Once the bright young hope of the Latin-American left, Alan García was caught up in an epic corruption investigation.
By Daniel Alarcón
July 1, 2019
Twelve hours before he locked himself in his bedroom and took his own life, Alan García, Peru’s two-time former President, gave an interview to the national radio-and-television station RPP, from a local univJenny Alvaro, a producer of the interview, was meeting García for the first time, but she thought she knew what to expect: the bombastic, theatrical, larger-than-life politician who had been a presence on the national stage for more than three decades. “I’d seen him on television, at rallies, and had always heard he had an imposing presence,” Alvaro told me. Instead, García that evening was calm, even subdued, with little of the bluster usually associated with his public persona. He wore a dark-blue suit, a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, no tie. His black hair, with a wisp of gray in front, was combed back and thin compared with the wild mane he’d had in his youth. He had been dashing as a young man but had gained weight as he aged. He was known to be meticulous about his image, to have strong opinions about the fine details of his televised interviews—which camera angle suited him best, where he should be placed in relation to the interviewer. But now García was pliant, almost deferential. Alvaro told him where to sit and which direction to face, and when, for a moment, he seemed to doubt her she assured him, “It will make you look younger, Mr. President.” García laughed.
Jenny Alvaro, a producer of the interview, was meeting García for the first time, but she thought she knew what to expect: the bombastic, theatrical, larger-than-life politician who had been a presence on the national stage for more than three decades. “I’d seen him on television, at rallies, and had always heard he had an imposing presence,” Alvaro told me. Instead, García that evening was calm, even subdued, with little of the bluster usually associated with his public persona. He wore a dark-blue suit, a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, no tie. His black hair, with a wisp of gray in front, was combed back and thin compared with the wild mane he’d had in his youth. He had been dashing as a young man but had gained weight as he aged. He was known to be meticulous about his image, to have strong opinions about the fine details of his televised interviews—which camera angle suited him best, where he should be placed in relation to the interviewer. But now García was pliant, almost deferential. Alvaro told him where to sit and which direction to face, and when, for a moment, he seemed to doubt her she assured him, “It will make you look younger, Mr. President.” García laughed.
The interviewer that evening, Carlos Villarreal, had known the former President—and covered his exploits—for twenty years. García told him that he had just half an hour before he was scheduled to teach his weekly class on political theory, and that he liked to set an example for his students by being on time. (In a country that is, broadly speaking, agnostic on the importance of punctuality, his insistence on this point amounted to a personal quirk.) When the interview began, García frowned and nodded as Villarreal alluded to new allegations that might send him to prison. Finally, Villarreal asked, “Are you aware that this interview with RPP could be your last?”
In light of subsequent events, the question seemed ominous. Five months earlier, García had handed his personal secretary, Ricardo Pinedo, a sealed letter to give to his family when the time came; he didn’t explain that it was a suicide note, but he’d often mentioned to friends that he would never submit to the humiliating spectacle of an arrest. As far back as 2012, García had told an interviewer, “I wasn’t born for that. No one is putting a hand on me.” Erasmo Reyna, García’s lawyer, told me that, after a hearing last year, García showed him a pistol that he’d carried in his waistband in case the authorities tried to arrest him. “That was when I knew this was serious,” Reyna said.
In response to Villarreal’s question, García let out a pensive, almost plaintive “No.”
Villarreal quickly added, “As a free man.”
A few minutes earlier, a source had confirmed to Villarreal that an order for García’s preliminary detention was awaiting a judge’s approval. Once the order was signed, a long career in public life would come to an ignominious end, and a man who had been obsessed with his place in history would enter it as perhaps little more than a footnote. The press knew it. Much of the country had been waiting for it. Crucially, García himself knew it.
To Villarreal, García offered a sober defense against the latest allegations: There was no proof. It was all insinuations and hypotheses. But his heart didn’t seem to be in it. “I’m a Christian,” García said, at one point. “I believe in life after death. I believe in history. And, if you’ll allow me, I believe I have a small place in the history of Peru.”
Shortly before six-thirty the following morning, police knocked on the door of García’s home in the Miraflores district of Lima. A few journalists were waiting outside when the officers were admitted by household staff. García met the police, along with a representative from the prosecutor’s office, on the landing between the first and second floors and, after a brief exchange, walked back up the stairs. Video later released by the authorities shows García pulling a gun from his pocket as he turns. He locked himself in his bedroom, contacted his partner, Roxanne Cheesman, who was in Miami and is the mother of his youngest son, and told her he loved her, on a video call that lasted less than a minute. Then he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He was just over a month shy of his seventieth birthday.
To understand García, it’s necessary to understand the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or apra, the political party he led for decades and, in some ways, embodied. In a country where most parties have been weakened to the point of irrelevance and political alliances are often little more than marriages of convenience arranged for a specific election, the apra, which was founded ninety-five years ago, is different, as much a cultural institution as a political party. For generations, being an Aprista has been an inherited identity; militants join the Party because their fathers and mothers were members, and their grandparents before them. When I asked Erasmo Reyna to define the apra, he made no mention at first of ideology or policies. “Aprismo is a feeling,” he told me. “A brotherhood. It’s like you’re part of a big family.” I pointed out that it sounded as if he were talking about a soccer team. He shook his head. “We’re not a club. Not a fan base. We’re something bigger than that.”
Alan García was born into the apra. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father an accountant; both were committed Party members. After the apra was declared illegal, García’s father spent years living clandestinely, as did the apra’s legendary founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. García’s father was being held in El Sexto, a notorious prison in Lima (which was later torn down), when his son was born in 1949.
García joined the Party as a teen-ager, and he was often in the front row for Haya de la Torre’s classes on history and politics at the Casa del Pueblo, the apra’s cavernous headquarters, in central Lima. Even then, he stood out, for his Party pedigree, his intellect, and his size. (As an adult, he was six feet three, nearly a foot taller than the average Peruvian, “which is like having free publicity in a country like ours,” his diminutive secretary Ricardo Pinedo told me.) In the early seventies, García was one of a small group of young men whom Haya de la Torre selected to study with him personally. The students would gather on Sunday afternoons at Haya’s home, on the outskirts of Lima, to talk politics and revolution and history, and to sing. García was a precocious public speaker, in the mold of his mentor, and a good singer, a talent he later employed to great effect when he was busking as a student in Paris, and, even later, when he campaigned with famous Peruvian musicians, belting out Creole classics in his melodic baritone. He was a charismatic but undisciplined student, well known at the Catholic University for his eloquent speeches and for the orange leather coat he wore. Mirko Lauer, a political analyst and an editor, befriended García when they were both students. He describes him as on the surface full of confidence but, in fact, dogged by uncertainty and obsessed with status. “There was something missing, replaced, as it were, by ambition,” Lauer told me. “García didn’t seem to be completely there. And those who aren’t there tend to make stupendous candidates because people can project onto them whatever they wish.”
García spent five years studying law and sociology in Europe. He returned to Peru in 1977, from which point his rise within the Party was seemingly unstoppable. He was elected as a delegate of the 1978 Constitutional Assembly, at twenty-nine, and won a seat in Congress two years later. By thirty-three, he was the Party’s secretary-general, and, having outmaneuvered all others for the role of Haya de la Torre’s chosen successor, he was more or less guaranteed to be the Party’s Presidential candidate in 1985. His election that year was historic, the culmination of the apra’s decades-old dream—he was the first (and, to date, only) apra President—and the first peaceful transition from one democratically elected leader to another in nearly forty years. García was thirty-six years old, South America’s youngest head of state at the time, half the age of Peru’s outgoing President.
The story most often told about García is that he was predestined, the most talented of Haya de la Torre’s disciples, the Chosen One. And there was certainly something messianic about Alan García circa 1985; he was a firebrand, a vocal anti-imperialist, a popular hero of the left. Full of promise and brio, he was most at home in front of a crowd, which he could whip up into a kind of ecstasy with his unabashedly lofty language. “The task couldn’t be more dramatic and difficult,” García declared in his inauguration speech. “Nor could the challenge be more beautiful and transcendental.” His first address as President was full of the kind of populist gestures that would become his specialty: he proposed to cut his own salary and reduce Peru’s payment on its international debt to ten per cent of its exports. He promised to double the punishments for public servants who broke the law, and pledged his allegiance to his fellow-Peruvians: “The future will be ours. That’s my commitment, and here is the promise of my life and self in the face of death.”
A month into his term, García’s approval rating was above ninety-five per cent, and for a couple of years his policies appeared to be working: he froze savings accounts in foreign currency, fixed prices, and even had some success in controlling inflation. The economy expanded by nearly ten per cent annually, an astonishing growth rate for any country. At the same time, however, Peru began running large deficits, a problem that García addressed by simply printing more money. By 1987, Peru’s reserves of foreign currency had all but vanished, and García, without the full support of his Cabinet, announced a plan to nationalize the banks. The move was eventually defeated by public outcry, including protests led by, most prominently, the novelist and future Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa.
Hyperinflation is what most Peruvians remember when they think of the late nineteen-eighties. Prices could change several times daily, and shopping bags full of cash were required to buy basic household supplies. New denominations of bills were printed with a seemingly endless string of zeros, and the lifetime savings of the middle class became suddenly worthless. During the final three years of García’s first term, the nation’s G.D.P. fell by a quarter, one of the most dramatic recessions in Peru’s history. By 1990, some sixty per cent of Peruvians were living in poverty.
If there’s a mitigating factor to this generalized Presidential incompetence, it’s that García was at the time grappling with South America’s most bloodthirsty terrorist group, the Shining Path, as well as another, less violent but also destabilizing insurgency, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or M.R.T.A., led by a former Aprista and onetime friend of García’s, Víctor Polay. As if that weren’t enough, a paramilitary group named for Rodrigo Franco, an apra martyr who had been killed by the Shining Path, was responsible, toward the end of García’s term, for the assassinations of several suspected members of the Shining Path and the M.R.T.A. Political violence like this would have tested any head of state, but García’s response was particularly calamitous. He presided over a campaign against the Shining Path that cost thousands of lives. His armed forces responded to Shining Path prison riots by killing hundreds of guerrillas, some even as they surrendered. This did little to contain the terrorist threat, and the economic chaos further emboldened the terrorists. By 1989, more than a thousand electrical towers had been destroyed by the Shining Path, and Lima had grown accustomed to blackouts. Bombs in the capital were also a regular occurrence, and in the interior the situation was even worse: by some estimates, more than half a million rural Peruvians were displaced by political violence. Among political analysts, historians, and ordinary Peruvians, there is a consensus that García’s first Presidency was the worst in contemporary Peruvian history. His popularity plummeted to six per cent, and, when he visited Congress for his farewell address in 1990, opposition members pounded their desks and chanted “Thief!” so loudly that for several minutes he was unable to speak.
By the time García left the Presidential Palace, his reputation as the bright young hope of the Latin-American left had been destroyed. He was dogged by accusations of corruption and illicit enrichment through dubious contracts, including one for an electric train line, which would remain unfinished for more than two decades. The new Congress launched investigations into the charges, which were abruptly halted in April, 1992, when President Alberto Fujimori dissolved Congress and filled the streets of Lima with tanks. Soldiers went to García’s home to arrest him, but he fired shots in the air and fled, jumping from his balcony to a neighboring house, where he hid in an empty water tank. Eventually, García was smuggled to the Colombian Embassy in Lima and, from there, into exile.
After a stint in Bogotá, García settled in Paris, where he bought an apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Mirko Lauer, who visited García in those years, told me that it was a classic Paris apartment with high ceilings, but “not a mansion, by any means.” Mansion or not, the fact that García, who had once sworn to the tax authorities that his only assets were his house in Lima and the watch on his wrist, was able to buy an apartment of any size in Paris was cause for suspicion.
Ricardo Pinedo was working for an apra congressman in 1995, when he got an e-mail from someone claiming to be Alan García. “He was a ghost in those days,” Pinedo told me, and so he wrote back, admonishing the sender not to make jokes on an official congressional e-mail account. Minutes later, his phone rang: it was García, calling from Paris. “I had a lump in my throat and couldn’t speak for two minutes,” Pinedo told me. The former President was at his lowest ebb, disgraced and marginalized. Still, for Pinedo García remained a hero, the man who had carried the apra to power. Via late-night calls from Paris, the two developed a friendship, and together they devised a plan: Pinedo bought a speakerphone and a tape recorder, and the former President, who had once addressed crowds of tens of thousands, orated for an audience of one, tackling, in his typically erudite tones, aspects of national or international politics. Pinedo pitched small local radio stations in the Peruvian provinces, offering them these exclusive recordings free, on the condition that they be broadcast unedited. “Of course, they’d laugh. Alan García? They thought he was dead!” Pinedo said. But, eventually, the project began to gain traction, and, at its peak, twenty-two radio stations were airing García’s recordings.
It was the prehistory of a comeback as remarkable as any in contemporary Latin-American politics. By 1999, García had, from Paris, gained control of the apra, and graffiti began to appear around Lima announcing his imminent return: “Alan vuelve”—“Alan is coming back.” (I saw more than a few of these announcements transformed into a reference to the millions he was believed to have stolen: “Alan devuelve”—“Alan, give back.”)
In 2000, when the Fujimori regime collapsed amid its own epic corruption scandal, with politicians of every stripe caught on tape accepting bribes, García—who had been in exile for most of the Fujimori years—was one of the few to emerge unscathed. The following year, without ruling on the merits of any of the investigations, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the statute of limitations on all of García’s pending charges had expired. The stage was set for his return. And although he failed to recapture the Presidency in 2001, he came far closer than anyone had expected, buoyed, in part, many critics noted, by new voters who were too young to remember his first Presidency. He’d lost none of his charisma. “Don’t listen to Alan García” was a piece of advice often heard in those days. “He might convince you.”
In 2006, he did win, squeaking to a runoff and prevailing in the second-round vote by successfully painting his opponent, Ollanta Humala, as a stooge of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez. In a country scarred by leftist terrorism, Chávez and his socialist revolution were anathema to many. For García, the narrative of that victory was one of personal and political transformation: from an impetuous young President who had failed spectacularly into a chastened, mature head of state who had learned from his mistakes; from a populist, left-leaning politician who spoke the language of anti-imperialism into a right-wing neoliberal who called indigenous Peruvians “not first-class citizens” and chastised them for standing in the way of economic progress. He dragged his party to the right, fretting over every upward tick in the inflation rate, no matter how minute. “He was traumatized by it,” Mercedes Aráoz, who served in García’s second Cabinet, told me. “He didn’t want to be known as the hyperinflation President.”
Apristas and other allies often say that García’s second Presidency was a great success, and some even call it the greatest Presidency in Peruvian history. Pinedo rattled off García’s achievements for me: thirteen free-trade agreements signed, including pacts with Korea, Japan, and China; an average of nearly seven-per-cent annual growth in G.D.P.; thirty hospitals built; millions of Peruvians with access to clean water for the first time; and the poverty rate cut nearly in half. But much of that G.D.P. growth—almost half, according to some estimates—could be attributed to rising global metal prices, and although the apra held more than a third of the seats in Congress, García made no major structural reforms. Some analysts have argued that his predecessor, Alejandro Toledo—Peru’s first indigenous President—managed to do more despite an approval rating that hovered in the low teens. To his critics, García, always keenly aware of the failures of his first term, was timid when he should have been bold, content simply to oversee a period of relative prosperity and fiscal stability.
While the economic results of García’s second term were better than those of his first, his Administrations shared one trait: multiple well-documented and credible allegations of corruption. There are, to be frank, too many scandals to name, but perhaps the most politically damaging of García’s second term was known as Narcoindultos, a scheme that involved selling Presidential pardons. An investigative commission formed under García’s successor, Humala, found that García had commuted or reduced the sentences of more than three thousand convicted drug traffickers and shortened a third of all the prison sentences in the country.
According to Sergio Tejada, a former congressman who directed the commission, the scandal revealed something essential about García’s character: an infatuation with expressions of absolute power and, in particular, with the performance of mercy. “He had no law but his own. He felt like he spoke with God,” Tejada told me. García’s influence over the judiciary was immense, even after he left office. Judges close to the apra complicated proceedings, Tejada said. Investigations were closed arbitrarily, sometimes even before his commission had filed its report on the matter. One potential witness gave his testimony in private—then went to the press, claiming that Tejada had paid him to incriminate García. Tejada was hauled before Congress to answer these charges, while the witness fled to Brazil and was never heard from again. “That was one of the moments when I realized how Mafia-like they can be,” Tejada said, of García and his associates. In the end, one Aprista, who had headed the committee on pardons, was convicted in the Narcoindultos affair, but refused to say whether he was part of a larger conspiracy. He is still in prison. “It was surprising,” Tejada told me, almost bemused, how García’s followers “were willing to immolate themselves for him.”
Tejada himself had paid a price for his work on the commission. Subjected to a campaign of defamation and threats, he was accused of being a terrorist and a member of the Shining Path, and was even attacked by Aprista militants, but he has no regrets. “I never feared him,” he said, of García. “He spent his whole life evading justice. When he realized he couldn’t anymore, he killed himself.”
García was still alive when he arrived at the hospital, and he underwentemergency surgery. Within minutes, photographs of his body on the operating table were being shared widely on social media. Still, many people seemed unwilling or unable to believe what had happened. A cousin of mine sent me a photo that was making the rounds of a tall, heavyset woman at the airport with a vague resemblance to García, which was enough to feed the macabre speculation that his suicide was a hoax. Of course he’d got away with it. Hadn’t he always? Family and friends gathered at the hospital, and when his death was officially confirmed, just after ten that morning, the debate about its meaning began.
By Daniel Alarcón
July 1, 2019
Twelve hours before he locked himself in his bedroom and took his own life, Alan García, Peru’s two-time former President, gave an interview to the national radio-and-television station RPP, from a local univJenny Alvaro, a producer of the interview, was meeting García for the first time, but she thought she knew what to expect: the bombastic, theatrical, larger-than-life politician who had been a presence on the national stage for more than three decades. “I’d seen him on television, at rallies, and had always heard he had an imposing presence,” Alvaro told me. Instead, García that evening was calm, even subdued, with little of the bluster usually associated with his public persona. He wore a dark-blue suit, a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, no tie. His black hair, with a wisp of gray in front, was combed back and thin compared with the wild mane he’d had in his youth. He had been dashing as a young man but had gained weight as he aged. He was known to be meticulous about his image, to have strong opinions about the fine details of his televised interviews—which camera angle suited him best, where he should be placed in relation to the interviewer. But now García was pliant, almost deferential. Alvaro told him where to sit and which direction to face, and when, for a moment, he seemed to doubt her she assured him, “It will make you look younger, Mr. President.” García laughed.
Jenny Alvaro, a producer of the interview, was meeting García for the first time, but she thought she knew what to expect: the bombastic, theatrical, larger-than-life politician who had been a presence on the national stage for more than three decades. “I’d seen him on television, at rallies, and had always heard he had an imposing presence,” Alvaro told me. Instead, García that evening was calm, even subdued, with little of the bluster usually associated with his public persona. He wore a dark-blue suit, a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, no tie. His black hair, with a wisp of gray in front, was combed back and thin compared with the wild mane he’d had in his youth. He had been dashing as a young man but had gained weight as he aged. He was known to be meticulous about his image, to have strong opinions about the fine details of his televised interviews—which camera angle suited him best, where he should be placed in relation to the interviewer. But now García was pliant, almost deferential. Alvaro told him where to sit and which direction to face, and when, for a moment, he seemed to doubt her she assured him, “It will make you look younger, Mr. President.” García laughed.
The interviewer that evening, Carlos Villarreal, had known the former President—and covered his exploits—for twenty years. García told him that he had just half an hour before he was scheduled to teach his weekly class on political theory, and that he liked to set an example for his students by being on time. (In a country that is, broadly speaking, agnostic on the importance of punctuality, his insistence on this point amounted to a personal quirk.) When the interview began, García frowned and nodded as Villarreal alluded to new allegations that might send him to prison. Finally, Villarreal asked, “Are you aware that this interview with RPP could be your last?”
In light of subsequent events, the question seemed ominous. Five months earlier, García had handed his personal secretary, Ricardo Pinedo, a sealed letter to give to his family when the time came; he didn’t explain that it was a suicide note, but he’d often mentioned to friends that he would never submit to the humiliating spectacle of an arrest. As far back as 2012, García had told an interviewer, “I wasn’t born for that. No one is putting a hand on me.” Erasmo Reyna, García’s lawyer, told me that, after a hearing last year, García showed him a pistol that he’d carried in his waistband in case the authorities tried to arrest him. “That was when I knew this was serious,” Reyna said.
In response to Villarreal’s question, García let out a pensive, almost plaintive “No.”
Villarreal quickly added, “As a free man.”
A few minutes earlier, a source had confirmed to Villarreal that an order for García’s preliminary detention was awaiting a judge’s approval. Once the order was signed, a long career in public life would come to an ignominious end, and a man who had been obsessed with his place in history would enter it as perhaps little more than a footnote. The press knew it. Much of the country had been waiting for it. Crucially, García himself knew it.
To Villarreal, García offered a sober defense against the latest allegations: There was no proof. It was all insinuations and hypotheses. But his heart didn’t seem to be in it. “I’m a Christian,” García said, at one point. “I believe in life after death. I believe in history. And, if you’ll allow me, I believe I have a small place in the history of Peru.”
Shortly before six-thirty the following morning, police knocked on the door of García’s home in the Miraflores district of Lima. A few journalists were waiting outside when the officers were admitted by household staff. García met the police, along with a representative from the prosecutor’s office, on the landing between the first and second floors and, after a brief exchange, walked back up the stairs. Video later released by the authorities shows García pulling a gun from his pocket as he turns. He locked himself in his bedroom, contacted his partner, Roxanne Cheesman, who was in Miami and is the mother of his youngest son, and told her he loved her, on a video call that lasted less than a minute. Then he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He was just over a month shy of his seventieth birthday.
To understand García, it’s necessary to understand the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or apra, the political party he led for decades and, in some ways, embodied. In a country where most parties have been weakened to the point of irrelevance and political alliances are often little more than marriages of convenience arranged for a specific election, the apra, which was founded ninety-five years ago, is different, as much a cultural institution as a political party. For generations, being an Aprista has been an inherited identity; militants join the Party because their fathers and mothers were members, and their grandparents before them. When I asked Erasmo Reyna to define the apra, he made no mention at first of ideology or policies. “Aprismo is a feeling,” he told me. “A brotherhood. It’s like you’re part of a big family.” I pointed out that it sounded as if he were talking about a soccer team. He shook his head. “We’re not a club. Not a fan base. We’re something bigger than that.”
Alan García was born into the apra. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father an accountant; both were committed Party members. After the apra was declared illegal, García’s father spent years living clandestinely, as did the apra’s legendary founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. García’s father was being held in El Sexto, a notorious prison in Lima (which was later torn down), when his son was born in 1949.
García joined the Party as a teen-ager, and he was often in the front row for Haya de la Torre’s classes on history and politics at the Casa del Pueblo, the apra’s cavernous headquarters, in central Lima. Even then, he stood out, for his Party pedigree, his intellect, and his size. (As an adult, he was six feet three, nearly a foot taller than the average Peruvian, “which is like having free publicity in a country like ours,” his diminutive secretary Ricardo Pinedo told me.) In the early seventies, García was one of a small group of young men whom Haya de la Torre selected to study with him personally. The students would gather on Sunday afternoons at Haya’s home, on the outskirts of Lima, to talk politics and revolution and history, and to sing. García was a precocious public speaker, in the mold of his mentor, and a good singer, a talent he later employed to great effect when he was busking as a student in Paris, and, even later, when he campaigned with famous Peruvian musicians, belting out Creole classics in his melodic baritone. He was a charismatic but undisciplined student, well known at the Catholic University for his eloquent speeches and for the orange leather coat he wore. Mirko Lauer, a political analyst and an editor, befriended García when they were both students. He describes him as on the surface full of confidence but, in fact, dogged by uncertainty and obsessed with status. “There was something missing, replaced, as it were, by ambition,” Lauer told me. “García didn’t seem to be completely there. And those who aren’t there tend to make stupendous candidates because people can project onto them whatever they wish.”
García spent five years studying law and sociology in Europe. He returned to Peru in 1977, from which point his rise within the Party was seemingly unstoppable. He was elected as a delegate of the 1978 Constitutional Assembly, at twenty-nine, and won a seat in Congress two years later. By thirty-three, he was the Party’s secretary-general, and, having outmaneuvered all others for the role of Haya de la Torre’s chosen successor, he was more or less guaranteed to be the Party’s Presidential candidate in 1985. His election that year was historic, the culmination of the apra’s decades-old dream—he was the first (and, to date, only) apra President—and the first peaceful transition from one democratically elected leader to another in nearly forty years. García was thirty-six years old, South America’s youngest head of state at the time, half the age of Peru’s outgoing President.
The story most often told about García is that he was predestined, the most talented of Haya de la Torre’s disciples, the Chosen One. And there was certainly something messianic about Alan García circa 1985; he was a firebrand, a vocal anti-imperialist, a popular hero of the left. Full of promise and brio, he was most at home in front of a crowd, which he could whip up into a kind of ecstasy with his unabashedly lofty language. “The task couldn’t be more dramatic and difficult,” García declared in his inauguration speech. “Nor could the challenge be more beautiful and transcendental.” His first address as President was full of the kind of populist gestures that would become his specialty: he proposed to cut his own salary and reduce Peru’s payment on its international debt to ten per cent of its exports. He promised to double the punishments for public servants who broke the law, and pledged his allegiance to his fellow-Peruvians: “The future will be ours. That’s my commitment, and here is the promise of my life and self in the face of death.”
A month into his term, García’s approval rating was above ninety-five per cent, and for a couple of years his policies appeared to be working: he froze savings accounts in foreign currency, fixed prices, and even had some success in controlling inflation. The economy expanded by nearly ten per cent annually, an astonishing growth rate for any country. At the same time, however, Peru began running large deficits, a problem that García addressed by simply printing more money. By 1987, Peru’s reserves of foreign currency had all but vanished, and García, without the full support of his Cabinet, announced a plan to nationalize the banks. The move was eventually defeated by public outcry, including protests led by, most prominently, the novelist and future Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa.
Hyperinflation is what most Peruvians remember when they think of the late nineteen-eighties. Prices could change several times daily, and shopping bags full of cash were required to buy basic household supplies. New denominations of bills were printed with a seemingly endless string of zeros, and the lifetime savings of the middle class became suddenly worthless. During the final three years of García’s first term, the nation’s G.D.P. fell by a quarter, one of the most dramatic recessions in Peru’s history. By 1990, some sixty per cent of Peruvians were living in poverty.
If there’s a mitigating factor to this generalized Presidential incompetence, it’s that García was at the time grappling with South America’s most bloodthirsty terrorist group, the Shining Path, as well as another, less violent but also destabilizing insurgency, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or M.R.T.A., led by a former Aprista and onetime friend of García’s, Víctor Polay. As if that weren’t enough, a paramilitary group named for Rodrigo Franco, an apra martyr who had been killed by the Shining Path, was responsible, toward the end of García’s term, for the assassinations of several suspected members of the Shining Path and the M.R.T.A. Political violence like this would have tested any head of state, but García’s response was particularly calamitous. He presided over a campaign against the Shining Path that cost thousands of lives. His armed forces responded to Shining Path prison riots by killing hundreds of guerrillas, some even as they surrendered. This did little to contain the terrorist threat, and the economic chaos further emboldened the terrorists. By 1989, more than a thousand electrical towers had been destroyed by the Shining Path, and Lima had grown accustomed to blackouts. Bombs in the capital were also a regular occurrence, and in the interior the situation was even worse: by some estimates, more than half a million rural Peruvians were displaced by political violence. Among political analysts, historians, and ordinary Peruvians, there is a consensus that García’s first Presidency was the worst in contemporary Peruvian history. His popularity plummeted to six per cent, and, when he visited Congress for his farewell address in 1990, opposition members pounded their desks and chanted “Thief!” so loudly that for several minutes he was unable to speak.
By the time García left the Presidential Palace, his reputation as the bright young hope of the Latin-American left had been destroyed. He was dogged by accusations of corruption and illicit enrichment through dubious contracts, including one for an electric train line, which would remain unfinished for more than two decades. The new Congress launched investigations into the charges, which were abruptly halted in April, 1992, when President Alberto Fujimori dissolved Congress and filled the streets of Lima with tanks. Soldiers went to García’s home to arrest him, but he fired shots in the air and fled, jumping from his balcony to a neighboring house, where he hid in an empty water tank. Eventually, García was smuggled to the Colombian Embassy in Lima and, from there, into exile.
After a stint in Bogotá, García settled in Paris, where he bought an apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Mirko Lauer, who visited García in those years, told me that it was a classic Paris apartment with high ceilings, but “not a mansion, by any means.” Mansion or not, the fact that García, who had once sworn to the tax authorities that his only assets were his house in Lima and the watch on his wrist, was able to buy an apartment of any size in Paris was cause for suspicion.
Ricardo Pinedo was working for an apra congressman in 1995, when he got an e-mail from someone claiming to be Alan García. “He was a ghost in those days,” Pinedo told me, and so he wrote back, admonishing the sender not to make jokes on an official congressional e-mail account. Minutes later, his phone rang: it was García, calling from Paris. “I had a lump in my throat and couldn’t speak for two minutes,” Pinedo told me. The former President was at his lowest ebb, disgraced and marginalized. Still, for Pinedo García remained a hero, the man who had carried the apra to power. Via late-night calls from Paris, the two developed a friendship, and together they devised a plan: Pinedo bought a speakerphone and a tape recorder, and the former President, who had once addressed crowds of tens of thousands, orated for an audience of one, tackling, in his typically erudite tones, aspects of national or international politics. Pinedo pitched small local radio stations in the Peruvian provinces, offering them these exclusive recordings free, on the condition that they be broadcast unedited. “Of course, they’d laugh. Alan García? They thought he was dead!” Pinedo said. But, eventually, the project began to gain traction, and, at its peak, twenty-two radio stations were airing García’s recordings.
It was the prehistory of a comeback as remarkable as any in contemporary Latin-American politics. By 1999, García had, from Paris, gained control of the apra, and graffiti began to appear around Lima announcing his imminent return: “Alan vuelve”—“Alan is coming back.” (I saw more than a few of these announcements transformed into a reference to the millions he was believed to have stolen: “Alan devuelve”—“Alan, give back.”)
In 2000, when the Fujimori regime collapsed amid its own epic corruption scandal, with politicians of every stripe caught on tape accepting bribes, García—who had been in exile for most of the Fujimori years—was one of the few to emerge unscathed. The following year, without ruling on the merits of any of the investigations, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the statute of limitations on all of García’s pending charges had expired. The stage was set for his return. And although he failed to recapture the Presidency in 2001, he came far closer than anyone had expected, buoyed, in part, many critics noted, by new voters who were too young to remember his first Presidency. He’d lost none of his charisma. “Don’t listen to Alan García” was a piece of advice often heard in those days. “He might convince you.”
In 2006, he did win, squeaking to a runoff and prevailing in the second-round vote by successfully painting his opponent, Ollanta Humala, as a stooge of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez. In a country scarred by leftist terrorism, Chávez and his socialist revolution were anathema to many. For García, the narrative of that victory was one of personal and political transformation: from an impetuous young President who had failed spectacularly into a chastened, mature head of state who had learned from his mistakes; from a populist, left-leaning politician who spoke the language of anti-imperialism into a right-wing neoliberal who called indigenous Peruvians “not first-class citizens” and chastised them for standing in the way of economic progress. He dragged his party to the right, fretting over every upward tick in the inflation rate, no matter how minute. “He was traumatized by it,” Mercedes Aráoz, who served in García’s second Cabinet, told me. “He didn’t want to be known as the hyperinflation President.”
Apristas and other allies often say that García’s second Presidency was a great success, and some even call it the greatest Presidency in Peruvian history. Pinedo rattled off García’s achievements for me: thirteen free-trade agreements signed, including pacts with Korea, Japan, and China; an average of nearly seven-per-cent annual growth in G.D.P.; thirty hospitals built; millions of Peruvians with access to clean water for the first time; and the poverty rate cut nearly in half. But much of that G.D.P. growth—almost half, according to some estimates—could be attributed to rising global metal prices, and although the apra held more than a third of the seats in Congress, García made no major structural reforms. Some analysts have argued that his predecessor, Alejandro Toledo—Peru’s first indigenous President—managed to do more despite an approval rating that hovered in the low teens. To his critics, García, always keenly aware of the failures of his first term, was timid when he should have been bold, content simply to oversee a period of relative prosperity and fiscal stability.
While the economic results of García’s second term were better than those of his first, his Administrations shared one trait: multiple well-documented and credible allegations of corruption. There are, to be frank, too many scandals to name, but perhaps the most politically damaging of García’s second term was known as Narcoindultos, a scheme that involved selling Presidential pardons. An investigative commission formed under García’s successor, Humala, found that García had commuted or reduced the sentences of more than three thousand convicted drug traffickers and shortened a third of all the prison sentences in the country.
According to Sergio Tejada, a former congressman who directed the commission, the scandal revealed something essential about García’s character: an infatuation with expressions of absolute power and, in particular, with the performance of mercy. “He had no law but his own. He felt like he spoke with God,” Tejada told me. García’s influence over the judiciary was immense, even after he left office. Judges close to the apra complicated proceedings, Tejada said. Investigations were closed arbitrarily, sometimes even before his commission had filed its report on the matter. One potential witness gave his testimony in private—then went to the press, claiming that Tejada had paid him to incriminate García. Tejada was hauled before Congress to answer these charges, while the witness fled to Brazil and was never heard from again. “That was one of the moments when I realized how Mafia-like they can be,” Tejada said, of García and his associates. In the end, one Aprista, who had headed the committee on pardons, was convicted in the Narcoindultos affair, but refused to say whether he was part of a larger conspiracy. He is still in prison. “It was surprising,” Tejada told me, almost bemused, how García’s followers “were willing to immolate themselves for him.”
Tejada himself had paid a price for his work on the commission. Subjected to a campaign of defamation and threats, he was accused of being a terrorist and a member of the Shining Path, and was even attacked by Aprista militants, but he has no regrets. “I never feared him,” he said, of García. “He spent his whole life evading justice. When he realized he couldn’t anymore, he killed himself.”
García was still alive when he arrived at the hospital, and he underwentemergency surgery. Within minutes, photographs of his body on the operating table were being shared widely on social media. Still, many people seemed unwilling or unable to believe what had happened. A cousin of mine sent me a photo that was making the rounds of a tall, heavyset woman at the airport with a vague resemblance to García, which was enough to feed the macabre speculation that his suicide was a hoax. Of course he’d got away with it. Hadn’t he always? Family and friends gathered at the hospital, and when his death was officially confirmed, just after ten that morning, the debate about its meaning began.
