Set during the years of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist campaign that wrought havoc on Peru's social and political systems, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Historia de Mayta, 1984) and Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes, 1993) coincide in their exploration of political violence within revolutionary contexts: both depict a nation that has become apocalyptic as a result of Sendero Luminoso's actions; both look to the past to identify the origins of the destructive forces that have taken over the nation; and both cast the Andes as the place of origin of Peru's political crises, with turbulence in la sierra setting the course for the nation's urban centres. Vargas Llosa also grapples with the role of Peru's indigenous populations in bringing about this social upheaval in both novels. In The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, this question is subordinated to explorations of political ideology and of how history is written – vehicles for a critique of socialism's legacy in Latin America – but in Death in the Andes, the representation of the indigenous lies at the heart of the author's assessment of the state and fate of the nation. Hence this essay's attention to the representation of Peru's indigenous populations in both novels, and to the role that Vargas Llosa posits for them in determining Peru's political stability and future.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta recounts the investigation into a failed rebellion led by Alejandro Mayta and a young military officer named Vallejos in Jauja, a town in the Peruvian highlands, in 1958. In each of the novel’s first nine chapters, an anonymous first-person narrator, a Vargas Llosa persona researching the uprising for a novel, interviews participants in the rebellion and individuals connected to its organisers. The narrator claims to have chosen Mayta as his subject because the latter was a former classmate.