Life Among the Pirates

For Coronado, this marked the beginning of a grave shift. Over the next few years, book piracy became a project of state. As Peru emerged from war, Fujimori opened up the economy to imports, new presses arrived and overnight the country was flooded with cheap, fifty­cent newspapers whose editorial content was quite literally dictated by the government. Coronado believes this same machinery was used to grow the book­piracy industry. As publisher of Fujimori’s most vociferous and internationally prestigious critic, Coronado too became a target. His brother­in­law, financial head of Peisa, was kidnapped in a dramatic case that was never solved. ‘Three months of hell’ was how Coronado described the ordeal to me, and he suspects it was a reprisal for publishing books the government didn’t appreciate. Meanwhile, his core business was under economic assault. The pirates were everywhere, sprouting like mould all over the city. Coronado estimates his losses at around 600,000 US dollars a year in the 1990s. ‘We were very quickly transformed from a successful business to a one in crisis, overwhelmed by debt.’ Peisa filed more than 250 lawsuits in those years against book counterfeiters. They hired private investigators, sent the police detailed lists of pirates, their names and aliases, physical descriptions, home addresses, suspected locations of presses, and known points of sale. As we spoke, he pulled up the files on his desktop – letters, complaints, lists, accusations.

‘And after all that effort?’ I asked.

‘There’s not a single person in jail for book piracy in Peru,’ Coronado said. ‘Not one.’

Fujimori’s corrupt regime was eventually toppled, but the pirates were here to stay. By 2001, the Peruvian publishing industry was in freefall. Book production had declined by twenty­eight per cent in only four years and the industry had shed forty per cent of its workers. This was due in large part to the competition from the pirates. Fake copies of Vargas Llosa’s 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat were available on the streets of Lima the same day it was published, and there would eventually be seven different unauthorized editions. How could an honest publisher compete?

I presented the usual arguments in defence of piracy: principally, inescapable poverty and the relatively high cost of books.

For Coronado, these arguments neglected a very important fact: the street­level vendors tend to congregate in the same middle­ and upper­class neighbourhoods where you find the bookstores. Their clients are people with money. Coronado could do little to mask his disgust. ‘It’s a cultural problem. The same people who would never consider buying fake whisky think nothing of buying a pirated book. There’s no respect for intellectual production in this country.’

After the fall of Fujimori, some publishing houses, in desperation, tried appeasement. Perhaps they had been seduced by the romantic idea that the pirates were simple, poor merchants taking culture to the masses. Or perhaps they felt they had no other choice. A movement began within the CPL to organize the thousands of informal booksellers, the men and women working the street corners, and provide them with authorized editions at lower prices. Coronado has nothing but disdain for this idea, and for ‘the wise, the illuminated’ publishers who believed in what he derisively called ‘the splendour of piracy’.

Vargas Llosa, with his new publishing house, was invited to Amazonas, the largest informal book market in Latin America, to give a reading. It was a media spectacle – the return of the exile. The publisher dropped the price of the book for the event. The informal booksellers toasted our internationally prestigious writer. They posed for pictures with their famous guest and, once the cameras had gone, went back to selling pirated editions.

‘Those people can’t be trusted,’ Coronado said.

I mentioned that I would be keeping an eye out for my new book – I was publishing a collection of stories that month to coincide with the book fair, and I wondered aloud if the pirates would get to it before I returned to the United States in mid­August.

He smirked and shook his head. ‘Will you be pirated?’ the editor asked. ‘I can guarantee it.’