The Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa died on Sunday, April 13, 2025, At 89 years in the capital of Peru, where he lived in the last months almost retired after a prolific career that led him to the cusp of Latin American letters.
Universal writer from the complex Peruvian reality, Vargas Llosa was part of the so -called regional ‘boom’ along with other greats such as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Argentine Julio Cortázar or the Mexicans Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo.
In October 2019, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa presented in Madrid, Spain, his novel RECIOUS TIMES, A new dive in Latin American history to address the coup in Guatemala in the mid -1950s, which marked the future of the region for decades.
Mixing history and fiction, as in The goat party (2000) with which he shares characters, the bare book “The most outdated and retrograde face of a Latin America” of dictatorships that fortunately “disappears,” he said at a press conference.
That 2010 Nobel Prize novel, for sale since October 2019 in Latin America, Spain and the United States, uses cross stories to compose the years around the coup against Jacobo Affenz in 1954.
Affenz was a democratically elected president who sought to modernize Guatemala, but in full cold war.
He was threatened
The powerful American company United Fruit was threatened by its social reforms, and was accused of being a Soviet agent for Washington, who used the CIA to overthrow it.
A serious mistake, in the opinion of Vargas Llosa, since it was “a nerve act” that reverberated throughout Latin America and that conditioned it for decades.
Half a century of delay
The fall of Arbenz led to a negative image of the United States and “led many young Latin Americans, among them, (…) to skim in democracy and think of socialism, in communist paradise, in the revolution in the manner of the Cubans, and opened a terrible period of killings and terrorism” in the region, he said.
“If the United States instead of overthrowing Affenz would have supported the reforms (…) Probably another would be the history of Latin America, Fidel Castro probably would not have been radicalized and returned communist,” nor the Che Guevara, who, in Guatemala at that time, took refuge in the Argentine embassy when the “anti -communist fever” unleashed.
“That delayed us half a century,” said the 83 -year -old Peruvian writer, who in his youth was seduced by the Cuban revolution, but then denied her and for decades he has been a burning defender of liberal democracies.
Anyway, the author of the city and dogs and conversation in the cathedral clarified that his new book “is a novel” and not “a history book.”
“I start investigating to lie with knowledge of cause, to be able to create, fantasize from real material,” said Vargas Llosa, who should have documented “the flavors, colors” and the voseo in speaking of the Guatemalans.
“Don’t fuck in one day”
“A country, except for exceptional cases, do not fuck in one day” and Latin American countries “have lived a long process in which they have been losing opportunities,” said Vargas Llosa, which added: “Our responsibility in the failure of Latin America is gigantic.”
This was stated when presenting RECIOUS TIMES (Alfaguara).
“My impression is that, if the United States instead of overthrowing Affenz would have supported its reforms, it would probably be the history of Latin America,” since that operation radicalized Fidel Castro and made young people think of the “communist paradise”, in addition to giving way to a “terrible time of killings and terrorism” of which “fortunately” it has come out.
But this episode is not enough to change history because “a country does not fuck in one day,” said Vargas Llosa.
At a dinner
The Peruvian writer remembered journalists for more than an hour at Casa América in Madrid, how the idea of writing this novel that comes out simultaneously in 20 countries with a first run of 180 thousand copies arose.
It was at a dinner about three years in the Dominican Republic when an acquaintance told him that he had a story to tell him to write a novel something that, he remembered, made him think: “My God, another one, no!
But for the first time in his life, the story left him very intrigued: it was the involvement of General Trujillo -the Dominican dictator who starred in his novel The goat party– In the fall of Arbenz Guzmán and how he supported the military coup of Carlos Castillo Armas, for three years later to get involved in the murder of the latter.