A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Sixteen. The Great Change

It is a custom that at CADE, the Annual Conference of Executives, the presidential candidates present their plans for governing. The meetings arouse great interest and the explanatory speeches are delivered before audiences full of entrepreneurs, political leaders, government officials, and many journalists.

Of the ten candidates, CADE invited those four of us who, according to the opinion polls, were the only ones in December 1989 who might possibly be elected: the candidates of the Democratic Front, of the APRA, of the United Left, and of the Socialist Alliance. Four months away from the elections, Alberto Fujimori’s name did not turn up in the surveys, and when eventually it did, he was vying for last place with the Prophet Ezequiel Ataucusi Gamonal, the founder of the Israelite Church of the New Universal Pact.

I was impatiently awaiting the chance to present my program, showing the Peruvian people what was new about my candidacy and the drive for reform that inspired it. I was chosen to give the final speech ending the conference, on the afternoon of the second day, after the speeches by Alva Castro and Henry Pease, and the one by Barrantes, who set forth his ideas in the morning of the second day, Saturday, December 2. Speaking last seemed to me to be a good sign. Those chosen to be on the panel with me were a man who was for the Front, Salvador Majluf, the president of the National Association of Industries, and two dignified adversaries: the agrarian technician Manuel Lajo Lazo and the journalist César Lévano, one of the few judicious Marxists in Peru.

Although those in charge of our Plan for Governing had not finished drawing up the program, in the last week of November Lucho Bustamante handed me the draft of a speech setting forth its main features. Performing miracles as far as time was concerned, since those were the days of the public controversy with Alan García regarding the number of government employees, I managed to seclude myself for two whole mornings so as to write the text of my speech,^* and on the eve of the CADE conference I met with the directorate of the Plan for Governing for a practice session in answering the predictable objections of the panel and the audience.

After describing the impoverishment of Peru in recent decades and the contribution of the Aprista government to the cataclysm (“Those who, taking Señor Alan García Pérez at his word, as set forth in his speech at this same forum in 1984, invested their entire savings, made a miserable deal: today they have less than 2 percent of their savings left”), I explained our proposal for “saving Peru from mediocrity, from demagoguery, from hunger, from underemployment, and from terror.” From the very start, coming straight to the point, I made the aim of our reforms clear: “We already have political freedom. But Peru has never really tried to follow the path of economic freedom, without which any democracy is imperfect and condemned to poverty…All our efforts will be directed toward turning Peru from the country of proletarians, the unemployed, and the privileged elites that it is today into a country of entrepreneurs, property owners, and citizens equal before the law.”

I promised to take on the task of leading the fight against terrorism and mobilizing civil society, arming peasant patrols and making every effort to have this example of self-defense be imitated in urban and rural centers of production. Civil authorities and institutions would again take control of the emergency zones that had been entrusted to the military.

This step would be a strong one, but one within the law. There must be an end to the violations of human rights committed by the forces of order in their antisubversive campaign: the legitimacy of democracy depended on it. Peasants and humble Peruvians would never aid the government in confronting the terrorists as long as they felt that police and soldiers were riding roughshod over them. In order to demonstrate my administration’s resolve not to tolerate abuses of this sort, I had decided — as I outlined to Ian Martin, the secretary general of Amnesty International, who visited me on May 4, 1990—to appoint a commissioner of human rights, who would have an office in the Presidential Palace. In the following months, after shuffling through many names, I asked Lucho Bustamante to sound out Diego García Sayán, a young attorney who had founded the Andean Committee of Jurists and who, although he had ties to the United Left, seemed capable of carrying out the duties of this post impartially. This commissioner would not be appointed simply for show; he would have powers to follow up on complaints and accusations, to conduct investigations on his own, to initiate court proceedings, to draft projects for informing and educating public opinion, in schools, labor unions, agricultural communes, barracks, and police headquarters.

In addition to this commissioner, there would be another who would be responsible for the national program of privatization, a key reform of the program, that I too wanted to follow closely. Both commissioners would have ministerial rank. For this latter task I had designated Javier Silva Ruete, who at that time was the head of the program for privatization.

The first year would be the most difficult stage, owing to the inevitable recessionary nature of the anti-inflationary policy, the aim of which was to reduce the increase in prices to 10 percent per year. In the next two years — of liberalization and of major reforms — the increase in production, employment, and revenues would be moderate. But from the fourth year on, we would enter a very dynamic period, on a solid foundation, in which employment and revenues would increase. Peru would have begun the takeoff toward freedom accompanied by material well-being.

I explained all the reforms, beginning with the most controversial ones, from the privatization of public enterprises — it would begin with some seventy firms, among them the Banco Continental, the Society Paramonga, the Empresa Minera Tintaya, AeroPerú, Entel Perú, the Compañía de Teléfonos, the Banco Internacional, the Banco Popular, Entur Perú, Popular y Porvenir Compañía de Seguros, EPSEP, Laboratorios Unidos, and the Reaseguradora Peruana, and would continue until the whole of the public sector had been handed over to private hands — until the present number of ministries had been cut in half.

In education, I anticipated a thoroughgoing reform, so that equality of opportunity would at last be possible. Only if poor Peruvian children and young people received a high-level technical or professional education would they have equal status for getting ahead in life along with those children and young people from families with middle and high incomes who could attend private schools and universities. In order to raise the educational level of the poor, it was necessary to reform the programs of study so that they would take into account the cultural, regional, and linguistic heterogeneity of Peruvian society, modernize the training given teachers, pay them good salaries and give them well-equipped schools, with libraries, laboratories, and an adequate infrastructure. Did the impoverished Peruvian state have any way to finance this reform? Of course not. For that, we would have to put an end to the indiscriminate access to a free education. After the third year of secondary school, it would be replaced by a system of scholarships and grants, so that those who were in a position to do so would finance, in whole or in part, their own education. No student who lacked financial resources would be left without a secondary school or a university education; but middle and high income families would contribute to giving the poor the means to acquire an education that would prepare them to emerge from poverty. Parents would participate in the administration of the school centers and in determining the contributions made by each family.

Almost immediately, this proposal was used against us and became one of the most fiery warhorses sent into battle against the Front. Apristas, Socialists, and Communists proclaimed that they would defend “free education” with their lives, maintaining that we wanted to do away with it so that not only having enough to eat and having a job, but also getting an education would be a privilege of the rich alone. And a few days after my speech at CADE, Fernando Belaunde came to my house with a memorandum, reminding me that a free education was a firm plank in the Popular Action campaign platform. They would not abandon it. Populist leaders began to make statements along the same lines. The criticisms of the allied parties assumed such proportions that I called a meeting of all the parties of the Democratic Front in the Freedom Movement in order to discuss this measure. The meeting was a stormy one. In it, León Trahtenberg, the chairman of the committee on education, was relentlessly questioned by the populists Andrés Cardó Franco, Gastón Acurio, and others.

I myself intervened in the argument, on that and other occasions, as the defender of our proposal. It is demagoguery to uphold in principle universal free education, if the result of it is that three children out of four study in schools that lack libraries, laboratories, bathrooms, desks, and blackboards, and often even ceilings and walls, that teachers receive inadequate training and earn starvation wages, and that therefore only the young people of the middle and upper classes — who can afford to pay for good schools and good universities — receive an education that assures them of a successful professional career.

In my conversation with Belaunde I made myself very clear: I would not yield on this or any other point of our program. I had given in when it came to the municipal elections and the congressional lists, allowing Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party a great many advantages, but when it came to the Plan for Governing I would make no concessions. The one reason why I wanted to be president was to carry out those reforms. The educational one was among the most important, since it was aimed at putting an end to one of the most unjust forms of cultural discrimination: that stemming from differences in income.

Finally, although we were unable to keep dissident voices within the alliance from speaking out against this measure from time to time, we managed to get Popular Action, against their will, to put up with it. But our adversaries continued to attack us mercilessly on the subject, with advertising campaigns and pronunciamentos by teachers’ unions and associations in defense of “popular education.” The campaign was such that León Trahtenberg himself sent me his letter of resignation from the committee (I did not accept it) and came to me, at the beginning of January 1990, to propose that we retreat from our position, in view of the negative reactions. With the backing of Lucho Bustamante, I insisted that it was our duty, since the measure seemed to us to be necessary, to go on defending it. But despite my constant preaching about it — from that time on, in all my speeches I brought the subject up — this was one of the reforms that frightened the voters most and made a fair number of them decide to vote against me.

I am writing these lines in August 1991, and I see, by clippings from newspapers in Lima, that the teachers in state schools—380,000 of them — have been on strike for five months, in despair over their living conditions. Pupils in public schools risk missing out on the entire year of studies. And even if they don’t, a person can easily imagine what, with the huge parenthesis of five months of no schooling, this year will mean for these students in academic terms. The bishop of Huaraz states in a magazine that it is a scandal that the average pay of a schoolteacher is scarcely more than a hundred dollars a month, which means that they and their families go hungry. For five months now, because of the strike, all the state schools have been closed, and since the new administration took office the state has not built a single classroom, because of a lack of funds. But education continues to be free and Peruvians should congratulate themselves that the great victory of the people was not cast aside!

This controversy taught me a great deal about the power of ideological myth, which is able to completely replace reality. Because the free public education that my adversaries defended so zealously was nonexistent, a dead letter. For some time, the well-nigh total bankruptcy of the nation’s treasury kept the state from erecting schools, and the immense majority of classrooms that were constructed in marginal districts and young towns to meet the growing demand were built by the people of the neighborhood themselves. And the parents also took over the maintenance, the cleaning, and the repair of the national primary and secondary schools because of the inability of the state to cover these expenses.

Every time I toured a poor neighborhood, in Lima or in the provinces, I visited a number of schools. “Did the government build these classrooms?” “No! We did!” Owing to the economic crisis, it had been some time since the Peruvian state had contributed anything except the teachers’ salaries. The parents had filled the vacuum by taking it upon themselves to build and maintain the schools in the poorest neighborhoods and districts in the country. In my speeches I always emphasized that, in just a couple of years, our Solidarity program had built, thanks to donations, volunteer work, and the collaboration of the local residents, more day-care centers and schoolrooms than the Peruvian state. Moreover, Enrique Ghersi discovered that that same Aprista government that harped day and night on the threat to free public education had passed measures that required parents who enrolled their children in state schools to pay “fees” to parents’ associations which would go to a national education fund. Like many other unrealistic measures, making education free, which had served only to do further harm to the poor by increasing discrimination, had gradually been modified in practice, owing to the force of circumstances.

I placed great hopes in the reform of education. I was convinced that the most effective way to achieve justice in Peru was high-level public instruction. Sometimes I pointed out that I had studied in public schools, such as Leoncio Prado and San Miguel in Piura, and at the University of San Marcos, so that I knew the defects of the system (although they had grown worse since my days as a student). But these efforts to persuade my compatriots of the sound principles underlying our proposed reform of education were useless, and those who accused me of wanting to keep the people ignorant prevailed.

Two other reforms that I announced at the CADE were also the object of fierce attacks: that of the labor market and the new model for government employment. The former was made out by my adversaries to be a clever way of allowing entrepreneurs to fire their workers, and the latter to be a plan to turn out half a million public employees into the streets. (In a video against us that managed, in less than a minute, to pile up, one on top of the other, plagiarism [it repeated images from Pink Floyd’s The Wall], distortion, and slander, the government pictured me, disfigured by fangs à la Dracula, as bringing on an apocalyptic shock, in which factories were closed, prices shot into the stratosphere, children were thrown out of schools, and workers out of their jobs, and the entire country blew up in a nuclear explosion.)

Like free education, job security is a false social victory, which, instead of protecting the good worker against arbitrary dismissal, has turned into a mechanism for protecting the inefficient worker, and an obstacle to the creation of jobs for those who need work — in Peru, at the end of 1989, seven out of every ten adults. Job security favored 11 percent of the economically active population. It was, then, a small minority that had job security and an income that ensured that the number of unemployed would remain constant. The laws protecting the worker meant that, after a trial period of three months, a worker turned into the owner of his job, from which it was practically impossible to remove him, since the “just cause” for his dismissal referred to in the Constitution had been reduced, by the laws in force at that time, to a “grave dereliction of duty,” something almost impossible to prove. The result was that companies functioned with a minimum of personnel and hesitated before expanding for fear of finding themselves later on with the dead weight of a payroll that was too large. In a country where unemployment and underemployment affected two-thirds of the population and where creating work for the immense majority was an extremely urgent necessity, it was imperative to give the principle of job security a genuinely social meaning.

Explaining that I would respect rights already won — the reforms would affect only those newly hired — I enumerated at CADE the principal measures needed to mitigate the negative effects of job security: lack of productivity would be included among the just causes for dismissal, the trial period for evaluating the worker’s ability would be extended, commercial enterprises would be offered a vast range of possibilities for hiring temporary workers that would allow them to adjust their work force to market variations, and to combat unemployment among young people, contracts for training and apprenticeship, part-time work, and contracts for rotating workers and early retirement would be drawn up. In addition, the worker would be allowed to set himself up as a private and autonomous business and negotiate with the employer for providing his services on a contract basis. Within this package of measures, the democratization of the right to strike was also included, which up to that time had been the monopoly of the highest levels of the union hierarchy, and which, in many cases, forced the rest of the workers to go out on strike through a sort of blackmail. Strikes would be decided on by secret, direct, and universal vote; strikes that affected vital public services and strikes in support of other unions or associations would be prohibited; the practice of taking hostages and occupying work sites, as an adjunct to union work stoppages, would be penalized.

(In March 1990, during our congress on “La revolución de la libertad”—“The Revolution of Freedom”—Sir Alan Walters, who had been one of Margaret Thatcher’s advisers, assured me that these measures would have a favorable effect on the creation of jobs. He reproached me, I admit, for not having been as radical with regard to the minimum wage, which we were going to maintain. “It appears to be an act of justice,” he said to me. “But it is one only for those who are working. The minimum wage is an injustice for those who have lost their job or enter the labor market and find all the doors shut. To benefit these latter, those most in need of social justice, the minimum wage is an injustice, an obstacle that blocks their path to employment. The countries where there are the most jobs are those in which the market is freest.”)

I explained, particularly on visits to factories, that an efficient worker is too expensive for businesses to let him go, and that our reforms would not affect rights already won, but would apply only to new workers, those millions of Peruvians who were unemployed or who had miserable jobs, whom we had the duty to help by quickly creating work for them. I can see why workers alienated by populist preaching were bound to be hostile, because they didn’t understand these reforms, or because they understood them and feared them. But the fact that the majority of the unemployed, in whose favor these reforms were conceived, should vote massively against these changes in particular says a great deal about the formidable dead weight of populist culture, which leads those who are most discriminated against and exploited to vote in favor of the system that keeps them in that condition.

As for the half million public employees, it is worth telling the entire story, because this subject, like that of free education, had a devastating effect in my disfavor among the humble sectors and because it shows how effective dirty tricks can be in politics. The news that, once I took office, I would throw 500,000 bureaucrats out into the streets appeared in that great orchestrator of out-and-out lies, La República,^* as a statement that Enrique Ghersi, the “young Turk” of the Freedom Movement, had supposedly made in Chile, to a Chilean journalist.^† In fact, Ghersi hadn’t said any such thing and he hastened to deny this piece of information, once he returned to Peru, in the press^§ and on television. A while later, the Chilean journalist himself, Fernando Villegas, came to Lima and denied this cock-and-bull story,^* in the daily papers and on TV. But by this point the concerted lies regarding the 500,000 employees, organized by a cabal consisting of La República, Hoy, La Crónica, and the state-run radio stations and TV channels, had become an incontrovertible truth. Even leaders of the Democratic Front, my allies, were convinced of it, since some of them, such as the PPC leader Ricardo Amiel and the populist Javier Alva Orlandini, confirmed the falsehood in their statements to the press instead of denying it — by criticizing Ghersi for the slanderous untruth they attributed to him!^*

What is certain is that neither Ghersi nor anyone in the Front could have said any such thing, because there was no way of determining how many public employees were superfluous, since there was no way of even knowing how many of them there were. The Democratic Front had a committee, headed by Dr. María Reynafarje, trying to determine the number, and it had tracked down more than a million (excluding the members of the armed forces), but the evaluation was still going on. Naturally, this bureaucratic inflation had to be drastically reduced, so that the state would have only those functionaries it needed. But the transference from the public sector to the private of the tens or hundreds of thousands of excess bureaucrats was not going to be accomplished through untimely dismissals. We were aware of the problem, and my administration, not only for legal and ethical reasons, but also for practical ones, was not going to make the stupid mistake of beginning its term in office by making this problem many times worse. Our plan was to painlessly relocate unneeded bureaucrats. This process of decanting would go on gradually as, with the reforms, economic growth started, new business concerns came into being, and the ones that already existed began to work at full capacity. This process would be speeded up by the government, through incentives to bring about voluntary resignations or early retirements. Without trampling anyone’s rights underfoot, doing our best to encourage the market to carry out the relocation, a good part of the bureaucracy would pass over to the civil sector — a good part, although at this juncture the exact number could not be determined.

But fiction routed reality. In perfect synchronization, the moment the falsehood was printed in La República (with huge headlines on the front page), the government began its campaign, via the radio stations and the TV channels it controlled and via its fanatical followers, distributing millions of leaflets throughout the country, and repeating daily, in every possible form, through all its mouthpieces, from its leaders to its shadiest newsmongers, the rumor that I would begin my administration by firing half a million government employees. Declarations, denials, explanations, from me, from Ghersi, or from those in charge of the Plan for Governing, were of no use whatsoever.

From a very early age I have lived my life fascinated by fiction and the spell it casts, because my vocation has made me highly sensitive to that phenomenon. And I have long since realized how far the realm of fiction extends beyond the bounds of literature, cinema, and the arts, genres in which it is thought to be confined. Perhaps because it is an irresistible necessity that the human species tries to satisfy in one way or another, even by unimaginable ways of behaving, fiction makes its appearance everywhere, crops up in religion and in science and in activities more obviously vaccinated against it. Politics, particularly in countries where ignorance and passions play as important a role in it as they do in Peru, is one of those fields that has been well fertilized so that what is fictitious, what is imaginary, will take root. I had many chances to verify this during the campaign, above all with regard to the subject of the half a million bureaucrats threatened by my liberal ax.

The left immediately joined the campaign and there were union agreements, manifestoes in protest and repudiations, public demonstrations of government employees and workers at which they burned me in effigy or carried coffins about the streets with my name on them.

The apogee was a judicial proceeding against me, initiated by the CITE (Confederación Intersectorial de Trabajadores Estatales: Intersectorial Confederation of State Workers), a union group controlled by the left that had been seeking legal recognition for some time. Alan García hastened to grant it now, for that very purpose. The CITE initiated what, in legal jargon, is called “a proceeding preparatory to an admission of guilt” before the judiciary because of “the risk of losing their jobs confronted by its members.” I was summoned before the 26th Civil Court of Lima. Besides being grotesque, the matter was a legal absurdity, as even adversaries like the Socialist senator Enrique Bernales, for instance, and the Aprista representative Héctor Vargas Haya declared.

In the executive and political committees of Libertad we discussed whether I should appear before the judge, or whether this was tantamount to collaborating with Alan García’s Machiavellian tactics, permitting the hostile press to cause a great uproar over me, brought before the bar in the Palace of Justice by workers threatened with dismissal. We decided that only my attorney would appear. I entrusted this mission to Enrique Chirinos Soto, a member of the political committee of Libertad, which I had invited to advise me. Enrique, an independent senator, journalist, historian, and an authority on the Constitution, was one of those liberals of yesteryear, like Arturo Salazar Larraín, educated alongside Don Pedro Beltrán. A journalist whose opinion carried weight, a subtle political analyst, a conservative without complexes, and a staunch Catholic, Enrique is one of the intelligent politicians — despite being a little scatterbrained — that have appeared in Peru, and a native Arequipan who has been able to maintain the legal tradition of his home territory. He almost always attended the meetings of the political committee, during which he was in the habit of remaining completely silent and motionless, giving off an aroma of good Scotch whisky, in a sort of voluntary catatonia. Every so often, something would arouse him from his geologic torpor and impel him to speak: his contributions to the discussion were wondrously clearsighted and helped us to surmount complicated problems. Every once in a while, remembering his function as adviser, he sent me little notes that I read with delight: descriptions of the political situation at the moment, tactical advice, or simply comments on what was going on at the time, written with great wit and humor. (None of his many talents kept him, however, from making a monumental blunder between the first and the second round of voting.) Enrique was a brilliant polemicist and easily proved to the court the legal impertinence of the CITE’s accusation.

On January 2, the judge of the 26th Civil Court of Lima backed down on his decision to force me to appear, and declared the CITE’s request for a hearing null and void. CITE appealed and Chirinos Soto made an outstanding impression with his oral report before the bar of the Civil Superior Court of Lima, on January 16, 1990, which confirmed the lower court’s decision.^*

As a colophon to this episode, I shall point out a curious coincidence. During Alan García’s administration, because of the inflation coupled with recession — so-called stagflation — analysts calculated that in Peru some half a million jobs were lost, the same figure that, according to his campaign, I was planning to eliminate from the government’s payroll. The subject would provide material for an essay on the Freudian theory of transference and, surely, for a politics-fiction novel.

Another radical measure that I announced at the CADE conference did not, however, cause any significant repercussions: the reform of General Velasco’s agrarian reform, which was still in force. Our adversaries’ failure to mount a big campaign against this issue was due, perhaps, to the fact that the present arrangements in rural Peru — above all, in the state-run cooperatives and SAIS (Sociedades Agrarias de Interés Social) — were so clearly repudiated by the peasants that our adversaries would have had a hard time attempting to defend the status quo. Or, perhaps, because the peasant vote — thanks to the mass migration to the cities in recent decades — today represents barely 35 percent of the national electorate (and absenteeism at the polls is higher in the country than in the city).

In agriculture too we proposed to introduce a market economy, by privatizing it, so that the transference from enterprises under complete or partial state control to civil society would serve to create a large number of independent owners and entrepreneurs. Much of this reform was already under way, through the efforts of the peasants themselves, who, as I have said, had gradually been parceling out the cooperatives — dividing them up into individual private plots of land — despite the fact that this was forbidden by law. Their action had affected two-thirds of the rural areas of the country, but it had no legal validity. The movement of the parceleros, born independently, in opposition to the parties and the unions of the left, had for years represented a hopeful sign to me — like that of the informales, those earning their living from the parallel economy. The fact that the poorest of the poor had opted for private enterprise, for emancipation from state tutelage, was, even though they themselves didn’t know it, a resounding demonstration that the doctrines of collectivism and state ownership had been repudiated by the Peruvian people and that, through this trying experience, they were discovering the advantages of liberal democracy. And so, on June 4, 1989, in the Plaza de Armas of Arequipa, on declaring my candidacy, the parceleros and the informales were the heroes of my speech; I referred to them by calling them the spearhead of the transformation for which I was seeking the vote of Peruvians.

(My campaign strategy was based, in large part, on the supposition that parceleros and informales would be the principal support for my candidacy. That is to say, I foresaw a campaign in which I would manage to persuade these sectors that what they were doing, in the cities and in the countryside, corresponded to the reforms that I wanted to carry out. I failed without question: the immense majority of parceleros and informales voted against me — rather than in favor of my adversary — having been frightened off by my antipopulist preaching; in other words, they voted in defense of the populism against which they had been the first to rebel.)

The reform of the agrarian reform was to be accomplished by giving title deeds to the members of cooperatives that had decided on the privatization of the collectivized landholdings and by creating legal procedures so that other cooperatives could imitate them. Privatization would not be obligatory. Those cooperatives that wanted to continue as such could do so, but without state subsidies. As for the large sugar refineries on the coast — Casagrande, Huando, Cayaltí, for instance — the government would offer them technical advice as to how to turn themselves into private companies, and their members into stockholders.

The run-down condition of these refineries — at one time the principal exporters and drawers of foreign capital to Peru — was the product of the inefficiency and the corruption that the system of government control had introduced into them. Under private and competitive management they could recover and serve to create jobs and foster rural development, since they owned the richest landed properties with the best intercommunications in the entire country.

The reform of the system of land ownership would create hundreds of thousands of new owners and entrepreneurs in the country, who could get ahead, thanks to an open system, without the obstacles and discrimination of which agricultural areas had always been a victim by comparison with the cities. There would no longer be the price controls on agricultural produce that had doomed entire regions to ruin, or impelled them to produce coca — regions where the peasants were obliged to sell their produce below cost, with the consequence that Peru now imported a large part of its food. (I repeat that this system permitted memorable chicanery: the privileged who had been granted import licenses, who received undervalued dollars, could, in just one of these operations, leave accounts abroad amounting to millions of dollars. As I write these lines, in fact, the magazine Oiga^* has just revealed that one of Alan García’s ministers of agriculture, a member of his circle of intimates, Remigio Morales Bermúdez — the son of the ex-dictator — deposited in the Atlantic Security Bank, in Miami, more than twenty million dollars during his term in office!) With a market economy, farmers would receive fair prices for their produce, determined by supply and demand, and would have the necessary incentives to invest in agriculture, to modernize their techniques of cultivating crops, and pay taxes on their incomes sufficient to permit the state to improve the infrastructure of roads and highways that had deteriorated and nearly disappeared in certain regions. The familiar spectacle in the last years of the Aprista regime of tons of rice produced by the impoverished growers of the departamento of San Martín rotting in warehouses while Peru wasted tens of millions of dollars importing rice — and on the side, enriching a handful of bigwigs with political pull — would not be repeated. This was another constant subject of my speeches, especially to audiences of peasants: the reforms would immediately benefit millions of Peruvians who were barely scratching out a living; liberalization would bring rapid growth to agriculture, livestock raising, and agroindustry and a social restructuring that favored those who were poorest. But in my innumerable trips to the highlands and the mountains, I always noted the resistance of country people, above all the most primitive of them, to allowing themselves to be convinced. Because of centuries of mistrust and frustration, doubtless, and because of my own inability to formulate this message in a convincing way. Even in the periods of my candidacy’s greatest popularity, the places where I noted the strongest rejection were the rural regions. Puno in particular, one of the most miserably poor departamentos (and one of those richest in history and in natural beauty) of the country. All my tours of Puno were the object of violent counterdemonstrations. On March 18, 1989, in the city of Puno, Beatriz Merino, after delivering her speech without letting herself be intimidated by a crowd that booed her and shouted “Get out of here, Aunt Julia!” at her (the scant applause we received came from a handful of members of the PPC, since AP had boycotted the rally), fainted from the shock and from the 12,000-foot altitude and had to be given oxygen right there on the spot, in one corner of the speakers’ platform. On the following day, March 19, in Juliaca, Miguel Cruchaga and I were almost unable to give our speeches, because of the catcalls and the racist shouts (“Get out of here, you Spanish!”). On another tour, on February 10 and 11, 1990, our leaders had me suddenly appear in the stadium, during the celebration of Candlemas, and I have already recounted how we were greeted by a shower of stones thrown at us, which thanks to the reflexes of Professor Oshiro didn’t harm me, but made me fall ignominiously to the ground. The rally to mark the close of the campaign, on March 26, 1990, in the main square, was very well attended, and the efforts by groups of troublemakers to break it up did not succeed. But our hopes because of the large crowd were sheer illusion, since in both the first and the second round my lowest percentage of votes in Peru was in that departamento.

At CADE I also put forward the plans to privatize the postal and customs services and to reform the tax system, but only mentioned in passing many other subjects because of the time limit. Among these subjects, the one that mattered most to me was privatization. I had been working for some time on it with Javier Silva Ruete.

Javier, whom the readers of my books are more or less acquainted with, since — with due regard for the distances that separate fiction and reality — he had served me as the model for the Javier of my first short stories and of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, had had an outstanding career as an economist and had occupied important political posts. After graduating from San Marcos, he had honed his skills in Italy, and worked in the Central Reserve Bank. He was Belaunde Terry’s youngest minister during his first term in office — at the time Javier was a member of the Christian Democratic Party — and, after that, secretary general of the Andean Pact. When General Velasco was overthrown by the coup hatched in the Presidential Palace, his successor, General Morales Bermúdez, named Silva Ruete minister of finance, and his direction of the ministry put an end to certain upheavals of the Velasco regime, such as inflation and the exclusion from international organizations. The group that, with Javier, managed the economy during that period had formed the nucleus of the small political association of technical experts and professionals, SODE, that formed part of the Democratic Front (Manuel Moreyra had been the president of the Central Bank at the same time that Silva Ruete was minister of finance). The people of SODE, such as Moreyra, Alonso Polar, Guillermo van Ordt, Raúl Salazar himself, and several others, had had a prime role in the drawing up of our Plan for Governing and I invariably found in them support for the reforms we proposed and allies against the resistances to the reforms on the part of AP or the PPC.

In order to get Popular Action to accept the incorporation of SODE as part of the Democratic Front I had had to perform miracles, since Belaunde Terry and the populists had strong prejudices against it because of SODE’s collaboration with the military dictatorship and because of the extremely tough stand that SODE, particularly Manolo Moreyra and Javier Silva, had taken against Belaunde Terry’s second term. There was the further fact that SODE had collaborated with Alan García during his electoral campaign, having been his ally for a time, and from whose congressional lists two members of SODE had been elected, Javier to the Senate and Aurelio Loret de Mola to the Chamber of Representatives. Silva Ruete, moreover, had been an adviser to Alan García in the latter’s first year in office. But I made a point of emphasizing to Belaunde how SODE had broken with the APRA since the days of the nationalization of the banks, supporting our campaign very actively, and how indispensable it was to have in our administration a team of high-level technical experts. Belaunde and Bedoya finally reluctantly gave in, but never felt very happy with this ally.

It made both of them uneasy, moreover, that Javier Silva Ruete was one of the owners of La República, that loathsome monster of a daily paper. Born under the editorship of Guillermo Thorndike, that specialist in sleaze, as a yellow scandal sheet, tireless in the exploitation or fabrication of sensationalism — crimes, gossip, denunciations, gruesome stories, human smut frenetically exhibited—La República, without ceasing to exploit this sort of filth, at the same time immediately turned into the mouthpiece of the APRA and of the United Left, in a case of political schizophrenia improbable in any country but Peru. The explanation of this hybrid was, apparently, the fact that among the owners of La República there was a perfect balance between the power of Senator Gustavo Mohme (a Communist) and that of Carlos Maraví (a fervent nouveau-riche Aprista), who had arrived at the opera buffa formula of placing the news stories and editorials of the daily in the service of these two masters who were each other’s enemies. Javier’s role in this complicated situation and amid people of that sort — his name appeared on the masthead as chairman of the board of directors of the company that published La República—was always a mystery to me. I never asked him why he had done as he did nor did we speak of the subject, since both he and I wanted to maintain a friendship that had meant a great deal to both of us since we were youngsters and we tried not to put it to the test by subjecting it to the treacherous pressures of politics.

We had seen very little of each other when he was a minister during the military dictatorship and while he was an adviser to Alan García. But when we did occasionally run into each other, at some social get-together, our mutual affection was always there, stronger than anything else. At the time of the events at Uchuraccay, after the report of the commission which I wrote and defended publicly, La República carried out a campaign against me that lasted for many weeks, in which false testimony and lies were followed by insults, by extremes of monomania. The substance of the attack pained me less than the fact that all these insults appeared in a newspaper owned by one of my oldest friends. But our friendship survived even this experience. This was another argument that I used with Belaunde and Bedoya to win their approval for including SODE in the Democratic Front: La República had vented its fury on few people as mercilessly as it had on me. It was necessary, then, to cast suspicion aside and trust that Javier and his group would behave decently toward the Front.

SODE’s change of attitude came about as a result of the campaign to nationalize banking. Manuel Moreyra was one of the first to condemn the step, from Arequipa, where he happened to be, and he devoted countless statements, lectures, and articles to the subject. His resolve caused all of his colleagues to follow his lead and precipitated the break between SODE and the APRA. SODE’s two members of Congress, Silva Ruete and Loret de Mola, fought the measure in the two legislative bodies. From that time on, there had been close collaboration between SODE and the Freedom Movement.

The reasons why I asked Javier confidentially to lead the committee on privatization were his competence and his capacity for work. In the first months of 1989 we talked, in his study, and I asked him if he was ready to assume that task, keeping in mind the following: the privatization was to include the whole of the public sector and be planned in such a way as to permit the creation of new owners among the workers and employees of the privatized enterprises and the consumers of their services. He agreed. The main objective of the transference to civil society of public enterprises would not be technical — to reduce the fiscal deficit, to provide the state with revenue — but social: to multiply the number of private shareholders in the country, to give millions of Peruvians with small incomes access to ownership. With his characteristic enthusiasm, Javier told me that from that moment on he would abandon all his other activities to devote himself body and soul to that program.

With a small team, in a separate office, and with funds from the campaign budget, he worked for an entire year making a survey of the nearly two hundred public enterprises and setting up a system and a sequence for privatization, which was to begin on a precise date, July 28, 1990. Javier sought advice in all the countries with experience of privatization, such as Great Britain, Chile, Spain, and a number of others, and began negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Bank for Development. Every so often, he and his team gave me progress reports on their work, and when it was finished, I invited foreign economists — the Spaniard Pedro Schwartz and the Chilean José Piñera, for instance — to give us their opinion. The result was a solid and thoroughgoing program that combined technical rigor and the will to change on the one hand and creative boldness on the other. It gave me genuine satisfaction when I was able to read the thick volumes and verify that the plan was a marvelous instrument to break the back of one of the principal sources of corruption and injustice in Peru.

Javier, who had agreed to be the head of the committee on privatization, also agreed not to be a candidate for Congress, so as to devote himself full time to this reform.

The reaction of the media and of public opinion to my speech at CADE was one of consternation at the magnitude of the reforms and the frankness with which they were put forth, and widespread recognition that, among the four speakers, I had been the only one to present a complete plan for governing (the magazine Caretas spoke of the “Vargas Coup”).^* On December 5, I had a working breakfast at the Hotel Sheraton with some hundred foreign journalists and correspondents, to whom I gave further details concerning the program.

My speech at the CADE conference was to be preceded and continued by a publicity campaign, in newspapers, on radio and on television, to disclose the reforms in the C and D sectors. This campaign, which began very well, in the first months of 1989, was then interrupted for various reasons, one of them being the quarrels and tensions within the Front, and another, an unfortunate spot on TV that showed a little monkey urinating.

José Salmón was responsible for the media campaign, and collaborated very well with Lucho Llosa, my brother-in-law, whom I had asked, because of his experience as a filmmaker and a television producer, to advise me in this field. During the campaign against nationalization and in the early days of Libertad, the two of them were in charge of all advertising and publicity. Then, when the Democratic Front was set up, the campaign manager, Freddy Cooper, who didn’t get along well either with Salmón or with Lucho, began to call more and more for publicity on the company owned by the brothers Ricardo and Daniel Winitsky, who also prepared TV spots on their own. (I shall be more specific and add that, like Jorge Salmón, the Winitskys did so in order to lend the Front their support and without charging us any fees for their services.) From that time on, in this touchy field, there was a bifurcation or parallelism that, at one moment, led to chaos and caused serious harm to the “campaign of ideas” that we ought to have waged.

At the beginning of 1989 Daniel Winitsky planned a series of TV ads using animals to promote the ideas of Libertad. The first one, with a tortoise, was amusing and everybody liked it. The second one, with a fish, in which Patricia, my children, and I were to participate, never got filmed: the fish died of asphyxiation, clouds hid the sun, sudden sandstorms thwarted the takes on the deserted beach at Villa where we tried to film it one morning. With the third ad, disaster overtook us, all because of a little monkey. Daniel had had an idea for a very brief spot, showing the damage wrought by the ever-increasing number of bureaucrats. In it a public employee, transformed into a monkey, was shown in his office, where, instead of working, he was reading the newspaper, yawning, loafing about, and even pissing on his desk. Freddy showed me the spot on a hectic afternoon packed tight with interviews and meetings, and I didn’t see anything shocking about it, except for a certain vulgarity that, perhaps, wouldn’t upset the audience it was aimed at, so I gave it my okay. This tactlessness would no doubt have been caught and corrected if the spot in question had been analyzed by the person responsible for media advertising, Jorge Salmón, or by Lucho Llosa, but because of his personal antipathies toward them which, at times, interfered with his work, Freddy went over both their heads, seeking only my approval for the spot ads. In this case, we paid the price for our indiscretion.

The little micturating monkey caused a major scandal, with both supporters and adversaries of Libertad finding it distasteful, and the Apristas made good use of the uproar. Upstanding ladies who were offended sent letters to newspapers and magazines or appeared on television protesting against the “vulgarity” of the ad, and government leaders appeared on the little screen, upset because self-sacrificing public employees were being ridiculed in that way, comparing them to animals. So that was how Vargas Llosa was going to treat them when he became president, like monkeys or dogs or rats or something even worse…There were editorials, apologies to government functionaries, and my house and the Freedom Movement received many calls from supporters urging us to take the spot in question off the TV channels. We had already done so, of course, once we realized how counterproductive it had turned out to be, but the administration saw to it that it continued to be shown on television for several days longer. And, up until the eve of the elections, the state-run channel kept bringing it back to the screen.

Criticisms of the little monkey were forthcoming from our allies as well, and even Lourdes Flores, the young attorney who had been our candidate for representative major of Lima, admonished us in a public speech for our lack of tact. The affair reached its peak when, in Caretas, Jorge Salmón was criticized for an ad that he hadn’t even been consulted about. But Jorge, in this and in other unpleasant incidents of which he was the victim during the campaign, showed a gentlemanliness that equaled his loyalty to me.

A while later, when the time came to begin the “campaign of ideas,” in order to prepare public opinion for our launching of the program, both Jorge Salmón and the Winitskys, with Daniel now recovered from the setback of the peeing monkey, presented me — each team on its own — with a plan. Jorge’s was politic and prudent; it avoided polemics and confrontation, and avoided giving precise details about the reforms, emphasizing, above all, the “positive” aspects: the need for peace, work, modernization. I appeared as the restorer of collaboration and fraternity among Peruvians. The Winitskys’ plan, on the other hand, was for a sequence in which each spot, in a very lively but also a very blatant way, focused on the evils that we were trying to face up to — inflation, state control, bureaucracy, international isolation, terrorism, discrimination against the poor, an ineffective educational system — and the remedies for them: fiscal discipline, restructuring of the state, privatization, reform of education, mobilization of the peasantry. I liked the Winitskys’ project a lot and approved of it, something that Salmón accepted, with a fine sense of fair play. And Lucho Llosa directed the filming of the first two “educational” spots.

Both of them were excellent and the opinion polls we took to check on their impact on the C and D sectors were encouraging. The first one showed the damage caused by inflation suffered by those who lived on a fixed income and the only way to put an end to it — by drastically reducing the printing of money without backing — and the second one, the paralyzing effects that government intervention had on production, stifling private enterprises and preventing the emergence of other new ones, and how, with a free market, there would be incentives for the creation of jobs.

Why was this sequence interrupted, after my speech at CADE, when it was so necessary to publicize the reforms? I can give only a tentative explanation of something that, obviously, was a grave error.

I believe that, at first, we didn’t go on filming the new spots planned by Winitsky because of the approach of the year-end holidays. We had special ads made for Christmas, and Patricia and I each recorded separate holiday greetings. Then, in January of 1990, when we should have gone on with the “campaign of ideas,” we found ourselves confronted by the tremendous amount of publicity put out to discredit us, in which every effort was made to present our proposal in a false light by attacking me personally, by making me out to be an atheist, a pornographer, a practicer of incest, an accomplice of the murderers of Uchuraccay, a tax evader, and a number of other horrors.

It was a mistake to try to refute the lies of this campaign through ads on television, instead of sticking to publicizing our proposed reforms. In allowing ourselves to be dragged into an area of controversy in which we had everything to lose, all we accomplished was to see my image cheapened by petty political maneuvering. Mark Malloch Brown was right when he insisted that we shouldn’t pay any attention to the mudslinging campaign. I thought so too, but after the first days in January, my hectic activities were such that I no longer had sense enough to mend the error. At that point, moreover, it was too late to do so, since something had begun that inflicted another grave blow on the Front: the chaotic and wasteful television campaign of our congressional candidates.

The directorate of the Movement had given me the authority to decide on the order in which our candidates would be listed, and also to designate a small number of the candidates for seats as representatives and senators. As for their place on the list, I put Miguel Cruchaga, the secretary general and jack-of-all-trades of Libertad from the very start, at the head of the candidates for senator, and at the head of the list of candidates for representative, Rafael Rey, who had been departmental secretary of Lima. They all accepted their position on the lists, which I had decided on, with few exceptions, by following the percentage of votes won by each of the congressional candidates in elections within Libertad. The only one who had his feelings hurt, because he had been put in fourth place — after Cruchaga, Miguel Vega, and Lucho Bustamante — was Raúl Ferrero, who, after I had read off the list of candidates, announced to the political committee that he was resigning as a candidate. But a few days later he reconsidered.

Among the individuals whom I invited to be candidates of ours were, as a representative, Francisco Belaunde Terry, and as a senator, the entrepreneur Ricardo Vega Llona, who had supported us since the days of the campaign against nationalization. Vega Llona represented that modern and liberal spirit in the businessman that we wanted to see spread among entrepreneurs in Peru — someone sick and tired of mercantilism, a determined supporter of a market economy, and without the social prejudices or the pseudoaristocratic, snobbish airs of many Peruvian businessmen. I also invited, as candidates for senator, Jorge Torres Vallejo, who had been forced out of the APRA because of his criticisms of Alan García and who, as the former mayor of Trujillo, we thought would be able to attract votes for the Front in that Aprista bastion, and a journalist who defended our ideas in his column in the daily Expreso: Patricio Ricketts Rey de Castro. And among our own militants, I gave in to the pleas of my friend Mario Roggero, who wanted to be a candidate for congressman despite his not having participated in the elections within the Freedom Movement. I included him on our list because of the good work that he had done as the Movement’s national secretary for unions, organizing various sectors of professionals, technicians, and craftsmen, never imagining that, once elected, he would turn out to be disloyal to those who had been responsible for his winning his seat in the Chamber of Representatives, first of all by helping Alan García out by taking a trip abroad so as not to cast his vote in Congress when the possibility came up of trying García for responsibility for the slaughter of prisoners that took place in June 1986, and then, after that, playing footsie with the regime that his party and his colleagues opposed.^*

But we are still in the last weeks of 1989 and on one of those days — December 15—I had a brief literary parenthesis in the endless political hustle and bustle: the presentation, at the Alliance Française, of a translation of Rimbaud’s “Un Coeur sous une soutane” (“A Heart beneath a Cassock”) that I had done thirty years before and that had remained unpublished until Guillermo Niño de Guzmán and the enthusiastic cultural attaché of the French embassy, Daniel Lefort, finally took it upon themselves to bring it out. I could scarcely believe it when, for a couple of hours, I heard talk of poetry and literature, and of a poet whose works had been part of my bedside reading when I was young, and talked of them myself.

In the last days of December I went on tour once again, to take part in the distribution of gifts and toys throughout Peru that had been organized by a committee headed by Gladys Urbina and Cecilia Castro, the wife of the secretary general of Libertad in Cajamarca, and by the young people of Libertad’s Mobilization section. Hundreds of people participated in this operation, the object of which, besides bringing a little gift to several thousand poor children — a drop of water in the desert — was to test our ability to conduct mobilizations of this sort. We were thinking of the future: it would be imperative, in the hardest days of the fight against inflation, to make great efforts to bring aid to every corner of Peru in the form of food and medicine that would make the tremendous ordeal less of a hardship. Were we capable of organizing civil operations of major importance in cases of emergency such as natural catastrophes or for campaigns such as those for self-defense, literacy, and hygiene among the masses?

The results, from this point of view, were all that we could have asked for, thanks to the excellent work of Patricia, Gladys, Cecilia, Charo, and many other women members of Libertad. With the exception of Huancavelica, in all the other capitals of departamentos and in a great number of provinces, the boxes, bags, and packages full of the gifts we had gathered together thanks to factories, businesses, and private individuals, all arrived. Everything got done within the time limits we’d set: storing, packing, transporting, distributing. Shipments of them went out by truck, bus, plane, accompanied by young people from Mobilization, and in each city they were received by a committee of Libertad, which had also collected donations and gifts in the region. Everything was ready for starting the distribution of the gifts on December 21. During the final days, I went by the headquarters of the Solidarity program, on the Calle Bolívar, several times, and it was a swarm of activity, a hive of busy bees, with charts and time schedules on the walls, and vans and trucks filled to overflowing arriving and departing. On the morning we left for Ayacucho to start the distribution there, I said to Patricia, whom I scarcely saw during that time, since she devoted eighteen hours a day to that operation, that if all went that well for the Front, we already had victory in our pockets.

We left at dawn on the 21st, with my daughter Morgana, who was on vacation, and in Ayacucho we were welcomed, along with the departmental committee of Libertad, by the younger of my two sons, Gonzalo, who, for several years by then, had devoted his winter and summer vacations — he was attending London University — to lending a helping hand to the Andrés Vivanco Amorín children’s center. This institution had sprung up as a result of the revolutionary war being waged by Sendero Luminoso, which broke out in 1980 in this region. Because of it, Ayacucho was filled with abandoned children, who begged in the streets and slept on the benches of the Plaza de Armas or under the arcades bordering it. An old secondary schoolteacher, as poor as a church mouse but with a heart like the sun of his native land, Don Andrés Vivanco got to work. By knocking on people’s doors, by begging at public and private offices, he managed to secure a place to house many of those children and give them a mouthful of bread. That orphanage required heroic efforts on his part, and Violeta Correa, President Belaunde’s wife, helped him a great deal at the beginning. Thanks to her, the children’s center obtained a plot of land on the outskirts of the city. In 1983, I donated to Don Andrés Vivanco the $50,000 that I had received as the Ritz-Hemingway Prize for my novel La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), and Patricia had managed to get aid from the Ayacucho Emergency Association, which, through the initiative of Anabella Jourdan, the wife of the United States ambassador, she and a group of her friends had created at the beginning of the 1980s to bring help to the martyred region of Ayacucho.

Since then my younger son, Gonzalo, had conceived a passion for the orphanage. He collected money from his acquaintances and friends, and on each of his vacations he brought the nuns who had taken charge of the institution food, clothing, and little trinkets. Unlike his brother Álvaro, he was never interested in politics, and when I began the electoral campaign, he kept going to Ayacucho several times a year to bring provisions to the children’s center as though nothing had changed.

The distribution of presents in Ayacucho was made at the children’s center with an orderliness that did not cause us to foresee in any way what would happen in other cities, and afterward, I went to place flowers on Don Andrés Vivanco’s grave, to visit the soup kitchen for the poor of San Francisco, the University of Huamanga, and to go through the Central Market. We lunched with the leaders of the Freedom Movement, in a little restaurant behind the Hotel de Turistas, and that was the last time I ever saw Julián Huamaní Yauli, who was murdered a few weeks thereafter.

From Ayacucho we went by plane to the jungle, to Puerto Maldonado, where, after the distribution of Christmas gifts, a street rally had been planned. The instructions to the committees of Libertad had been quite clear: the distribution was a celebration within the Movement, the object of which was to bring a little present to the children of militants, a ceremony not open to everyone, since we didn’t have enough gifts for the millions of poor children in Peru. But in Puerto Maldonado the news of the distribution had spread throughout the city, and when I arrived at the fire station, the place selected for the ceremony, there were thousands of children and mothers with babies in their arms and on their shoulders, pushing and shoving desperately to get a place in line, since they had a presentiment of what in fact happened: the presents came to an end before the lines of people waiting did.

The sight was heartbreaking. Children and mothers had been there, roasting in the burning-hot sun of Amazonia, since very early that morning, four, five, six hours, to receive — if they managed to — a plastic sand bucket, a little wooden doll, a bit of chocolate, or a package of caramels. I was upset, hearing the mothers of Libertad trying to explain to that horde of children and barefoot mothers dressed in rags that the toys had given out, that they would have to go away empty-handed. The image of those sad or angry faces did not leave me for a single second, as I spoke at the rally and visited the local headquarters of Libertad, and as I held a discussion that night with our leaders, in the Hotel de Turistas, with the sounds of the jungle as a background, about our electoral strategy in Madre de Dios.

The next morning we flew to Cuzco, where the departmental committee of Libertad, headed by Gustavo Manrique Villalobos, had organized the distribution in a more sensible way, in the Movement’s local headquarters itself, and for the families of enrolled members and active supporters. This was a committee of young people new to politics, in which I had great faith, since, unlike other committees, there seemed to exist an atmosphere of understanding and friendship among the men and women who constituted it. I discovered that morning that I was mistaken. As I left, two leaders of the Cuzco committee handed me, separately, letters that I read on the plane taking me to Andahuaylas. Both contained sulfuric accusations, with the usual charges against the other faction — disloyalty, opportunism, nepotism, intrigues — so that it did not surprise me to learn, shortly thereafter, that with regard to the candidacies for Congress, our Cuzco committee was also experiencing divisions and desertions.

In Andahuaylas, following the rally in the main square, Patricia and I were taken to the place where the Christmas presents were to be given out. My heart sank when I saw that, as in Puerto Maldonado, here too all the children and mothers of the city seemed to have crowded together in the lines that went around an entire block. I asked my friends from Andahuaylas who belonged to Libertad whether they hadn’t been too optimistic by inviting the entire city to come receive presents when there wouldn’t be enough for even a tenth of those lined up. But, gamboling about in high spirits because of the rally, which had filled the square, they laughed at my apprehensions. After the distribution began, Patricia and I went on our way, and as we left the place, we saw children and mothers flinging themselves, amid indescribable chaos, on the presents, knocking over barriers set up by the young people of Mobilization. The women and girls distributing the gifts saw a horde of eager hands advancing toward them. I don’t believe that that Christmas won us a single voter in Andahuaylas.

In order to have a few days of complete rest, before the last stage of the campaign, Patricia and I, along with my brother- and sister-in-law and two couples who were friends of ours, went to an island in the Caribbean to spend the last four days of 1989. Shortly thereafter, back in Lima again, I came across a stern editorial in the magazine Caretas,^* criticizing me for having gone to spend the end of the year in Miami, since my trip would be interpreted as support of the U.S. military intervention in Panama to overthrow Noriega. (The Freedom Movement had expressed its disapproval of that intervention, in a communiqué that I wrote and that Álvaro read to the entire press corps. Our unequivocal rejection of military intervention included a severe condemnation of the dictatorship of General Noriega, which I had long criticized — and done so, even more pointedly, at the time when President García invited the Panamanian dictator to Lima and awarded him a decoration. Our solidarity with the democratic opposition to Noriega, moreover, had been made public, months before, on August 8, 1989, in a ceremony at the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, to which we invited Ricardo Arias Calderón and Guillermo Fort, the two vice presidents elected with Guillermo Endara in the elections that Noriega refused to recognize, an event at which Enrique Ghersi and I spoke. Furthermore, on that very short vacation, I did not visit Miami nor did I set foot on United States territory.) The little editorial combined factual errors and malevolence in a way that surprised me, coming from that magazine. I had been a contributor to Caretas for many years and considered its owner and editor-in-chief, Enrique Zileri, to be my friend. When the magazine was hounded and he himself was persecuted by the military dictatorship I made bold efforts to denounce the fact both inside and outside the country, even to the point, as I have said, that I asked to have an audience with General Velasco himself, despite the distaste I felt for him, in order to plead Zileri’s cause, the most legitimate one in the world: the freedom of the press. When Caretas began to move closer to Alan García because such proximity brought the magazine profits in the form of paid state advertising or because, it was said, Zileri had been seduced by García’s eloquence and flattery, I continued to figure among his contributors. Then, in May 1989, I agreed to speak in Berlin, at Zileri’s insistence, at the congress of an international press institute that he was presiding over. At the time, Caretas had already given indications of its antipathy toward my political activity and toward Libertad, but without having recourse to methods that were incompatible with the tradition of the magazine.

Hence, with a certain regret, I confess, since for many years the magazine had been my forum in Peru, I resigned myself to expecting no support whatsoever from Caretas in the months to come, but rather hostility that the approach of the elections would make even more stubborn. But I never imagined that the magazine — one of the few in the country with a certain intellectual standing — would become one of Alan García’s most docile instruments for turning public opinion against the Democratic Front, against the Freedom Movement, and against me personally. That editorial was like taking off the mask — the careta—of the Caretas that we were familiar with; since then and up until the end of the first round of voting — in the second, it changed its stance — its reporting was tendentious, aimed at aggravating the contention within the Front, at giving the appearance of respectability to many lies against me invented by the APRA or at making them public through the hypocritical device of repeating them so as to deny them, while at the same time it placed little value in, or ignored, any information that might be of benefit to us.

In the case of Caretas certain forms were respected, and it did not resort to the contemptible tactics of La República or of Página Libre; it specialized in sowing confusion and discouragement with regard to my candidacy in that middle class to which the readers of the magazine belonged, rightly supposing that they were inclined to favor me as a candidate and trying to manipulate them with more elegant subtleties than the journalistic swill eagerly consumed by readers of the scandal sheets.

Despite the fact that my advisers tried to persuade me not to do so, after that editorial appeared I had my name taken off the masthead of that weekly which, in the days of its founders — Doris Gibson and Francisco Igartua — surely would not have played the role that it did in the electoral campaign. My letter of resignation to Zileri, dated January 10, 1990,^* contained only one sentence: “I request you to remove my name from the list of contributors to the magazine, since I am no longer one.”