LIMA (AP) — Peru declared national mourning on Monday following the death at the age of 89 of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize in Literature, amid various tributes from national and world authorities.
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In a resolution published in the official gazette, it was ordered that all Peruvian flags be flown at half-mast in all public buildings, military installations, bases, ships, police stations, as well as in Peruvian diplomatic and consular missions abroad.
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Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said at the beginning of her daily morning press conference that “a great writer has passed away” and added that “beyond political differences, we must always recognize the greatness of a writer.”
The Peruvian was a critic of Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), and indicated during a visit to Mexico in 2021 that López Obrador was overstepping his presidential role by “commenting every morning on the articles he reads in the press and often censoring or attacking journalists.”
Chilean leader Gabriel Boric also lamented the death of Vargas Llosa, whom he described as a “giant writer, who portrayed Latin America with a pen of real tears in delicate and challenging fiction.” He added that “he was also a top intellectual and, regardless of whether one agrees with his liberal ideals or not, a democrat at all times who deserves all our respect,” expressed through X, before Twitter.
But tributes to Vargas Llosa also came from provincial authorities, including those from the Arequipa region, in whose capital of the same name the writer was born in 1936 and to which he donated thousands of his books to a library that bears his name almost at the end of his life. On Monday, the authorities of Arequipa declared two days of mourning.
In a school in the north, called San Miguel de Piura, in the Piura region, where the writer lived and studied the last year of his school education in 1952, the school principal, José Elías Flores, dusted off his files and showed the local radio station RPP the report card of the then future novelist.
Vargas Llosa passed away on Sunday, confirmed by his long-time lawyer and friend Enrique Ghersi in a phone call to The Associated Press. The lawyer recalled the novelist’s 89th birthday, celebrated on March 28 at his youngest daughter Morgana’s house. “He spent it happily, surrounded by his closest friends, ate his cake, we joked that day that there were still 89 more years to go, he had a long, fruitful, and free life,” he said.
Earlier, the writer’s eldest son, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, stated on his X account that his father had passed away in Lima in a note signed with his siblings Gonzalo and Morgana.
“His departure will sadden his readers around the world, but we hope they find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, varied, and fruitful life and leaves behind a body of work that will outlive him,” they wrote in a message in English and Spanish.