Mario Vargas Llosa attacks Peru newspaper over election 'propaganda'

Nobel laureate accuses El Comercio of favouring presidential hopeful Keiko Fujimori by 'opening pages to lies and defamation'

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• Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 June 2011 18.35 BST
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Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel prize for literature this year, was a columnist for El Comercio. Photograph: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images

Mario Vargas Llosa's columns have long enlivened Peru's major daily newspaper, but his most compelling copy arrived this week in the form of an attack on the paper itself.

"Dear director," began the Nobel laureate's letter, and there ended the only kind words for his former employers at El Comercio, one of south America's most venerable and influential newspapers.

Vargas Llosa said he was withdrawing his fortnightly column, syndicated by the Spanish daily El País, from the Peruvian paper because it had degenerated into a vehicle for lies and manipulation in the run-up to this Sunday's presidential election.

"The newspaper has become a propaganda machine to favour the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori in an all-out effort to prevent the victory of Ollanta Humala, violating the most elementary notions of objectivity and journalistic ethics: silencing and manipulating information, twisting the facts, opening its pages to lies and defamation."

The journalist and novelist, who was awarded the Nobel literature prize earlier this year, accused the El Comercio group, which owns three other newspapers and two TV channels, of firing and harassing journalists who refused to spin the news and resorting to low blows, malice, sensationalism and scandal.

"I cannot permit my column, Touchstone, to continue to be published in a caricature of what should be a genuinely free, plural and democratic organ," he wrote.

A handful of shareholders, led by Martha Meier Miro Quesada, said his parting shot had fouled a once decent and honourable publication.

It was the sort of incendiary, news-making copy that editors and publishers love – except when they are the target – and symptomatic of Peru's polarisation faced with two controversial presidential candidates.

Fujimori's father, Alberto, is in jail for corruption and human rights abuses committed when he was president in the 1990s. His daughter has surrounded herself with his former advisers. Humala is a former army officer who attempted a coup and once aligned himself with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Polls give Fujimori an edge.

Vargas Llosa said it was a choice between Aids and cancer but backed Humala as the lesser evil. Social networks have accused El Comercio and other mainstream media of demonising Humala to protect the interests of big business.

El Comercio's publisher, Francisco Miro Quesada, responded with an open letter saying the Nobel laureate's letter was full of "ill-intentioned untruths" and lies. The newspaper championed freedom, pluralism and tolerance, he said. "We are not the ones that have changed," he said. "We have kept our commitment to the country and democracy."

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