1. The Feast of the Goat by Vargas Llosa - fast paced, fictionalized account of the last days of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic

2. 100 years of solitude - currently 70% through but the writing and story is superb.

3. Death in the Andes — another Vargas Llosa book. Not as good as Feast of the Goat in my opinion, but gives a good idea of the situation in Peru in the 1980s during the Shining Path insurrection, written after the author’s participation in a government investigation of the murder of several journalists in a remote Peruvian village.

EDIT: spelling