A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  In the realm of politics, the consequences have been even worse because those who had made a modus vivendi out of duplicity and ideological double-dealing won almost total control of the cultural life of Peru. And they produced almost everything that Peruvians studied or read, the ideological sustenance of the country, all that might satisfy the curiosity or appease the concerns of the young generations. Everything was in their hands: the universities and state schools and many private ones; the research institutes and centers; the magazines, the cultural supplements and publications, and, of course, the classroom textbooks. With their lack of culture and their contempt for any intellectual activity, the conservative sectors, which up until the 1940s or 1950s still had cultural hegemony over the country—with that brilliant generation of historians such as Raúl Porras Barrenechea and Jorge Basadre or philosophers such as Mariano Iberico and Honorio Delgado—had lost the battle sometime before and had not produced either individual talents or a concerted action capable of opposing the advance of the leftist intellectuals, who, once General Velasco took over as dictator, monopolized cultural life.

  Yet leftist thought had an illustrious precursor in Peru: José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). In his short lifetime, he produced an impressive number of essays and articles to further the spread of Marxism, of analyses of Peruvian reality, and works of literary criticism or political commentaries on current events notable for their intellectual acuity, and often for their originality. In them the reader can find a freshness of concept and an individual voice that were never to appear again among his avowed followers. Although they all call themselves Mariateguists, from the most moderate to the most extreme (Abimael Guzmán himself, the founder and leader of Sendero Luminoso, maintains that he is a disciple of Mariátegui’s), passing by way of the PUM (Partido Unificado Mariateguista: Unified Mariateguist Party), the truth of the matter is that after the brief apogee that Mariátegui represented for socialist thought, the latter entered a decline in Peru which touched bottom during the years of the military dictatorship (1968–1980), in which the opposing positions in intellectual debate appeared to be confined to two: the opportunism of the left or terrorism.

  Intellectuals had as much responsibility as the military for what happened in Peru during those years, especially in the first seven—1968 to 1975, those of General Velasco’s regime—in which all the wrong solutions for the nation’s great problems were adopted, making them worse and plunging Peru into a state of ruin to which Alan García was to give the last turn of the screw. They applauded the destruction by force of the democratic system, which, however defective and inefficient it may have been, permitted political pluralism, criticism, active unions, and the exercise of freedom. And with the argument that “formal” freedoms were the mask of exploitation, they justified the fact that political parties were forbidden, that no elections were held, that landed estates were confiscated and collectivized, that hundreds of businesses were nationalized and turned over to state control, that the freedom of the press and the right to criticize were suppressed, that censorship was institutionalized, that all the TV channels, the daily papers, and a large number of radio stations were expropriated, that a law was passed to subjugate the judicial power and place it in the service of the executive power, that hundreds of Peruvians were imprisoned and deported and a number of them assassinated. In all these years, having seized all the important communications media that existed in the country, they devoted themselves to harping on those slogans against democratic values and liberal democracy and to defending, in the name of socialism and the revolution, the abuses and iniquities of the dictatorship. And, of course, to raining down insults on those of us who did not share their enthusiasm for what Velasco’s sycophants called “the socialist, participationist and libertarian revolution.” And we lacked any forum for answering them.

  Some of them, the fewest in number, acted in this fashion out of naïveté, truly believing that the longed-for reforms to put an end to poverty, injustice, and backwardness could come about by way of a military dictatorship which, unlike those of yesteryear, did not speak of “Western Christian civilization” but of “socialism and revolution.”* These ingenuous supporters of the dictatorship, people like Alfredo Barnechea or César Hildebrandt, soon lost their illusions and joined those who opposed the regime. But the majority were not partisans of the dictatorship out of naïveté or out of conviction, but, as their later behavior proved, out of opportunism. They had been summoned. It was the first time that a government of Peru had called on intellectuals and offered them a few crumbs of power. Without hesitating, they threw themselves into the arms of the dictatorship, displaying a zeal and a diligence that frequently went beyond what had been asked of them. This was the reason, no doubt, why General Velasco himself, a man without subtlety, had spoken of the intellectuals of the regime as of mastiffs he kept so as to scare the bourgeoisie.

  And, in fact, that was the role to which the regime reduced them: to bark and bite from the vantage point of the newspapers, radios, television channels, ministries, and official agencies whose excesses we opposed. What happened to so many Peruvian intellectuals constituted for me a genuine trauma. From the time of my break with the Cuban regime, at the end of the 1960s, I had come to be the object of the attacks of many of them, but even so I had the feeling that they were acting as they did—defending what they were defending—guided by a faith and certain ideas. After having seen that sort of moral abdication by a generation of Peruvian intellectuals, in the years of Velasco’s dictatorship, I discovered something that I still believe today: that for the great majority of them, those convictions were only a strategy to enable them to survive, build a career, get ahead. (In the days of the nationalization of the banks, the Aprista press published, with a great deal of ballyhoo, a number of irate statements by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, from Paris, accusing me of identifying myself “objectively with the conservative sectors of Peru” and of opposing “the irresistible incursion of the popular classes.” Ribeyro, a very courteous and respectful writer and up until then a friend of mine, had been given a diplomatic post at UNESCO by Velasco’s dictatorship and was retained in it by all the successive governments, whether dictatorships or democracies, which he served obediently, impartially, and discreetly. Shortly thereafter, José Rosas-Ribeyro, a Peruvian ultraleftist from France, described him, in an article in Cambio,* trotting all over Paris with other bureaucrats of the Aprista regime in search of signatures for a manifesto in favor of Alan García and the nationalization of the banks signed by a group of “Peruvian intellectuals” established there. What had turned the apolitical and skeptical Ribeyro into an untimely socialist militant? An ideological conversion? The instinct of diplomatic survival. That was what he himself informed me, in a message he sent me at the time—one that made a worse impression on me than his statements—via his publisher, who was also a friend of mine, Patricia Pinilla: “Tell Mario not to pay any attention to the things that I am declaring against him, because they represent only favorable opportunities for me.”)

  I then understood one of the most dramatic expressions of underdevelopment. There was practically no way in which an intellectual of a country such as Peru was able to work, to earn his living, to publish, in a manner of speaking to live as an intellectual, without adopting revolutionary gestures, rendering homage to the socialist ideology, and demonstrating in his public acts—his writings and his civic activities—that he belonged to the left. To get to be editor-in-chief of a publication, to be promoted to higher academic rank, to obtain fellowships, travel grants, invitations with expenses paid, it was necessary for him to prove that he was identified with the myths and symbols of the revolutionary and socialist establishment. Anyone who failed to heed the invisible watchword was condemned to the wilderness: marginalization and professional frustration. That was the explanation. Hence the inauthenticity, that “moral hemiplegia”—in Jean-François Revel’s phrase—in which Peruvian intellectuals lived, repeating on t
he one hand, in public, an entire defensive logomachy—a sort of countersign in order to assure their posts within the establishment—which corresponded to no intimate conviction, a mere tactic of what the anglicism calls posición amiento, positioning oneself correctly. But when one lives in this way, the perversion of thought and language becomes inevitable. It was for that reason that a book such as the one brought out by Hernando de Soto and his team at the Freedom and Democracy Institute—El otro sendero—had aroused so much enthusiasm on my part: at last something was appearing in print in Peru that revealed an effort to think independently and originally on the underlying problems of Peru, breaking taboos and frozen ideological concepts. But, once more in the land of unfulfilled promises, that hope came to nothing almost the moment it was born.

  When I thought I had found the explanation of what Sartre would call the situation of the writer in Peru in periods of dictatorship, I wrote a series of articles in the magazine Caretas, under the overall title of “El intelectual barato” (“The Cut-Rate Intellectual”),* which—this time for good reason—exacerbated the long-standing phobia against me on the part of those who knew very well that they had sold out. Alan García, with his infallible intuition for this sort of move, recruited several of them to be his mastiffs and let them loose on me, armed with the weapons that they wield so well. They played an important role during the campaign and spared no effort to bring it down to the level of mere mudslinging.

  The first one hired was—a striking paradox—a journalist on the take who had faithfully served Velasco from his post as editor-in-chief of La Crónica, a figure of whom it can be said, without fear of being mistaken, that he is the most exquisite product that dung-collecting journalism in Peru has yet created and the one whose talent has contributed the most to beating even our recent records for pestilence: Guillermo Thorndike. From the pages of that daily, with a little band of collaborators recruited in the local literary pigsties (the exception was Abelardo Oquendo, one of the best friends of my youth, whose reasons for being there, surrounded by such resentful and scheming pen pushers as Mirko Lauer, Raúl Vargas, Tomás Escajadillo, and other even worse muckrakers, I was never able to understand), there poured forth adulation of the dictator and a stubborn defense of his actions, alternating with infamous campaigns against their adversaries which censorship of the communications media prevented us from answering. One of the worst victims of these diatribes was the Aprista party, from which, at the same time that it stole from it a large part of its program for governing, the Velasco dictatorship attempted, through Sinamos (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social: National System of Support for Social Mobilization), to steal away the backing of the masses. At the time of the events of February 5, 1975, when a police strike degenerated into popular uprisings against the regime and in the burning down of the Círculo Militar and the daily Correo,* the newspaper, under Thorndike’s editorship, blamed the Aprista party for the disorders and intoxicated public opinion with an anti-Aprista campaign compared to which the witch-hunts against Haya de la Torre’s party by the ultraconservative press of the 1930s was mere child’s play.

  A few years later, however, from his position as editor-in-chief of the daily La República—another famous manifestation of a sewer metamorphosed into a paper—Thorndike would turn to serving the APRA and Alan García with the same enthusiasm and the identical vile means as when he was a toady of Velasco’s. As a reward, following Alan García’s victory in the election, he was sent to Washington at the taxpayers’ expense (his likable wife, about whom nobody had ever known that she had even a casual relationship to culture, was named cultural attaché of Peru to the Organization of American States). Guillermo Thorndike was quickly summoned home from there by President Alan García in the days of the nationalization of the banks, so that he could apply his techniques of poisoning public opinion and wage one of his mudslinging campaigns against those of us who were opposed to the measure. A “hate office” was set up in a suite at the Hotel Crillón. From there, under Thorndike’s direction and prepared by him, there came pouring forth, to daily papers, radio stations, and government-controlled TV channels, accusations, insinuations, and the most despicable attacks against my person and my family. (Among the lies—along the lines of the age-old ruse of committing a robbery and then coming out into the street shouting “Thief!”—was that of my having been a Velasco supporter!) Thanks to unexpected allies, who, from the ranks of the Aprista administration itself, told us in secret how the “hate office” functioned, the daily Expreso revealed its existence and photographed Thorndike coming out of the Crillón, whereupon his operations diminished somewhat. Later, ever the diligent servant of the master of the day, Thorndike would publish a hagiographic biography of Alan García, and during the electoral campaign, García would once again bring him back to Peru to be editor-in-chief of a scandal sheet, Página Libre, which, in the final months before the elections, played a role that can easily be imagined. (A few days before the first round of balloting, a woman telephoned my house, many times, insisting on speaking to me or to Patricia, explaining that she would reveal her identity only to us. Patricia finally came to the phone to talk to her. The woman, Argentine by birth but Peruvian by marriage, was Guillermo Thorndike’s mother. We had never met her. She was calling to say that she was so ashamed of what her son was up to in the pages of the newspaper of which he was the editor-in-chief that she had decided, for the first time in her life, to vote in the coming elections: she would vote for me, as a way of making amends, and we could make that fact public. We didn’t do so at the time, but I am doing so now, with my thanks for an initiative which, in all truth, still amazes me.*

  These are not mere anecdotes. They represent a general phenomenon, a state of affairs that affects the entire cultural life of Peru and that has repercussions on its political life. One of the contemporary myths concerning the Third World is that, in those countries frequently subjugated by despotic and corrupt dictatorships, intellectuals represent a moral reserve, which, although powerless in the face of the dominant brute force, constitutes a hope, a source from which, when things begin to change, the country will be able to draw ideas, values, and persons that will allow it to promote freedom and justice. In reality, this is not how things are. Peru is a demonstration, rather, of how fragile the intellectual class is in the Third World—of the ease with which the lack of opportunities, the insecurity, the scarcity of means to carry out one’s work, the absence of any accepted status in society, and the inability to exert any sort of effective influence make intellectuals vulnerable to corruption, to abandonment of their ideals, to cynicism and careerism.

  When I first began to take an active part in Peruvian politics I was prepared for confrontations with my colleagues, whose techniques I was familiar with from the days when, at the end of the 1960s, I came into conflict with them by starting to criticize the Cuban revolution. From then on, I had been the target of their wrath, apparently for reasons having to do with ideological differences, although in truth, very often the real reason was rivalry and envy, which is also inevitable when someone has, or is perceived as having, recognition, of enjoying what goes by the name of success, by those who must confront all sorts of difficulties in order to practice their calling. I was, therefore, prepared to contend with those Peruvian intellectuals whom for some time I had promised myself only to read, and never again to keep company with.

  And so it was a surprise to find, among my colleagues, a number of writers, professors, journalists, or artists who, knowing that they were exposing themselves to satanization in the milieu in which they worked, nonetheless made common cause with the Freedom Movement and helped me all through the campaign. I am not referring to friends like Luis Miró Quesada Garland or Fernando de Szyszlo, with whom I had waged political battles side by side for a long time now, but to persons such as the anthropologist Juan Ossio, the historian and publisher José Bonilla, the essayists Carlos Zuzunaga and Jorge Guillermo Llosa, the novel
ist Carlos Thorne, and a fair number of others who, like them, worked diligently for the victory of the Front, and to the several dozen university professors who joined our committees for government planning. Or to those who, though not members of Libertad, lent me invaluable aid with their writings and their pronouncements, such as the journalists Luis Rey de Castro, Francisco Igartua, César Hildebrandt, Mario Miglio, Jaime Bayly, Patricio Ricketts, and Manuel d’Ornellas,* or the actor and stage director Ricardo Blume, whom I shall never be able to thank enough for the courage and generosity with which he staked everything, whenever necessary, in defense of what we both believed in. Or to intellectuals such as Fernando Rospigliosi and Luis Pásara and young writers such as Alfredo Pita, Alonso Cueto, and Guillermo Niño de Guzmán, who, from positions that were independent of and sometimes hostile to my own, made, amid the din of the electoral battle, the noblest of gestures toward me personally or toward what I was doing.

  But among the adversaries too there were a number of intellectuals whose conduct attracted my attention, because, for the reasons that I have already mentioned, I didn’t expect from them the propriety with which they acted, even in the most heated moments of the political debate. That was the case with Henry Pease García. A university professor, a sociologist, the director for a time of a well-known institute of social investigation, DESCO—financed by the German Social Democratic Party—Henry Pease was, with Alfonso Barrantes, representative mayor of Lima, and a close collaborator of the latter before the break that brought them both face to face as leaders of the two factions of the left in the battle for the presidency. Pease’s conduct, as head of the most radical sector, in which, in point of fact, cut-rate intellectuals abounded, was exemplary. He made every effort to wage a campaign of ideas, promoting his program without ever having recourse to personal attacks or underhanded maneuvers, and acted at all times with a logical consistency and sobriety that was in sharp contrast to that of some of his followers. His personal life, moreover, had always likewise struck me as being consistent with what he wrote and defended as a public figure. This was a decisive reason for my accompanying him on the Peace March.