Peru Politics

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 (Fredemo) -- an unruly coalition in the best of times -- which 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.