"You're not going to believe this," Mario Vargas Llosa told me in October 2002, "but until three weeks before the voting [in the 1990 race for president of Peru], I had no idea who [Alberto] Fujimori was."
Our meeting came vividly back to life for me on April 13 when I learned that the author and politician from Peru died at age 89.
The occasion of our meeting was an appearance by the famed Peruvian novelist before a small group at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C. Somehow, my wife had secured tickets for both of us as a birthday present for me. And I not only was able to get Vargas Llosa to sign "The Feast of The Goat" (a gripping tale of Dominican Republican strongman Rafael Trujillo's final days and, at the time, his most recent book) but to discuss his own unsuccessful foray into politics a dozen years before.
Running on a platform of free market economics and reducing the size of government not unlike what Argentinian President Javier Millei and U.S. President Donald Trump are executing now, Vargas Llosa topped the initial field of candidates. But in the subsequent runoff against the obscure agronomist and college rector Fujimori, Vargas Llosa found his conservative stands used against him.
Were he to actually implement his market-based, less-is-best agenda, opponents charged, it would do severe damage to Peru's indigenous population.
The son of Japanese immigrants, Fujimori rallied minorities as well as the poor against the urbane, sophisticated Vargas Llosa. He received much support from the government of outgoing leftist President Alan Garcia, who had clashed with Vargas Llosa over his unsuccessful plan to nationalize banks.
Fujimori won with 62%.
Within two years, Fujimori declared martial law and dissolved Congress. Although he actually adopted much of Vargas Llosa's free market agenda and brought inflation down from four digits to single digits, his seizure of power and ruling by decree was fiercely denounced by Vargas Llosa, who was then living in London.
It didn't matter that Fujimori was getting it right on economics, Vargas Llosa said, if a free market was accompanied by coercion of the individual. Quoting economist Friedrich Hayek, he warned, "Coercion occurs when one man's actions are made to serve another man's will, not for his own but for the other's purpose."
Like columnist William F. Buckley Jr. and Czech playwright Vaclev Havel, Vargas Llosa was a man of both prose and politics. But unlike Havel, who was elected president of the post-Cold War Czechoslovakia, and more like Buckley, who lost a bid for mayor of New York in 1965, the prolific Peruvian's defeat in his lone bid for office paved the way for many more books and regular newspaper columns.
Like Norman Mailer, his prize-winning writing and his political career were coupled with a turbulent personal life — albeit in his twilight years.
In 2015, soon after toasting wife Patricia at a 50th anniversary party, Vargas Llosa suddenly left her to begin a seven-year (and very public) romance with the much-younger Isabel Preysler. Calling the former Mrs. Julio Iglesias his "great passion," the author drew paparazzi and gossip columnists as he accompanied her to events worldwide.
In 2022, the romance ended and Vargas Llosa was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Patricia put aside past differences to be with him at events honoring his work and career.
Moreover, differences with their three children were patched up.
"A Fish In The Water" was his memoir of the story of his candidacy for president and reminiscences of his youth. These included stories of his early days as a reporter and how the attempt of a Roman Catholic priest to molest him led the young Vargas Llosa to leave the church.
A vociferous reader of philosophy, he would later call himself an agnostic and said he did not know whether God existed.
In 2011, however, he did say, "[A]lthough it may be losing numbers and shrinking, Catholicism today is more united, active and assertive now than in the years in which it seemed to be on the verge of becoming unhinged." For this change, he credited the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
But he was always critical of the role of government in issues such as abortion and said religion would remain strong "[a]s long as the State remains secular and independent of all Churches."
Admirers on the right always suspected that Vargas Llosa's conservatism kept him from the Nobel Prize for Literature at a time when he was considered one of the three titanic figures of literature in Latin America, along with Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Columbia — the latter two of whom were decidedly on the political left, with Garcia Marquez fiercely defending Cuba's Fidel Castro.
In 2010, after 20 novels, two memoirs, and hundreds of essays, Vargas Llosa was finally awarded the Nobel Prize. A decade later, he wrote his final book, "Harsh Times" — vividly bringing to life the U.S.-supported overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.
As in "Feast of the Goat" and other novels, the author's conclusion was that replacing a democratic government — whatever its faults — with a dictatorship inevitably spelled disaster for the country.
At the 2002 event at the Folger Theatre, Vargas Llosa revealed that he did most of his writing at the neighborhood library, where he could do his own research. Almost to the end, he remained a source of zesty quotes for political reporters.
He famously characterized Mexico's 70-year-old system of the ruling party nominating candidates and then staging a campaign despite their being guaranteed election as "the perfect dictatorship." In 2011, asked about the Peruvian presidential election between former strongman Fujimori's daughter, Keiko Fujimori, and leftist Army Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, Vargas said it was a choice between "cancer and AIDS."
Mario Vargas Llosa was a man of many parts. And his work and his career moved and inspire many, and will almost certainly continue to do so.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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