“Peru has become a third-class country,” says Mario Vargas Llosa

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Peruvian Nobel Literature Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa said that Latin America “is going from bad to worse”, that it is going through its worst political moment, and cited the case of Peru, which “has become a third-class country”.

During the presentation of his latest book at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, where he traveled from Madrid after recovering from COVID-19, on the occasion of the important literary fair, he gave his political reading after the recent triumphs of center-left parties in the presidential elections in Chile and his native Peru.

“Latin America is at its worst political moment,” said the award-winning author of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (“Pantaleón y las visitadoras”) on Sunday, May 8, adding that “it is difficult to be optimistic, which doesn’t mean we don’t have to fight.”

The Peruvian writer, who came to run as a presidential candidate three decades ago, is explicit in defending conservative politicians. In the last elections in Peru, he supported Keiko Fujimori, who lost in 2021 to Pedro Castillo, whom he described as “illiterate”.

“Peru has become a third-class country”, said Vargas Llosa, analyzing the triumph of Castillo, who belongs to a range of Latin American leftist politicians who, according to the author, are “fanatic, blind, and dogmatic”.

In the Chilean presidential elections, Vargas Llosa, who on his visit to Argentina had lunch with the liberal former president Mauricio Macri, gave his support to the right-wing politician José Antonio Kast, who lost to Gabriel Boric.

The 2010 Nobel Literature Prize winner said that the region’s future depends on “choosing well and taking advantage of the positive examples of free countries” but said, “we are choosing badly”.

At the 46th edition of the Buenos Aires Book Fair, Vargas Llosa presented his latest book, The Quiet Gaze (“La mirada quieta”), a literary essay he wrote after reading the work of Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, author of “Fortunata y Jacinta” when he was in his forties.

At the end of his presentation, the 86-year-old writer announced that he would travel to Peru to write a novel. “I am always writing novels. Sometimes they don’t come out, and I keep them. The novel is constitutive of the human being and sets society in motion, as long as there is freedom,” he concluded.

With information from Reuters