Peruvian Vote Seems Too Close to Call; Novelist Links Campaign to Quake Aid : South America: Novelist Vargas Llosa draws even with agronomist Fujimori in Sunday’s presidential race.

Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa this week brought his campaign into the ruins of a deadly earthquake and found the political aftershocks to be as divisive as the presidential race itself.

Some people cheered him as his horn-honking caravan passed by the rubble of collapsed adobe-brick homes and families huddled under plastic sheeting in the narrow streets. They applauded his center-right coalition, the Democratic Front, for providing some of the first relief aid to the ravaged jungle region.

But other residents of Rioja and nearby smaller towns grumbled that the candidate was exploiting their suffering.

There was no lack of signs of the polarization that has split Peru on the road to Sunday’s election, in which, polls show, Vargas Llosa has all but drawn even with centrist front-runner Alberto Fujimori, a little-known agronomist and political novice who portrays himself as a champion of the downtrodden.

The earthquake struck at 9:30 p.m. on May 29, killing about 60 people and causing immense damage to the poorly built houses in this remote farming area northeast of Lima. More than a week later, most victims are still fending for themselves, with little evidence of organized assistance.

The greatest need now is shelter. Repeated aftershocks threaten the cracked, weakened structures, so families camp in the streets or in their yards rather than stay indoors, despite the frequent jungle downpours. That has raised concern about respiratory and other infections. Residents are crying out for tents and, more important, for aid that will allow them to rebuild more safely.

Although the earthquake was a magnitude 6.3, seismologists note that similar quakes in developed countries cause far less damage because of better construction methods and materials.

Vargas Llosa’s principal objective was to deliver an enormous tent, designed to provide shelter for 500 people, to the town of Soritor, about 20 miles southeast of Rioja. But the tent itself became a symbol of the divisions bedeviling this poor country of 22 million.

It arrived Tuesday, a day before the candidate, aboard a 30-year-old Electra cargo plane, at the airport in Rioja, a city of 27,000 where well over half the homes have been damaged beyond repair.

Many Rioja residents were angry that the $25,000 tent, donated by one of the companies that endorse Vargas Llosa’s campaign, was destined for Soritor, a much smaller town whose suffering has been better publicized.

The tent was trucked from the airport to Soritor, but the steel poles that were to form its frame were dumped on the central plaza in Rioja. A crowd quickly formed, demanding that the tent stay in Rioja. Security police impounded the steel tubes, saying they could not be removed from the town square without permission. Arguments flared through the evening in the plaza, where several families are living in small tents and impromptu plastic shelters facing the ruined Roman Catholic church and the lopsided town hall.

Only the next day, shortly before Vargas Llosa’s small chartered plane landed, did the police agree to release the poles, and then only after Mayor Aurora Torrejon and two witnesses signed a written order handing them over to her counterpart in Soritor.

Later Wednesday, after delivering two speeches in Rioja and Soritor, Vargas Llosa visited a schoolyard where the 66-by-82 foot tent was being erected.

Designed as a permanent structure that can serve later as a community center, the tent was spread out over a field near several wrecked houses. In the red and white of the Peruvian flag, it bore the Spanish initials of the Solidarity Action Program, PAS, and also said in black letters 20 feet across “Mario Vargas Llosa” adorned with the Democratic Front’s ballot symbol.

That kind of electioneering, and the front’s campaign handbills pasted on the boxes of aid, were cause for some bitterness.

Maria Lenith Herrera, a school supervisor working in the civil defense program in Soritor, said: “The aid is welcome. The unfortunate thing is . . . that they are taking advantage of this situation for their own purposes.”

The day after the earthquake, the first aid to arrive was from the three-party coalition, known as Fredemo, accompanied personally by Vargas Llosa’s wife, Patricia, and his ally in the front, former President Fernando Belaunde Terry of the Popular Action Party.

Answering Fujimori’s charges that Fredemo represents the white and wealthy, Vargas Llosa has emphasized the PAS role in assisting the needy. He also has sought to show that he already has a solid, extensive organization, able to respond concretely to Peru’s needs, while Fujimori is hurriedly trying to put a team together.

Fujimori has not involved himself in the earthquake beyond expressing condolences to the victims.

The shipment from Fredemo on Tuesday, the second since the quake a week earlier, included two pallets of donated blankets and powdered milk as well as the huge tent, filling about one-fourth of the plane.

Deputy Rioja Mayor Astolvo Paredes complained angrily that the nearby city of Moyobamba had suffered little damage but was receiving more aid than Rioja, where the suffering was much greater.

“The help that is being received is going to those who have the most political muscle,” he said. He estimated that about 60,000 people are homeless in Rioja Province, in 46 villages in a 40-mile-long belt of destruction in the Upper Mayo River Valley along the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains.

Torrejon, the Rioja mayor elected on a Fredemo ticket in November, said the central government, run by the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), still has not met her demand that the region be declared an emergency zone and therefore eligible for special relief aid.

The government, however, is now setting up an emergency branch of the Materials Bank, which provides up to $730 in low-interest loans for housing construction, said Edgar Huamani, who was sent to Rioja by the Housing Ministry. He denied Torrejon’s criticism that the bank, often seen as an arm of the APRA party, was refusing to work with the local Fredemo-dominated council. Most elements of APRA, which lost out in the first round of presidential voting, now support Fujimori.

Religion, too, has been politicized in the earthquake aftermath. Several residents said the growing evangelical Protestant churches in Rioja have been exploiting the earthquake to recruit new members.

“They are saying, ‘We are close to the end of the world, and more quakes will come if people don’t get baptized quickly,’ ” said Father Cristian Alejandria, a Roman Catholic priest in Rioja. “Last night, they were in the central square, using loudspeakers, speaking of the earthquake. They say it is a curse of God, a punishment.”

Fujimori, a Catholic, has been under attack by Vargas Llosa’s campaign for his association with evangelicals, who made up more than a fourth of the candidates for Congress for Fujimori’s Cambio 90 (Change 90) party. The Catholic Church has openly accused some evangelicals of politicizing religion and attacking Catholic practices.

Vargas Llosa, an agnostic, complains that Fujimori is polarizing Peru by encouraging sects that are “foreign to Peru’s traditions.” Fujimori notes that he is a good Catholic, unlike his opponent.

The earthquake victims, meanwhile, are trying to cope, and nervously enduring aftershocks that sometimes tumble broken-backed houses that withstood the first quake. Most are oblivious to the political wrangling and welcome the assistance, whatever the source. Others are still hoping for help.

“They have given us nothing,” said Saul Vaca as he sifted through the dust of his fallen adobe house in Rioja. He and his wife and five children huddle at night under plastic strung across sticks in the ruins. “I want to rebuild, but they don’t give us anything.”