Life Among the Pirates

2.

In July, a few weeks before the start of the annual Lima book fair, I went to see Germán Coronado, the director of Peisa, one of the last independent publishing houses still functioning in Peru. It was an odd day in the city: a heavy drizzle fell from a textureless, milky­grey sky, so thick it could almost be called rain. The precipitation had caught Limeños unprepared. Traffic in this desert city had gone from merely chaotic to frankly terrifying. Cars slid haphazardly along the roads and pedestrians were spooked.

Coronado is among those who have fought the hardest to protect the rights of authors in Peru, and he has paid a high price for his efforts. Founded in 1968, Peisa once published Mario Vargas Llosa and Alfredo Bryce Echenique in Peru – our country’s two bestselling and most respected novelists – and by rights, Coronado should be wealthy. He is not. The day I met him, he looked haggard and worn, unshaven, with the pallor of a man who hadn’t been outside in weeks. His office, on the ninth floor of an inelegant building in San Isidro, was cramped and narrow. The windows offered a view of the hills, but that afternoon he had the shades pulled down. I had the sense he hadn’t raised them in months.

Coronado’s thesis was simple. While book piracy has always existed in Peru, for years it was small­scale, serving primarily the needs of university students. He recalled shopping for second­hand books in the Plaza Francia when he was a student at San Marcos, a prestigious public university in Lima, the oldest institute of higher learning in the Americas. Then came the 1980s, years of general disorder. The nation barely survived the trials of that decade: a civil war claimed 70,000 lives before it ended and the economy all but collapsed. By 1990, hyperinflation had reached an annual rate of 7,649 per cent and the middle class had been nearly wiped out. Thousands of Peruvians emigrated in search of a better life in the United States, Europe or richer neighbouring countries like Chile and Argentina. Even in this dire context, Peisa managed, but things were about to get worse. According to Coronado, the first sign of doom came in 1988, in the final years of Alan García’s disastrous first term as president, when he said in an interview that, given the economic crisis, it didn’t make sense for parents to buy original school books for their children – the president, in other words, advocating piracy.

Then Peisa’s star author, novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, entered politics: he ran for president in 1990, receiving the most votes in the first round, before eventually losing to Alberto Fujimori. As Coronado tells it, Vargas Llosa lay low after his defeat, but in April 1992, when President Fujimori dissolved Congress and declared that the constitution would be rewritten, he could no longer keep quiet. To his credit, Vargas Llosa correctly identified Fujimori as a dictator and a menace at a time when many other observers were still ambivalent. In his weekly column in El País, he denounced Fujimori’s coup as an attack on democracy and called for a worldwide embargo on Peru. The media allied with (or bought by, depending on your interpretation) Fujimori struck back, initiating a ruthless and coordinated campaign of character assassination against Peru’s most accomplished novelist. He was attacked and ridiculed, all but declared an enemy of the state. For Fujimori’s allies, it was simple: if Vargas Llosa wanted an embargo on Peru, then Peru should embargo him right back.