Many Peruvian authors, critics, and readers are of the opinion that there is no common literary project uniting young Peruvian writers. According to this theory, the writers who began publishing in the 1990s were by nature so individualistic that they never formed any kind of group, movement, or tendency, nor could they be said to comprise a generation, in the traditional literary sense of that term. This position surprises me, because among young authors of the decade, there was indeed a common theme, much clearer and sharper in the Peruvian case, than in any other moment or country that I’m aware of: cocaine.

Cocaine, of course, never comes alone, and less so in literature. Its derivatives are nightlife, prostitution, street violence, repressed or compulsive homosexuality (as opposed to relaxed and natural homosexuality), homelessness, slang, and a series of other elements that, with a little rhetorical embellishment and a lot of punch, tend to be grouped by Peruvian critics beneath the rubric “dirty realism.”

Dirty realism and the adolescence of Lima’s middle or marginal class impregnates, more or less, the style of an entire generation of authors, many of whom were included in the first National Young Writers Awards short story anthology, organized by the Cener of Studies and Action for Peace in the second half of the 1990s. Nor was the cocaine boom in Peru was not limited to literature. Movies like No se lo digas a nadie (Don’t Tell Anyone), Ciudad de M (City of M), La bala perdida (Stray Bullet), and Muertos de amor (Death by Love) demonstrate that this style and theme impacted the world of all the Peruvian storytellers, including filmmakers. Four films may not seem like much, but keeping in mind that Peru rarely produces more than two features a year, these constitute overwhelming evidence of cocaine’s significance for the Peruvian creative class and its consumers. Similar things happened in other countries—for example, the Spanish author José Angel Mañas or the 1999 novel Mala onda (Bad Vibes) by Chilean novelist and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet—but nowhere with the vigor of the Peruvian case.

The explanation most frequently offered for this phenomenon links it to the waning relevance of the leftist ideologies that had sustained social realism. Throughout the 1990s, as these ideologies declined, so too did the principles that Latin American literary and cultural elites had held most dear. As with politics, literature was suddenly untethered, unmoored. Realism, as it had been defined for decades, was no longer real. How to make fiction in a world in which the most concrete ideological realities had themselves become fiction?

In the Hispanic world, the first response to that question was the infamous 1996 anthology McOndo, which reclaimed the quotidian experiences of the urban middle class, in order to capture a new type of reader, that is, middle-class urban youth. Novels and stories ceased to be written exclusively for the academy. For someone like me, who was studying literature at that time, McOndo was liberating. Previously, the entire exercise of writing seemed impossibly weighty—building upon the literary legacy of Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, or Gabriel García Márquez. For many authors who have come since, McOndo allowed us to value and then write about what we already knew intimately, as opposed to having further one-sided conversations with the literary canon.

If the previous statement is true, it’s possible to explain the cocaine-fueled Peruvian literary boom by understanding the world in which these authors came of age. For those born in the 1970s, the democracy they came to know in their youth could be defined as a place without water, without electricity, where the sounds of bombs were routine, where windows were sealed with tape in case of explosion, where life was lived before curfew, where staying out late was, for security reasons, unthinkable. The dictatorship, on the other hand, brought with it peace and prosperity—unsustainable, but still tangible—and succeeded in finishing off the disgraced political parties, along with various political and social institutions on all levels. If the 1980s were an interminable and violent political fight, the 1990s closed off the possibility of discussion and dialogue, creating in its stead an illusory world where everything was okay and everyone should just be happy and quit protesting.

Every dictatorship—and many democracies—derive a subtle degree of legitimacy from the citizenry’s fear of chaos, from those who offer up certain freedoms to a strong leader, releasing themselves of the responsibilities those freedoms bring. Erich Fromm called this phenomenon “the fear of liberty,” including the liberty to think; to see beyond the simple, standard explanations offered. Many societies in moral, political, or economic turmoil—Weimar Germany, Republican Spain, Peru under Alan García’s first administration—have put themselves in the hands of someone who thinks for them. They have left the responsibility to others, have opted not to raise their voices against those others, or to look beyond their limits of their own lives. In some ways, this keeps them from feeling implicated by the government’s actions: it’s not that we approve, it’s that we would rather not know the details of what’s going on while order is imposed in our name. It’s an unconscious process of collective expiation; societies rely on dictatorships so as not to feel guilty for the acts they themselves are demanding.

The young authors of the nineties simply mirrored the mood of the nation—a people gripped by a fear of liberty, and a regime, that of the autocratic Alberto Fujimori, propped up by this fear. Peru was a society that had ceded its capacity to think and look deeper than its own lot—a coked-up, doped-up society. The literature created may or may not have been worthwhile, but it’s significant that these Peruvian authors, unlike their counterparts throughout Latin America, were preoccupied with what they saw, rather than what they read. And, in contrast to their public image as individualists, they dealt primarily with the same reality, sometimes even employing the same stylistic techniques, like a well-organized social collective, transparently united by common concerns.

Awareness of a deed represents complicity with it, and innocence is feigned through silence. These were atrocious times in Peru. Ordinary people were dying by the tens of thousands. The literature of the 1990s then, and in particular the work of young writers, is significant for the issues it neglects—including the issue—rather than those it addresses. Regarding political violence, these writers, comprising the first generation to have grown up with this chaos as an ordinary aspect of reality, preferred silence. As did, certainly, the rest of the nation.

In this respect, Peru differs from other countries of the region. Social and political violence played a significant role in the work of the most important Latin American authors of the 1990s—writers like Roberto Bolaño of Chile, Fernando Vallejo of Colombia, Paulo Lins and Ricardo Piglia of Argentina—and it is also revisited in the recent novels of McOndo authors like Bolivia’s Edmundo Paz Soldán, Chile’s Sergio Gomez or Alberto Fuguet. In this context, it is striking that Peru hid its most brutal open wound, nor is it normal that this silence is nearing its twenty-fifth unbroken year. All this as Chile and Argentina have filled ample libraries—as well as concert halls, movie theaters, and playhouses—with their respective bloody and violent histories.

Did Peruvian literature ignore the issue because it did not have the capacity to confront it? Did the the political successes of the first half of the 1990s shut the eyes of writers euphoric simply to be done with politics? Is Peruvian society so lacking in historical memory? This literary silence has been the object of debate in multiple forums and academic discussions, but there are now indications that, in fact, it simply never existed.

Recently, Professor Marcel Velázquez, from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, told me he was gathering a corpus of literature written and published outside of Lima in the 1990s. According to Velázquez, of these nearly forty books, many touched, directly or indirectly, upon the political violence of the time, but not a single one of them was reviewed in the newspapers of Lima or distributed in the bookstores of Peru’s capital. In his opinion, the “dirty realist” strain of literature, often described as the dominant style of the era, actually only existed in Lima. Naturally, Peruvian literature was also written outside the capital, but Lima did not read it. Lima was doped up. The supposed silence of Peruvian literature was itself fiction—the literature of the violence was being conveniently ignored.

It would be interesting to get to know that body of work now, this anti-canonic writing that existed outside the “official” literature. Be it what it may, whatever it describes, it is part of the country that the writers of Lima, those young and not-so-young, could not see, or ignored with such diligence that we were nearly able to persuade ourselves that it did not exist—perhaps because we were afraid of it, perhaps because its very existence assaulted our innocence. A true sense of what the Peruvian literature was in those years can only come if we know both sides. It is the only way to understand this country, this divided nation, whose two faces have yet to read one another.