What if Mario Vargas Llosa Had Won The 1990 Peruvian Presidential Election?

When Mario Vargas Llosa passed away last Sunday, much of the obituaries and tributes revolved around his literary career. 

And justifiably so. After all, Vargas Llosa was bestowed with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat" in novels such as Time of the Hero, The Green House and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter among others.

But as a political junkie, I remember Vargas Llosa for his unsuccessful attempt in running for the presidency of Peru in 1990. Despite his literary prestige, Vargas Llosa was unabashed champion of the free market and embraced Reaganism and Thatcherism. Like many young intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was man of the left until Cuban dictator Fidel Castro imprisoned his friend poet Heberto Padilla in 1971.

At the time Vargas Llosa ran for office, Peru was besieged with inflation. If you thought former President Biden couldn't control inflation, he had nothing Peruvian President Alan Garcia who presided over an economy that had an inflation rate of over 2775%. If that wasn't enough, the Maoist Shining Path were committing acts of terrorism against civilians.

Vargas Llosa won the first round of the presidential election, but did not reach the 50% plus one threshold necessary to win. This forced a runoff election against the relatively unknown economist Alberto Fujimori who presented himself as a more moderate voice and bested Vargas Llosa by a near 2:1 margin.

Alas, Fujimori, who passed away this past December, was anything but moderate. His economic policies were far more drastic than anything Vargas Llosa dared to propose. While Fujimori is credited with vanquishing the Shining Path, he did so by dissolving Congress and the Supreme Court. His rule led to extrajudicial killings and the forced sterilization of the Indigenous population. 

Fujimori served as Peru's President from 1990 until his resignation in 2000. After nearly five years in exile in Japan, Fujimori was arrested in 2005 while traveling in Chile. He would eventually be extradited to Peru where he faced trial for his role in the extrajudicial killings and forced sterilizations. In 2009, Fujimori was convicted of these crimes and was sentenced to 25-years in prison marking the first time a democratically elected leader had faced that sort of punishment in the country he once led. However, Fujimori would be pardoned and released from jail in 2017. 

In this context, one must ask what would have happened to Peru had Vargas Llosa been elected its President in 1990. One would like to think that Vargas Llosa would not have overseen extrajudicial killings or forcibly sterilized the country's Indigenous population. Yet it is worth noting that in 1983, Vargas Llosa was appointed to lead a commission inquiry regarding the deaths of 8 journalists murdered execution style. Instead of casting blame on Peru's death squads, blame was placed on Indigenous people claim they mistook the journalists for Shining Path terrorists. While it is possible that Vargas Llosa would not have been directly responsible for extrajudicial killings, he did demonstrate he was willing to look the other way. 

Then there is Peru's endemic corruption. Despite the prestige Vargas Llosa earned as a writer, this did not translate into money. Since Fujimori left office nearly a quarter century ago, Peru has had 10 Presidents many of whom are in jail for corruption or were accused of it before the net closed in. I'm not sure that Vargas Llosa would have acted any differently in this regard. 

In other words, Vargas Llosa might not have been any worse than his predecessors or successors. But then again, there is little proof to suggest he would have been any better - up to and including Fujimori. 

With this in mind, given that Vargas Llosa never ran for political office again, I suspect that Vargas Llosa was glad he lost and free to resume his literary career. R.I.P.