Death in the Andes

The Missing and the Investigators

The setup is economical: Corporal Lituma has been posted to Naccos, a remote Andean community near a road construction site, with his assistant Tomás Carreño. Three men from the community have disappeared. The official explanation — that they were killed by Shining Path guerrillas, who were active throughout the Andes during the 1980s and early 1990s — is plausible but incomplete. The locals know something they are not saying. Lituma and Tomás investigate, and the mystery deepens in directions neither of them is equipped to follow.

Lituma is a recognizable Vargas Llosa type: a decent, unimaginative man of the coast, operating in a world he doesn’t understand, doing his job with a professionalism that the situation renders inadequate. Tomás, his assistant, is more complicated — he has a history involving a woman and a gangster that the novel slowly reveals through his account to Lituma, stories told to pass the Andean nights that become the novel’s other narrative thread. The relationship between the two men is one of the novel’s pleasures: gruff, loyal, and genuinely affectionate in the way of men who have only each other in an alien place.

The Andean community is rendered with Vargas Llosa’s usual care for specificity. Naccos is neither picturesque nor folkloric — it is a working community under enormous pressure: from the road construction that has disrupted the traditional economy, from Shining Path’s demands for collaboration, from the state’s counter-insurgency, and from something older and harder to name that the novel is circling toward. The locals’ reluctance to cooperate with Lituma’s investigation is not obstruction — it is a comprehensible response to a situation in which cooperation with authority has historically meant danger.

The Pishtaco

Midway through the investigation, the word pishtaco begins to appear. The pishtaco is a figure from Andean folklore: a supernatural being, often imagined as white or foreign, who attacks people to extract their fat or blood for various nefarious purposes — greasing church bells, lubricating machinery, selling to pharmaceutical companies. The pishtaco is not a fixed figure but a flexible one, absorbing the anxieties of each era — colonial, republican, modern — into its basic structure of the outside predator who consumes the substance of the Andean poor.

What Vargas Llosa does with the pishtaco is the novel’s most audacious move. He does not treat it as superstition to be demystified by the crime-novel investigation. He treats it as a genuine explanatory system — one that is, in its own terms, as internally consistent as the political explanations offered by Shining Path or the legal explanations offered by the state. The three missing men, it eventually emerges, were sacrificed — offered to the earth (the Pachamama) and the mountains (the Apus) in a ritual intended to appease forces that the community believed were angered by the road construction that was cutting through the land.

This is the novel’s central argument: that Peru in the 1980s and 1990s was a country in which three completely different explanatory systems for violence — Shining Path’s Maoist revolutionary logic, the state’s legal and counter-insurgency logic, and the Andean communities’ ancient cosmological logic — were operating simultaneously, in the same territory, without any of them being able to fully comprehend the others. Lituma, trying to solve a murder, is a man with one set of tools standing in a world that requires three others.

The Civil War Novel

Death in the Andes was published in 1993 in Spanish, in 1996 in English, and it represents Vargas Llosa’s most direct engagement with the Peruvian civil conflict that lasted from 1980 to 2000 and claimed approximately seventy thousand lives. The Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), a Maoist guerrilla organization, conducted campaigns of extraordinary brutality against the Peruvian state, the armed forces, and communities it deemed insufficiently revolutionary — including many Andean communities that bore the brunt of both guerrilla violence and state counter-insurgency.

Vargas Llosa had been a public intellectual throughout the conflict and ran unsuccessfully for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, losing to Alberto Fujimori. His engagement with the Shining Path was not simply novelistic: he headed a government commission investigating the 1983 massacre at Uchuraccay, in which journalists investigating guerrilla violence were killed by villagers who mistook them for guerrillas. The commission’s report — which attributed the killings to the community’s own cosmological framework, not simply to panic or mob violence — was controversial and influenced Death in the Andes.

Within the tradition of Latin American political violence fiction — alongside Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente and García Márquez’s treatments of the Colombian civil conflict — Death in the Andes is distinctive for its insistence that the political framework is insufficient: that to understand violence in the Andes, you need categories that no political ideology provides. Whether Vargas Llosa fully succeeds in that argument is a legitimate question; that he asks it seriously and with formal care is not.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A compact, propulsive, and genuinely strange novel that uses the crime-fiction framework to ask questions about Peru’s civil war that straightforward political fiction cannot reach. The pishtaco haunts you.