“And now what?”: Luces criticism of the journalist Diego Salazar’s book

Of all the electoral processes in our history, perhaps none has been as dramatic and literary as that of 1990. The context was that of an impossible country, on the brink of disintegration and that had opted for two absolutely different candidacies: that of Mario Vargas Llosa, champion of a right-wing coalition that brought together the most rancid of the ruling political class, and that of Alberto Fujimori, an unknown university professor whom the economically impoverished sectors decided to support, fed up with selfish elites who failed them in every way conceivable. The dirty war that marred that campaign, characterized by racism and an absurd religious confrontation, was unusual in its levels of aggressiveness and disgust. Last year’s elections showed us that we have learned very little from that tragic experience. The social fracture of thirty years ago continues in force and the inability to solve what separates us seems to have worsened, beyond the different circumstances in which we are debating today.

Diego Salazar (Lima, 1981) is a rigorous professional who does not believe in the harmful esprit de corps so common in our press, as the reader of his first book, “We have not understood anything,” can see, a compilation of texts about evils of post-truth and the alarming lightness that native journalists and those from the rest of the world tend to show when undertaking the informative task. In his recent installment, “Now what? Urgent notes to understand an endless electoral campaign ”, brings together a series of articles written around April and August 2021, focused on the vicissitudes of the second round and its subsequent consequences. Salazar reviews, with acuity, evidence and objectivity, the role of journalists, intellectuals and politicians during those turbulent months in which “fake news” and calls to ignore the popular will by shaking up the scarecrow of electoral fraud were the order of the day.

The panorama offered by this book – structured by means of apostilles that precisely mesh with texts previously published in various international media – is bleak. There we find usually serious journalists like Juan Carlos Tafur defending the possibility of a “restorative coup”, making a clean sweep of the institutions in charge of solving our democracy. Or Gilberto Hume justifying with hallucinatory arguments the presentation of the delusional cryptanalyst Arturo Arriarán in his Sunday program: “I don’t really see any mistake in inviting a person who suddenly turns out to be crazy. Because television is also a show (…). Television apart from journalism also has a show part”. As Salazar points out, when the proposed show is based on invalidating the legitimacy of the electoral bodies, the matter no longer laughs.

But the saddest and most painful role of “Now what?” it stars Mario Vargas Llosa and his son Álvaro. That our greatest intellectual, a figure who for decades was an uncompromising champion of freedom and a tireless fighter against the dictatorship that subjugated us in the nineties, has folded, without doubts or murmurings, to the disgraceful narrative of a fraud of which there was never a single one. Serious proof is an unequivocal symptom of the impoverishment of the public debate and incidentally, of the profound devaluation of liberal thought in Peru. That today there is no longer any difference between what the author of “The fish in the water” advocates and the falsehoods sustained by pseudo-liberals such as the implausible congressman Alejandro Cavero makes understandable the feeling of orphans suffered by a sector of the electorate in search of an alternative to that right that, following the doctrine of Pedro Beltrán, only considers democracy useful when it serves its particular interests.

However, we must not succumb to the current grim outlook. Salazar’s book teaches us that there is still room for a look that resists prejudice, misinformation and open lies. That it is possible, from a liberal perspective, to defeat the demons of this dark age where fear, transfigured in so many ways, guides the score of our daily lives.

The token

Author: Diego Salazar

Title: Now what? Urgent notes to understand an endless campaign.

Editorial: Debate

Year: 2021

Pages: 114

Relationship with the author: friendship.

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5 possible

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