* Also widely known as La Alianza (The Alliance). (Trans. note)
* He was to demonstrate his democratic convictions once again, when he was past eighty, from April 5, 1992, on, following the “self-coup” by Alberto Fujimori, coming out publicly to wage a tenacious fight against the dictatorship.
† See “Sangre y mugre de Uchuraccay,” in Contra viento y marea, III, pp. 85–226.
* Reprinted in Álvaro Vargas Llosa, El diablo en campaña (The Devil on Campaign). Madrid: El País/Aguilar, 1991, pp. 154–57.
* André Coyné, César Moro (Lima: Torres Aguirre, 1956).
† “En todas partes se cuecen habas, pero en el Perú sólo se cuecen habas.” (“They cook broad beans everywhere, but in Peru they only cook broad beans.”) (Trans. note)
* Unlike the first four, whose loyalty I have no way of thanking them for, the moment we lost the elections Rocío Cillóniz hastened to put out a de luxe scandal sheet, whose goal, in the brief time that the disaffection of its readers enabled it to survive, was to serve as a mouthpiece for renegades from Libertad.
* “La revolución silenciosa,” in Hernando de Soto, El otro sendero (Lima: Editorial El Barranco, 1986), pp. xvii–xxix; reproduced in Contra viento y marea, III, pp. 333–48.
* See, as an example of de Soto’s cunning, the article in The Wall Street Journal for April 20, 1990, by David Asman, a journalist unwittingly taken in by his sly self-promotion, who attributes to him the organization of the Meeting for Freedom of August 21, 1987.
* The tally of the second round of voting for the departamento of Piura was 56.5 percent (253,758 votes) for Cambio 90 and 32.5 percent (145,714 votes) for the Democratic Front.
* In 1960, Peru occupied eighth place in Latin America; at the end of Alan García’s administration it had dropped to fourteenth.
* In the 1960s, Peru’s income per capita from agriculture and cattle raising was second in Latin America; in 1990, it was next to last, superior only to that of Haiti.
* In 1990, the book value of Peru’s one hundred largest private corporations was $1,232 million. This amount, divided equally among 22 million Peruvians, would give each person $56. (I am grateful to Felipe Ortiz de Zavallos and Raúl Salazar for these particulars.)
* Of the 20,000 deaths caused by acts of terrorism up until mid-1990, 90 percent of those killed were peasants, the poorest of the poor in Peru.
* The APRA is a specialist in this type of operation: on the eve of the launching of my candidacy, on June 3, 1989, anonymous voices phoned to warn me that there was a bomb on the plane that was taking me to Arequipa. After the emergency removal of the plane to an area of the airport far from the place where people were waiting for me to arrive, the aircraft was searched and nothing suspect was found.
* A building such as a prison, hospital, library, or the like so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point. (Trans. note)
* Before this trip, I had had interviews with other heads of state or of government, three of them European—the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, in July 1988; the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in May 1989; the president of the Spanish government, Felipe González, in July 1989—and three Latin Americans: the presidents of Costa Rica, Óscar Arias, on October 22, 1988; of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, in April 1989; and of Uruguay, Julio María Sanguinetti, on June 15, 1989. And I would do likewise later on with the president of Brazil, Collor de Mello, on February 20, 1990. In the publicity for the campaign we used photographs and films of these meetings to create for me the image of a statesman.
* In July 1991, at the time of the international scandal concerning BCCI, the District Attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, accused Alan García’s government of having caused his country to lose $100 million by ordering that it not intervene in BCCI’s negotiations to repurchase its fourteen planes through a country in the Middle East, thereby implying that shady dealings were involved.
* I remember having had a discussion, in London, about Singapore with the writer Shiva Naipaul, who had just returned from there. According to him, that progress, the rapid modernization, represented a cultural crime against the Singaporeans, who were “losing their souls” because of it. Were they more authentic then, when they lived surrounded by swamps, crocodiles, and mosquitoes, than they are now, living amid skyscrapers? More picturesque, doubtless, but I am certain that all of them—all of the inhabitants of the Third World—would be ready to give up being picturesque in exchange for having work and living with a minimum of security and decency.
* Data from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
* Oiga, Lima, February 11, 1985.
* Written in exile, from 1929 to 1930, and published in several issues of the Mercurio Peruano. The first edition in book form appeared in Paris in 1930, with a second part on Leguía’s eleven years of dictatorship (1919–1930).
† Lima: Editorial Mejía Baca, 1956.
* Jorge Basadre and Pablo Macera, Conversaciones (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1974), p. 13.
* And for truth’s sake, it must be admitted that he was to maintain that attitude until Velasco’s dictatorship expropriated La Prensa and prostituted it by converting it into a mouthpiece of the regime. Pedro Beltrán would spend the last years of his life in exile, until his death in 1979.
* Although, in his last public act as minister of foreign relations, he voted at the meeting of foreign ministers in Costa Rica in 1960 against the condemnation of Cuba, thereby disobeying instructions from Prado’s government, and as a consequence found himself forced to resign. He died shortly thereafter.
* “La fobia de un novelista,” Sí, Lima, April 6, 1987.
* I include among them Carlos Delgado, the civilian of greatest influence during the Velasco years and the one who wrote the majority of the speeches that the dictator delivered. A former Aprista and the ex-secretary of Haya de la Torre, the sociologist and political scientist Carlos Delgado resigned from the APRA when this party made a pact with the followers of Odría during Belaunde Terry’s first term as president. He backed the military revolution and contributed greatly to giving it an ideological cover, at the same time that he was the driving force behind a large part of the economic reforms—industrial co-ownership, the agrarian reform, controls and subsidies, et cetera—many of which were modeled on what had been the program for governing of the Aprista party. Carlos Delgado believed in that “third position” and his support for the dictatorship was inspired by the illusion that the army could be the instrument for instituting in Peru the democratic socialism that he defended. In Sinamos (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social: National System of Support for Social Mobilization), Carlos Delgado gathered around himself a group of intellectuals—Carlos Franco, Héctor Béjar, Helan Jaworski, Jaime Llosa, and others—who shared his position and the majority of whom, with intentions as good as his own, actively collaborated with the regime in its nationalizations and the extension of state intervention in the economy and in social life. But the criticisms that they deserve for this must be, especially in the case of Carlos Delgado, accompanied by a clarification: his good faith could not be doubted nor the consistency and openness with which he acted. He therefore always seemed “respectable” to me and I could disagree with him—and argue a great deal—without our friendship’s being broken. Moreover, it is obvious to me that Carlos Delgado did as much as he could to prevent, with all the influence he had, the co-opting by the Communists and those closest to them of the institutions of the regime and that he also used that influence to mitigate insofar as possible the abuses of the dictatorship. When the magazine Caretas was closed down and its editor-in-chief, Enrique Zileri, was persecuted, he secured me an interview with General Velasco (the only one I ever asked the dictator for) and supported me when I protested against this closing down and the persecution of Zileri and urged him to end them.
* Supplement of Unicornio, Lima, October 25, 1987, p. 5.
* Reproduced
in Contra viento y marea, II (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990), pp. 143–55.
* See my article on the subject, “La revolución y los desmanes,” Caretas, Lima, March 6, 1975; reproduced in Contra viento y marea, I (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990), pp. 311–16.
* Since then, Guillermo Thorndike has enriched his dossier by performing new feats. In 1990 he was editor-in-chief of a scandal sheet, Ayllu, that sympathized with the MRTA terrorist movement. In it he fiercely attacked his former employer, Alan García, and presented sensationalist documents regarding his misdeeds while in power. Later he became editor-in-chief of La Nación, a daily paper in the service of the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori.
* These last two, to the distress of those of us who considered them to be exemplary democratic journalists, were to become, from April 5, 1992, on, militant defenders of Fujimori’s coup d’état, which destroyed Peruvian democracy.
* Henry Pease, of the United Left, with 11.54 percent, the Aprista candidate Mercedes Cabanillas, with 11.53 percent, and the candidate of the Socialist Alliance, Enrique Bernales, who won barely 2.16 percent, straggled far behind.
* “The Consultant,” Granta, no. 36, London, Summer 1991, pp. 87–95.
* Acción para el cambio: el programa de gobierno del Frente Democrático (Lima, December 1989).
* Lima, August 9, 1989, p. 3.
† The interview with Ghersi appeared in the Santiago El Diario (in the section Finance-Economy-Business) of August 4, 1989, and in it there is a discussion in general terms regarding whittling down the bureaucracy, but no specific figure is mentioned.
§ Expreso, Lima, August 10, 1989, p. 4.
* Ojo, Lima, December 22, 1989.
* See the statements by Ricardo Amiel in La República and in La Crónica, August 6, 1989, and that of Javier Alva Orlandini in El Nacional, November 30, 1989.
* Chirinos Soto’s report was published in El Comercio, Lima, January 23, 1990.
* Oiga, Lima, August 12, 1991.
* “Vargas Llosa’s speech at CADE was unquestionably impressive, but more than one of his listeners is already trembling.” Caretas, Lima, December 4, 1989.
* His case was not the only one. Of the fifteen Libertad senators and congressmen, four deserted the Movement, on various pretexts, in the first year and a half of the new administration: Senators Raúl Ferrero and Beatriz Merino and congressmen Luis Delgado Aparicio and Mario Roggero. But, unlike the first three, who after parting company with Libertad maintained a discreet and even friendly attitude toward the Movement, Roggero devoted himself to attacking it in public communiqués and declarations. That was his response to the generous decision of the political committee which, instead of declaring him no longer a member of Libertad because of his absence when that vote was taken in Congress, confined itself to a mild warning. Several months later, the representative Rafael Rey also was to resign, after being criticized by the leaders of Libertad because of his gestures and declarations in favor of the dictatorship instituted by Fujimori on April 5, 1992, which he has been faithfully serving since.
* Caretas, Lima, January 8, 1990.
* Caretas, Lima, January 15, 1990.
* Law 15792, of December 14, 1965.
* In March, an opinion poll by the CIP (Centro de Investigaciones del Peru—Peruvian Center for Research) gave me 43 percent nationwide, against 14.5 percent for Alva Castro, 11.5 percent for Alfonso Barrantes, and 6.8 percent for Henry Pease.
* During the month of October many people in Lima dress in purple or wear something purple to show their devotion to the Lord of Miracles, a painting of the crucified Christ said to have been done on the wall of slaves’ quarters in the seventeenth century, which has survived all of Lima’s great earthquakes and is an object of veneration. On three days in October, the icon, which weighs three tons, is borne through the streets by teams of men in a spectacular procession that includes incense bearers and a choir. (Trans. note)
* Faithful to these ideas, General Salinas Sedó, who had already retired, tried to start a movement, based on constitutional provisions, to restore democracy in Peru, on November 13, 1992, seven months after the authoritarian coup on April 5. But the attempt was a failure, and he and the group of officers who backed him are, as of the time when I am correcting the proofs for this book, currently in prison.
† “Civiles y militares en el Perú de la Libertad.” Speech explaining the background of the current situation, delivered before officers of the Peruvian army, navy, and air force at CAEM (Centro de Altos Estudios Militares: Center for Advanced Military Studies), on February 26, 1990. Lima, 1990.
* “El país que vendrá.” Closing speech of the Freedom Revolution meeting. Lima, March 9, 1990.
* Following the “self-coup” of April 5, 1992, the rivalry between Mayor Belmont and the brand-new dictator was to turn into an impassioned romance.
* This had happened in the 1985 elections, in which Alan García won a little less than 50 percent, beating Alfonso Barrantes, who came in second. There ought therefore to have been a second electoral round, which was avoided because of the withdrawal of the candidate of the United Left.
* I wrote about it for the first time in an article entitled “Crónica de un viaje a la selva” in the magazine Cultura Peruana (Lima: September 1958); then in a lecture published as La historia secreta de una novela (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1971); in Chapter IV of my novel El hablador (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987); and in countless reportages and articles as well.
* After April 5, 1992, Chirinos Soto was to arm himself with “constitutional” reasons to justify agricultural engineer Fujimori’s coup d’état and attack those of us who condemn it. He now accuses me of being—a Marxist!
* This individual also visited Álvaro, who, like Patricia, agreed to submit to the ritual of the laying-on of hands and has left a personal account of the episode in El diablo en campaña, pp. 180–81.
* See the vivid description of this process in José María Arguedas’s posthumous novel El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox Below and the Fox Above) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1971).
† The Lima daily Expreso, May 28, 1990.
* Television message to the Peruvian people, May 30, 1990.
† It must be said that the evangelical congressmen and senators behaved discreetly and respectfully toward the Catholic Church during their short period in office. And when Fujimori, after twenty months of his term as president, closed down Congress and proclaimed himself dictator, almost all of them, beginning with the second vice president, Carlos García, condemned what had occurred and made common cause with the democratic resistance against the coup d’état.
* Congressman Olivera, the leader of the FIM (Frente Independiente Moralizador: Independent Front for Morality), did not belong to the Democratic Front nor did he support my candidacy.
* An absurdist literary movement, contemporary with existentialism, which flourished in Paris in the 1950s. Many of its efforts to deflate pretentiousness of all sorts depended on outrageous parody. (Trans. note)
* El diablo en campaña, pp. 195–204.
* “Una visita a Lurigancho,” in Contra viento y marea, II (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983).
* Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), vol. 1, p. 107.
Mario Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water
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