Harsh Times: Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa brings Guatemala to life

Harsh Times

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Adrian Nathan West

ISBN-13: 9780571365654

Publisher: Faber

Guideline Price: £20

Twenty years after the English-language publication of The Feast of the Goat, a novel about the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, Mario Vargas Llosa returns with a fictionalising of real events in 1950s Guatemala. Harsh Times, first published in Spanish in 2019, tells the fascinating story of a CIA-supported military coup that toppled the government of Jacobo Árbenz, leading to decades-long violence and instability in Guatemala and the wider Central American region.

The blending of fact and fiction results in a busy, compelling narrative, full of intrigue, backstabbing and shifting power dynamics. The title is fitting: 
from the peasant farmers to the rotating cast of presidents and military leaders – some of whom barely last a week in power – every echelon of society is affected by a bloody takeover that has brutal and long-lasting consequences.
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The blending of fact and fiction results in a busy, compelling narrative, full of intrigue, backstabbing and shifting power dynamics. The title is fitting: from the peasant farmers, to the rotating cast of presidents and military leaders – some of whom barely last a week in power – every echelon of society is affected by a bloody takeover that has brutal and long-lasting consequences.

The form of Harsh Times reflects the content. In the US, the Eisenhower administration’s reasons for backing the coup are held up by Vargas Llosa to be fictions; worse – deliberate lies. As the narrator takes fictional licence with action, dialogue and characterisation in the book, in real life a deadlier fiction occurs: US politicians and businessmen concoct a tale about Soviet communism in Guatemala.

The blending of fact and fiction results in a busy, compelling narrative, full of intrigue, backstabbing and shifting power dynamics

A charged opening shows the head of the United Fruit company, "the boorish self-made impresario Sam Zemurray", asking public relations guru Edward L Bernays to help spin the story of "the Soviet Union Trojan Horse" in order to extend the US company's control of fruit production and trade between the Americas. They target Árbenz's planned agrarian reform Bill, a piece of legislation that seeks to democratise the farming industry:

"The foreign press attacked it, the United States especially, and accused his government of bowing to the Soviet Union, conspiring to create a communist fifth column in Central America that would threaten the Panama Canal."

The media campaign is an outrageous success, in both senses of that word. In 1954, the US-backed coup by Carlos Castillo Armas overthrows Árbenz. The consequences are documented over the course of the book: five military juntas, violence, bloodshed and political instability lasts for decades.

The tone is accusatory, the questions provocative: "Was this the democracy Roosevelt had imagined with his Good Neighbour Policy for Latin America? A military dictatorship at the service of a handful of greedy, racist latifundistas and a big Yankee conglomerate?"

Born in Peru in 1936, Vargas Llosa is a Nobel Prize winner whose back catalogue includes The War of the End of the World, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and Conversation in the Cathedral. His formidable intellect and years of experience bring a necessary weight to a novel that looks to right real-world wrongs. Other Latin American authors who have tackled similarly fraught topics include Gabriel García Márquez (Autumn of the Patriarch) and Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos (I, the Supreme). Rachel Kushner’s debut, Telex from Cuba, is another touchstone, with its shrewd depiction of the role of the US in Latin American political history.

The narrative in Harsh Times is more diffuse, with Vargas Llosa trying to manage a huge cast of characters. Politicians and military officials from Guatemala – Árbenz, Castillo Armas, Juan José Arévalo, Enrique Trinidad Oliva (the Lug), to name a few – are joined by American businessmen and diplomats, the Dominican intelligence agent Johnny Abbes García (whose obsession with "gash" is documented to a nauseating degree), Cuban renegades and even the Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier also appear.

Fans of Vargas Llosa will not be surprised by a metafictional twist at the end

Loaded with historical cameos, the timeline can confuse, an issue that’s exacerbated by a stylistic choice to circle back on past events. Elsewhere, this same technique adds poignancy – a scene where Castillo Armas thinks of firing his security director is one example, Árbenz’s struggles with alcohol another – and infuse the political machinations with a sense of loss and regret.

In such instances, history comes to life through the skilful rendering of character. Nowhere is this more evident than with the vibrant depiction of Marta Borrero, aka Miss Guatemala, a fictional character who speaks to the corruptions and hypocrisies of society. Disowned by her family for getting pregnant as a teenager, the guileful Marta becomes, over the course of the book, a lover, spy and propagandist for hire.

Fans of Vargas Llosa will not be surprised by a metafictional twist at the end, where the author himself tries, and largely fails, to get Marta to own up to the sins of the past. Instead it is left to the author to outline the charges in his inimitable way:

"No less grave were the effects of Castillo Armas's victory for the rest of Latin America (especially Guatemala), where for decades guerrillas and terrorists proliferated, and military dictatorships assassinated, tortured, and plundered their own countries, taking democracy off the table for half a century."