What I Am Reading: "The Neighborhood" by Mario Vargas Llosa

The peril of beating a novelist in an election is that he can then write about how terrible your administration-cum-regime was. Thus is the fate of Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, who defeated Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1990 Peruvian election while running on an apolitical outsider platform. Fujimori's dictatorship is first the setting, then ultimately the subject of this latter-day Llosa novel.The plot of the novel concerns the life of a rich Lima couple as the husband, head of a mining company, is blackmailed and exposed by a tabloid editor as having been photographed at an orgy a few years earlier. It eventually transpires that the editor was closely linked to the secret police, and is killed for going rogue and threatening a member of the elite against the will of "The Doctor," Fujimori's secret police head. Eventually, things are all sorted out as the editor's star journalist goes on to expose these corrupt relationships, and the milquetoast mining millionaire gets to live happily ever after.

I thought initially that this novel was intended to be about how terrible the press is, as the tabloid editor is portrayed as an utter bottom-feeder, maliciously ruining the lives of various members of the entertainment industry (including a nice old man who was a poetry reciter and TV comedian, who comes to be the fall guy for the editor's death). The press does do the right thing in the end, and the journalist's exposé is portrayed as hastening the fall of the Fujimori dictatorship, but it was clear to me that Vargas Llosa had some experience of the regime-linked journalism portrayed.

Vargas Llosa was the candidate of a center-right coalition in the 1990 Peruvian presidential election, a famous novelist at the time but still 20 years away from his Nobel Prize. His platform included the implementation of several radical free-market reforms. Fujimori, a university administrator, was the surprise dark-horse candidate of those opposed to radical reform but fed up with the corrupt Peruvian political system. He and Vargas Llosa faced each other in the runoff, and Fujimori won by a considerable margin. He proceeded to implement many of the pro-market reforms that Vargas Llosa had run on, as well as the corrupt and repressive police state that is portrayed in The Neighborhood. For the first part of the novel, politics is mainly in the background, as the characters live in fear of Shining Path terrorism or of being caught out after curfew. As the book moves along though, politics are foregrounded, and even expounded upon by the secret police chief as he converses with Julieta/"Shorty," the journalist. Alongside notes on actual corruption and police repression, Vargas Llosa refers to a conspiracy theory that Fujimori was not born a Peruvian citizen that apparently came up during the 1990 campaign, though he has the grace not to name-drop himself. Fujimori's daughter, nostalgic (in my understanding) for the days of his authoritarianism, has thus far been held off from the Peruvian presidency. In fact, as I learned while checking in to write this, she is in prison, from the same scandal that brought down her political opponent in the 2016 Presidential election, Peru’s premier and penultimate Polish President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. Her father, meanwhile, was pardoned and is out of prison. Peruvian politics continue to be interesting to this day.