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The Nisei and the Novelist: Alberto Fujimori, Mario Vargas Llosa, and the Peruvian Election of 1990
| Article
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19860 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
10,403 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence A. Clayton
Lawrence A. Clayton is director of the Latin American Studies
Program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. |
Peru's voters delivered a stunning victory on June 10, 1990, to Alberto Fujimori, a presidential candidate virtually unknown three months before. The odds-on favorite in the first round on April 8 was Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's most celebrated writer, a man whose works have been translated all over the world, the author of numerous classics in modern Latin American literature such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The War of the End of the World, a man whose creativity and brilliance may someday earn him a Nobel Prize in literature.
Instead, in the second round June 10, Peruvians chose Alberto Fujimori, the former rector of the National Agrarian University, a descendant of Japanese immigrants to Peru, a man the pollsters and pundits dismissed as a newcomer, a populist, and a man whose Asian ancestry put him well beyond the pale of realistic possibility. On June 10, Fujimori trounced Vargas Llosa by more than 15 percentage points.
When inaugurated on Peruvian Independence Day--July 28--Fujimori was the first politician of Japanese descent to be elected chief executive of a nation other than Japan in modern times. Fujimori also celebrated his fifty-second birthday on July 28, endowing him with an aura one might bestow on an American "born on the Fourth of July."
Fujimori's party, Change 90, emerged a few weeks before the April election just as meteorically as its leader, who had little political experience. While Vargas Llosa had been effectively running for the office for the past two years, and until March 1990, was the acknowledged front runner, Fujimori's campaign didn't even register seriously among the pollsters until March. When the first round of voting was over April 8, only a few percentage points separated Vargas Llosa from Fujimori and the landslide was on. Since no candidate gained a majority, a second round runoff was scheduled.
By early June it was clear that Fujimori was going to sweep away the world-renowned Vargas Llosa, a member of that class of white Creoles, descendants of conquistadors and their lordly successors, who had governed Peru for more than four hundred years.
In fact, race became one of the major issues in the election. Peru, over 85 percent mestizo and Indian, went for Fujimori, who portrayed himself as one of the newest members of the long suffering non-white majority in Peru.
Only Fujimori promised
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