard of living has dropped more than 50%
since 1985. Corruption thrives in the bloated, inefficient
state bureaucracy. Only Vargas Llosa seems to want the job of
managing the nearly unmanageable country. Even for those who
oppose him and his politics, which are supported by the
country's wealthy conservatives, Vargas Llosa remains the only
reasonable option.

    Vargas Llosa is not the most natural of candidates. In
style, he is the exact opposite of incumbent Alan Garcia Perez,
a fiery speaker whose high-profile antics wore thin as he ran
the Peruvian economy into the ground. When Garcia tried in 1987
to nationalize the banks, Vargas Llosa successfully rallied
against the move. He has been in the limelight ever since. In
fact, the handsome 54-year-old novelist is openly disdainful
of the occupation that engages him. "Politics is intimately
related to human mediocrity," Vargas Llosa observes wryly. So
far, this attitude has been to his advantage in Peru, where
voters seem as cynical about those who govern them as he is.

    The latest polls show Vargas Llosa with an estimated 44% of
the vote, well ahead of the closest of his three opponents,
Luis Alva Castro of the American Popular Revolutionary
Alliance. Because a candidate must attract 50% of the vote to
win, a June runoff is likely. Vargas Llosa is expected to
prevail, but once ensconced in the presidential palace in Lima
he may look back upon his campaign days with longing. His
party, Libertad, is one of three parties in the Democratic Front

is unlikely to win a majority in the national congress. "That
for me would be the worst scenario," Vargas Llosa says. "To win
the election but not have the mandate to make clear and
necessary reforms."

    The cornerstone of Vargas Llosa's platform is his economic
program, which promises to bring the flourishing informal
economy above ground, push down inflation to 10% a year,
attract foreign investment and privatize bankrupt state
businesses. The blend of belt tightening and free-market
policies may, however, hurt the poorest of Peru's 21 million
citizens. Political experts are concerned that Vargas Llosa's
weak relations with the Peruvian military might jeopardize his
ability to combat Sendero Luminoso, now active in every region
of Peru. In recent weeks the terrorists have stepped up a
violent campaign of car bombings aimed at intimidating voters
so they will not go to the polls. Last year Shining Path
executed 696 political candidates, public officials, soldiers,
policemen and rural peasants. Since 1980, when the group
launched its offensive, Peru has been swept up in a civil war
that has claimed more than 17,000 lives and last year alone
cost the country over $500 million. Recent reports indicate
that the subversives are cooperating with eastern Peru's
cocaine producers, whose drug trafficking accounts for an
estimated $1 billion black-market economy. The underpaid and
ill-equipped military, cited frequently for human-rights
abuses, can do little to stem the violence.

    Vargas Llosa's antipathy toward the military, sharpened
during the brutal 1950s dictatorship of General Manuel Odria,
has remained the one constant through his chameleon's life of
political affiliations. Like many of his Latin American
contemporaries, Vargas Llosa supported the leftist ideals of
the Cuban revolution. But his growing disillusion with
socialist politics in the 1970s estranged him from other Latin
writers, most notably his former friend Colombian novelist
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom he once belted in front of a
Mexico City movie theater. Since then, Vargas Llosa has cast
about with the zeal of his fictional characters for other
ideologies. In The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1986), the
antihero is an aging revolutionary confounded by how to effect
change in a corrupt and unjust society. Today Vargas Llosa has
only two modern political heroes: Charles de Gaulle and
Margaret Thatcher. "Thatcher is the only stateswoman whom I have
never seen make concessions in the values that, for her, are
very important," he says.

    Vargas Llosa has committed mistakes that a more seasoned
politician in Peru would have avoided. A campaign television
ad last summer, for example, depicted the current government
bureaucracy as a urinating monkey, a stunt that insulted many
viewers. Vargas Llosa, who has spent 16 years in self-imposed
exile in Europe (and is often accused of being more European
than Peruvian), was reluctant to criticize the American
invasion of Panama in December -- a move denounced by many
Latin American countries -- then spent his Christmas holidays
in Puerto Rico.

    Many Peruvians continue to wonder what makes Mario run. Some
say Vargas Llosa's writing has lost much of its vitality in
recent years and he is seeking less abstract challenges. Others
speculate that he requires a larger playing field for his
considerable talents and ego. "For a man of his fame, politics
is the only game in town," says Peruvian poet and journalist
Mirko Lauer. "Mario is hooked on success. To keep on
succeeding, he must step into politics."

    There is another, irresistible question. Will Mario Vargas
Llosa, whose fiction is often derived from his life, turn his
political career into novelistic fodder? Vargas Llosa insists
that for him art and politics are separate worlds with
precisely opposite requirements. "In politics you can't be the
master of the game," he says. "You must create consensus, have
great flexibility, accept criticism. Not in literature. When
you write a novel, you should be very intolerant, very
intractable about the goals that you have set." His critics say
this stubborn streak has kept the author from building the
alliances, particularly with leftist groups, that he needs to
govern Peru effectively. Instead, they say, he relies on advice
from a small cadre of confidants that includes his wife
Patricia, 43. "He is very alone out there," says Hernando de
Soto, a leading Peruvian economist and onetime friend.

    The challenge of remaking Peru has taken a toll on Vargas
Llosa's writing. Aside from a brief erotic novel, In Praise of
My Stepmother (1989), a book that Vargas Llosa considers a
"diversion" and in which he devotes rapturous pages to the joys
of a woman's bottom, he has written very little during the past
two years. He considers this curtailment of his vocation as a
"contribution to emergency times." Says he: "When you are in
a situation like Peru's today, you can't change it with a novel
or a poem."

    Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa tries to steal two or three hours
in the mornings for reading, writing and contemplation. Mostly
he reads poetry for its quick burst of language, but he admits
that he finds it hard to concentrate these days. No doubt
Peruvian reality rivals even the most artful and engaging of
his novels. In Conversations in the Cathedral (1969) and The
War at the End of the World (1984), the two books of which he
is proudest, Vargas Llosa explored fanaticism, apocalypse and
corruption. If he is elected President, Vargas Llosa will have
to contend more directly with these themes, which exist in
ample supply in contemporary Peru.