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Life imitates SF
Sep. 18th, 2007 09:44 pm
About ten years ago I drove from Lima, Peru, 130km south to Cerro Azul on the Pan-American Highway. It's a small, run-down fishing village of makeshift homes and a long-derelict pier, a place popular with Lima families having a day trip to the coast. The woman I was seeing then still has family there, and I sincerely hope they're OK because I doubt there's much left of Cerro Azul now.
2007 books
Jun. 6th, 2007 01:50 pm
45) Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927
In 1714 a bridge in Peru collapses killing five people, a priest who witnesses the accident is compelled to ask why those five were chosen by God to die, and after looking into each of the victim's lives he draws his conclusions. It's a necessary book about the danger of trying to divine religious meaning from random events and why bad things happen to undeserving people, written in a slightly arcane historical style that doesn't make for fluid reading but does instead capture the time and place very well indeed. I came to this book because I'd read that it served as inspiration for John Hersey's excellent Hiroshima, though I didn't get as much out of it as I'd hoped, with the conclusions drawn seeming somehow vague and, well, inconclusive.
Sendero Luminoso
Oct. 14th, 2006 11:35 amI've had a passing fascination with Peruvian politics since around 1990. Like many I was first drawn in by the story of Abimael Guzmán's 'Shining Path' Maoist guerillas and successive governments' complete inability to deal with them. This seemed like a particularly un-South American story, certainly not unique in Latin America's wider struggle to accept or deny a foothold to communism but one in which Sendero Luminoso took Maoist purism to a very bloody extreme, a kind of early microcosm of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge without the eventual rise to the office of government. Needless to say Guzmán's brand of terrorism never attracted Peruvians, other than the highly impressionable or those already disposed to murderously anti-social behaviour.
Guzmán is in the news again, after his life sentence by a secret military court was overturned in 2003 but was yesterday reinstated at a retrial. There are at least 70,000 deaths that can be laid at his feet.
The best writing on the utterly labyrinthine world of Peruvian politics I have found so far has been the right-leaning author Mario Vargas Llosa's autobiographical A Fish in the Water, written after his failed 1990 bid for the Peruvian presidency. In it he was understandably very disparaging towards Alan García under whose turbulent government hyperinflation wrecked the country. García fled into exile in Colombia under much suspicion of corruption but has somehow returned to democratically reclaim the presidency earlier this year. Hugo Chavéz has publically called him a thief. I was most optimistic for Peruvians under the government of Alejandro Toledo, who rose to power in 2001 on a wave of leftist, roots-based populism – Alberto Fujimori had mysteriously absconded to Japan in 2000, from where he resigned by sending a fax. Fujimori was probably never more than a puppet for García, having had absolutely no political experience prior to his inexplicable running for the Peruvian presidency, yet democratically winning. The notable things that could be said for his government was that he restored some economic stability, he introduced the notorious "self-coup" as a way of staying in power, and that under his tenure Abimael Guzmán was finally captured after so many years of pointless, ideologically-driven murder.
Good writing on Sendero Luminoso is hard to find. The best I have found so far was the excellent long essay 'In Pursuit of Guzmán' by Nicholas Shakespeare, which I have only seen published in the 1991 collection The Best of Granta Travel. I've found very little else other than magazine articles. I was disappointed Matthew Parris didn't give nearly enough space to the subject in his Peruvian travelogue Inca-Cola. There is also The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru by Gustavo Gorriti which sounds very dry and academic, but what it may need to take it into the far more interesting realm of personal stories might be the journalistic approach of Nicholas Shakespeare, someone who clearly knows and understands Peru better than most.
Guzmán is in the news again, after his life sentence by a secret military court was overturned in 2003 but was yesterday reinstated at a retrial. There are at least 70,000 deaths that can be laid at his feet.
The best writing on the utterly labyrinthine world of Peruvian politics I have found so far has been the right-leaning author Mario Vargas Llosa's autobiographical A Fish in the Water, written after his failed 1990 bid for the Peruvian presidency. In it he was understandably very disparaging towards Alan García under whose turbulent government hyperinflation wrecked the country. García fled into exile in Colombia under much suspicion of corruption but has somehow returned to democratically reclaim the presidency earlier this year. Hugo Chavéz has publically called him a thief. I was most optimistic for Peruvians under the government of Alejandro Toledo, who rose to power in 2001 on a wave of leftist, roots-based populism – Alberto Fujimori had mysteriously absconded to Japan in 2000, from where he resigned by sending a fax. Fujimori was probably never more than a puppet for García, having had absolutely no political experience prior to his inexplicable running for the Peruvian presidency, yet democratically winning. The notable things that could be said for his government was that he restored some economic stability, he introduced the notorious "self-coup" as a way of staying in power, and that under his tenure Abimael Guzmán was finally captured after so many years of pointless, ideologically-driven murder.
Good writing on Sendero Luminoso is hard to find. The best I have found so far was the excellent long essay 'In Pursuit of Guzmán' by Nicholas Shakespeare, which I have only seen published in the 1991 collection The Best of Granta Travel. I've found very little else other than magazine articles. I was disappointed Matthew Parris didn't give nearly enough space to the subject in his Peruvian travelogue Inca-Cola. There is also The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru by Gustavo Gorriti which sounds very dry and academic, but what it may need to take it into the far more interesting realm of personal stories might be the journalistic approach of Nicholas Shakespeare, someone who clearly knows and understands Peru better than most.