Thereupon, in Peru and in many other places it began to be said that, even though defeated at the ballot box, I had vicariously won the election—one of those famous “moral triumphs” that conceal Peruvian failures—because President Fujimori had appropriated my ideas and put my program for governing into practice. His brand-new critics from within, the APRA and the parties of the left, said as much, as did the right, and the entrepreneurial sector in particular, which, relieved by the new president’s change of direction, finally felt free of the insecurity of the Alan García era. The result was that this thesis—this fiction—in the end became the incontrovertible truth.
This has been, I believe, my real defeat, not the superficial one of June 10, because it perverts a good part of what I did and everything I tried to do for Peru. That thesis was already untrue before April 5, and is much more so since the power play whereby Fujimori deposed senators and congressmen who had a legitimacy as unquestionable as his own, and restored, with a new mask—as in those Kabuki melodramas where, beneath the masks of many characters, there is always the same actor—the authoritarian tradition, the reason behind our backwardness and barbarism.
The program for which I had sought a mandate and which the Peruvian people refused to give me proposed placing public finances on a sound footing, putting an end to inflation, and opening the Peruvian economy to the world, as part of an integral plan to dismantle the discriminatory structure of society, removing its systems of privilege, so that the millions of impoverished and marginalized Peruvians could finally accede to what Hayek calls the inseparable trinity of civilization: legality, freedom, and property.* And to do so with the acquiescence and the participation of Peruvians, not under cover of darkness and treachery, that is to say, by fortifying, instead of undermining and prostituting, in the process of economic reforms, the newborn democratic culture of the country. That project contemplated privatization not merely as a recourse for doing away with the fiscal deficit and endowing the state’s depleted coffers with funds, but as the swiftest way in which to create a mass of new shareholders and a capitalism with popular roots, to open the market and the production of wealth to those millions of Peruvians which the mercantilist system excludes and discriminates against. The present reforms have put the economy on a sounder footing, but they have failed to further justice, because they have not broadened in the slightest the opportunities of those who have less, so as to enable them to compete on equal terms with those who have more. The distance between what Fujimori’s administration has accomplished and my proposal is an abysmal one, whose measure, in economic terms, is that between a conservative and a liberal policy, and between dictatorship and democracy.
Nonetheless, having put a stop to runaway inflation and imposed order where the demagoguery of the Aprista government had created anarchy and a terrible uncertainty in the face of the future earned President Fujimori considerable popularity, kept alive by communications media that supported with a sense of relief his unexpected somersault. This enthusiasm went hand in hand with an increasing loss of prestige suffered by political parties, all of which, commingled in an irrational amalgam, began to be attacked by the new leader of the country, from the first day of his administration, as responsible for all the nation’s ills, the economic crisis, the administrative corruption, the inefficiency of institutions, the trivial and paralyzing maneuvering in Congress.
This campaign, preparatory to the self-coup of April 5, had been conceived, apparently, even before the new administration took office, by a small circle of Fujimori’s advisers, and orchestrated under the direction of a curious individual, with a dossier straight out of a novel, someone the equivalent, in the present regime, to what Esparza Zañartu had been for Odría’s dictatorship: a former army captain, a former spy, a former criminal, a former lawyer for drug dealers, and an expert in special operations named Vladimiro Montesinos. His meteoric (but secret) political career began, it would appear, between the first and second rounds of voting, when, thanks to his influence and contacts, he caused every trace of the suspicious deals involving the buying and selling of real estate of which Fujimori was accused to disappear from the public registers and judicial archives. From then on, he was to be Fujimori’s adviser and right-hand man, and his contact with the Army Intelligence Service, an agency which, long before, but above all after the abortive attempt at a constitutionalist uprising led by General Salinas Sedó, on November 11, 1992, was to become the backbone of power in Peru.
Instead of a popular rejection in defense of democracy, the April 5 coup earned broad backing, from a social spectrum that went from the most depressed strata—the lumpenproletariat and the new migrants from the mountains—to the very top, and also included the middle class, which appeared to mobilize en masse in favor of the “strongman.” According to the opinion surveys, Fujimori’s popularity increased at a dizzying rate, and reached new heights (above 90 percent) with the capture of the leader of Sendero Luminoso, Abimael Guzmán, in which many naïvely believed they saw a direct consequence of the replacement of the inefficiencies and shiftiness of democracy by the swift and efficacious methods of the recently instituted regime of “national emergency and reconstruction.” Other cut-rate intellectuals, with good syntax and this time with a liberal or conservative background—at the head of them my old supporters Enrique Chirinos Soto, Manuel d’Ornellas, and Patricio Ricketts—hastened to produce the proper ethical and juridical justifications for the coup d’état and to turn into the new journalistic mastiffs of the de facto government.
Those who condemned what had happened, in the name of democracy, soon found themselves political orphans and victims of a campaign of vituperation that was articulated by the hack journalists of the regime but had the endorsement of a substantial part of public opinion.
This was my case. Once I had left Peru, on June 13, 1990, I had decided not to participate further in professional politics, as I had between 1987 and 1990, and to abstain from criticizing the new government. I held to that, with the one exception of the brief speech I gave, on a lightning trip to Lima, in August 1991, to turn the presidency of Libertad over to Lucho Bustamante. But after April 5, 1992. I felt myself obliged, once again, plucking up my courage so as to overcome the visceral disgust that political action had left in my memory, to condemn, in articles and interviews, what seemed to me to be a tragedy for Peru: the disappearance of legality and the return of the era of strongmen, of governments whose legitimacy is founded on military force and public opinion surveys. Consistent with what, during the campaign, I had said would be the policy of my administration toward any dictatorship or coup d’état in Latin America, I asked the democratic countries and international organizations to penalize the de facto government by applying diplomatic and economic sanctions—as had been done in the case of Haiti, when the army overthrew the legal government—in order, in this way, to aid Peruvian democrats and discourage potential planners of coups d’état in other Latin American countries which (as has already been seen in Venezuela) might feel encouraged to follow Fujimori’s example.
This position has, naturally, been the object of strident recriminations in Peru, and not only by the regime, the traitorous military leaders, and the journalists in their hire but also by many well-intentioned citizens, among them any number of former allies of the Democratic Front, to whom seeking economic sanctions against the regime appears to them to be an act of treason against Peru. They find themselves unable to accept the clearest lesson of our history: that a dictatorship, no matter what form it adopts, is always the worst of evils and must be fought by every available means, for the shorter the time that it remains in power the less damage and suffering will be inflicted on the country. Even in circles and persons I thought would be the least inclined to act by way of mere conditioned reflexes, I perceive a shocked stupefaction at what seems to them to be my lack of patriotism, an attitude dictated not by convictions and principles but by the bitterness of having suffered a defeat.
> This is not something that I lose sleep over. And perhaps being so unpopular will enable me in the future to dedicate all my time and energy to writing, something at which—I touch wood—I trust that I am less inept than I am at undesirable (yet indispensable) political action.
My last reflection, in this book that has been difficult to write, is not optimistic. I do not share the broad consensus that appears to exist among Peruvians, that through the two electoral processes held in Peru after April 5—one for a Constituent Congress and one for a new role for town councils—legality has been reestablished and the government has recovered its democratic credentials. On the contrary, I think that these measures have served, rather, to make Peru go backward politically and that, with the blessing of the Organization of American States and many Western foreign offices, there has been restored in the country, with just a slight touch of makeup, the very old authoritarian tradition: that of caudillos, that of military power over civilian society, that of force and the intrigues of a coterie over institutions and the law.
Since April 5, 1992, an era of confusion and of notable paradoxes has begun in Peru, one that is very instructive as regards the unpredictability of history, its slippery nature and its surprising zigzags. A new antistate and anticollectivist mentality has spread in vast sectors, infecting many who, in 1987, courageously fought for the nationalization of the financial system and now enthusiastically support privatizations and the opening up of the economy. But how can one not deplore that this advance is weighed down by a simultaneous popular repudiation of political parties, of institutions, of the system of representative government and its autonomous powers that supervise and balance each other, and worse still, by the enthusiasm of vast sectors for authoritarianism and the providential caudillo? What purpose is served by the salutary reaction of the citizenry against the moth-eaten traditional political parties, if it tolerates the enthronement of that aggressive lack of culture that goes by the name of chicha culture, that is to say a contempt for ideas and morality and its replacement by shoddiness, vulgarity, con games, cynicism, jargon, and gibberish, which, to judge by the municipal elections of January 1993, appear to be the attributes most appreciated by the “new Peru”?
The support for the regime is based on a tissue of contradictions. The entrepreneurial sector and the right hail in President Fujimori the Pinochet that they were secretly yearning for, the military officers nostalgic for barracks coups have him as their transitory straw man, while the most depressed and frustrated sectors, which racist and anti-establishment demagoguery has penetrated, feel that their phobias and complexes have somehow been explained, through Fujimori’s deliberate insults of the “corrupt” politicians and “homosexual” diplomats, and through a crudeness and vulgarity that gives these sectors the illusion that it is, at last, “the people” who govern.
The rhapsodies of the regime—grouped, above all, on the newspaper Expreso and the TV channels—speak of a new stage in the history of Peru, of a social renewal, of the end of political parties made up of bureaucratized and encysted hierarchies, blind and deaf to the “real country,” and of the refreshing leading role being played in civic life by the people, who now communicate directly with the leader, without the distorting mediation of the corrupt political class. Isn’t this the old refrain, the eternal monotonous singsong of all the antidemocratic currents of modern history? In Peru, wasn’t it the argument of General Sánchez Cerro, the caudillo who, like Fujimori, also captured the fervor of “decent people” and “the plebs”? Wasn’t it the argument of General Odría, who suppressed political parties so that there would be an authentic democracy? And is it any different from the ideological justification of General Velasco, who wanted to replace the rotten “partidocracy” with a participatory society, freed from that trash, the politicians? There is nothing new under the sun, except, perhaps, the fact that the reborn authoritarian harangue is now closer to fascism than to Communism, and can count on more ears and hearts than the old dictatorships. Is this something that should make us rejoice, or instead feel terrified as we face the future?
In the new political jigsaw puzzle, after April 5, 1992, many of yesterday’s adversaries suddenly found themselves in the same trenches, and confronting the same losses. The APRA and the left, who opened the doors of the Presidential Palace to Fujimori, then became his principal victims, and their principal sources of strength, even when combined, did not amount to 10 percent of the vote in the municipal elections in Lima in January 1993. The great architect of the intrigues and maneuvers that paved the way for Fujimori’s triumph, Alan García, after half destroying Peru and depriving his party of all prestige for the remainder of its life, is now in exile, like a number of his friends and collaborators, being prosecuted in various court trials for theft and corruption. The United Left fell apart, broke into fragments, and in the last election seemed to be reduced to dust.
But the weakening of the political forces that between them made up the Democratic Front, among them the Freedom Movement, having been harshly punished for their resolute defense of the Constitution and their refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the April 5 coup, has been no less dramatic.
Subjected to arduous trials and tribulations when it first began to exist on its own, Libertad, born under the auspices of that multitude of August 21, 1987, and the spell of Szyszlo’s paintings, finds itself at a critical moment of its existence. Not only because the defeat of June 1990 reduced its ranks, but because the evolution of Peruvian politics since then has little by little confined it to a more or less eccentric function, like the other remaining political parties. Harassed or silenced by communications media which, with a few—admirable—exceptions, are tied hand and foot to the regime that they are serving, without resources and with a diminished militancy, it has nonetheless survived, thanks to the self-sacrifice of a handful of idealists who, against all odds, continue to defend, in these inhospitable times, the ideas and the moral values that brought us to the Plaza San Martín six years ago, never suspecting the great upheavals that would result for the country and for so many private lives.
Princeton, New Jersey
February 1993
By Mario Vargas Llosa
The Cubs and Other Stories
The Time of the Hero
The Green House
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
Conversation in The Cathedral
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
The War of the End of the World
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
The Perpetual Orgy
Who Killed Palomino Molero?
The Storyteller
In Praise of the Stepmother
A Fish in the Water
English translation copyright © 1994 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
Originally published in Spanish as El pez en el agua
Copyright © 1993 by Mario Vargas Llosa
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Vargas Llosa, Mario.
[Pez en el agua. English]
A fish in the water : a memoir / Mario Vargas Llosa ; translated
by Helen Lane.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Vargas Llosa, Mario. 2. Peru—Politics and
government—1980—. 3. Authors, Peruvian—20th century—Biography.
4. Politicians—Peru—Biography. I. Title. PQ8498.32.A65P4913 1994 863—dc20 [B] 93-42603 CIP
ISBN: 978-0-374-15509-4
*“Una montaña de cadáveres: carta abierta a Alan García,” El Comercio, Lima, June 23, 1986; reprinted in Contra viento y marea, III (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990), pp. 389–93.
* In 1988, the deficit of public enterprises in Peru amounted to $2,500,000,000, the equivalent of all the foreign currency brought in that year by exports.
*Contra viento y marea, III, pp. 417–20.
&nb
sp; * In January 1983, eight journalists were killed in Uchuraccay, a remote village in the Andes. Vargas Llosa was one of the members of a commission appointed by Belaunde Terry’s government to investigate the killings. This was the only government position that Vargas Llosa had held. He wrote the commission’s report and came under fierce attack in the press. (Trans, note)
* Lima, August 24, 1987.
*The Frente Democrático, after joining with Acción Popular (AP) and the Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), was often also called La Alianza (the Alliance). (Trans, note)
* On July 8, 1992, in a ceremony that took place at the Rafael Hoyos Rubio barracks, in Rímac, in which all the leaders of the Peruvian Army supported the coup d’état of April 5 perpetrated by Alberto Fujimori, who until then had been the constitutional president.