He was a dashing former war correspondent turned popular TV personality, covering breaking national news in the capital of a mysterious northern land called Canada.

She was an ex-employee of the Peruvian Navy, recently released from an Ontario women’s prison after smuggling drugs — unwittingly, she says — aboard a flight from South America.

They met, they fell in love — or something like it — and the rest is either a cringe-inducing chronicle of unsafe sex involving a man who should have known better, or else an epic tale of longing and passion that’s worthy of a Latin American soap opera or telenovela.

In Lima, they seem to be taking the telenovela approach.

Behold Peruvian TV’s melodramatic take on the amorous adventures of Mike Duffy and Yvette Benites, also starring their putative Peruvian-Canadian love child — a.k.a. Karen Duffy — whose long, heartfelt search for the man she believes to be her biological father provides the main plot motor for a story Peruvians are calling Mi Padre el Senador — My father, the senator.

That is the title of a Peruvian mini-epic that aired Sunday night on Punto Final, a weekly newsmagazine on TV station Frecuencia Latina in Lima.

Accompanied by countless portentous drum rolls, the documentary charts a decades-long tale of indiscretion, desire and denial that is by now familiar to most Canadians ever since the story broke earlier this month by Maclean’s magazine.

It centres on Duffy, of course — the disgraced former senator who turned a longtime gig as a much-admired TV interviewer into a lucrative spot on the Conservative side of the Canadian parliament’s upper house. Unfortunately, he got himself into money trouble along the way and now faces 31 criminal charges related to his Senate expenses.

Duffy has declared himself innocent on all counts, a response that parallels his initial reaction to allegations he is the father of an unacknowledged Peruvian daughter, now 32, whose full name is Karen Duffy Benites and who lives with her businessman husband and their three young daughters in La Molina, an upscale neighbourhood of Lima.

The woman recently launched a paternity suit in the Superior Court of Lima in hopes of proving Duffy is her father, after years of sending him plaintive emails without receiving a reply.

It would be an exaggeration to say the Mike Duffy love scandal is the top news story in Peru these days, but many newspapers and other news outlets are covering the tale, and tens of thousands of limenos — as residents of the capital are known — are now familiar with two Canadians, just one of whom is named Bieber.

Twelve minutes long, the documentary tells a tale of thwarted love and lingering silence, a romance that began well but went awry.

Thanks to a shared connection to Duffy’s sister, Moira, the Canadian newsman and the young Peruvian ex-con spoke on the phone one day while both were living in Ottawa — she in a halfway house following her release from jail. This was in the early 1980s.

“He said, ‘You have a beautiful voice,’ ” Benites tells reporter Fabricio Escajadillo. “What are you doing later on?”

According to the Peruvian program’s slightly overwrought version, what followed was “three months of passionate relations in the cold of Canada.”

It all ended on a grim day, while Duffy was travelling out of town, when Benites was informed she would be deported within 24 hours.

She never saw or heard from her Canadian paramour again.

In the months that followed, she sent him cards, letters, photos, even cassettes with recordings of her infant daughter’s cries. But Duffy never wrote back, she says.

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Later, her daughter took up the task of uniting with a man the Peruvian documentary inaccurately identifies as “one of the richest” politicians in Canada.

Karen Duffy tells the show’s reporter she has no monetary interest in seeking contact with Duffy.

“I want him to know,” she says, “and to turn his head to see that here in Peru, in a country where he never imagined it, there is a piece of him. That is me, and I am waiting for him.”

The narrator ends the documentary with a poignant thought.

“Who would have said that, after a career filled with denunciations and dark moments, in the faraway land of Peru, there exists a woman who wants to give Mike Duffy a hug?”

Who indeed?

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