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

Mexican PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional: Institutional Revolutionary Party)—a party dictatorship that keeps up democratic appearances by dint of tolerating elections, a “critical” press, and a civilian government—has traditionally been a temptation for Latin American dictators. But none of them has been able to duplicate the model, an authentic creation of Mexican culture and history, because one of the requisites of its “success” is something that none of its emulators can resign himself to: the ritual sacrifice, every certain number of years, of the president, in order that the party may continue in power. General Velasco dreamed of a Mexican-style regime—for himself alone. And it was a commonplace of public opinion that President García had dreams of perpetuating his presidency indefinitely. Sometime before that July 28, 1987, one of his faithful congressmen, Héctor Marisca, passing himself off as an independent, had formally proposed a constitutional amendment allowing the president to be reelected, a change that aroused vehement protest. The control of government funds by the executive branch was a decisive step toward the perpetuation in power of the APRA, to which one of Alan García’s appointees, the minister of energy and mines, Wilfredo Huayta, had promised “fifty years in power.”
    “And the worst of it is,” I said to Patricia, panting as I was about to finish the four-kilometer run, “that this proposal is going to be supported by 99 percent of Peruvians.”
    Is anyone in the world fond of bankers? Aren’t they the symbol of affluence, of selfish capitalism, of imperialism, of everything to which the ideology of the Third World attributes the wretchedness and the backwardness of our countries? Alan García had found the ideal scapegoat to explain to the Peruvian people why his program did not produce the fruits that he had promised: it was all the fault of the financial oligarchies that made use of banks to take their dollars out of Peru and used the money of those with savings accounts to make loans under the table to the companies they controlled. Now, with the financial system in the hands of the people, all that was going to change.
    Almost the moment I returned to Lima, a few days later, I wrote an article, “Hacia el Perú totalitario” (“Toward a Totalitarian Peru”) that appeared in El Comercio on August 2, * outlining the reasons for my opposition to the measure and urging Peruvians to oppose it by any and every legal means if they wanted the democratic system to survive. I did so in order to put my reaction to it on record, even though I was convinced that my effort would be useless, and that, with the exception of a few protests, the measure would be passed by Congress with the approval of the majority of my compatriots.
    But that was not how things turned out. At the same time that my article appeared, the employees of banks and of other threatened companies took to the streets, in Lima, in Arequipa, in Piura, participating in marches and small-scale meetings that surprised everyone, me first of all. In order to support them, along with four close friends with whom for years Patricia and I had gone out to have dinner and talk together once a week—three architects, Luis Miró Quesada, Frederick Cooper, and Miguel Cruchaga, and the painter Fernando de Szyszlo—we decided to draft a manifesto as quickly as possible, for which we were sure we could collect some hundred signatures. The text, affirming in part that “the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the party in power may well mean the end of freedom of expression and, should worst come to worst, of democracy,” was given to me to read on television and published under my name in the newspapers of August 5 with the heading “Against the Totalitarian Threat.”
    What happened in the next few days unexpectedly turned my life upside down. My house was flooded with letters, phone