information:extraction
Presidential candidacy

In 1987, he helped form and soon became a leader of the center-right party Movimiento Libertad. The following year his party entered a coalition with the parties of Peru's two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaúnde Terry (of the Popular Action party) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (of the Partido Popular Cristiano), to form the tripartite center-right coalition known as Frente Democrático (FREDEMO). He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the FREDEMO coalition with the support of the United States. Many of Peru's political elite in the twenty first century would begin their careers in FREDEMO. He proposed neoliberal policies similar to Fujimori that included a drastic economic austerity program that frightened most of the country's poor; this program emphasized the need for privatization, a market economy, free trade, and most importantly, the dissemination of private property.

Vargas Llosa, according to Rospigliosi, inspired some of the objectives drafted by the Peruvian Armed Forces in Plan Verde, specifically in the volume titled " Driving Peru into the XXI century", which outlined Peru becoming a neoliberal country and called for the extermination of vulnerable populations deemed as economically burdensome. Members of the Peruvian Armed Forces who drafted Plan Verde initially expected Vargas Llosa to win the presidency and support their objectives. Although Vargas Llosa won the first round with 34% of the vote, Vargas Llosa was defeated by a then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori, in the subsequent run-off. Vargas Llosa included an account of his run for the presidency in the memoir A Fish in the Water (El pez en el agua, 1993).