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Twelve hours before he locked himself in his bedroom and took his own life, Alan García, Peru’s two-time former President, gave an interview to the national radio-and-television station RPP, from a local university where he taught. It was a Tuesday evening in mid-April, during Holy Week, and the city was swirling with rumors about García’s imminent arrest. He had been implicated in a dizzyingly complex transnational corruption scandal that had already enveloped much of the Peruvian political class. Now, after months of silence in the face of mounting pressure from prosecutors and the press, he’d decided that it was time to talk.

Jenny Alvaro, a producer of the interview, was meeting García for the first time, but she thought she knew what to expect: the bombastic, theatrical, larger-than-life politician who had been a presence on the national stage for more than three decades. “I’d seen him on television, at rallies, and had always heard he had an imposing presence,” Alvaro told me. Instead, García that evening was calm, even subdued, with little of the bluster usually associated with his public persona. He wore a dark-blue suit, a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, no tie. His black hair, with a wisp of gray in front, was combed back and thin compared with the wild mane he’d had in his youth. He had been dashing as a young man but had gained weight as he aged. He was known to be meticulous about his image, to have strong opinions about the fine details of his televised interviews—which camera angle suited him best, where he should be placed in relation to the interviewer. But now García was pliant, almost deferential. Alvaro told him where to sit and which direction to face, and when, for a moment, he seemed to doubt her she assured him, “It will make you look younger, Mr. President.” García laughed.

The interviewer that evening, Carlos Villarreal, had known the former President—and covered his exploits—for twenty years. García told him that he had just half an hour before he was scheduled to teach his weekly class on political theory, and that he liked to set an example for his students by being on time. (In a country that is, broadly speaking, agnostic on the importance of punctuality, his insistence on this point amounted to a personal quirk.) When the interview began, García frowned and nodded as Villarreal alluded to new allegations that might send him to prison. Finally, Villarreal asked, “Are you aware that this interview with RPP could be your last?”

In light of subsequent events, the question seemed ominous. Five months earlier, García had handed his personal secretary, Ricardo Pinedo, a sealed letter to give to his family when the time came; he didn’t explain that it was a suicide note, but he’d often mentioned to friends that he would never submit to the humiliating spectacle of an arrest. As far back as 2012, García had told an interviewer, “I wasn’t born for that. No one is putting a hand on me.” Erasmo Reyna, García’s lawyer, told me that, after a hearing last year, García showed him a pistol that he’d carried in his waistband in case the authorities tried to arrest him. “That was when I knew this was serious,” Reyna said.

In response to Villarreal’s question, García let out a pensive, almost plaintive “No.”

Villarreal quickly added, “As a free man.”

A few minutes earlier, a source had confirmed to Villarreal that an order for García’s preliminary detention was awaiting a judge’s approval. Once the order was signed, a long career in public life would come to an ignominious end, and a man who had been obsessed with his place in history would enter it as perhaps little more than a footnote. The press knew it. Much of the country had been waiting for it. Crucially, García himself knew it.

To Villarreal, García offered a sober defense against the latest allegations: There was no proof. It was all insinuations and hypotheses. But his heart didn’t seem to be in it. “I’m a Christian,” García said, at one point. “I believe in life after death. I believe in history. And, if you’ll allow me, I believe I have a small place in the history of Peru.”

Shortly before six-thirty the following morning, police knocked on the door of García’s home in the Miraflores district of Lima. A few journalists were waiting outside when the officers were admitted by household staff. García met the police, along with a representative from the prosecutor’s office, on the landing between the first and second floors and, after a brief exchange, walked back up the stairs. Video later released by the authorities shows García pulling a gun from his pocket as he turns. He locked himself in his bedroom, contacted his partner, Roxanne Cheesman, who was in Miami and is the mother of his youngest son, and told her he loved her, on a video call that lasted less than a minute. Then he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He was just over a month shy of his seventieth birthday.

To understand García, it’s necessary to understand the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA, the political party he led for decades and, in some ways, embodied. In a country where most parties have been weakened to the point of irrelevance and political alliances are often little more than marriages of convenience arranged for a specific election, the APRA, which was founded ninety-five years ago, is different, as much a cultural institution as a political party. For generations, being an Aprista has been an inherited identity; militants join the Party because their fathers and mothers were members, and their grandparents before them. When I asked Erasmo Reyna to define the APRA, he made no mention at first of ideology or policies. “Aprismo is a feeling,” he told me. “A brotherhood. It’s like you’re part of a big family.” I pointed out that it sounded as if he were talking about a soccer team. He shook his head. “We’re not a club. Not a fan base. We’re something bigger than that.”

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Alan García was born into the APRA. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father an accountant; both were committed Party members. After the APRA was declared illegal, García’s father spent years living clandestinely, as did the APRA’s legendary founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. García’s father was being held in El Sexto, a notorious prison in Lima (which was later torn down), when his son was born in 1949.

García joined the Party as a teen-ager, and he was often in the front row for Haya de la Torre’s classes on history and politics at the Casa del Pueblo, the APRA’s cavernous headquarters, in central Lima. Even then, he stood out, for his Party pedigree, his intellect, and his size. (As an adult, he was six feet three, nearly a foot taller than the average Peruvian, “which is like having free publicity in a country like ours,” his diminutive secretary Ricardo Pinedo told me.) In the early seventies, García was one of a small group of young men whom Haya de la Torre selected to study with him personally. The students would gather on Sunday afternoons at Haya’s home, on the outskirts of Lima, to talk politics and revolution and history, and to sing. García was a precocious public speaker, in the mold of his mentor, and a good singer, a talent he later employed to great effect when he was busking as a student in Paris, and, even later, when he campaigned with famous Peruvian musicians, belting out Creole classics in his melodic baritone. He was a charismatic but undisciplined student, well known at the Catholic University for his eloquent speeches and for the orange leather coat he wore. Mirko Lauer, a political analyst and an editor, befriended García when they were both students. He describes him as on the surface full of confidence but, in fact, dogged by uncertainty and obsessed with status. “There was something missing, replaced, as it were, by ambition,” Lauer told me. “García didn’t seem to be completely there. And those who aren’t there tend to make stupendous candidates because people can project onto them whatever they wish.”