There have been two powers operating Guatemala after the Second World War, and solely one in all them was the authorities. The different, an American company referred to as the United Fruit Company, was identified inside the nation as the Octopus, as a result of it had tentacles all over the place. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, and it managed the nation’s solely Atlantic port, nearly each mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole phone and telegraph services. U.S. State Department officers had siblings in the higher ranks of the firm. Senators held inventory. Running United Fruit’s publicity division, in New York, was a legendary adman who claimed to have a listing of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and name. They fashioned, in his phrases, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the U.S., to say nothing of the international locations underneath American sway.
By 1952, the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was combating a battle he couldn’t win. He was making an attempt to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its huge holdings. Not solely had the firm been exempt for many years—it had additionally secured a assure that it will by no means have to pay its staff greater than fifty cents a day. To deal with the nation’s rampant inequalities, together with its feudal labor system, Árbenz handed an agrarian reform legislation to convert unused personal land into smaller plots for peasants. A average institutionalist, he argued that the legislation mirrored his capitalist bona fides. Weren’t monopolies thought of anathema in the U.S., too?
In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying marketing campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the U.S. authorities that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who wanted to be overthrown. It was the begin of the Cold War, which made American officers into simple marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council mentioned, in 1953. Over the following 12 months, the C.I.A. and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” drive towards the authorities. They finally landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan navy officer with darkish, diminutive options and a toothbrush mustache, who got here throughout as flighty and dim. (“He looked like he had been packaged by Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator mentioned at the time.) His chief qualification was his willingness to do no matter the Americans informed him. In June, 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the U.S. Ambassador, he was rewarded with the Presidency. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, however not earlier than Castillo Armas compelled him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the airplane.
The 1954 C.I.A. coup and its aftermath are the topic of “Harsh Times” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a brand new novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, which has been translated by Adrian Nathan West. At eighty-five, Vargas Llosa is now not only a man of letters however a pundit, with a syndicated column, and his pronouncements on politics generate their very own information—in Peru, in his adopted house of Spain, and throughout Latin America. The writer has all the time been excited about the lures and predations of energy. Of the practically twenty novels to his identify, a few of his most memorable—“Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969), “The War of the End of the World” (1981), “The Feast of the Goat” (2000)—are research of the psychological warfare wrought by politics. The man himself is not any stranger to lofty ambitions. After changing into a vocal critic of Peru’s left-wing populist President in the late nineteen-eighties, Vargas Llosa ran for the job, in 1990, and misplaced. His spouse at the time warned him that his motivations weren’t totally pure. “The moral obligation wasn’t the decisive factor,” she mentioned, as he gamely recounts in his memoir, “A Fish in the Water.” “It was the adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk. Of writing the great novel in real life.”
To the novelist and political aspirant, the occasions in Guatemala maintain an simple curiosity, and the historic report provides an in depth plotline. With the help of U.S. authorities cables dislodged by means of years of public-records requests, journalists and historians have been in a position to reconstruct the operation, from the roles of the State and Defense Departments and United Fruit (“Bitter Fruit,” by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer) to the machinations of the C.I.A. (“Secret History,” by Nick Cullather). But Vargas Llosa takes up a subplot that continues to be murky: the homicide of Castillo Armas, in 1957, and the half that Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, might have performed in it. The official narrative was all the time suspicious. One night time, in July of that 12 months, Castillo Armas was strolling along with his spouse by means of the courtyard of the Presidential palace when two photographs rang out, and he fell to the floor, killed on the spot. Authorities pinned the homicide on a supposedly left-leaning soldier inside the President’s safety element, who was discovered lifeless close to the scene, in an obvious suicide. According to one in all Trujillo’s biographers, a supply shut to the dictator as soon as mentioned, “The affair of Castillo Armas is one of those mysteries that Trujillo took with him to the grave.” For Vargas Llosa, that brush of chance is the ebook’s animating spark.
Much of the novel is structured round Trujillo’s henchmen as they shut in on their quarry. There’s Johnny Abbes García, the malevolent, sex-crazed director of Trujillo’s intelligence providers, who stations himself at a resort in Guatemala City, courts Castillo Armas’s mistress (“Miss Guatemala”), and creeps into the President’s inside circle. His man on the inside, a member of the Guatemalan safety service, is a thug who respects Trujillo way over his personal boss. “He’s got a pair of balls as big as an elephant’s,” the man says of Trujillo. “We could use some of that around here.” Then there’s Mike Laporta, a C.I.A. man posing as a climatologist, who “couldn’t look more like a gringo if he tried.” In subsequent appearances, Laporta is referred to as the “strange gringo” and “the man whose name wasn’t Mike.”
Structuring the novel round the assassination is clearly meant to create suspense, however the result’s blended, partly as a result of Castillo Armas’s fall wasn’t as vital as his rise. From the day he took the Presidency, he was basically residing on borrowed time. He was a sort of strongman manqué, with no actual world view or angle of his personal—nothing that, in novelistic phrases, might cross for an uncommon inside life. American Cold War orthodoxy made it simple on such operators; all they’d to say to earn U.S. assist was that they hated Communists. Even by that normal, although, Castillo Armas was a little bit of a laggard. Vargas Llosa, having some enjoyable at his expense, writes, “He told his men this often, in every meeting where they gathered in his office: ‘The gringos’ Puritanism makes them dawdle, and when they finally do take action, they move at a snail’s pace.’ He didn’t really know what he meant by that, but he felt proud of himself for saying it, and he considered it a weighty, philosophical insult.”
More promising characters, like Árbenz, survive their attackers however endure in different methods. When Vargas Llosa introduces him, he’s simply gained the Presidency, in 1950, and desires a stiff drink: “His body was quivering, especially his hands. He had to clutch the glass in all ten fingers to keep it from falling and splashing whiskey all over his pants. You’re an alcoholic, he thought, scared. You’re killing yourself, you’ll wind up like your father.” Árbenz’s father, a Swiss pharmacist who immigrated to the western highlands of Guatemala, died by suicide when Árbenz was a toddler. The future President spent his early adolescence residing with kin, then enrolled in the nationwide navy academy, the place he excelled. He grew to become excited about politics solely after falling in love along with his future spouse, a Salvadoran aristocrat who embraced social-justice causes. There’s a wealthy inside life right here, and but one thing oblique and secondhand shrouds the novel’s depiction of Árbenz. His ideas are largely restatements of the public report (“They would have to change the feudal structures that reigned in the countryside”), and his analyses are the identical ones we’ve learn in the historical past books. (“In essence, his responsibility was to keep politics from driving the army apart and to prevent incitement to conspiracy: the eternal story of Central America.”) In truth, nearly all the characters in the novel endure from the identical downside. They act much less like individuals than spokespeople, channelling the voices of journalists or historians who’ve informed their story earlier than.
The result’s that “Harsh Times” covers lots of floor with out burrowing into the loam which may distinguish the ebook from a piece of nonfiction on the identical topic. There’s no scarcity of dramas throughout these years from which to select, and a few of the extra compelling plots get brief shrift. In the last days of Árbenz’s Presidency, overwhelmed by the inexorable conspiracy towards him, he jailed and attacked quite a few his political opponents. He left Guatemala a damaged man, and later drowned in a bath, in Mexico City, at the age of fifty-seven. Despite their alliance, the U.S. authorities and United Fruit finally got here into battle. The 1954 coup (code identify: Success) was the mannequin for the Bay of Pigs invasion, in Cuba, a spectacular failure. And, following Castillo Armas’s assassination, the nation lurched into greater than thirty years of civil struggle, with a loss of life toll that exceeded 200 thousand.
The largest downside with constructing the novel round the Castillo Armas plot is that it leads Vargas Llosa into rewriting “The Feast of the Goat,” the novel that he printed, twenty years in the past, about Trujillo. That ebook is a masterpiece, weaving collectively the story of the exiled daughter of a Trujillo loyalist with the plot of the three males who—in a mixture of rage, desperation, and spasmodic braveness—lastly assassinated the dictator, in 1961. “Harsh Times” isn’t flattered by the comparability, but it’s inconceivable to keep away from at each flip. The identical kinds of scenes and insights recur in pallid reprise: Trujillo’s affectedly stiff, machista bearing when he meets with underlings, Johnny Abbes’s baroque sociopathy. The construction of each books can also be strikingly comparable, with the assassination plot (and its aftermath) diced up and elegantly intercut from the completely different views of these concerned. In “The Feast of the Goat,” the assassins have to battle towards their very own internalized sense of powerlessness and worry, which evinces the binding psychic energy of Trujillo. Castillo Armas’s assassins, against this, play a bit half. Their motivations (together with Trujillo’s) are obscure to the finish, and, since we all know the President will die, it’s only a matter of ready for the last photographs to sound.
It’s potential that Vargas Llosa simply desires to spend extra time along with his previous characters. But it’s one factor to profile the deranged psychology of males in energy, and one other to delight in it. Take Abbes, whose life the novelist chronicles to the bitter finish. When the man isn’t plotting murders, he’s largely simply getting off. His fetish for cunnilingus is matched solely by Vargas Llosa’s compulsion to describe it time and again, in language that’s awkwardly blunt and stodgy. “You never change, do you?” Abbes’s inside man tells him. “Always the same thing: torture, women whose gash you licked or want to lick . . . . You know what you are? An obsessive. Not to say a pervert.”
Vargas Llosa has succeeded in a single respect: he’s managed to establish an neglected historic determine who very properly may very well be the idiosyncratic, enthralling character the novel wants. The downside is that she’s forged much less as a protagonist than as an object of lust for all the males in the ebook, together with Trujillo, Abbes, Castillo Armas, and even the puritanical C.I.A. agent. Her identify is Marta Borrero, higher referred to as Miss Guatemala. She meets Castillo Armas when she’s twenty, and he falls for her instantly, putting in her in her personal home with servants, guards, and different luxuries. Abbes and the C.I.A. man befriend her, hoping to suss out data—however, since Borrero is extremely devoted to Castillo Armas, and is way from naïve, her openness to them by no means makes complete sense. On the morning of the homicide, when she realizes that one thing is afoot, it’s too late to warn Castillo Armas with out implicating herself.
Minutes after the killing, one in all Trujillo’s males whisks her off to El Salvador, the place Johnny Abbes is ready. He’s had designs on her all alongside, one thing she seems to settle for now that she will be able to’t return to Guatemala. They grow to be lovers and transfer to the Dominican Republic, the place Borrero embarks on an illustrious profession as a right-wing political commentator, extolling the virtues of dictators throughout the area. One of her lodestars is Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the successor to Castillo Armas and the Americans’ new man in Guatemala; this final endorsement is made to look like a quid professional quo, in change for envelopes of cash given to her by “the man whose name wasn’t Mike.”
The finest a part of the novel is the epilogue, through which the writer presents an ostensibly nonfictional account of a latest go to he made to the U.S., the place the real-life mannequin for Borrero resides in unbothered previous age. Her precise identify stays out of the ebook, and Vargas Llosa situates her home between Washington and Virginia, “not very far from Langley.” But he’s following real-life coördinates, established by the analysis of two of his buddies, Soledad Álvarez and Tony Raful, Dominican writers who’re talked about in the ebook’s dedication. The novelist’s scrupulous vagueness flows from a writerly decorum that Borrero doesn’t seem to share. She retains a weblog, the place she plies her previous commerce, asking, “What would have happened to Latin America if it hadn’t been for the armies?” Each day, Vargas Llosa writes, “she renders them homage” whereas fulminating towards Communist cabals.
Almost immediately, as the pretense of fiction begins to fall away, “Harsh Times” comes alive. Borrero each is and isn’t what we would anticipate. Her home is a sort of aviary, thick with vegetation and stuffed with tropical birds in cages, and she or he treats her visitor with haughty, theatrical aptitude, dismissing Vargas Llosa’s notions as “preposterous fantasies.” Eventually, he turns into satisfied that “it will be impossible to get anything more of value from her,” and he will get up to depart. She accompanies him to the door. “Don’t bother sending me your book when it comes out, Mario,” she tells him. “I will absolutely not be reading it. But I warn you, my lawyers will.” At final, there’s a significant stress: the writer arrives armed with particulars and questions, and his topic, realizing that she has the higher hand of direct expertise, mocks his effort to get at the fact of issues. If solely she’d challenged him sooner.
