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As the Mario Vargas Llosa papers in the Princeton University's Firestone Library show, Vargas Llosa began The War of the End of the World in Lima in 1979 and continued to draft it during his stay at the Wood-row Wilson Center in Washington in early 1980. This was just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when sentiment in the United States was alarmed about Soviet aggression, and the menace of left-wing radicals in third world countries seemed very real. In the Latin American sphere of Vargas Llosa's primary interest, the Sandinistas had come to power in Nicaragua in July 1979 and were already showing signs of hewing more closely to the Moscow/Havana line than their foreign celebrants had promised. Furthermore, the remnants of the Velasco regime, with its Left-nationalist rhetoric, were still present in Peru, although the August 1980 inauguration of Fernando Belaunde Terry for the latter of his far-separated terms as president of Peru, signaled democratization. Yet Vargas Llosa's then-ideological soulmate Hernando de Soto first conceived the agenda, in 1979, that led to the founding of the Instituto Libertad y Democracia two years later, this promotion of free-market, libertarian attitudes seemed to fly in the face of a hegemonic socialist consensus among Latin American intellectuals. What Efraín Kristal in Temptation of the Word (110) calls Vargas Llosa's "antiauthoritaran" ideas were not, in their incipience, comfortably "establishment" in torque.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230113596_5

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