A Fish in the Water: A Memoir by Mario Vargas Llosa Read Free Book Online Page A

the key posts, political influence would be the determining factor when it came to promotions and being named to important posts, and in no time the same corruption would take over in these companies as in the rest of the public sector.
    “Once more in its history Peru has taken yet another step backward toward barbarism,” I remember saying to Patricia the next morning, as we were going for a run along the beach toward the little village of Punta Sal, escorted by a flock of gannets. The nationalizations that had been announced would bring more poverty, discouragement, parasitism, and bribery to Peruvian life. And furthermore, in either the long run or the short, they would fatally damage the democratic system that Peru had recovered in 1980, after twelve years under military rule.
    “Why all the fuss,” I have often been asked, “over a few nationalizations? President Mitterrand nationalized the banks, and even though the measure was a failure and the Socialists had to reverse course, was French democracy ever endangered?” People who follow that line of argument have no understanding that one of the characteristics of underdevelopment is the total identity of the government and the state. In France, Sweden, or England, a public enterprise maintains a certain autonomy in relation to those who hold political power: it belongs to the state; and its administration, its personnel, and its functioning are more or less safe from the abuse of governmental power. But in an underdeveloped country, exactly as in a totalitarian one, the government is the state and those in power oversee it as though it were their own private property, or, rather, their spoils. Public enterprises are useful for providing cushy jobs for the protégés of those in power, for feeding the people under their patronage, and for making shady deals. Such enterprises soon turn into bureaucratic swarms paralyzed by the corruption and inefficiency introduced into them by politics. There is no danger that they will go broke; almost always they are monopolies protected against competition and their life is guaranteed indefinitely thanks to subsidies, that is to say, the taxpayer’s money. * Peruvians have seen this process repeated, ever since the days of the “socialist, libertarian, and participatory revolution” of General Velasco, in all the nationalized companies—petroleum, electricity, mines, sugar refineries, et cetera—and now, as in a recurrent nightmare, the whole story was going to be repeated with the banks, insurance companies, and financial firms that Alan García’s democratic socialism was getting ready to gobble up.
    Moreover, the nationalization of the financial system involved an aggravating political factor. It was about to place absolute control over all credit in the hands of an ambitious leader capable of lying without the least scruple—not very long before, in late November 1984, Velasco had given his word, at CADE, the Conferencia Anual de Ejecutivos, that he would never nationalize the banks. Once he had taken them over, all the business enterprises in the country, beginning with the radio stations, the television networks, and the press, would be at the mercy of the government. There was no need to be possessed of the gift of prophecy to realize that in the future funds for the news media would have their price: subservience. General Velasco had placed the daily papers and television channels under state control so as to wrest them away “from the oligarchy” and place them in the hands “of the organized people.” Through this, during the dictatorship, the communications media in Peru fell to levels of indescribable servility and contemptibility. Being more clever, Alan García was going to obtain total control of information through credits and publicity, in the meanwhile maintaining the appearance, in the Mexican fashion, that the media were independent.
    The allusion to Mexico is not gratuitous. The system of the