Okay, let's unpack this. Welcome back to another
deep dive. Today we are tackling a subject that
feels incredibly heavy, but also absolutely necessary.
We are looking at the life of a man who was in
so many ways the last giant standing. Indeed.
We are talking about Mario Vargas Llosa. And
as we record this, it is January 2026. The world
is really still processing his death, which happened
less than a year ago, back in April of 2025.
It feels like the closing of a massive chapter
in literary history, doesn't it? Oh, absolutely.
It's like the final curtain call on a specific
era of greatness. Right. You know, when we talk
about the Latin American boom, that explosion
of literature in the 60s and 70s that completely
changed how the whole world reads fiction. Vargas
Llosa was one of the central pillars. Maybe the
sturdiest pillar. I think you could argue that.
And with his passing, that era has definitively
moved from living memory into the history books.
We are no longer living in the time of the boom.
We're now living in its aftermath. And our mission
today is to unpack a life that was frankly exhausting
just to read about. I mean, this guy wasn't just
a writer. Yeah. He was a politician, a literal
nobleman, a marquess, a brawler. a Nobel Prize
winner, and a man whose personal life was just
as dramatic as any of his novels. It's true.
If you wrote his biography as a work of fiction,
an editor would tell you to tone it down. They'd
say it's too implausible. Exactly. He was often
described as a cartographer of power. That was
actually part of the citation when he won the
Nobel Prize. A cartographer of power. I like
that. It's perfect for him. He mapped out how
authority, rebellion, and defeat work in the
human soul. But what makes him so fascinating
to study is that he didn't just write about these
things from a desk in Paris or London. No, he
lived them. He lived them. His life mirrored
the turbulent history of Latin America in the
20th and 21st centuries. He was in the trenches.
Exactly. We have a massive stack of sources here.
Biographical records, detailed breakdowns. of
his literary works, reports on his political
shifts and coverage of his global impact. Yeah.
And we need to parse through all of it because
depending on who you ask, he was a hero of liberty
or a traitor to the left. Right. He was a disciplined
artist or a tabloid scandal waiting to happen.
He was all of it. And that tension is exactly
where we should start. I mean. If you want to
understand Vargas Llosa, you have to look at
the central conflict that defined his entire
life, the individual versus the oppressive structure,
whether that structure was a military academy,
a dictatorship, a fanatic ideology, or even his
own family. He spent 89 years fighting against
anything that tried to put him in a cage. Right.
So let's rewind. Let's go all the way back to
the beginning. Because his origin story has a
plot twist that sounds like something out of
a soap opera or a telenovela. To be precise.
It really does. So he was born in Arequipa, Peru
in 1936 to a middle class family. But the defining
event of his childhood happened before he could
even remember it. His parents separated just
a few months before he was born. And this is
where the deception comes in. This isn't just
a quiet separation. It's a full on cover up.
It's a total cover up. He was raised by his mother
and her family, the Yosis. They lived in Arequipa.
Then they moved to Cochabamba in Bolivia and
later to Piura in northern Peru. And for the
first 10 years of his life. Mario was told a
lie. A huge lie. He was led to believe that his
father was dead. Can you just imagine that? You're
growing up, you're surrounded by this nurturing
maternal family. His grandfather, who managed
a cotton farm, basically sustained them. Right.
He's the center of attention, surrounded by aunts
and a doting mother. He has this image of a father
who is gone, maybe a tragic figure, maybe a hero
in his mind, but definitely absent. And then,
at age 10... The reveal. It happened in Piura
in 1946. He needs his father, Ernesto Vargas
Maldonado, for the very first time. And it turns
out not only is his father very much alive, but
his parents have decided to get back together.
That has to be traumatic. You go from my father
is a ghost to my father is this stranger standing
in the living room. Yeah. And from what I've
read, Ernesto wasn't exactly father of the year
material. No, far from it. And it wasn't a happy
reunion for young Mario at all. The family moved
to Lima, specifically to the suburb of Magdalene
del Mar. And the whole environment shifted. He
went from a pampered, affectionate environment
in his grandfather's house where imagination
was encouraged, where books were a good thing,
to living with a father who was authoritarian,
harsh, and frankly resentful of Mario's literary
interests. Wow. This sudden imposition of discipline
and, you know, this very toxic masculine authority
was a complete shock to his system. It sounded
like his father viewed Mario's love of reading
and poetry as a weakness, like it was something
that needed to be beaten out of him. That's a
very accurate way to put it. His father feared
his son was becoming effeminate because he was
raised by women. So when Mario was 14, his dad
decided he needed to be straightened out. He
needed a dose of real manhood. Yes. And here
is where the origin story turns into, well, kind
of a horror movie for a sensitive kid. This is
a huge moment. In 1950, his father sent him to
the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima. Leoncio
Prado. You should keep that name in mind because
it is... going to come up again in a very big
way. It was a boarding school and by all accounts,
just a brutal environment. It was a microcosm
of Peruvian society at its worst. How so? Well,
you had boys from all different social classes
and races thrown together, but ruled by this
rigid, violent hierarchy. Bullying was rampant.
Hazing was basically institutionalized. For a
sensitive boy who loved to read, it was hell.
But if we're looking at this from a literary
perspective, this was the foundational trauma,
wasn't it? This is the crucible. Absolutely.
This specific event being thrust from that maternal
world into this harsh, violent, masculine military
world, it gave him the raw material for his first
masterpiece. He learned about power dynamics
there. Right. He learned how the strong crush
the weak and how institutions protect the strong.
He hated every second of it, but it made him
a writer. But he didn't just sit there and take
it. He started rebelling pretty early on, right?
Oh, yeah, he did. He actually withdrew from the
academy before graduation. graduating and finished
his studies back in Piura. But the rebellion
took other forms, too. He started working as
a journalist at age 16 for a local paper called
Law Industria. 16. 16. And then in 1953, when
he went to university at San Marcos in Lima,
he did what many young, angry intellectuals did
at the time. He embraced communism. Which makes
a certain kind of sense. You look around at the
corruption and inequality in Peru, and you look
for a system that promises to fix it all. Of
course. If the establishment is your abusive
father in that horrible military school, then
the anti -establishment must be the solution.
Exactly. He joined a small communist group, a
cell named Cahuayde. It was a reaction to the
endemic inequality he saw everywhere. But his
rebellion against authority also bled into his
personal life. Well, this is a big one. At age
19, he did something that shocked his family
even more than the communism. He married Julia
Urquidy. And we have to clarify who Julia was.
Because the family tree gets a little tangled
here. It does. She was his maternal uncle's sister
-in -law. Okay, so let's be crystal clear. Not
a blood relative. No genetic issues here. but
definitely family in the social sense of the
word. And she was older. Significantly older.
Ten years older. He was 19. She was 29 and divorced.
In conservative Catholic Lima in the 1950s, this
was a massive scandal. It was a huge act of defiance.
The biggest. It was a massive defiance of family
norms, of social expectations. It was him asserting
his independence in the most dramatic way possible.
He was basically shouting, I choose who I love,
regardless of what any of you think. It sounds
chaotic. but it also seemed to fuel his work
ethic like he had to prove everyone wrong. It
absolutely marked the beginning of his serious
literary grind. He was working multiple jobs
to support them. He was a radio news editor.
He was cataloging names on tombstones. Wait,
really? On tombstones? Yes, whatever he could
do to pay the bills. And then he was writing
short stories all night trying to find his voice.
And finding that voice didn't take long. Yeah.
Let's jump to the 1960s. This is the era of the
Latin American boom. And we throw around this
term, the boom, but we need to really explain
what that meant in the 1960s. Before this, Latin
America was seen by the West essentially as,
you know, a banana farm that occasionally had
coups. Cultural backwater. Exactly. Europe and
the U .S., they weren't reading books from Peru
or Colombia. Barely. And then suddenly you have
this explosion. It wasn't just that the books
were good. It was that they were new. They were
doing something different. They took the modernism
of Europe, you know, Faulkner, Joyce, and they
mixed it with the brutal political reality and
the mythology of Latin America. Exploding onto
the scene is this young Peruvian guy with a book
called The Time of the Hero, or in Spanish, La
Ciudad y los Perros. Published in 1963, and remember
Leoncio Prado, the military academy. Oh, I remember.
The place where he was sent to be straightened
out. This book was a direct fictionalization
of his time there. It portrayed the academy not
as a place of honor and discipline, but as a
snake pit of bullying, corruption, gambling,
and cruelty. So he just aired all the dirty laundry.
All of it. He showed how the institution mocked
the very moral standards it was supposed to uphold.
And the reaction in Peru was, well, was it explosive?
To put it mildly, critically, it was a smash
hit. It won the Premio de la Critica Española.
But the Peruvian military establishment, they
were absolutely furious. Generals publicly attacked
the novel. They called it the work of a degenerate
mind. I love this detail. They claimed he was
paid by Ecuador to undermine the Peruvian army.
That was the official accusation. You have to
remember, Peru and Ecuador have had border conflicts
for decades. So accusing him of being a paid
agent of Ecuador was a very specific way to paint
him as a traitor. It's so over the top. And they
even burned copies of the book in the courtyard
of the academy. A public book burning. They burned
the books. I feel like if you're a writer, having
the army burn your books is basically the best
marketing campaign you could ever ask for. It
kind of is, isn't it? It proves you matter. It
proves your words have power. And it established
his role immediately. He wasn't just a storyteller.
He was a public enemy of established authority.
He was willing to tell the ugly truth about sacred
institutions. He was dangerous. So he's on the
map. He's famous. And then he follows it up with
the greenhouse in 1965. Now, looking at our notes
on his writing style, this is where things get
technically very complicated. Critics talk about
this technique he used. interlacing dialogues,
or vasos communicantes. Right. The Greenhouse,
or La Casa Verde, is a dense, complex novel.
It's set in two places, the desert city of Piura
and the Amazon jungle. But what makes it such
a landmark of the boom is that technique. Okay,
hold on. I read notes on this, and complex feels
like an understatement. You compared it to movie
editing in our pre -show chat. But isn't it more
aggressive than that? Much more aggressive. In
a movie, you see a cut. You have a visual cue
that you've changed scenes. In Vargas Llosa's
prose, you don't. So what does that feel like
for the reader? Well, you might be reading a
sentence spoken by a character in 1945 in some
remote jungle outpost. And the very next sentence,
with no paragraph break, sometimes in the same
line, is a response from a completely different
character 20 years later in a city brothel. So
he's collapsing time. He's just... mashing different
timelines together. Exactly. He's forcing you
to experience time not as a straight line, but
as a simultaneous event. It is disorienting by
design. He had this idea of the total novel,
a book that consumes reality from all sides at
once. He didn't want you to just read a story.
He wanted you to feel the chaos of a society
where the past is constantly intruding on the
present, where everything is connected. That
sounds absolutely exhausting to read. It demands
an active reader. You can't just passively consume
the text. You have to work at it. But once you
get the rhythm, it's hypnotic. And the critics
loved it. They went wild for it. This book won
the first ever Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1967,
competing against giants like Onetti and Garcia
Marquez. It solidified his place in the canon.
He was no one -hit wonder. And then, just to
cap off this incredible decade, he releases what
many people think is his greatest work, Conversation
in the Cathedral in 1969. Many critics, and even
Vargas Llosa himself at times, consider this
his monumental masterpiece. It's a massive, bitter,
sprawling novel. The plot sounds deceptively
simple on the surface. It's just a conversation
at a bar, right? On the surface, yes. It's a
four -hour conversation between Santiago Zavala,
who is the disillusioned son of a government
minister, and Ambrosio, who was his father's
chauffeur. They happen to meet at a dog pound,
and they go to a dive bar called The Cathedral.
But through this one conversation they're basically
dissecting an entire era of Peruvian history.
Exactly that. They are peeling back the layers
of the Odria dictatorship, which ruled Peru in
the late 40s and 50s. Santiago is searching for
the truth about his father's role in the murder
of a notorious underworld figure. But the real
theme is bigger than that. Oh, much bigger. The
broader theme is about how dictatorship corrupts
everything. It doesn't just kill people. It destroys
families. It destroys trust. It creates this
pervasive sense of hopelessness that seeps into
every corner of life. It's described as his most
bitter novel. It is, because at the end of Santiago's
quest, there's no redemption. He finds only dead
ends and moral ambiguity. It portrays a society
where integrity is impossible because the system
relies on complicity from everyone. And there's
that famous line from the book. At what precise
moment had Peru fucked itself up? That question
just haunts the whole novel. It's the central
question. So by the end of the 60s, he's the
undisputed master of this serious, political,
structurally complex novel. But then... In the
70s, he takes this huge left turn, or maybe a
funny turn. The discovery of humor. Yes, it's
a fascinating shift. After the heavy, dark tone
of conversation in the cathedral, he writes Captain
Pantoja and the Special Service in 1973. And
this book sounds hilarious. It's about the army
hiring prostitutes for soldiers. It is a satire,
but what's amazing is that it's based on reality.
Vargas Llosa had actually witnessed this, the
Peruvian army trying to service its soldiers
in remote jungle outposts to prevent them from
harassing the local women. So what does he do
with that idea? He creates this character, Captain
Pantoja, who is the most efficient by the book
officer you can imagine. And he's assigned to
set up a special service of prostitutes. And
he writes it as a bureaucracy. That's the joke.
He treats it with the same administrative seriousness
as a supply chain for boots or ammunition. The
book is filled with memos, requisitions, efficiency
reports on the prostitutes. It's a brilliant
parody of his own earlier work, like The Greenhouse.
He takes the same themes, military, prostitution,
the jungle. But instead of tragedy, he plays
it as farce. Which shows incredible range. And
then he minds his own life for comedy with Aunt
Julia and the scriptwriter in 1977. This is a
fan favorite for a reason. It's a semi -autobiographical
novel about his first marriage to Julia Urquidy.
His aunt -in -law. Right. It mixes the story
of their forbidden romance, the young writer,
the older divorced aunt -in -law, with the story
of a crazy radio soap opera writer who starts
losing his mind and mixing up the plots of his
10 different shows. But this one had real world
fallout, didn't it? Oh, yes. Julia Urquidy was
not happy at all. She felt he exaggerated the
negatives of their relationship and really minimized...
how much she supported him when he was a nobody.
So she wrote a book in response? She did. She
actually wrote a rebuttal memoir called What
Little Vargas Didn't Say. Ouch. The literary
clapback. It's a rare thing to see, the subject
of a famous novel writing a rebuttal. But it
showed that using real life as raw material,
you know, it has consequences. Speaking of conflict,
here is where it gets really interesting. We
have to talk about the feud. The feud of the
century. Yes. We mentioned the Latin American
boom was this tight -knit group. Vargas Llosa
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were best friends.
They were neighbors in Barcelona. Vargas Llosa
even wrote his doctoral thesis on Garcia Marquez.
He called it story of a day aside. They were
inseparable. They were the two pillars of the
boom. And then in 1976, at a theater in Mexico
City, it all ended in a single moment. The punch.
The punch. Vargas Llosa walked up to Garcia Marquez,
who opened his arms to hug him, and Vargas Llosa
just punched him square in the face, knocked
him down, gave him a massive black eye. There's
a famous photo of Garcia Marquez with that black
eye. There is, and they never spoke again. Never.
A 30 -year silence until death. So what happened?
I mean, do we actually know? Well, neither of
them ever publicly explained it. They took the
secret to their graves. But mutual friends have
filled in the gaps over the years. The consensus
is that it was personal. And it involved Vargas
Llosa's second wife, Patricia. Patricia, who
was also his cousin. Yes. After he divorced Julia
in 1964, he married his first cousin, Patricia
Yosa, in 1965. The story goes that while Vargas
Yosa was away, some sources say he was pursuing
another woman on a cruise ship. Patricia was
distraught. And Garcia Marquez tried to console
her. When Vargas Yosa returned, Patricia told
him something about Garcia Marquez's behavior,
or maybe his advice to her, that caused the explosion.
Consoling can be interpreted in many ways, I
suppose. Indeed. But there is a deeper layer
here. The punch wasn't just personal. It was
symbolic. By 1976, they were standing on opposite
sides of a massive ideological canyon. This is
the second act of his life. And honestly, this
is the part that confuses people the most. How
does the guy who wrote the ultimate anti -military
novels, who was an early supporter of Fidel Castro,
end up running for president on a platform of
radical capitalism? That is a wild swing. It
looks wild from the outside. But if you look
closer, there is a consistent thread. And that
thread is liberty. Vargas Llosa was always obsessed
with liberty. In the 50s and 60s, he thought
the main threat to liberty was the bourgeoisie
and American imperialism. So he goes left, he
supports the Cuban Revolution. Right. But then
comes 1971, the Padilla affair. Explain this,
because it seems to be the absolute pivot point
for him and so many other intellectuals. It was.
The Castro regime arrested a poet named Gilberto
Padilla. They imprisoned him, essentially, for
writing poems that were deemed critical of the
revolution. They forced him to perform this Stalinist
-style public confession where he admitted to
being a traitor and even denounced his own wife.
And for Vargas Llosa, that's not just politics.
That's personal. That's a writer realizing, wait
a minute, this system comes for people like me.
Exactly. He realized that a dictatorship of the
left silences you just as effectively as a dictatorship
of the right. He was horrified. He signed a famous
letter of protest and Fidel Castro called him
and the other signatories traitors. That was
the break. The friendship was over. And he didn't
just drift to the center. He went full. classical
liberal. He swung hard. He started reading Karl
Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Isaiah Berlin. He came
to the conclusion that the only real protection
against the structure, whether it's a general
or a commissar, is individual liberty and the
free market. So in his mind, it wasn't a betrayal
of his principles. No, it was an evolution of
his method for protecting them. The goal was
always freedom. The enemy just changed. And he
didn't just write about it. He decided to do
the most dangerous thing a writer can do. run
for political office? The 1990 Peruvian presidential
election. This is such a fascinating case study.
In 1987, he helped form the Liberty Movement
to protest the nationalization of banks. And
by 1990, he was running as the candidate for
the Democratic Front Coalition, or FREEDOMO.
And what was his platform? Because this is where
it gets really controversial. Radical austerity.
He was brutally honest with people. He told the
Peruvian people that the economy was completely
broken, inflation was at thousands of percent,
and the only way to fix it was a shock therapy
program. Privatization, free trade, firing legions
of bureaucrats. Okay, pause. I have to play devil's
advocate here. That sounds like political suicide.
You're running for office in a country with massive
poverty, and your opening pitch is... I'm going
to make your life much harder for a while. Was
he naive or just arrogant? That is the million
dollar question, isn't it? His critics called
it arrogance. The great intellectual looking
down from his ivory tower lecturing the poor
on economics. They said he was totally out of
touch with the daily suffering of the average
Peruvian. It feels disconnected. Like it's easy
to talk about necessary pain when you're a famous
author living comfortably in London or Madrid.
And that's a fair point. But from Vargas Llosa's
perspective, he saw it as a moral imperative.
He believed that lying to the poor, promising
them magic solutions that didn't exist, was the
ultimate form of disrespect. So he wanted to
treat the electorate as adults. Exactly. He wanted
to say, this is the medicine we need. It will
taste awful, but it's the only way to get better.
Which is noble, sure. But in politics, adults
usually want to hear that everything is going
to be fine without any pain. And then along comes
Fujimori. Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer,
the son of Japanese immigrants. Literally nobody
knew who he was. He showed up riding a tractor
campaigning in the countryside and his slogan
was simply, no shock. A simple, powerful message.
And he painted Margus Yosa as the candidate of
the white, wealthy Lima elite. And it worked.
It worked brilliantly. Vargas Llosa won the first
round but didn't get a majority. In the runoff
election, Fujimori crushed him in a landslide.
And the irony, and this is the part that always
gets me, is what happened after Fujimori won.
It is the ultimate, most bitter irony. Fujimori
won by campaigning against Vargas Llosa's shock
plan. But once he took office, Fujimori turned
around and implemented many of Vargas Llosa's
exact neoliberal policies. They called it the
Fuji shock. But he did it while dismantling democracy.
Yes, he implemented the economic plan while staging
a self -coup and becoming an authoritarian leader.
So Vargas Llosa lost the election, but his economic
ideas won. But they were implemented by a dictator
he absolutely despised. Precisely. It was a brutal
defeat. He wrote a fantastic memoir about it
called A Fish in the Water. And after that loss,
he largely moved to Madrid, acquired Spanish
citizenship in 1993, and became this transatlantic
public intellectual. But even in defeat, he couldn't
help but speak his mind. We have to talk about
the perfect dictatorship moment, because in the
footage of this event, you can practically see
the heir leave the room. It was 1990, just after
he lost the election. He was invited to Mexico
City for this prestigious intellectual gathering,
and it was being broadcast live on Televisa,
which was basically the propaganda arm of the
Mexican government at the time. And the ruling
party, the PRI, had been in power for 61 years
straight. And the audience is packed with PRI
officials. The moderator is Octavio Paz, Mexico's
great Nobel -winning poet. Vargas Llosa is the
guest of honor. He's supposed to be polite. But
he wasn't. Instead, he leans into the microphone
and just calmly dismantles the entire Mexican
political system. He tells them, Japan is not
a dictatorship, but Mexico, Mexico is the perfect
dictatorship. Wow. Perfect because it doesn't
look like one on the surface. Exactly his point.
He said it has the camouflage of democracy. It
has elections, but you can't win them. It has
a press, but the press is bought. It suppresses
dissent, not with gulags, but with jobs and bribes
and subtle pressure. I read that Octavio Paz
actually tried to cut him off. He was panicking.
He tried to do damage control immediately. It
was incredibly awkward on live TV. Imagine walking
into someone's house for dinner, and while they're
serving the soup, you announce to the whole table
that the host is a con artist. That is Mario
Vargas Llosa. He embarrassed everyone, but the
phrase stuck. For decades, the perfect dictatorship
became the defining description of 20th century
Mexican politics. It just shows that he could
not help himself. He had to speak what he saw
as the truth. regardless of the setting or the
consequences. That is the core of his character,
the absolute refusal to be polite when liberty
is at stake. So he's lost the election. He's
living mostly in Europe. You might think his
best writing days were behind him at this point,
but he actually enters this incredible new phase
of literary masterpieces. It does. And this phase
is marked by a deep, almost obsessive exploration
of fanaticism. If his early work was about military
and state dictatorships, his later work asks,
Why do human beings follow irrational causes?
Why do we kill for an idea? Let's talk about
The War at the End of the World, published in
1981, so actually before his presidential run.
But it really signals this shift in his focus.
This is his first major novel set outside of
Peru. It's set in 19th century Brazil. And it's
based on a real and truly insane historical event,
the War of Canudos. Set the scene for us. What
was this war? It's the backlands of Bahia. A
harsh, dry, impoverished region. And you have
this millenarian cult that springs up, led by
a charismatic figure called the Counselor. He
preaches that the end of the world is coming
and that the new Brazilian Republic is the Antichrist.
And people follow him. Thousands of poor, desperate
people flock to him and they build this city
from scratch called Canudos. So it's the state
versus a cult. Yes, but this is the genius of
the book. Vargas Llosa shows the fanaticism on
both sides. The religious zealots are irrational.
Yes, they are waiting for the apocalypse. But
the secular Republicans in Rio. They are also
blinded by their own ideology. How so? They refuse
to see these people as human beings with legitimate
grievances. They see the cult as a monarchist
conspiracy funded by the British. They are just
as fanatical in their belief in progress and
reason, so they send the army to wipe them out.
And the result? is a massacre. A total slaughter.
It's a massive Tolstoyan novel about how blind
belief on any side leads to catastrophe. It shows
that the civilized soldiers can be just as barbaric
as the fanatics they are trying to destroy. And
then, in 2000, he drops The Feast of the Goat.
La Fiesta del Chivo. This is arguably his greatest
late career work. It's about the Dominican Republic
and the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo is
a monster. An absolute monster. A true monster.
He ruled for 31 years. He renamed the capital
city after himself. He orchestrated the Parsley
Massacre, killing thousands of Haitians. And
the novel structures this horror through three
interwoven strands. You have Urania Cabral, a
woman returning to the island after 30 years
to finally confront her father, who was one of
Trujillo's cronies. You have the assassins waiting
in a car on a dark highway to ambush and kill
Trujillo. And you have Trujillo himself. in his
final pathetic days. So it's a psychological
study of power. And of the rot that power creates.
It explores how authoritarianism isn't just about
force, it's about humiliation. Trujillo maintained
power by systematically humiliating the men around
him, making them complicit in his crimes so they
couldn't possibly turn against him. How did he
do that? He would sleep with their wives and
daughters, force them to do degrading things
in public, and they would have to smile and thank
him for the honor. It's a terrifying, brilliant
book about the psychology of tyranny. We should
also touch on the controversy regarding the Uchiraca
Commission, because that also influenced his
writing during this period. This was back in
1983. The Peruvian president, Fernando Belalonde,
asked Vargas Llosa to lead a commission investigating
the murder of eight journalists in the remote
Andes. What did they find? The commission concluded
that indigenous villagers had killed the journalists,
mistaking them for terrorists from the Shining
Path, the Maoist guerrilla group that was terrorizing
the country. And the backlash was severe. Extremely.
The left accused him of a government cover up.
that he was protecting the military who were
also in the area. Anthropologists accused him
of paternalism and of fundamentally misunderstanding
Andean culture. It was a really bruising experience
for him. But being Vargas Llosa. He turned it
into art. It directly inspired his novel Death
in the Andes. It seems like every single trauma
in his life, public or private, eventually became
a novel. That is the mark of a great writer.
Nothing is ever wasted. So we arrive at 2010,
the Nobel Prize in Literature. Finally. Yes,
long overdue, many would say. The Swedish Academy
cited his cartography of structures of power
and his trenchant images of the individual's
resistance, revolt, and defeat. That cartography
of power again. It's the perfect summary. And
in his acceptance speech, he got very emotional.
He did. He spoke about carrying Peru deep inside
me. But he also spoke of his love for Spain.
He said, I am a Peruvian citizen and I am a Spanish
citizen. He was truly a man of two worlds. And
speaking of two worlds, his personal life took
one last very public, dramatic turn in his twilight
years. Yes. After 50 years of marriage to Patricia,
who was basically his manager, his anchor, the
mother of his three children, he left her. In
2015, he was 79 years old. He was 79. He left
her for Isabel Preissler. And for those of our
listeners who don't follow Spanish celebrity
culture, Isabel Preissler is... A big deal. She
is the queen of hearts, the queen of the gossip
magazines, a massive socialite in Spain, the
ex -wife of singer Julio Iglesias. It was a huge
shock. Vargas Llosa went from the serious literary
pages to the cover of Hola magazine. Right. He
was suddenly walking red carpets, living this
very high profile, glamorous life in Madrid mansions.
Did it last? It lasted until 2022. They split
up. But it showed that even in his 80s, he was
still chasing something, passion, novelty, life.
He refused to just sit in a rocking chair and
be the old writer. And he also became a literal
nobleman around this time. Yes. King Juan Carlos
I of Spain made him the Marquess of Vargas Llosa
in 2011. So you have a man who started as a middle
class boy in Arequipa, became a communist revolutionary,
then a neoliberal politician, and ended his life
as a Spanish Marquess. You can't make it up.
Let's talk about his politics in these final
years, because he didn't mellow out at all. If
anything, he seemed to get even more controversial.
He became a staunch, and I mean staunch, defender
of what he considers liberal values, but what
many people saw as a drift to the hard right.
He supported neoliberalism aggressively. He endorsed
figures like Javier Millet in Argentina and José
Antonio Kast in Chile. And the Keiko Fujimori
situation in Peru. That was the most painful
dilemma for many of his followers. Remember,
Alberto Fujimori was his nemesis. Teiko is Alberto's
daughter and political heir. In 2011, Vargas
Llosa called her the worst option for Peru. But
then he changed his mind. In 2021, she was in
a runoff against Pedro Castillo, a far -left
teacher with a Marxist party behind him, and
Vargas Llosa endorsed Keiko. He called her the
lesser of two evils. He did. He genuinely believed
that Castillo represented a path to Venezuelan
-style socialism, a catastrophe which he feared
more than the corruption and authoritarian tendencies
of the Fujimori clan. But it cost him a lot of
prestige. A huge amount, especially among centrists
and the left. He was accused by intellectuals
in France and elsewhere of contributing to political
polarization. But he stuck to his guns. Always.
He believed that silence was the worst. sin for
an intellectual. He would rather be wrong and
loud than right and silent. And that brings us
to the end. April 13th, 2025 in Lima, Peru. He
died at age 89. His son Alvaro announced he was
at peace and surrounded by family, including
his ex -wife Patricia. It's interesting that
he died in Lima. Despite living in Madrid for
so long, despite the Marquez title, he went home.
He did. And the reaction was massive. National
mourning in Peru, treats from world leaders like
Macron and Pedro Sanchez, and from leaders all
across the Latin American spectrum. Even those
who completely disagreed with his politics acknowledged
his literary genius. And he didn't leave us without
one last gift. His final novel, Le Derico Mi
Silencio. which translates to I give you my silence.
It was published in 2023 and announced as his
last work of fiction. So looking back at this
massive, contradictory, brilliant life. What
is the legacy? I mean, he was a giant who brought
Latin American literature to the world stage.
That's undeniable. But beyond the books, I think
his legacy is the very stance of the intellectual
in public life. The public intellectual. Yes.
He was a man who refused to stay in his lane.
He changed his mind from Marxist revolutionary
to aristocratic liberal Marquess, and he did
it all publicly, loudly, and fearlessly. He forced
you to argue with him. We'll leave our listeners
with a final thought, a question to chew on.
Fargus Yosa once said that literature was fire,
an act of rebellion against the imperfections
of life. Yet he ended his life as the ultimate
insider, a Nobel Prize winner, a Marquess, a
member of the Académie Française, the establishment
personified. So it raises the question, does
the rebel inevitably become the institution or
did he somehow manage to change the institution
from the inside? That is something to think about.
If you haven't read them, don't let the size
of the books scare you. Pick up The Feast of
the Goat or The Time of the Hero. Go see that
cartography of power for yourself. It's definitely
worth the journey. Thanks for listening. Keep
diving deep.