A Fish in the Water
Llosa), Mario Vargas
M ario Vargas Llosa's run for the presidency of Peru was a matter of intense interest. He was that rarest of creatures: a creative intellectual who broke with the left's orthodoxies to endorse free...
...That a novelist should have such an ambition, natural enough for a politician, will no longer surprise anyone who reads to the end of this book...
...His wife understood this fascination well, and when Vargas assumed the leadership of the opposition to President Alan Garcia's 1987 nationalization of the banks, she saw precisely where it was leading...
...He understands completely the damage done by a huge and corrupt state: "In an underdeveloped country, exactly as in a totalitarian one, the government is the state and those in power oversee it as though it were their own private property, or, rather, their spoils...
...maybe they were frightened away from Vargas by crude leftist scare tactics and lies...
...But De Soto helped convince Fujimori that they were essential for Peru, and indeed Fujimori has implemented Vargas's economic program with amazing fidelity...
...Once he starts meeting with the other two parties in his coalition, he sees how it will be...
...Vargas is entitled to this view, which he earned in several arduous years of political activity...
...During the campaign, Vargas's enemies made a series of false accusations about his wealth, and accused him of tax evasion...
...Why did he lose...
...None of the presidents who have undertaken deep economic reforms in Latin America—not Salinas in Mexico, nor Menem in Argentina, to take the best examples—said one word about such reforms in their campaigns...
...This is his privilege, as indeed was his recent decision to adopt Spanish citizenship, but it ill behooves him to malign others who remain Peruvian patriots committed to bringing economic freedom to their homeland...
...De Soto and Vargas were once close friends and political allies, but the friendship was destroyed by politics...
...This fidelity Vargas will not admit, nor will he give Fujimori credit for the astonishing progress against the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas (including the capture of its entire top leadership...
...Early in the book Vargas tells us that "my vocation is that of a cosmopolitan and an expatriate...
...Vargas was often buoyed by the large demonstrations supporting him, but anyone who had sat down with a cool head to add and subtract and attentively observe the sort of people who attended those marches and rallies would have had reservations: those who took part in them represented almost exclusively the third of Peruvians with the largest incomes...
...Vargas writes of "the great Peruvian sport of raje—badmouthing" and it is apparently one of his own favorite pastimes...
...He wanted to convey that to vote for me was to vote for certain concrete reforms, so that there would be no misunderstanding concerning what I intended to do or the sacrifices that it would cost...
...he has lived most of his adult life outside of Peru...
...Although a minority, there were enough of them to fill the squares of Peruvian cities, above all now that, for one of the few times in our history, those middle and upper classes had backed, en bloc, a political plan...
...and maybe they voted for the person furthest removed from their old political system...
...But there were the remaining two-thirds, all those Peruvians who had been most impoverished and most frustrated by the national decline of recent decades—including those who had once been interested by my proposals only to have their interest flag out of fear, confusion, and displeasure at the manifestation, in the last months of the campaign, of what appeared to be the old elitist, arrogant Peru of the whites and the rich, something that our advertising contributed to as much as did the campaign of our adversaries...
...He wished to put into effect a program of reforms that would end statism and open the economy of Peru...
...First, he could not retain the support of poor Peruvians, for his candidacy appeared to them to be supported by the country's rich elites...
...Vargas may have overloaded the circuits by trying to educate a nation—or as he puts it at one point, "making the country moral"—in the course of one presidential contest...
...Finally, Vargas lost because he was attempting something extremely difficult to begin with: to win through the power of ideas...
...He placed first with 45 percent in the multi-candidate first round of Peru's 1990 election, but in the second, two-candidate round could not increase that percentage and was defeated by Alberto Fujimori...
...How was it that a brilliant and world-renowned Peruvian with a program that could bring real progress to Peru was rejected in favor of an apparent non-entity, an obscure Japanese-Peruvian agricultural engineer...
...When he announced he would lead only one march, she told him "then there'll be another and another and you'll end up being a candidate for president...
...Vargas is especially angry that De Soto collaborated with President Fujimori, for Fujimori came to office having denounced the free market reforms Vargas was proposing...
...Vargas emerges here as the brilliant writer he has always been, with insights into politics as deep as those he has previously shown about other forms of human endeavor...
...As for Vargas's claim that De Soto backed Fujimori even after his "autocoup," the fact is that De Soto urged foreign governments to keep heavy pressure on Fujimori until he allowed a democratic opening and called new elections...
...Vargas is emphatic that the congressional campaign waged by his party coalition was fatal to his own presidential effort...
...This volume of memoirs will not disappoint fans of his novels (among whom I count myself...
...He is at his most vicious when discussing Hernando de Soto, author of the famous book The Other Path, which introThe American Spectator September 1994 69 duced the idea of the informal economy to readers around the world...
...He joined with two center/right parties in a coalition, knowing that he would need their votes not only to win but also to govern...
...Who knows just what the Peruvian people voted for, or against, in 1990...
...I do not propose to cover those chapters much here, although most readers will find them—especially those about his childhood—beautifully written and deeply interesting...
...Now that I had become involved, I made a depressing discovery in these tripartite meetings: that real politics, not the kind that one reads and writes about, thinks about and imagines (the only sort I was acquainted with), but politics as lived and practiced day by day, has little to do with ideas, values, and imagination, with teleological visions—the ideal society we would like to create—and, to put it bluntly, little to do with generosity, solidarity, and idealism...
...By the time the elections came, it was Fujimori who seemed truly a new face, with a brand-new party of his own, a non-white who clearly did not belong to the old upper classes...
...Of course we cannot know how Vargas would have done as president, or what would have become of him as an intellectual after five years in office, but the two years he spent campaigning provided wonderful material for him as an author...
...Vargas had a very difficult childhood, with a detested father repeatedly disappearing and reappearing at precisely the wrong moments...
...Moreover, he challenged the common view that intellectuals should stay out of politics, lest it blunt their creative abilities or tempt them to make the compromises so deadly to originality...
...It seemed to many Peruvians an arrogant demonstration of wealth and economic power, a sure sign that Vargas and his allies were indeed the party of the rich...
...This book is his payback to a lifetime's worth of enemies, and the meanness of spirit gets tiresome...
...The decision as to which candidate to vote for was made, in the overwhelming majority of cases, on the basis of the personalities of the people running for office and out of obscure impulses, and never on account of the programs the voters were offered...
...Not because it took him away from literature for a while (a loss balanced by the appearance of this book), but because it has left him enormously bitter...
...The autobiographical material will be Elliott Abrams, former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute...
...In the end, Vargas ran both to promote his deeply held ideas about how to "fix" Peru, and because, as his wife put it, "it was an adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk...
...This last remark refers to the excessive spending on advertising by Vargas's allies during the congressional election campaign that preceded the presidential campaign by only a few months...
...Suffice it to say that De Soto continues to live in Peru to this day, fully engaged in the struggle for reform and modernization, while Vargas has renounced his citizenship and divides his time between Europe and the United States...
...I don't believe that I succeeded in putting across either of these two things...
...His analyses of the Peruvian intellectual class, their pens most often available to whoever is bidding the highest, their tickets to Miami in one pocket and their denunciations of the imperialist monster in another, help explain why no challenge to the left emerged until 1990...
...Vargas devotes a full four pages to attacking and maligning De Soto in the nastiest possible terms: "a slightly pompous and ridiculous figure," "more ambitions than principles," "sly self-promotion," and the like...
...Maybe Vargas was too cosmopolitan, too white, too rich for most of them...
...If it seems a bit excessive, his is a cautionary tale...
...He notes that he was clean, because "knowing very well that should I one day enter politics everything about my life would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb in search of my vulnerable points, I had been particularly scrupulous about my annual income tax returns...
...Vargas's attempt to answer this question is the heart of the book...
...For Peruvians did not vote for ideas in the elections...
...There was a second and related problem: Vargas had first appeared as something entirely new in Peruvian politics, but as the months went by he seemed more and more just another rich politician...
...Psychiatrists will note that, after scores of pages about his battles with and resentment of his father, he reports the latter's death in a parenthesis...
...A FISH IN THE WATER: A MEMOIR Mario Vargas Llosa Farrar, Straus & Giroux/532 pages /$25 reviewed by ELLIOTT ABRAMS 68 The American Spectator September 1994 W by did Vargas run for president...
...Who ever said a great writer had to be a good pol and a decent human being as well...
...familiar to those who know his novels...
...He describes with the detailed attention of an entomologist the parasites at all levels of government and politics who "were all followers of the moral philosophy summed up in the precept: to live without money from the state is to live in error...
...He was that rarest of creatures: a creative intellectual who broke with the left's orthodoxies to endorse free market economics and denounce statism publicly...
...He was captivated by politics as a youth, spent his university years deeply immersed in it—in the Communist left, at first—and never lost his fascination for it...
...It consists almost exclusively of maneuvers, intrigues, plots, paranoias, betrayals, a great deal of calculation, no little cynicism, and every variety of con game...
...We know how his effort ended...
...Vargas's analysis of Peru and of his own campaign is penetrating...
...Scores of Peruvians are maligned, by name, as drunks, dullards, sloths, fools, ignoramuses, and sell-outs...
...This is an autobiography as well as a political record, alternating chapters that tell the story of his life with those that tell the story of the campaign...
...This is true beyond the borders of Peru as well...
...If he also emerges as a bitter and often nasty man, that too is his privilege...
...H e emerges, unsurprisingly, with a jaundiced view of politics...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
