Hero storyteller - Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa; includes related article

National Review, April 17, 1995 by James Como, Thomas L. Rhodes

Mr. Como teaches speech and rhetoric at York College in the City University of New York.

There is no trust in the Americas, neither in individuals nor in nations: the constitutions are books, the treaties scraps of paper, the elections battles, liberty is anarchy, and life a torture. -- Simon Bolivar, 1815

THIS spring Peru will elect a president, its fourth consecutive legitimate presidential election -- astonishing in a country that has had only one other such succession in this century. Alberto Fujimori is running again and he will not lose, not even to the universally respected Javier Perez de Cuellar, the former secretary general of the United Nations. And that virtual certainty is accompanied by a second: there will be a campaign unlike any that most Peruvians have ever known, for the rhetoric of liberal democracy, free markets, private initiative, and personal freedom -- as opposed to that of ubiquitous statist intervention -- will be taken for granted by nearly everyone.

Until 1987, the most compelling feature of late-twentieth-century Peru was this: no newness, and so no hope. The entire culture was saturated by ``noise,'' randomly distributed uncertainty and uniform disarray; that is, by entropy. Is it any wonder that Mario Vargas Llosa, the renowned novelist briefly turned politician, felt ``absurd and unreal'' in his own country? Was it at all likely that he could do anything about it? Yet, thanks in large part to Vargas Llosa, Peru -- ``this beggar sitting on a bench of gold,'' as the Peruvian naturalist Raimondi described his country -- has shown signs of, finally, refuting Bolivar. Today Vargas Llosa's carping about President Fujimori (amidst much necessary criticism of him) has earned considerable ostracism, but tomorrow, when a whole pack of opportunists, demagogues, and technocrats are reduced to footnotes, he will still be the hero who not only stood athwart Peruvian history and yelled ``Stop!'' but went on to propel it on its historic way.

Peru Unraveling

UNTIL then, Peru was hardly worthy of exclusion from the Liberator's 175-year-old judgment. A febrile, Khmer Rouge - like terrorist organization, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), was slowly eviscerating the country; hyperinflation was devaluing an absurd currency just as an unraveling social contract was debasing standards of conduct, both public and private; the underemployed joined the unemployed, those who had been merely hungry now starved, and the infrastructure deteriorated. Overpopulation of the capital turned its environs into great garbage heaps (so that cholera erupted) and its downtown streets into little more than urinals. Many of the people living in small towns or in the countryside away from the coast were de facto serfs, semi-indentured, not to multinational corporations or to old oligarchic interests, but to the barons of a great drug-trafficking empire and their ideologically maniacal counterparts. And all the while a helplessly

mercantilist state presided, at once bloated and flaccid. Rampant and petty corruption (coima) accompanied an obligatory shamming (pilleria) in all aspects of bureaucratic life, and the state employed or otherwise ruled most of the official Peruvian work force. In some years more than a thousand executive decrees per month were issued, and the constitution itself was more than one hundred pages long.

In the mid Sixties Peru had been, per capita, second on the continent in animal husbandry. Then, in 1968, General Juan Velasco conducted a leftist military coup against President Fernando Belaunde (who was spirited out of the presidential palace in his pajamas) and botched a land reform that broke up large estates. So began the decline in Peruvian husbandry; by 1990 only Haiti had a lower per-capita rate. President Belaunde, vindicated by his re-election in 1980, told me in 1981 that his policy was decentralization; he would build roads and telecommunications facilities and encourage investment outside Lima. Later that week I interviewed a very prominent leader of the left-wing party APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) and asked if he thought Belaunde would survive his full term or again be removed by a coup. I was stupefied to hear, ``That is the very thing we are now deciding upon.''

Under such bizarre circumstances, who better than a novelist -- whose living is the invention of credible worlds -- to summon forth a new vision after having lived through, assaulted, and finally discarded a ruinous one (Marxist-socialist ``Castroism'')? In person Vargas Llosa is charming, friendly, and supremely courteous -- cosmopolitan, multilingual, apparently at home with people of all kinds, who in turn have seemed at home with him. In person he is impossible to dislike. And as a national treasure he is unique: among the most indigenous writers his country has ever produced, he is also the most internationally renowned in its history.

So it was with exceptional authority that in 1981 he spontaneously formed and led a large and varied group of demonstrators to the Soviet embassy to protest the imposition of martial law in Poland, and in July of 1987 he raised an alarm in response to the plan of President Alan Garcia (who had handily won the 1985 election on the APRA ticket) to nationalize banks, insurance companies, and all other lending institutions. One month later, to the amazement of the continent, Vargas Llosa led a rally of over one hundred thousand people in the Plaza San Martin -- street vendors and bus drivers, along with bankers, all protesting Garcia's decision. That demonstration was the birth of Libertad, not a political party but a social movement, the largest ever in Peru.