COLUMN ONE : Penning His Page in History : Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has turned from literature to presidential politics. It’s a campaign of truly novelistic proportions.

A town called “Bad Raincoat,” in the middle of a desert where it never rains, seems a proper setting to begin this heroically improbable tale.

A couple of dozen skeptical, tawny faces gather to hear the candidate deliver his fervent message from the trunk of a car over a scratchy loudspeaker in the dusty square:

“The truth of our time is one of freedom over totalitarianism, of free markets over collectivism. . . . Our goal is modernization, without hate, without violence. . . . Marxism and statism have only brought poverty and dictatorship.”

The applause, tepid and forced at first, grows.

If this were one of his novels, Mario Vargas Llosa might have written:

Can it be that the famous novelist with the aquiline nose and penetrating gaze, in the prime of life, has abandoned his chosen and lucrative vocation for his country? Is this one-time leftist on his way to winning the presidency of Peru with a program of “people’s capitalism?” Does he really want to govern Latin America’s least governable country?

Vargas Llosa is well aware that his presidential campaign resembles the soap opera radio scripts that he wove into his autobiographical 1977 novel, “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.”

Yet he has found little cause for humor lately. His Peru has never fallen so low (2,775% inflation last year), never been so violent (17,500 dead in the 1980s in a gruesome leftist guerrilla war).

With the same intensity that made him one of Latin America’s finest writers, he now is immersing himself in the world of politics, rid of the doubts that once plagued him. He leads his nearest opponent, a gentlemanly leftist nicknamed “Beanie,” by a more than 2-1 margin, and he may even win in the first-round ballot on April 8.

If he wins, he will join an array of new Latin American presidents who believe that free-market liberalism must supplant left- and right-wing state domination to bring the region into the modern economic world. From Mexico to Nicaragua to Argentina to Chile, the trend is taking hold.

But Peru is arguably the worst-case scenario for such experiments, with its virulent Maoist rebels, drug trafficking, crime and hyper-inflation. Vargas Llosa’s critics wonder if his own radical purity may end up defeating him. Many, though, invest their hopes in a man who, dismissed at first as a naive outsider, is proving adept with the levers of power.

“Literature is more permanent than political activity; a writer cannot put politics and literature on an equal footing, because if he does, he is surely going to fail as a writer and perhaps as a politician.”

--Vargas Llosa in a 1986 interview

Television and radio are the way to reach voters in Peru, with its scattered, isolated towns and dangerous roads (terrorists, bad drivers, decrepit cars and treacherous potholes, perhaps in that order). Vargas Llosa’s three-party alliance, well-financed by the business community, is deluging the airwaves with spots.

Yet he also spends several days each week doing old-fashioned stumping. On a recent four-day swing to northern coastal Peru, he made 27 campaign appearances. Some of the obscure villages had appeared in his own novels, places he had traipsed through in years of obsessive research to understand Peru’s history or to capture its current gritty reality.

Vargas Llosa, graying but still slender and handsome at 54, knows it is necessary to be seen among the people, kissing babies and wearing hard hats. But he also admits that he wants to go through the rituals, to baptize himself politically and, characteristically, to do nothing halfway.

“It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that the only thing I wanted to be in life was a writer (and) that the only way to be one was to devote oneself heart and soul to literature.”

--Recollections at age 19,

from “Aunt Julia”

This trip was among the most trying of the campaign; it brought him into “the solid north,” heartland of the rival American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. APRA, the party of besieged President Alan Garcia, is known for giving hostile receptions to its foes.

A man who has sparred intellectually with rivals throughout his life handled his hecklers with ease. “Listen to me first, and then applaud or whistle at me. But listen,” Vargas Llosa said. “Ideas are fought with ideas, not with shouting. Peru already has too much violence, too much intolerance, too much fanaticism.”

He also displayed the requisite machismo for rough-and-tumble Latin politics. He suggested to those who made obscene gestures questioning his manhood that they ought not cast the first stone. He described Garcia’s policies with a word gently translatable as “crappy.”

He seemed energized as each exhausting day ended, past midnight, at a dinner table with family members and friends, which is often the same thing. Vargas Llosa’s first wife, Julia, was his aunt by marriage. His second wife, Patricia, a central figure in the campaign, is his cousin by blood. His son, Alvaro, is his press officer. Cousins Frederick Cooper and Lucho Llosa help out.

“I was the hope of the tribe. It was true: That cancerous family of mine had every expectation that I’d be a millionaire someday, or at the very least president of the republic.”

--”Aunt Julia”

If the campaign sometimes feels like it is run from the kitchen, that is because Vargas Llosa’s house in Lima’s artist neighborhood of Barranco is the virtual headquarters. But that disguises the fax-machine sophistication used to elucidate the theme: “Mario Vargas Llosa, the Great Change.”

The phrase applies as much to his own odyssey as to the one he envisions for his country.

From his days as a Communist cell member at San Marcos University in Lima, he has made a steady transition through social-democratic centrism to a total belief in individual initiative without state domination, which he calls classical liberalism.

In the vanguard of the region’s “Boom” generation of talented young writers of the 1960s, he began to break with the left in 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the growing repression in Cuba.

“Cuba has a socialism that I could get to know in my own language. . . . I could live close up what was . . . let’s call it the socialist truth, a truth that was very different from the myth, from the illusion. In this way there was a process of profound disenchantment.”

--Interview, February, 1990

The personal changes deepened through the ‘60s and ‘70s, mostly spent abroad. His growing doubts helped produce his richest, most intricate works, using stories within stories and potent narrative skills in novels such as “The Green House” and “Conversation in the Cathedral.”

He paid for his rebellion. Friends and colleagues chastised him as a sellout, and some critics say he has remained embittered and combative ever since. (He punched out Colombia’s Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an ex-friend, in Mexico City in 1976).

In the ‘80s, he became a full philosophical convert, particularly after discovering the work of Hernando de Soto, whose work on the black-market economy in Lima detailed the entrepreneurial skills of poor squatters and street vendors and the costs of the suffocating state bureaucracy and privileges for those suckling from the state--through subsidies, fat contracts and import protection.

In July, 1987, when President Garcia announced a plan to nationalize Peru’s banks, Vargas Llosa forged a national protest campaign that gave birth to his candidacy.

“He wasn’t defending the banks, but a concept,” said Sen. Javier Silva Rueta, a friend since their childhood and a character in the writer’s books. “He perceived that for a government . . . which already controlled so much to control the banks, too, was one step before totalitarianism.”

The question pursuing Vargas Llosa now is how he can combat the privileges of Peru’s elite when the party he founded, called Libertad (Freedom), is allied with two Old Guard rightist parties: Popular Action, run by former President Fernando Belaunde Terry, and the Popular Christian Party of Luis Bedoya Reyes.

Vargas Llosa quit the race last July when the two veteran leaders balked at forming a single list of candidates for municipal elections in November. He stormed off to Europe, then re-entered the campaign after they accepted his demands. It was then that his voter share soared, belying predictions that he would be seen as irresolute.

“He is increasingly perceived as a leader,” said pollster Alfredo Torres. “He also has learned not to be manipulated. His resignation helped him. It showed people he is not a slave to Bedoya and Belaunde. He showed his independence, which is what people want.”

Vargas Llosa is fighting to explain that his program will serve the poor by giving them a space in a newly accessible system. He knows there are doubts that he can deliver. At a meeting in the northern city of Piura, he said:

“We don’t want an emotional, passionate vote, but a lucid, reasoned vote. If we get it, we will have the political strength to take on the interests that are going to resist these changes.”

Libertad organizer Juan Camminati said the message is getting through: 70% of the party’s 8,000 official members in Piura are from the “young towns,” a euphemism for urban slums.

“This is a man who married his own cousin, who doesn’t believe in God, who wants to take away free education and break up the unions. Those who are with Mario Vargas Llosa are those who have enriched themselves all these years at the hands of the workers. We won’t let the rich plunder Peru again.”

--Opponent interviewed on APRA-run

radio station in Trujillo

“I didn’t leave my writing desk to join this campaign to help the few,” he told sugar growers, fighting back at such charges. “I did it because of the pain I feel at seeing what the corruption and ineptitude have done to Peru. That is why I am in politics: to let the able, the honest, run this country.”

And again: “Do you believe that a writer, who owes everything to education and who earned his living from words, would tolerate taking away this right from the poor?”

“No!” the people shouted back.

If Vargas Llosa risks being undermined by his own right-wing followers, his foes ask, why attack so stridently Peru’s large legal left, which plays a key role in the struggle against the Maoist guerrillas?

“He is so ideologized, so visceral in his attitude toward the left,” said Abelardo Oquendo, a literary critic who once was his closest friend. “The dominant tendency of Libertad is too radical. It is strongly intolerant, almost arrogant. . . . It is a bit of ‘He who is not with me is against me.’

“He was a man of the left, and there is no worse enemy for the left than one who was resented by the left. It created antibodies within him. . . . He is very inflexible, not given to pardoning or forgetting. He is very passionate, very temperamental. His affections are profound, and his disaffections also run very deep.”

De Soto also has broken with Vargas Llosa, believing him too closely identified with the right. “It may be he wants to be dogmatic and win the elections as a decisive man and then turn around and embrace everyone,” De Soto said. “But he has been so bloody in his language that it’s going to be difficult later on to kiss any of them on the mouth.”

“I think that people believe they’re going to get a literary Pinochet,” said a senior Western diplomat, despite Vargas Llosa’s ardent belief in political freedom and his criticism of Chile’s right-wing leader, Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

“(But) Vargas Llosa is a man who cares about the social impact of his programs,” the diplomat said. “If in 60 days he doesn’t solve it, he may adapt his policies. He is a very independent man.” Vargas Llosa travels in an armor-plated, four-wheel-drive vehicle with plainclothes bodyguards in uniform sunglasses who try to maintain a discreet vigilance at rallies alongside less subtle local police. The schedule is confidential, the visits announced at the last moment. Vargas Llosa shrugs off the hazards: “These days, to be Peruvian is to live dangerously.”

The only danger on this trip proved to be a band of APRA “buffalo,” who stoned four press cars at the end of the dozen-car caravan after an uneventful speech, breaking some windows and scratching the cheek of a British reporter.

“The election campaign took a sinister turn this afternoon. . . . One foreign journalist . . . was gravely wounded and had to be rushed to the city for treatment. . . . The attack was truly savage . . . destroying all the cars except that carrying the candidate.”

--Vargas Llosa press release, Feb. 15

When the less dramatic truth emerged--a fleck of glass had drawn one spot of blood on a British reporter’s cheek--the leading magazine Caretas chided the novice campaign team for exaggerating and for inflaming tempers in a tense country.

His shirt drenched with sweat, Vargas Llosa strode among the poor of the Micaela slum of Piura in near 100-degree heat under a midday sun, in the 24th appearance in four days. With the resolve of a missionary and the cadence of an old pol, he shook his fist and preached his message, without notes, as if for the first time.

“Our country is almost destroyed by privileges and injustice and discrimination. Peru has political freedom, but we also need economic freedom. That is something we have never had in Peru.”

Then he posed comfortably with the slum’s young beauty queen for a photo. And the people cheered.