On the verge of becoming as famous an artist-politician as Václav Havel, Vargas Llosa managed to finish first in the initial round of balloting, only to lose the second, badly, to Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer of Japanese ancestry, who came so quickly out of nowhere—promising “Honesty, Technology and Work”—that his advent, too, seemed more “literary” than political. During the next decade, Fujimori delivered a species of economic reform, but he brought with it a nonmilitary dictatorship, shutting down Peru’s congress and gutting its courts. When Vargas Llosa called for international action against him, the novelist was threatened with the loss of his citizenship.
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