Guadalajara, Mexico – One of Peru’s top novelists says the political choice he and his compatriots have facing next year’s presidential election is one between bad and worse.
“Again we have to choose between AIDS and terminal cancer,” Alfredo Bryce Echenique told EFE here, where he is taking part in the International Book Fair of Guadalajara, the premier literary event in the Spanish-speaking world.
The 66-year-old writer, his nation’s most internationally renowned author after Mario Vargas Llosa, was talking about the April 2006 presidential contest in Peru.
Bryce Echenique pointed to polls that show two populists – retired army Col. Ollanta Humala and former President Alan Garcia – in the lead, and to the shadow cast over the entire process by another ex-head of state, Alberto Fujimori, who remains jailed in Chile pending possible extradition to Peru for trial on charges of corruption and dispatching death squads to kill opponents.
“The three of them are populists and populism is one of the worst evils, almost as bad as militarism and dictatorship in Latin America,” said the author of “Un mundo para Julius,” which became an instant classic upon its publication in 1970.
Bryce Echenique had especially harsh words for Humala, who promises to champion the cause of Peru’s generally marginalized Indians, saying the former officer is creating “a racist movement, appealing to the worst instincts of Peruvian society.”
Ollanta Humala, who with his brother Antauro led a brief uprising against then-President Fujimori in October 2000, leads the Peruvian Nationalist Movement, which propounds an volatile mix of nostalgia for the Inca Empire, xenophobia, homophobia and denunciations of corruption.
“I believe it’s necessary to warn Peruvians that before anything else, Humala is a military man, and that he will begin a brutal spending spree on armaments and the poor won’t see a cent,” said Bryce Echenique.
“I believe I have to say all this to see if it can reach Peruvians and open their eyes,” he continued. “It is a prospect that alarms writers and artists.”
He said that he has heard similar concerns expressed about the Peruvian election from journalists during both formal interviews and friendly chats at the book event in Guadalajara.
In “our incomplete civil societies,” Bryce Echenique said, “it is still the artist and writer who at times must occupy the space that ought to be filled by an elder statesman.”
He said that in Latin America, authors and intellectuals “continue having significant weight” in an environment where institutions are often weak and corrupt.
Born into a prosperous banking family in Lima, Bryce Echenique counts among his ancestors a Peruvian president and the last Spanish viceroy of the territory.
“The countries of Latin America still have not produced an original economic or political discourse,” the novelist said. “We clumsily copy the French Constitution, the French civil code, the Anglo-Saxon parliamentary system. This is surrealism. It does not correspond at all to what one sees on the streets. In other words, education is free and obligatory for all Peruvians, but if there are no schools nor teachers, it’s surrealism.”
In Bryce Echenique’s view, it was in the realm of literature that Latin America produced its first mature, homegrown discourse.
“That’s because it prevailed on the entire world after a long process of preparation and creation of the Latin American novel, which passed through (Leopoldo) Lugones, the founders, up until reaching the writers of the ‘boom’,” he said, alluding in the last instance to figures such as Vargas Llosa and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Bryce Echenique’s latest book is “Permiso para sentir” (Permission to feel), the second – but not the last – volume of what he calls an “anti-memoir.”
Winner of the 2002 Planeta Prize for his novel “El huerto de mi amada” (My Beloved’s Garden), he says the future of Latin American literature is safe in the hands of the current crop of peripatetic young writers.
“I think that travel is immensely enriching to the sources (of creativity), and clarifying and demythologizing,” Bryce Echenique said.
Given that he has spent 34 of his 66 years outside Peru, it is not surprising to hear him describe travel as “part of the quintessence” of the Latin American.
