Mario Vargas Llosa: Peruvian Nobel-winning novelist

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose novels explored the military dictatorships and political corruption of Latin America, has died. He was 89.

His son, Álvaro, announced his death on social media, without attributing a cause. Mario Vargas Llosa, a towering figure in literature and politics throughout Latin America, had retired from public life at the end of 2023 and was living in Lima.

Vargas Llosa was the author of more than 60 novels, plays and works of non-fiction that examined the brutality of power and the often-heroic resistance of those caught in history’s web. His repertoire also included comic and erotic novels and literary criticism.

As one of Latin America’s foremost writers and intellectuals, he defended individual liberty, democracy and the free market, which often put him at odds with his peers and political leaders in the region.

Vargas Llosa was a member of the wave of writers, including Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes, who transformed Latin American literature and provided insight into the region’s political struggles during the 1960s and 1970s. Fuentes died in 2012 and García Márquez died in 2014.

A failed campaign for the presidency of Peru in 1990 led Vargas Llosa to declare he wouldn’t run for elective office again. His rival back then, former president Alerto Fujimori, died in 2024.

Power corrupts

Among his most acclaimed novels were Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), set in Peru in the 1950s during a dictatorship, and The Feast of the Goat (2000), which examined the regime of General Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Both are studies of the psychology of power and its corruption of human integrity.

“Literature is fire,” Vargas Llosa said in his 1967 acceptance speech after winning the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, Latin America’s most prestigious literary award, for his second novel, The Green House, set in Peru’s Amazon region. “It signifies non-conformism and rebellion. Protest, contradiction and criticism are the writer’s reason for existence.”

Jose Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in the southern Andean city of Arequipa. His parents separated five months before he was born and reunited when he was 10.

He attributed his intolerance for authoritarianism to the beatings and verbal abuse dealt out by his father and said he sought refuge in books.

Book burning

After studying law and literature in Lima and Madrid, earning a doctorate for his thesis on García Márquez, he moved to Paris to work as a journalist and language teacher. His first novel, The Time of the Hero, was published in Spain in 1963 and was based on his experiences as a cadet at the Leoncio Prado military academy in Lima. A social satire, the book outraged Peruvian officers, who publicly burned copies.

A supporter of the Cuban revolution during the 1960s, Vargas Llosa publicly backed guerrilla warfare as a vehicle for bringing change to Latin America’s poverty-ridden societies. In the 1970s, he abandoned the Marxist and communist views of his youth and broke with Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, outraged by the censorship and imprisonment of Cuban writer Heberto Padilla.

He attributed his shift in perspective to the influence of anti-Marxist writer Karl Popper, whose work helped frame the free-market policies of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Ideological fight

As Vargas Llosa’s literary stature grew, he became a respected political essayist and a heavyweight in the ideological debates in Latin America. In the process, his longstanding friendship with Castro supporter García Márquez soured. While in Mexico City in 1976, he punched the Colombian writer in the face for a reason he never revealed.

“We drifted apart for personal as well as political reasons,” Vargas Llosa told The Paris Review in 1990. “In my opinion, his writing and his politics are not of the same quality.”

In a sign of reconciliation, he allowed excerpts from his 1971 essay on García Márquez to be reproduced for the first time in the prologue to the 40th anniversary edition of his fellow author’s novel, 100 Years of Solitude, published in 2007. Vargas Llosa’s 2008 play On the Banks of the Thames is an account of two friends who fall out after an altercation and seek to patch up their relationship years later.

Presidential bid

In 1987, Vargas Llosa led a campaign by Peruvian intellectuals against plans to nationalise the country’s banks as the economy lay in ruins and a Maoist insurgency controlled more than half the countryside. The campaign led him to make a bid for the presidency in 1990 on a free-market platform, an experience he chronicled in his 1993 memoir, A Fish in the Water.

Vargas Llosa lost a run-off vote against Fujimori, a former mathematics professor, who went on to rule Peru for a decade before serving a jail sentence for human rights abuses.

Vargas Llosa said he was viewed as a traitor by some compatriots when he called for democratic governments to impose sanctions on Peru after Fujimori shut the Congress and suspended the Judiciary in 1992. Writing in the Madrid-based El País newspaper, he continued to attack Fujimori’s policies until the regime collapsed amid a corruption scandal in 2000.

Vargas Llosa continued to oppose Fujimori and his legacy, mostly personified by his daughter Keiko, for most of the 21st century. But he surprisingly endorsed Keiko Fujimori in 2021 as she ran for the presidency against a far leftist. She ultimately lost by a slim margin.

“Vargas Llosa has been a central figure — central, central, central — for democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms,” José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times in 2018.

Nobel prize

The Swedish Academy awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize to Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

In his Nobel lecture delivered on December 10 of that year, the writer said: “In every circumstance when I have felt disheartened or beaten down, on the edge of despair, giving myself body and soul to my work as a storyteller has been the light at the end of the tunnel, the plank that carries the shipwrecked man to shore.”

His literary repertoire spans critiques of 19th century novelists Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert and Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas, as well as plays inspired by Arabian and Greek classics and a collection of essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“He is one of the few writers in the world who is in full command of a diverse range of literary procedures, which he can draw from, contrast and fuse at will,” wrote Peruvian novelist Alonso Cueto in The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa.

All of Vargas Llosa’s books were originally published in Spain, and he considered the country as important as Peru to his success as a novelist. He said he took Spanish citizenship as President Fujimori threatened to strip him of his Peruvian nationality. He was awarded the title of marquis by King Juan Carlos in 2011.

Vargas Llosa had three children from his marriage to Patricia Llosa, his cousin and second wife. He filed for divorce in 2015 after five decades of marriage.