A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Eighteen. The Dirty War

On January 8, 1990, the registration of candidates for the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives was closed. And the following day marked the start of a televised publicity campaign by our candidates for the two houses that had a devastating effect on everything that I had been saying since August 1987.

The Peruvian electoral system has what is known as the preferential vote. Candidates for the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives are not elected directly; their names appear on the ballot in a list made up by their party. Votes are cast for a party’s list, not for individual candidates, and votes are not split between parties; all votes are for the straight ticket. But a voter can, in addition, mark on the ballot his or her preference for two candidates on each one of the lists. The number of senators and representatives on each list who win seats is proportional to the percentage of votes won by the list as a whole. The order in which candidates qualify to enter Congress is determined by the preferential vote.

The reason for this system was to allow voters to rectify the decision of the parties as to the order of preference on their lists. This, it was thought, would be a way to counteract the influence of the party hierarchies which draw up the lists, giving the voter the possibility of correcting the partisan processes at work in the selection of candidates. In practice, however, the preferential vote turned out to be a perverse system that transfers the electoral contest to within the congressional lists, since each candidate tries to win the voter’s preference for himself rather than for his co-candidates.

In order to mitigate the bad effects of this practice, we drew up a little booklet with suggestions that set forth in didactic style the sore points in the system; it was distributed to our candidates in Libertad. In it, Lucho Bustamante, Jorge Salmón, Freddy Cooper, and I asked them not to promise anything in their publicity campaigns that I myself didn’t promise and not to go in for lies and contradictions. Since the CADE conference, the entire election campaign had been a massive attack against our program by Apristas and Socialists and they shouldn’t give our adversaries a chance to demolish what we had built up. It was also important to avoid wasting money. Jorge Salmón taught them about the risks of saturating TV screens with spot ads.

It was as if we’d been preaching to the deaf. A mere handful — less than ten, in any event — took the trouble to organize their campaign by coordinating what they said in their pitch to the voters with our Plan for Governing. I do not except from this charge the candidates of Libertad, several of whom shared responsibility for the excesses committed.

From January 9, when the Lima daily papers devoted an entire page to a full-face photo of Alberto Borea Odría, a PPC candidate for a Senate seat, until the end of March — that is to say, until a few days before the elections — the campaign for the preferential vote of our candidates kept growing, oppressively and anarchically, until it reached extremes that made me laugh and at the same time repelled me. “If what they are doing disgusts me all this much,” I said over and over again to Patricia, “what must the reaction of the man in the street be to such a spectacle?”

All the private television channels spewed out images of the faces of our candidates from morning till night, in ads in which the squandering of money often went hand in hand with bad taste, and in which many of them offered everything imaginable and unimaginable, without its mattering to them that this was in flagrant contradiction to the most elementary principles of that liberal philosophy which, I kept saying, was the one that was ours, and even contradicted common sense. Some promised public works and others price controls and the creation of new public services, but most of them didn’t offer any ideas whatsoever and limited themselves to promoting their face and their number on the list, in a strident voice, and as repetitively as a jackhammer. One senatorial candidate had his image enhanced by an aria from an operetta sung by a baritone, and a candidate for the Chamber of Representatives, to show his love for the people, appeared among the big backsides of mulattas dancing to Afro rhythms; another one was shown weeping, surrounded by elderly little men and women whose lot he sympathized with in a tremulous voice.

The propaganda of the Front’s candidates made such a clean sweep of the audiovisual media that, in February and the beginning of March, they gave the impression that they were the only ones who existed, and that their opponents on the other lists had disappeared, or made such sporadic appearances that they looked like pygmies competing with giants or, more precisely, victims of starvation confronting millionaires.

Alan García appeared on TV to explain that he had made a calculation, according to which a number of Democratic Front candidates for seats in the Senate or in the Chamber of Representatives had now spent more money in TV spots than they would earn in their five years in office if they were elected. Were they subsidized, then, by oligarchic groups, whose interests they were going to defend in the National Congress against those of the Peruvian people? How were those members of Congress going to pay back their generous patrons?

Although President García didn’t seem to be the ideal person to voice such scruples, it must have lingered in the minds of many people that all that excessive advertising concealed something shady. And other voters, those in the highlands, those who don’t make analyses, those who follow their impulses, must simply have been indignant at that arrogant demonstration of economic power and suppressed the enthusiasm they had felt at the beginning for what appeared to be a proposal that was new and untouched by corruption. Many of those candidates were not new, but rather the cream of the crop of sharp political schemers, and of one or another of them it could not even be said that he had clean hands, since his passage through the previous administration had left behind him a wake that discredited him.

From the first opinion polls taken by the Sawyer/Miller Group it was evident that that extravagant publicity had had a negative impact on voters with small incomes, those into whose heads the official propaganda hammered the slogan that I was the candidate of the rich. What better parading of wealth than the ads that turned up on their television screens? All that might have been won in the previous year and a half with my preaching in favor of a liberal reform was lost in just days and weeks in the face of that assault of repeated appearances, ads, posters, which monopolized TV screens, radios, walls, newspapers, and magazines. In the midst of that vast and confusing overabundance in which the emblem of the Democratic Front — a pre-Hispanic staircase shown in profile — was used to promote the most contradictory proposals and formulas, my message lost its air of reform and of change. And my image as a person was confused with that of professional politicians and those who acted as though they were.

In February the opinion polls showed a decrease in the number of those intending to vote for me. One of only a few points, but one that brought me further away from the 50 percent necessary to win in the first round of balloting. Freddy Cooper summoned the congressional candidates of the Democratic Front to a meeting. He explained to them what was happening and suggested that they put a stop to the spots. Only a handful of candidates showed up. And Freddy had to confront a sort of mutiny; candidates of the Christian Popular Party and of Popular Action told him, without mincing words, that they refused to accept his request, since it would favor the candidates of Libertad, who had begun their campaigns before their allies in the Democratic Front. As this was happening I was touring the departamento of Lambayeque, in the North, so that it was only on my return to Lima that I was informed of the matter. I met with Belaunde and Bedoya, whom I assured that if we didn’t put a stop to this extravagant publicity we would lose the elections. Both of them asked me to bring the subject up for discussion in the executive council of the Front, which meant losing several days.

In the meeting of the council the internal weakness of the alliance was evident. The explanations of the head of the campaign, with the results of the opinion surveys concerning the disastrous effect of the publicity on the preferential vote in hand, did not move the members, almost all of whom were candidates for the Senate or the Chamber of Representatives. In the name of the Christian Popular Party, Senator Felipe Osterling explained that many of the candidates of his party had waited until the final weeks of the campaign to launch their publicity and that to subject them to restrictions now would be unjust and discriminatory, and that, moreover, we ran the risk of being disobeyed. And in the name of Popular Action, Senator Gastón Acurio put forward similar reasons and another one, which many of those present agreed with: cutting down on our advertising meant leaving the field free for the list of independents headed by the banker Francisco Pardo Mesones, which, in fact, was also churning out a great deal. Those on the list headed by Pardo Mesones used the slogan “We’re free,” and Acurio made the executive council laugh by referring to it as “We’re rich.” Were we going to silence our candidates and hand the bankers of “We’re rich” their seats in Congress on a platter? The upshot was that a utopian agreement was adopted that merely urged the candidates to cut down on their advertising.

That same Sunday, in an interview on television with César Hildebrandt, I said that the excesses of our candidates gave an impression of extravagance that the majority of Peruvians found offensive, in addition to causing confusion concerning our program, and I urged the candidates to correct these excesses. I did the same thing on three other occasions, but it was of little use, since not even the candidates of Libertad paid any attention to me. One of the exceptions was, of course, Miguel Cruchaga, who, on the same day as my declaration, drastically cut down on his advertising. And a few weeks later, at a press conference, Alberto Borea announced that, in obedience to my exhortations, he was winding up his campaign. But there were now very few days remaining before the elections and the damage was irreparable.

Not all the Libertad candidates committed excesses or had the financial means to do so. But a number of them did, and waged such extravagant campaigns that the bad impression did damage to the entire Front and to me in particular. It played a role in weakening the support of that 20 percent of the voters who, in the final weeks of the campaign, according to the opinion polls, changed their minds about voting for me and instead favored Alberto Fujimori, who, in January and February, and even in the first two weeks in March, remained at a standstill, with a projected vote of one percent in his favor. In that 20 percent, the least-well-off sector of the entire population of the country, the idea the APRA and the left were trying to drum into the heads of voters in that sector — that if I won the rich would come to power along with me to do as they pleased in my administration — was spectacularly confirmed by that costly advertising campaign that was possible only with powerful and well-organized financial backing.

In the middle of the hectic agenda that I was trying to get through every day, what had happened made me think, very often, about what this augured for the future, once the elections had been won. Our alliance was held together with safety pins, and the fidelity of our own leaders to the ideas, to the ethics, and to the proposals I made was subordinate to mere political interests. Nothing guaranteed me the support of the congressional majority — if we managed to secure it — for liberal reforms. This would come about only if there were enormous pressure from public opinion. From January on, therefore, all my effort was concentrated on winning those sectors of the provinces and regions of the interior where I had not yet been or to which I had had made only very brief trips.

In my travels through the departamento of Lambayeque I visited for the first time the agricultural cooperatives of Cayaltí and Pomalca, both considered solid bastions of Aprismo. In both of them, however, I was able to talk with no problems, explaining the implications of the privatization of communal land and the conversion of agrarian complexes into private enterprises, in which former members of a cooperative would become stockholders. I don’t know whether I got my message across, but both in Cayaltí and in Pomalca there were warm smiles exchanged between the peasants and workers who were listening to me when I told them that they had the good fortune of working marvelously productive land and that, without price controls, without state monopolies, they would be the first social sector to benefit from liberalization. And even more than in the sugar mills, in Ferreñafe, and in Lambayeque, too, in Saña, in the huge rally in Chiclayo, or in the torrid little towns of the departamento, the campaign took on during those days the air of a lively fiesta, what with the inevitable dances and songs of the North opening and closing the rallies. The happiness and enthusiasm of the people was the best antidote against exhaustion. And it was something that made us forget at times the sinister side of the campaign: violence.

On January 9, the former minister of defense, Enrique López Albújar, an army general, was murdered in the streets of Lima by a terrorist commando unit; for a reason that never came to light, the general was not accompanied by an escort on the morning of the attack on his life. Since the sisters of General López Albújar were militants of Libertad in Tacna, I interrupted my tour of the North to return to Lima and attend the funeral rites. That assassination was the beginning of a sudden rise in political crimes in the country, whereby Sendero Luminoso and the Túpac Amaru revolutionaries tried to thwart the electoral process. Between January and February, more than six hundred persons died because of political violence and some three hundred attacks were put on record.

Also, as the elections approached, those who were acting within the law became extremely edgy. The APRA, returning to the weapons that made it famous in Peruvian history — stones, pistols, and cudgels — began to attack our rallies, with groups of “buffaloes” who did their best to break them up. There were frequent skirmishes that ended up with injured victims in the hospital. They never prevented us from holding our rallies, but in the course of a swing through the interior by Libertad, there were incidents that came very close to ending in tragedy.

In that northern departamento, an Aprista cradle and bulwark, the most important and most numerous cooperatives on the coast, such as Casagrande and Cartavio, are located, and I was determined to visit them. In Casagrande, although the counterdemonstration of “buffaloes” made an infernal racket — they were posted on the rooftops and in the narrow streets leading to the main square — the former Aprista senator Torres Vallejo and I were able to deliver our talks from the bed of a truck, and even take a turn on foot about the place, before leaving. But in Cartavio they had set up an ambush for us. The rally, attended by a fair number of people, took place without incident. Once it was over, as the motorcade was getting ready to leave, we were attacked by a horde armed with stones and knives and some with pistols, who hurled all sorts of things at us, even tires that they had set on fire. I was already in the supposedly armored van, one of whose windowpanes disintegrated from the stones being thrown at us, and despite the moments of chaos, I managed to grab the hand of one of my bodyguards when I noticed that, out of fear or rage, he was about to shoot point-blank at the attackers, headed by two Aprista leaders of the region: Benito Dioces Briceño and Silverio Silva. Four cars in our motorcade were smashed to pieces and burned, and among the injured was the English journalist Kevin Rafferty, who followed me all through the North and who, they told me, remained imperturbably calm as the blood streamed down his face. A similar cool-headedness was shown by my brother-in-law, who always stayed behind until the very end to make sure that the camera crews and sound technicians were protected, and Manolo Moreyra, the leader of SODE, who, in one of his usual streaks of inattention to what was going on, had stayed behind to inspect the place when the rally had already broken up. The attack did not give them time to reach their cars. So they then mingled with the assailants, who fortunately did not recognize them. Both of them escaped being thoroughly beaten up. The episode gave rise to many protests and President García made things worse by saying over television that there was no reason to make such a fuss “over a few little stones that landed on Vargas Llosa.”

In point of fact, the stones were a secondary aspect of the “dirty war” against me prepared by García and his followers for this last stage. The essential part would be the maneuvers to discredit me, to which, from January on, the entire administration appeared to devote itself, under the baton of the minister of finance. They would gradually increase in number and intensity until the elections. It would be an almost infinite task to enumerate all of them, but it is worth giving an account of the most notorious ones, since they prove to what abysses of filth, and at times, of unintended humor, their backers reduced the electoral process.

On January 28, 1990, the minister of finance, César Vásquez Bazán — the most incompetent of the nobodies to whom Alan García gave that portfolio during his term in office — went on television, on the Channel 5 program “Panorama,” to defy me to produce my annual sworn income tax returns since 1984 to prove that I had paid my taxes. And the following day a senator of the United Left, Javier Diez Canseco, showed those returns on television, assuring his audience that the figures that appeared on them were questionable “except for his income from author’s royalties.” He stated that I had undervalued my house in Barranco so as to get around paying the required amount of property tax on it.

There thus began a campaign which was to broaden by the day and on which two so-called adversaries — the Aprista administration and the extreme left represented by the PUM (the Unified Mariateguist Party) — collaborated to show the country that for the last five years I had filed false returns to avoid paying all the taxes I owed. I remember the insuperable feeling of disgust that came over me the few times I managed to see Vásquez Bazán (today a fugitive from Peruvian justice) on television screens, supposedly documenting this lie. Although it was sheer humbug from beginning to end, the massive synchronized propaganda that accompanied it for several long months, and the use of state agencies to distort the truth, were such that they managed to give this falsehood a sort of reality and a main role in the final round of the elections.

It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a writer to avoid paying taxes on the author’s royalties he has received. These are deducted from the profit made from his books by the publisher himself, in the country where his books are published. It is rare for a Peruvian to live on his author’s royalties, and therefore I had held consultations about my particular case, for many years before the election campaign, with one of the most outstanding tax lawyers in the country, a close friend of mine: Roberto Dañino. He — or, rather, his staff, and, above all, Dr. Julio Gallo — had for some time taken care of my sworn declarations. And, knowing very well that should I one day enter politics, everything about my life would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb in search of my vulnerable points, I had been particularly scrupulous about my annual income tax returns.

My books were not published in Peru and my taxes on the royalties they earned me were therefore paid in the countries where they were published and translated. Peruvian laws allow the sums paid by a Peruvian taxpayer on income earned abroad to be deducted from taxes owed in Peru. But, instead of going through this procedure, in Peru — where I earned no taxable income — I took advantage of a law exempting from taxation works considered to be of artistic value, a law that had been introduced in Congress by the APRA in 1965,^* and approved by the congressional majority made up of members of the alliance between the APRA and Odría’s supporters. (I will mention, in parentheses, that my program for governing contemplated the elimination of all tax exemptions, beginning with this very one.) In order for my books to be included within that category, I had to follow for each one of them a procedure before the National Institute of Culture and the Ministry of Education, which, eventually, handed down the applicable decision. Alan García’s Aprista administration had done this with my last three books. Where, then, did my supposed tax evasion lie?

Surrounded by journalists and cameramen, an Aprista attorney, Luis Alberto Salgado, hastened to the main offices of the National Tax Authority to ask that a tax hearing be opened to determine the amount of taxes I had cheated the Peruvian state out of. Obediently, the tax authorities opened not just one hearing but several dozen. In that way, there was always some sort of trouble brewing for me. Each of the items questioned by the Supervisory Board, which constitute supposedly private information, reached the Aprista and Communist press before they reached me and were publicized in the most scandalous way, so as to give the impression that I had already been found guilty and that my house in Barranco would very soon be seized.

Each item questioned — I repeat that there were several dozen of them — required an enormous amount of work by the secretaries, in order to hunt up documented justification for them, and the cost of transportation for this or that trip that I made to this or that university, to give this or that lecture, and letters and telexes to these universities to have them confirm that I had been paid the $1,000 or $1,500 recorded on my tax return for that year. The law firm to which Roberto Dañino belongs hadn’t yet completed the dossier in answer to one questioned item when it received another one, or several at the same time, with the most outlandish requests for information and proof with regard to my travels, my lectures, my articles of the last five years, to verify that I hadn’t concealed a single source of income. They were all answered to the tax authorities’ complete satisfaction, with no proof whatsoever of a single irregularity on my part.

How much work did it represent for those in Roberto Dañino’s law firm to help me confront that flood of investigations by the tax authorities ordered by President García as part of the dirty campaign against me? If they had charged me legal fees, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pay them, for another of the consequences of those three years of immersion in active politics was the fact that my income dwindled away to almost nothing and I had to live on my savings. But Bobby and his colleagues refused any honorarium whatsoever for the effort that they had had to expend to show that I had not violated that “legality” that the Aprista administration used so shamelessly.

One day, Óscar Balbi brought me a recording of a telephone conversation between the editor-in-chief of Página Libre, Guillermo Thorndike, and the tax commissioner, in which the two of them discussed the next steps to take in the campaign with regard to my tax returns, because each step in those proceedings against me was planned in accordance with a strategy for getting the most publicity possible from the scandal sheets. Huge headlines announced that the tax investigators had left for Europe because the authorities had been informed that I was the principal stockholder in Seix Barral, the major Barcelona publishing house, the owner of the Carmen Balcells Literary Agency in the same city, and of real estate in Barcelona and on the Costa Azul. And one morning, when I was going from one meeting to another, in different rooms in the house, I saw my mother and my mother-in-law, leaning over the radio, listening to an announcer on Radio Nacional reporting that officials of the judiciary were on their way to Barranco to carry out the seizure of my house and of everything in it, as surety against the sum I owed the government for fraud, as had already been announced.

The leaders of the extreme left were diligent collaborators with the government in this campaign, in particular Senator Diez Canseco, who kept waving about on the little screen my sworn income tax returns, passed on to him by the APRA, as evidence against me. And one day I heard over the radio Ricardo Letts, another leader of the PUM, call me a thief. Up until then Letts, whom I have known for many years, and with whom I had maintained a firm friendship all that time despite our ideological differences, hadn’t struck me as being capable of slandering a friend in the belief that it would gain him political benefits. But at this point in the campaign I already knew that, in Peru, there are few politicians whom politics, that Circe, doesn’t turn into pigs.

The tax affair was just one of several maneuvers to discredit me which the García administration used in its attempt to prevent what at this juncture still appeared to be an overwhelming victory by the Democratic Front.^* One of them made me out to be a pervert and a pornographer, as was proved by my novel Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother), which was read in its entirety during peak listening hours, at the rate of a chapter a day, on Channel 7, which was controlled by the state. In a dramatic voice, the woman announcer who introduced each episode warned housewives and mothers to keep their children away from the TV set because they were going to hear nefarious things. But the people had the right to know everything about the person who aspired to preside over the country’s destiny. Another announcer, a man this time, then proceeded to read the chapter, in melodramatic tones when there was an erotic passage. Afterward, a round table was held, in which Aprista psychologists, sexologists, and sociologists analyzed me. I was leading such a hectic life that I was unable, naturally, to allow myself the luxury of seeing those programs, but on one occasion I managed to watch part of one of them and was so amused that I remained glued to the TV set, listening to the Aprista general Germán Parra elaborate on the following thought: “According to Freud, Doctor Vargas Llosa ought to be under treatment for a mental disorder.”

Another of the APRA’s warhorses was my “atheism.” “Peruvian! Do you want an atheist in the office of president of Peru?” was the question put to viewers in a televised spot in which there appeared a semi-monstrous face — mine — that looked like the incarnation and the prelude of every sort of iniquity. The “hate office” researchers found, in an article of mine on huachafería—a form of bad taste that is a national propensity — entitled “A Bit of Bubbly, Old Buddy?” a mocking phrase referring to the procession of the Lord of Miracles. Alan García, who, in order to show the Peruvian people how devout he was, dressed in purple in October and helped carry the platform of the Lord of Miracles on his shoulders with the expression of a contrite sinner on his face, hastened to declare to the press that I had gravely offended the Church and the most heartfelt act of devotion of the Peruvian people.^* The strongest of García’s supporters joined in the chorus, and for several days people were treated to the spectacle, in newspapers, over the radio, and on TV, of high Aprista officials and members of Congress suddenly converted into crusaders for the faith, making amends to the Lord of Miracles. I remember the fiery Mercedes Cabanillas, her face trembling with indignation, talking like a Joan of Arc prepared to go to the stake in defense of her religion. (It was amusing that all of this should be staged under the auspices of the party founded by Haya de la Torre, who had begun his political career, in May 1923, opposing the dedication of Lima to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and who was accused, for a good part of his life, of being an enemy of the Church, an atheist, and a Freemason.)

I was overcome with a curious sensation in the face of these mudslinging capers. I don’t know if it was exhaustion brought on by the tremendous mental and physical effort required day after day to get through meetings, trips, rallies, interviews, and arguments, or whether I had developed a psychological defense mechanism, but I noted all that as though the person being invented by the negative campaign which was increasingly replacing any kind of rational debate were someone other than myself. But in the face of these extremes reminiscent of a one-act farce and the many violences of the electoral process, I began to be assailed by the thought that I had made a great mistake by focusing my strategy on telling the truth and outlining a program of reforms. Because ideas, intelligence, consistency, and above all decency seemed to have less place in the campaign with each passing day.

What was the attitude of the Church, on the eve of the first round of balloting? One of consummate prudence. Until April 8, it forbore to take part in the debate, not allowing itself to be dragged into the campaign issue of my “atheism” and my affronts to the Christ clad in purple, but at the same time not showing the slightest sign of approval of my candidacy. At the beginning of 1990, Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts, the archbishop and primate of the Church in Peru, had retired because he had reached the age limit — he was seventy-six years old at the time — and had been replaced by a prelate ten years younger, the Jesuit Augusto Vargas Alzamora. I paid both of them the visits called for by protocol, not suspecting the extremely important role that the Church would play in the second round of voting. I had seen Cardinal Landázuri, an Arequipan who was related to my mother’s family, a number of times at reunions of relatives on my mother’s side. He had granted the dispensation that enabled me to marry my cousin Patricia in 1965 (since Uncle Lucho and Aunt Olga demanded that we be married in church), though I had not been the one who went to request it of him; my mother and my Aunt Laura did. Cardinal Landázuri had been assigned the mission of leading the Peruvian Church from May 1955 on, perhaps the most difficult period in its entire history, what with the division that liberation theology brought with it and the Communist and revolutionary militancy of a considerable number of nuns and priests, together with the process of secularization of Peruvian society, which made greater advances in those decades than in all the preceding centuries. A very prudent man, not given to impressive moves in new directions or bold intellectual advances, but a scrupulous and painstaking arbitrator and a most astute diplomat, Cardinal Landázuri had managed to maintain the unity of an institution undermined by tremendous dissensions. I went to see him at his home in La Victoria on January 18, with Miguel Cruchaga, and we talked for some time, about Arequipa, about my family — he remembered having been a schoolmate of Uncle Lucho’s and told me anecdotes about my mother when she was a little girl — though he avoided the subject of politics and, of course, didn’t say a word about the campaign regarding my atheism, at its height at the time. But as he was bidding me goodbye he whispered to me, with a wink, pointing to the priest who was with him: “This Father is a fan of the Democratic Front.”

I didn’t know Monsignor Vargas Alzamora. Accompanied by Álvaro and Lucho Bustamante, who, as I have already said, is a sort of Jesuit ad honorem, I went to congratulate him on his being named Primate of Peru. He received us in a little study at the Colegio La Inmaculada and from the first moment of the conversation between us I was impressed by his lively intelligence and his clearsightedness with regard to the problems confronting Peru. Although we did not mention the electoral campaign, we spoke at length of the backwardness, the poverty, the violence, the anarchy, the lack of stability, and the inequalities in Peru, and his information about all those subjects was as solid as his opinion was judicious. Slender and delicate, most circumspect in his speech, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora nonetheless betrayed signs of great strength of character. He seemed to me to be a modern man, sure of his mission and possessed of great fortitude beneath his courteous manners, surely the best helmsman for the Peruvian Church in the difficult times that it was going through. After I had bidden him goodbye, I said as much to Lucho Bustamante. I couldn’t have imagined that the next time I saw the new archbishop of Lima it would be under spectacular circumstances.

Meanwhile, my trips throughout Peru followed one after the other without a letup, at a rate of visits to four, six, and sometimes more places a day, trying to cover for one last time the twenty-four departamentos, and in each one of them the greatest possible number of provinces and districts. The schedule set up by Freddy Cooper and his team — the efficient Pier Fontanot from the campaign’s command headquarters was in charge — was met perfectly, and I must say that the logistics of the rallies, transportation from place to place, connections, food and lodging, rarely broke down, which, in view of the state of the country and the national idiosyncrasy, was a real feat. The planes, helicopters, motorboats, minivans, or horses were there, and in all the villages or hamlets there was always a little platform and two or three young people from Mobilization who had arrived there beforehand to make sure that the microphones and loudspeakers were working, and that a minimum of security measures were in place. Freddy had several aides whose time was devoted exclusively to giving him a hand at this task, and one of them, Carlos Lozada, whom we called Woody Allen because he looked like him, and also like Groucho Marx, intrigued me by his gift for being everywhere at once. He looked as though he were disguised as something or other, though we couldn’t figure out what, with a strange headpiece, at once a cap and a helmet equipped with earflaps that reminded me of Charles Bovary’s headgear, and a loose jacket with a big backpack from which he took out sandwiches when it was time to eat, portable radios for communications, soft drinks to allay people’s thirst, revolvers for the bodyguards, batteries for the minivans, and even that day’s papers so we wouldn’t lose touch with the latest news. He was always on the run, and continually talking into a little microphone hanging from around his neck, with which he was constantly in communication with some mysterious control center to which he reported what was going on or from which he received instructions. I had the sensation that that eternal monologue of Woody Allen’s was organizing my destiny, that he was deciding where I would speak, sleep, travel, and whom I would see or fail to see in the course of my junkets. But I never managed to exchange a single word with him. Later on I learned that he was a public relations man who, having begun to work for the campaign in a professional capacity, discovered his real vocation and secret genius: that of a political organizer. In all truth, he did a magnificent job, solved any and every problem and never created a one. Glimpsing, wherever I arrived, whether in the midst of the underbrush of the jungle or amid the crags of the Andes or in the little towns along the sandy coast, his bizarre outfit — the thick glasses of someone very nearsighted, a colored shirt, and that sort of article of furniture with slipcovers that he carried around on his back, that Pandora’s box from which he took out unimaginable things — gave me a feeling of relief, the reassuring presentiment that, in that particular place, everything would come off as planned. One morning, in Ilo, immediately after we arrived, and before going to the rally in the main square where people were waiting for me, I decided to go down to the port, where a boat was being unloaded. I went up to it to speak with the stevedores, who, leaning on the gangplank of the vessel, were supervising the loading and unloading being done by the puntos (workers to whom they hire out their work), and all of a sudden, as though he were simply one more of those in the group, hidden underneath his combination cap and helmet and portable trunk of a backpack, talking into his microphone, I spied Woody Allen…

Amid these whirlwind tours all over Peru, I still arranged things so as to go to Brazil for a day, in answer to an invitation from the recently elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello. His triumph seemed to represent the victory of a radical liberal program, similar to mine, over Lula da Silva’s ideas in favor of mercantilism, state control, and interventionism, and for this reason, as well as because of the importance of Brazil to Peru — its neighbor with more than three thousand kilometers of common borders — it was decided by the directorate of the Democratic Front that I should make the trip. I took Lucho Bustamante, the head of the Plan for Governing, with me so that he could meet with Collor’s already appointed minister of finance — the instantly famous Zelia Cardoso — and Miguel Vega Alvear, whose Pro-Desarrollo (Association for Development) had drawn up a series of projects of economic cooperation with Brazil. One of these projects had aroused a great deal of enthusiasm on my part when it was described to me, and since that time I had encouraged its being worked out in detail. It had to do with linking the Pacific and Atlantic coasts through joining the highway systems of the two countries, following the Río Branco-Asís-Ipanaro-Ilo-Matarani axis, which, at the same time that it satisfied a long-cherished Brazilian ambition — having a commercial outlet to the Pacific and its emerging Asian economies — would act as a powerful economic stimulus for the development of all the southern region of Peru, particularly Moquegua, Puno, and Arequipa. The likable Collor — who could have imagined in those days that he would be impeached, having been accused of misappropriating state funds? — received me in Brasília, in a house surrounded with gardens straight out of a Hollywood movie (herons and swans strolled about all around us as we lunched together), with an encouraging sentence: “Eu estou torcendo por vocé, Mario” (“I’m pulling for you, Mario”) and the surprise of meeting an old friend, whom I had not expected to see there: José Guillermo Melquior, at that time the ambassador of Brazil to UNESCO. Melquior, an essayist and a liberal philosopher, a disciple of Raymond Aron and of Isaiah Berlin, with whom he had studied at the Sorbonne and at Oxford, was one of the thinkers who had defended with the greatest rigor and consistency the theses of a market economy and of the sovereignty of the individual in Latin America at a time when the collectivist and nationalist tide seemed to be monopolizing the culture of the continent. His presence at Collor’s side struck me as a magnificent sign of what the administration of the latter gave promise of being (an assumption not confirmed by reality, unfortunately). Melquior was already seriously ill, with the disease that would take his life a short time later, but he didn’t tell me so. On the contrary, I found him in an optimistic mood, joking with me about how times had changed since the days when, ten years before, in London, our countries seemed to us to be irredeemably immunized against the culture of freedom.

The meeting with Collor de Mello was extremely cordial but not very productive, because a large part of the conversation during the luncheon was monopolized by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, one of my economic advisers, with jokes and pieces of advice that at times gave the impression of being orders to the brand-new president of Brazil as to what he should and shouldn’t do. Pedro Pablo, the former minister of energy and mines in Belaunde’s second term in office — the best minister the latter had — had been persecuted by Velasco’s military dictatorship, to his good fortune. For living in exile allowed him to go from being a modest bureaucrat in the Central Reserve Bank of Peru to an executive of First Boston, in New York, where, after his experience as a minister of Belaunde’s, he was promoted to the office of president. In recent years he had traveled all over the world — he always specified a private jet, and if that couldn’t possibly be arranged, the Concorde — privatizing state-owned companies and advising governments of every ideology and geographical location that wanted to know what a market economy was and what steps to take to attain one. Pedro Pablo’s talent at handling economic matters was enormous (as was his talent for jogging and playing the piano, the flute, and the lute and telling jokes); but his vanity was even greater, and at that luncheon he displayed the latter above all, talking even with his elbows, giving us a professorial lecture and offering his services if there was need of them. At dessert, Collor de Mello took me by the arm and led me to an adjoining room where we could talk to each other alone for a moment. To my surprise, he told me that the project of integrating the Atlantic and Pacific coasts was bound to be confronted by the resistance and perhaps the open opposition of the United States, for that country feared that if the project were carried out, its commercial exchanges with the Asian countries of the Pacific Rim would suffer.

With the passage of time, I would often remember something that Collor said to me during the luncheon, at a moment when Kuczynski allowed him to get a word in edgewise: “I hope you win in the first round and don’t have to go through what I did.” And he explained that the second round of balloting in Brazil had been unbearably tense, so much so that for the first time in his life he had had doubts about his vocation for politics.

I was very grateful to Collor de Mello — as I was to President Sanguinetti of Uruguay — for inviting me in the thick of the election campaign, knowing that that would greatly displease President Alan García, and might displease the future Peruvian head of state, if I were not the winner. And I am sorry that this young and energetic president, who seemed so well prepared to carry out a liberal revolution in his country, failed to do so, except in a very partial and contradictory way, and, worst of all, did nothing to prevent corruption, with the consequent disastrous result.

On my return to Lima I found an invitation from the CGTP (Central General de Trabajadores del Perú: General Confederation of Workers of Peru), the Communist labor union, to set forth my Plan for Governing to the Fourth National Conference of Workers, which was being held in the Lima Centro Cívico. The debate had been organized to give the CGTP’s blessing to the candidacy of Henry Pease García, of the United Left, as “the workers’ candidate” and as a counterweight to the CADE conference. Only the four candidates who appeared to have any possibility of being elected were invited to this conference, as to the one held by CADE, but Alfonso Barrantes had invented an excuse for not attending, fearing that he would be humiliated by those who looked on him as having turned into a bourgeois and a revisionist. The APRA candidate, Alva Castro, on the other hand, turned up and ignored the jeers and catcalls. It seemed to me that I ought to attend too, precisely because the leaders of the Communist union were certain that I wouldn’t have the courage to put my head in the lion’s mouth. Moreover, I was curious to know the reaction to my proposals of those union delegates, steeped in Marxism-Leninism.

I hastily called together the leaders of the committees on labor and privatization — the obligatory subjects at the CGTP conference were the labor reform and popular capitalism — and, accompanied by Álvaro, we presented ourselves at the Civic Center on the afternoon of February 22. The place was packed with hundreds of delegates, and a group of extremists from Sendero Luminoso, barricading themselves in one corner, greeted me with cries of “Uchuraccay! Uchuraccay!” But it was the CGTP’s own service in charge of keeping order that shut them up and I could explain my program, for more than an hour, without interruptions and I was listened to with the attention that an audience of seminarians would pay to the devil. I hope that some of them discovered that Satan wasn’t as ugly as they made him out to be.

I told them that labor unions were indispensable in a democracy and that only in a democracy did they function as genuine defenders of workers, since in totalitarian countries unions were nothing but political bureaucracies and transmission belts for the watchwords of those in power. And that, for that reason, in Poland a labor union, Solidarity, in defense of which I had organized a march in the streets in Lima in 1981, headed the struggles for the democratization of the country.

As for Peru, I assured them that, even though it was against their firmest beliefs, our country was much closer to their ideal of state control and collectivization, with its swarm of public enterprises and generalized interventionism, than it was to the capitalist system, which it was acquainted with only in its most ignoble version: mercantilism. The reform that I was proposing had as its objective the removal of all the agencies of discrimination and exploitation of the poor by a handful of privileged individuals, thus assuring that justice would be accompanied by prosperity. The latter did not come about through the redistribution of existing wealth — which meant merely more widespread poverty — but with the establishment of a system in which everyone could have access to the market, to owning and running a business, and to private property. In order to bring this about, we had drawn up, in broad outline, the plans for large-scale “structural” reforms, such as property deeds for the parceleros, the removal of the barriers that restricted so many small businessmen and craftsmen to the informal economy, and, finally, the privatization of public enterprises. In this way there would come into being in Peru the popular capitalism whose principal beneficiaries would be those workers whose incomes populist policies had reduced so dramatically in the last five years.

With the help of Javier Silva Ruete, who had come with me, we explained that the privatization of public enterprises would be brought about in such a way that workers and employees could become stockholders — providing concrete examples by citing the cases of companies such as PetroPerú, the big banks, or Minero Perú—and also explained that defending, in the name of social justice, state-controlled enterprises such as SiderPerú, which was being kept alive artificially at enormous expense to the country, was an illogical argument, since the sums wasted in this way, from which only a handful of bureaucrats and politicians benefited, could be used to build the schools and hospitals that the poor were so badly in need of.

I was also very explicit with regard to job security. The first obligation of a government in Peru was to put an end to the poverty of so many millions of Peruvians, and to do so it was necessary to attract investment and stimulate the creation of new businesses and the growth of the ones that already existed, removing the obstacles that prevented this. “Job security” was one of them. The workers who benefited from it were a tiny minority, while it was the majority of Peruvians who needed jobs. It was not a happenstance that the countries with the best job opportunities in the world, such as Switzerland or Hong Kong or Taiwan, had the most flexible labor laws. And Víctor Ferro, of the committee on labor, explained why doing away with job security could not serve as an alibi for abuses.

I don’t know if we convinced anyone, but I for one found satisfaction in speaking of these subjects before an audience such as that. I had few possibilities to win them over to our cause, naturally, but I trust that some of them at least understood that our program for governing was proposing an unprecedented reform of Peruvian society and that the situation of workers, of jobholders in the informal economy, of those on the margins of society, and in general, of those strata with the lowest incomes, constituted the main focus of my efforts. When the meeting was over, there was polite applause, and an exchange with the secretary general of the CGTP and a member of the central committee of the Communist Party, Valentín Pacho, that Álvaro has recorded in El diablo en campaña: “You see, Doctor Vargas Llosa, there was no reason to fear workers.” “You see, Señor Pacho, workers have nothing to fear from freedom.” In the communications media, news of my presence at the CGTP conference was passed over in silence by the organs controlled by the state, but friendly media made much of it and even Caretas and Sí conceded that I had been courageous.

The next day Álvaro, very excited, interrupted a meeting at my house with Mark Malloch Brown to tell me the results of the elections in Nicaragua: against all predictions, Violeta Chamorro beat Daniel Ortega at the polls and put an end to ten years of rule by the Sandinistas. After what had happened in Brazil, Violeta’s victory confirmed the change in direction of the ideological winds in Latin America. I called her to congratulate her — I had known her since 1982, when she was resisting what seemed an unstoppable Sandinista mob which had covered the walls of her house with insults — and among the campaign leaders of the Democratic Front there were those who thought that I ought to make a lightning trip to Nicaragua, so as to have my photo taken with her as I had done with Collor de Mello. Miguel Vega Alvear even found a way to carry out the entire operation in twenty-four hours. But I refused, since in these last weeks it seemed imprudent to me, and since on February 26 I had a meeting scheduled with Peruvian military leaders at the CAEM (Centro de Altos Estudios Militares: Center for Advanced Military Studies).

An important weapon in the “dirty war” waged against me was my “antimilitarism” and “antinationalism.” The APRA, in particular, but also part of the left — which since the days of Velasco’s dictatorship had become militaristic — reminded voters that in a public ceremony, in 1963, the army had burned my novel La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero) because it was regarded as being an insult to the armed forces. The “hate office,” digging around in my bibliography, found many statements of mine and quotations I had cited in articles and interviews attacking nationalism as one of the “human aberrations that has caused the most bloodshed in history”—a sentence that, in fact, I still stand behind — whereupon it disseminated them far and wide, in huge quantities, in leaflets that were anonymous but had been printed on the presses of the state-run Editora Nacional. In one of them, voters were warned that the army would not allow “its enemy” to take office and that, consequently, if I won the elections there would be a military coup.

This was also something feared by the leaders of the Democratic Front, who advised me to make public gestures and hold private meetings with high-ranking officers in the military so as to reassure them with respect to the “antimilitarism” of my books and certain positions I had taken some twenty or thirty years back (in favor of the Cuban Revolution, for example, and of the MIR’s guerrilla attack, led by Luis de la Puente and Guillermo Lobatón, in 1965).

The armed forces were to play a decisive role in the elections, since, because they were in charge of guaranteeing the legality of the electoral process, it would depend on them whether Alan García got away with it if he attempted to falsify the results. Ensuring their impartiality was indispensable, as was holding an open dialogue with the military institutions along with which we would be governing the country on the morrow. But holding an interview with the highest echelons was no easy matter; they were afraid of reprisals by the president if he noted a tendency on their part toward supporting the candidate of the Democratic Front. And they had every reason to do so, inasmuch as, ever since assuming power, Alan García had caused tremendous upheavals within the armed forces, transferring, retiring, and promoting officers so as to make certain that adherents of his occupied the key posts. The navy had resisted these encroachments, holding to a certain institutional line with regard to promotions and the rotation of postings, but the air force, and above all the army, had been traumatized by the appointments that had been forthcoming from the Presidential Palace.

We had a committee of defense and internal order in the Front, headed by Johnny Jochamovitch, made up of half a dozen generals and admirals, which worked more or less secretly so as to protect the lives of its members from terrorist attacks and reprisals by the president’s office. Every time I met with them I had the feeling of having gone underground because of the precautions that had to be taken — changing cars, drivers, houses we met in — but I must say that in every overall review of the situation they passed on to me — usually with General Sinesio Jarama, an expert in revolutionary warfare, as their spokesman — I noted that they were working very hard. From the first meeting I told them that the objective of our defense policy ought to be, at the institutional level, the depoliticization of the armed forces, their reconversion with an eye to the defense of civil society and democracy, and their modernization. The reform ought to guarantee that there would be no more political interference in the organization of the military and no more military interference in the political life of the country. There was friction at first between this committee and the one on human rights and civil peace, headed by Amalia Ortiz de Zevallos, with whom a number of military officers also collaborated, but they were finally able to coordinate their work, particularly with regard to the subject of subversion.

Through the members of these committees, or through friends, and at times at their own request, I had several interviews with military leaders on active duty concerning the operations of Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA. The most official meeting of all took place on September 18, 1989, at the Institute for Development, with the minister of the interior and Alan García’s factotum, Agustín Mantilla, who, accompanied by a handful of generals and colonels of the police under the command of the military, gave me and a little group from Libertad a very frank exposition on Sendero Luminoso, the way it had taken root in the countryside and in the cities, and the difficulties involved in infiltrating spies into it and in obtaining information about such a hermetic and pyramidal organization which used such relentless methods. Minister Mantilla, who, let me say in passing, seemed to me to be more intelligent and articulate than could be expected of a man who had spent his life giving orders to hoodlums and gunmen, gave us a detailed account of a very recent operation, in a village in the highlands of the departamento of Lima, where Sendero, following its usual pattern, had “executed” all the authorities and taken over control of the place, through political commissars, turning it into a base of support for its guerrillas. An antisubversive commando unit had reached the village, after a night march amid the crags of the Andes, and captured and “executed” the commissars in turn, but the military detachment of Sendero had managed to escape. Minister Mantilla didn’t beat about the bush and coldly told us that this was the only possible way to act in the war to the death that Sendero had unleashed and in which, he admitted, subversion was gaining ground. When he finished he took me aside, to tell me that the president sent me his greetings. (I asked him to give the president mine in return.)

Sometime before that, on June 7, 1989, the Naval Intelligence Service, which has the reputation of being the best-organized one of all the armed forces (institutional rivalries had prevented the integration of all the intelligence services), had given Belaunde, Bedoya, me, and a small group from the Democratic Front an explanatory talk several hours long on the same subject, in one of its buildings. The officers who presented the reports were very forthcoming and had a wealth of information at hand that appeared to be well-founded. They had photographs taken in Paris of the visitors to the center of operations set up there by Sendero Luminoso for their propaganda campaigns and the collecting of funds throughout Europe. Why, then, was the fight against subversion so ineffective? According to them, because of the lack of training and equipment for this type of war being fought by armed forces that continued to ready themselves and equip themselves for conventional warfare, and because of the meager support from the civilian population, which acted as though this were a fight between terrorists and the military that was no concern of theirs.

Despite the discretion they requested of us, news of that meeting leaked out and had serious consequences, since President García asked that punitive measures be taken against those responsible for its having been held. From then on, I met with officers on active duty all by myself, after journeys straight out of a movie, in which both the place we were to meet and the car I was to use were changed several times, as though the persons with whom I was going to converse were criminals with a price on their head and not highly respectable superior officers in the armed forces. The most absurd thing about these meetings, in almost every instance, was that they were useless, since nothing of any importance was discussed in them, and all we did was exchange political gossip or talk about vague schemes that Alan García might have up his sleeve to keep me from winning the election. I believe that, in many cases, these exaggeratedly complicated meetings were organized by military officers curious to see me in person and get an idea of the sort of man they would have to deal with if I were to become president of Peru.

The impressions I received from these meetings were rather disappointing. Because of the economic crisis and the general national decline, military careers had ceased to attract young men of talent and standards had been lowered to a dangerous degree. Some of the officers with whom I talked were arrogantly uncultured and looked on me as though I were an odd specimen when I explained to them what, in my opinion, the function of the army ought to be in a modern democratic society. Some of them were likable and congenial — the artillery colonel, for instance, who asked me point-blank, almost the moment we were introduced: “How good are you at drinking?” I told him that I was very bad at it. “Well then, you’re screwed,” he assured me. According to him, Alan García had won the affection and the respect of his colleagues by winning the “obstacle courses” that he organized in the Presidential Palace for high-ranking officers after the military parade on the national holiday. What kind of obstacle race was it? Rows of glasses and goblets alternately filled with beer, whisky, pisco, wine, champagne, and every sort of alcoholic drink imaginable. The president designated the contenders and took part in the competition himself. The one who cleared the most “obstacles” without toppling over onto the floor dead drunk was the winner. I assured the colonel that, since I drink very little and am allergic to drunkards, the celebration of the national holiday held at the Presidential Palace would be somewhat more sober during my term in office.

Of all those meetings the one that left me with a better impression was a conversation I had with General Jaime Salinas Sedó, at that time the head of the Second Sector whose armored division has almost always been the source of military coups in Peru. With him in that post democracy seemed assured. Cultivated, well-spoken, with elegant manners, he appeared to be very concerned about the traditional lack of communication between civil society and the military sphere in Peru, which, he said, was a continual danger for the rule of law. He spoke to me of the necessity of modernizing the armed forces and bringing them up to date technically, of eradicating politics from them, and of severely punishing cases of corruption, frequent in recent years, so that the military institutions in our country would have the prestige that they had in France or Great Britain.^* Both he and Admiral Panizo, at the time chairman of the Joint Command, with whom I had a couple of private meetings, assured me emphatically that the armed forces would not permit any electoral fraud.

The speech I gave at the CAEM was one of three that I wrote and published during the campaign.^† It seemed important to me to speak in depth, before the cream of the crop from the various military branches, about subjects which were central to the liberal reform of Peru and which involved the armed forces.

Unlike the situation that obtains in modern democracies, in Peru there has never been a deep solidarity between the armed forces and civil society, because of the military coups and the almost total lack of communication between civilians and the military. In order to achieve that solidarity and professionalism, the total independence and impartiality of the armed forces in the face of political factionalism and contention were necessary. And it was necessary that military officers be aware of the fact that, in the economic situation in which Peru found itself, military expenditures would be nonexistent in the immediate future, except for giving the armed forces adequate equipment for the battle against terrorism. This battle would be won only if civilians and military personnel fought shoulder to shoulder against those who had already caused damages amounting to ten billion dollars. As president, I would assume the leadership of this fight, to wage which peasants and workers would be called upon to join together in armed patrols, advised by the military. And I would not tolerate abuses of human rights, for such tactics were incompatible with a state under the rule of law and counterproductive if the aim was to win the support of the people.

It is an error to confuse nationalism and patriotism. The latter is a legitimate feeling of love for the land where one was born; the former, a nineteenth-century doctrine, restrictive and antiquated, which in Latin America had brought on fratricidal wars between countries and ruined our economies. Following the example of Europe, we had to put an end to that nationalistic tradition and work toward integration with our neighbors, the disappearance of borders, and continental disarmament. My government would make every effort, from the very first day, to remove all economic and political barriers that hindered close collaboration and friendship with other Latin American countries, and with our neighbors in particular. I ended my speech with an anecdote that went back to the days when I was teaching at King’s College at London University. I discovered there one day that two of my most diligent students were young officers in the British Army, which had awarded them scholarships so that they could earn a master’s degree in Latin American studies: “I learned from them that in Great Britain entering Sandhurst or the Naval Academy or the Air Corps was a privilege reserved for the most capable and hardworking young men — neither more nor less so than entering the most prestigious universities — and that the training that they received there prepared them not only for the din of battle (though naturally it also prepared them for that), but also for peace: that is to say, for serving their country effectively as scientists, as researchers, as technical experts, as humanists.” The reorganization of the armed forces in Peru would be oriented toward that goal.

Two or three days after the CAEM meeting, the Sawyer/Miller Group had the results of a new national opinion poll, the most important one that had been taken up until then because of the number of people interviewed and the places included in the sample. I was first overall, with 41 or 42 percent of those in the sample intending to vote for me. Alva Castro had managed to climb to 20 percent, while Barrantes was at a standstill with 15 percent and Henry Pease at 8 percent. The results didn’t seem bad to me, since I was expecting a sharp drop because of the excessive propaganda put out for the preferential vote. But I didn’t accept Mark Malloch Brown’s proposal that I cancel the tours of the interior and concentrate on a media campaign and on visits to the marginal districts of Lima. My person and my program were well known in the capital, whereas in many places in the interior they still were not.

That same week, as, in the short breaks between meetings that I had in planes or minivans, I was scribbling the speech that I would deliver in a meeting with liberal intellectuals of different countries that Libertad had organized for March 7 to 9, the news of the assassination of our leader in Ayacucho, Julián Huamaní Yauli, reached me. I immediately flew to Ayacucho to attend his funeral and arrived as they were enshrouding his remains, in a little mortuary chapel that had been set up on the second floor of an ancient, dark building that had once been a private dwelling and was now the School of Public Accounting. I had a strange feeling as I stood there contemplating the head of this modest Ayacuchan, shattered to bits by Sendero bullets, remembering how, on each one of my trips to his homeland, he had accompanied me in my travels, formal and reserved, as the people in that part of the country usually are. His murder was a good example of the irrationality and stupid cruelty of the terrorist strategy, since it was not intended to punish any violence, exploitation, or abuse committed by the extremely modest and previously apolitical Julián Huamaní, but simply to terrify through the crime those who believed that elections could change things in Peru. He was the first leader of Libertad who had been killed. How many others would there be, I asked myself as we were taking his remains to the church, through the streets of Ayacucho, experiencing for the first time that feeling of guilt that, especially during the runoff vote, would overcome me every time I learned that the lives of militants or candidates of ours had been cut short by the terrorists.

Very shortly after the assassination of Julián Huamaní Yauli, on March 23, another of the Front’s candidates for a seat in the Chamber of Representatives, the populist José Gálvez Fernández, was murdered as he left the school that he was the head of, in Comas, one of the popular districts in Lima. Unaffected, simple and straightforward, likable, he was one of the local leaders of Popular Action who had worked the hardest for the close collaboration between the allied parties of the Front. When I went to the headquarters of Popular Action that night, where they were holding a wake for him, I found Belaunde and his wife Violeta badly shaken by the assassination of their colleague.

But amid bloody events such as these, in the final days of the campaign there was also a stimulating contrast: the Freedom Revolution meeting. For many months, we had been planning to bring together in Lima intellectuals of various countries whose ideas had contributed to the extraordinary political and cultural changes in the world, in order to show that what we wanted to do in Peru was part of a process of the reappraisal of democracy, in which more and more peoples around the globe were participating, and in order to show our compatriots that the most modern thought was liberal.

The meeting lasted for three days, in El Pueblo, on the outskirts of Lima, where conferences, round-table discussions, debates took place, and at night, serenades and fiestas to which the presence en masse of young people who belonged to Libertad lent a great deal of color. We had hopes that Lech Walesa would attend. The leader of Solidarity had promised Miguel Vega, who went to see him in Gdansk, that he would do his best to come, but at the last minute the internal problems of his country kept him from attending, and he sent us a message, through two leaders of the Polish labor movement, Stefan Jurczak and Jacek Chwedoruk, whose presence on the speakers’ platform, the night that they read the message aloud, gave rise to a great outburst of enthusiasm. (I remember Álvaro, more excited than usual, shouting Walesa’s name at the top of his lungs, in chorus with everyone else, with his arms upraised.)

Cultural meetings are usually boring, but this one wasn’t, not to me at any rate, nor, it seems to me, to the young people we brought from all over the country so that they could hear about the liberal offensive that was traversing the world. Many of them heard for the first time the things that were said there. Perhaps because of my total immersion in the stereotyped language of the electoral campaign, in those three days it seemed to me that I was tasting an exquisite forbidden fruit by hearing words without political cunning behind them or servitude to the immediate situation, used in a personal way, to explain the great changes that were taking place or that could suddenly occur in countries willing to reform themselves by staking everything on political and economic freedom — that was the subject dealt with by Javier Tusell — or simply to describe in the abstract, as Israel Kirzner did, the nature of the market. I remember the splendid explanatory speeches by Jean-François Revel and Sir Alan Walters as the high points of the meeting, and the explanation given by José Piñera of the economic reforms that brought Chile development and democratization. It was very stimulating, above all, thanks to the speeches by the Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the Mexicans Enrique Krause and Gabriel Zaid, the Guatemalan Armando de la Torre, and others, to realize that all over Latin America there were intellectuals attuned to our ideas, who looked on our campaign with the hope that, if it was carried through successfully in Peru, the liberal revolution would spread to their countries.

Among those who attended were two front-line Cuban freedom fighters: Carlos Franqui and Carlos Alberto Montaner. In the name of unequivocal democratic convictions, both of them had been fighting against Castro’s dictatorship for many years now, ever since they first felt that the revolution for which they had fought had been betrayed. It seemed to me that, as the meeting came to an end, I ought to make a public declaration of my solidarity with their cause, to say that the freedom of Cuba was also a flag we rallied round, and that, if we won the election, free Cubans would have in Peru an ally in their fight against one of the last vestiges of totalitarianism in the world. I did so, before reading my speech,^* provoking the predictable wrath of the Cuban dictator who, two or three days later, answered from Havana with his usual vituperations.

Octavio Paz, who was unable to come, sent a videotape with a recorded message, explaining why he now supported the candidacy which, two years before in London, he had tried to talk me out of, and Miguel Vega Alvear had trouble rounding up enough television sets so that everyone in the audience could hear the message. But he managed, and so Octavio Paz was there with us, through his image and his voice, during those days of the congress. His encouragement came at an opportune moment for me, for to tell the truth, every so often I could hear, still pounding in my ears, the reasons he’d given me, two years before, in a conversation in his London hotel on Sloane Street, as we were having the orthodox tea and scones, for not going into politics: incompatibility with intellectual work, loss of independence, being manipulated by professional politicians, and, in the long run, frustration and the feeling of years of one’s life wasted. In his message, Octavio, with that subtlety in developing a line of reasoning which, along with the elegance of his prose, is his best intellectual attribute, retracted those arguments and replaced them with other, more up-to-date ones, justifying my determination and connecting it with the great liberal and democratic mobilization in Eastern Europe. At that moment, it was invigorating for me to hear, from the lips of someone whom I had admired since my youth, the arguments in favor of my going into politics which I had put to myself sometime before. Not long afterward, however, I would have a chance to see how right his first reaction had been and how Peruvian reality hastened to prove this second one wrong.

But still more than for intellectual reasons, the three days of the congress were a real vacation for me, since I could hobnob with friends I hadn’t seen for some time and meet wonderful people who came to the meeting bringing ideas and testimony that were like a breath of fresh air to this country with a marginal culture at a dead end that poverty and violence had turned Peru into. Except for the heavy security surrounding the meeting place, the foreign participants had no indication of the violence amid which the country was living, and they could even enjoy a spectacle of Peruvian music and folk dances to which, on the spur of the moment, Ana and Pedro Schwartz contributed several lively Sevillian dances. (I record this fact for history, for every time I have told people about it, nobody has believed me that the eminent Spanish economist was capable of such a feat.)

These three days of relative relaxation gave me energy, moreover, for the last month, which was dizzying. I began campaigning again on Sunday, March 11, with rallies in Huaral, Huacho, Barranca, Huarmey, and Casma, and from that time on, up until the ceremony closing the campaign, on April 5 in Arequipa, I visited half a dozen cities and towns every day, talking, leading motorcades, and giving press conferences in all of them and flying back to Lima almost every night to meet with the Front’s national campaign leaders, with the team drawing up the Plan for Governing, and with the little group of advisers in the “kitchen cabinet,” meetings that Patricia, the coordinator of my agenda, also attended.

Since the rallies almost always drew huge crowds and, in the final weeks, the internal rivalries seemed to have disappeared and the Front presented an image of cohesion and solidity, victory seemed certain to me. The opinion polls also predicted the same thing, although all of them discounted the possibility of a resounding victory in the first round. There would be a weeding out of the weaker candidates, and I preferred running against the APRA candidate in the second round, since I imagined that the anti-Aprismo of certain forces of the left would allow me to capture votes from that constituency. But, deep down inside, I didn’t lose hope that, at the last moment, the Peruvian people would agree to give me the mandate I was seeking as early as April 8.

On March 28, my birthday, the reception given me in Iquitos was an apotheosis. A huge crowd accompanied me from the airport to the city, and Patricia, who was with me in the open-roofed touring car, and I were impressed to see that from all the houses and street corners more and more groups of enthusiasts came to join the dense procession that never stopped, not even for a moment, chanting in chorus the slogans of the Front and singing and dancing with indescribable happiness and fervor. (Every event in Amazonia turns into a fiesta.) A giant birthday cake awaited me on the speakers’ platform, with fifty-four little candles, and even though the lights kept going out and the microphones didn’t work well, the rally was so huge that Patricia and I were electrified.

I slept in Iquitos that night, for the three or four hours that had become my sleep ration, and on the following morning, very early, I flew to Cuzco, where, beginning with Sicuani, Urcos, Urubamba, and Calca, I set out on a tour that was to end, two days later at five o’clock in the afternoon, in the main square of the ancient capital of the Inca empire. For historical and also political reasons, Cuzco, the traditional bastion of the left, has symbolic value in Peru. The Plaza de Armas, its main square, where the stones of the ancient Inca palaces serve as a foundation for the churches and dwellings built in the colonial era, is one of the most beautiful and imposing ones I know, as well as one of the largest. The Libertad committee in Cuzco had promised me that, on that afternoon, it would be full to overflowing, and that neither Apristas nor Communists would manage to spoil the rally. (They had tried to attack us on all my previous tours of the departamento.)

I was getting ready to leave for the rally when Álvaro called me from Lima. I could tell that he was very upset. He was at the campaign headquarters, with Mark Malloch Brown, Jorge Salmón, Luis Llosa, Pablo Bustamante, and the analysts of the opinion polls. They had just received the final one before the election and had had a major surprise: in the marginal districts and young towns of Lima—60 percent of the capital — Alberto Fujimori had taken off in the last few days at a dizzying rate, displacing both the candidate of the APRA and that of the United Left as the one that voters intended to cast their ballot for, and there was every indication that his popularity was rising, “like foam, by the minute.” According to the analysts it was a phenomenon restricted to the poorest districts of Lima and the C and D sectors; in the other districts, and in the remainder of Peru, the proportion of forces was still the same as before. Mark considered the danger a very serious one and advised me to suspend the tour, including the rally in Cuzco, and return to Lima immediately, in order to concentrate all our efforts, from that day on until the election, on the districts and neighborhoods on the periphery of the capital so as to halt that phenomenon.

I answered Álvaro that they were crazy if they thought I was going to leave my followers in Cuzco in the lurch, and told him that I would return to Lima the next day, after the rallies in Quillabamba and Puerto Maldonado. I left for the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco, and the spectacle there made me forget all the apprehensions of the campaign directors. It was late afternoon and a torrid sun was scorching the foothills of the Cordillera and the coast of Carmenca. The roofs of San Blas and the pre-Hispanic stones of churches and convents gave off flames. In the pure indigo-blue sky there were no clouds and a few stars were already out. The dense crowd that covered the enormous square seemed to be on the point of bursting with enthusiasm and in the transparent mountain air the weathered faces of the men and the bright colors of the women’s wide skirts and the placards and flags which that forest of hands was waving were sharp and clear and seemed to be within reach of anyone who, from the speakers’ platform erected in the atrium of the cathedral, stretched out an arm to touch them. During the entire campaign I have never been as moved as I was that late afternoon in Cuzco, in that ancient and beautiful Plaza de Armas where the ill-starred country in which I was born experienced its most sublime moments of glory and where, in days long gone, it was civilized and prosperous. I said as much, with a lump in my throat, to the architect Gustavo Manrique Villalobos of the Libertad committee, when, his eyes damp, he whispered to me, pointing to the impressive crowd: “We’ve kept our promise, Mario.”

That night, at dinnertime, at the Hotel de Turistas, I asked who this Alberto Fujimori was, who now, only ten days before the election, seemed to begin to exist as a candidate, and where he came from. Up until then I don’t believe I’d given a single thought to him, or ever heard anyone mention him in the analyses and projected results of the election made within the Front and the Freedom Movement. On rare occasions I had seen, in passing, the few sparse placards of the ghostlike organization that registered him as its candidate, the name of which, Cambio 90, was plagiarized from a slogan of ours, “El gran cambio, en libertad”—“The great change, in freedom”—and picturesque photos of this figure whose campaign strategy consisted of riding around on a tractor, sometimes with an Indian cap with earflaps above his Oriental face, repeating a slogan — Honesty, Technology, and Work — which represented his entire proposal for governing the country. But not even as a folkloric eccentricity did this fifty-two-year-old agricultural engineer, the son of Japanese parents, with a twice-repeated surname — Fujimori Fujimori — reign supreme among the ten candidates for the presidency registered by the National Board of Elections, since in that domain he was bested by one even more bizarre: Señor Ataucusi Gamonal, also known as the prophet Ezequiel.

The prophet Ezequiel was the founder of a new religion, the Israelite Church of the New Universal Covenant, which had sprung up in the mountain fastnesses of the Andes, and to a certain extent had taken root in rural communities and marginal neighborhoods of the cities. A humble man, born in the little town of La Unión (in the departamento of Arequipa), educated by an evangelical sect in the central highlands, he had left that sect after having had a “revelation” in Tarma and founded his own. His faithful could be easily recognized because the women went around dressed in severe tunics and wore kerchiefs on their heads and the men had inordinately long hair and fingernails, since one of the precepts of their creed was not to interfere with the development of the natural order. They lived in communes, working the land and sharing everything, and had had confrontations with Sendero Luminoso. At the beginning of the campaign, Juan Ossio, an anthropologist who was studying the “Israelites” and had a good relationship with them, had invited me to have lunch at his house with the prophet Ezequiel and his chief apostle, Brother Jeremías Ortiz Arcos, since he thought that the support of the sect might win us votes among peasants. That lunch lingers in my mind as an amusing memory, in which all conversation with me was carried on by Brother Jeremías, a sturdy, astute mestizo who wore his hair in tangled braided dreadlocks and affected studied poses, as the prophet remained silent, lost in a sort of mystic rapture. Only over dessert, after having eaten like a Heliogabalus, did he return to this world. His eyes sought mine, and seizing my arm with his black talons, he uttered this definitive pronouncement: “I shall put you on the throne, Doctor.” Encouraged by what we took to be a promise of aid in the election, Juan Ossio and Freddy Cooper went to have lunch with the prophet Ezequiel and his apostles in an “Israelite” tent, in a slum district of Lima, and Freddy remembered that love-feast as one of the least digestible ordeals of his ephemeral political career. And a useless one, moreover, since a short time thereafter the prophet Ezequiel decided to place himself on the throne in my stead, by launching his own candidacy. Although he had never reached even one percent in the opinion surveys, the analysts of the Front sometimes speculated on the possibility of a shift in the rural vote toward the prophet, thereby destabilizing the political panorama. But none of them had any inkling that the surprise would come from agricultural engineer Fujimori.

On my return to Lima, on the afternoon of March 30, I was confronted with a curious piece of news. Our security unit had gotten wind of an order given the evening before by President García to all the regional development corporations to the effect that, henceforth, they were to redirect their logistic support — transportation, communications, and advertising — withdrawing it from Alva Castro’s Aprista candidacy and giving it instead to Cambio 90. At the same time, from that day on, all the communications media dependent on the government and with ties to García — especially Channel 5, “Radioprogramas,” La República, Página Libre, and La Crónica—began to extol systematically a candidacy that, up until then, they had scarcely mentioned. The only person who didn’t appear to be surprised at the news was Fernando Belaunde, with whom I met on the night of my return to Lima. “Fujimori’s candidacy is a typical Aprista maneuver to take votes away from us,” the ex-president assured me. “They did the same thing to me, in 1963, inventing the candidacy of engineer Mario Samamé Boggio, who said the same things I did, was a professor at the same university as I was, and who, in the end, received even fewer votes than the number of signatures that got him on the official list of candidates.” Was the candidate in the cap with earflaps and the tractor an epiphenomenon invented by Alan García? In any event, Mark Malloch Brown was worried. The flash polls — we took one every day in Lima — confirmed that in the shantytowns the popularity of the “little Chinaman” was rapidly increasing.

Who was he? Where did he come from? He had been a professor of mathematics and rector of the Agrarian University, and in that capacity headed for a time the CONUP (Asamblea Nacional de Rectores: National Assembly of University Rectors). But his candidacy couldn’t be weaker. He hadn’t even been able to fill the quotas for senators and congressmen on his list. Among his candidates there were many pastors of evangelical churches, and all of them, without exception, were unknowns. We discovered later that he had included on his list of candidates his own gardener and a prophetess and palmist, implicated in a trial having to do with drugs, named Madame Carmelí. But the best proof of the lack of seriousness of his candidacy was that Fujimori himself was also a candidate for a Senate seat. The Peruvian Constitution allows this duplication, which is taken advantage of by many aspirants to seats in Congress who, in order to garner more publicity, register at the same time as presidential candidates. Nobody with a real possibility of being elected president runs for a senatorship at the same time, since according to the Constitution the two offices create a conflict of interest.

Although I did not cancel all the remainder of the tours scheduled for the last days before the election — Huancayo, Jauja, Trujillo, Huaraz, Chimbote, Cajamarca, Tumbes, Piura, and Callao — I made lightning visits, almost every morning before leaving for the provinces, to the young towns in Lima where Fujimori seemed to have the firmest support, and I also made a series of TV spots, talking with people from the C and D sectors who asked me questions about the points in my program under heaviest attack. With the brand-new support of planes and minivans belonging to the government, Fujimori began a series of junkets in the provinces, and news programs showed large audiences of humble Peruvians at all his meetings, people whom the “little Chinaman” with the poncho, the cap with earflaps, and the tractor who attacked all politicians in his speeches seemed to have bewitched overnight.

On Friday, March 30, the new mayor of Lima, Ricardo Belmont, endorsed my candidacy. He did so from my house in Barranco, after a conversation that proved to be very instructive to me. Fujimori’s takeoff had greatly disturbed him, because not only had he repeated everything that Belmont had said in his municipal campaign—“I am not a politician,” “All politicians have been failures,” “The time for independent candidates has come”—but in addition the committees of Belmont’s own organization, OBRAS, were being cannibalized by Cambio 90 in the marginal districts of Lima. His local offices were switching banners and the posters with his face were being replaced by others with the face of the “little Chinaman.” In Ricardo’s opinion, there wasn’t the slightest doubt about it: Fujimori was a creation of the APRA. And he told me that the former Aprista mayor of Lima, Jorge del Castillo, had tried to get him to include Fujimori on his list of city councilmen, something he hadn’t gone along with since Fujimori, though a university professor, was an absolute political unknown. Six months back, the presidential candidate of Cambio 90 had aspired to no higher office than that of municipal councilman.

As he had told Álvaro, with whom he had had several meetings prior to this one with me and with whom he had made friends, in the talk we had together Ricardo Belmont assured me: “I’m going to stop Fujimori.” And in those last eight days of the campaign he did everything in his power to back my candidacy, in a press conference, on a television program he planned with that very purpose in mind, and by coming up onto the speakers’ platform to offer me his support at the rally on April 4, on the Paseo de la República, with which we ended the campaign in Lima. None of this helped to hold back what reporters were soon to baptize as “the tsunami,” but it left me with an image of Belmont as a likable person, who, predictably, was made to pay dearly for that display of loyalty to me by the future Peruvian government, which asphyxiated the mayoralty of Lima by depriving it of financial resources and condemning Belmont to a city administration that could accomplish next to nothing.^*

On April 3 two good things happened. The attractive Gisella Valcárcel, who, after being a music hall performer, had gone on to host one of the most popular shows on television, after interviewing Fujimori on it announced to her audience, in his presence, that she was going to vote for me. It was a brave gesture, because Channel 5 had previously tried to keep Gisella from participating in the festivities that Acción Solidaria organized for Christmas. Nonetheless, she went to the stadium and emceed the show — even getting me to dance a huayno—and now, on the eve of the election, she had given me a public endorsement, trying to persuade her viewers to vote for me. I called to thank her, and to swear to her that this would not bring her reprisals; fortunately, none took place.

The second piece of good news was the results of the last nationwide opinion poll that Mark and his analysts, Paul, Ed, and Bill, brought to the house late that Wednesday afternoon: I had maintained my average of some 40 percent of the electorate intending to vote for me, and Fujimori’s offensive, which included not only Lima but also the remainder of Peru — with the sole exception of the Amazon region — was taking votes away from the APRA and the United Left for the most part, causing them to drop down to third and fourth place respectively in almost all of the departamentos. Fujimori’s advance in the marginal sections of the capital appeared to have been halted; and in districts such as San Juan de Lurigancho and Comas I had regained several percentage points.

Hundreds of reporters from all over the world were in Lima for the election on Sunday, April 8, and the campaign directors feared that the 1,500-seat capacity of the auditorium of the Sheraton would not provide enough room for them all. My house in Barranco was surrounded by photographers and cameramen night and day and the security guards had trouble holding off those who tried to scale the walls or leap into the garden. In order to maintain some privacy we had to close the blinds and draw the curtains and have visitors drive their cars inside the garage if they didn’t want to be hounded by the hordes of reporters. The election law didn’t allow polls to be published for the two weeks preceding an election, but the daily papers abroad had already printed news stories about the surprising appearance at the last minute of a dark horse of Japanese origin in the Peruvian presidential election.

I didn’t feel alarmed, as I had been at the time of the excessive ad campaign of our congressional candidates — which, in these two final weeks, was reduced to less extravagant dimensions — although I couldn’t help thinking that between that campaign and the “Fujimori phenomenon” there was a reciprocal relation. That spectacle of economic immodesty presented by our candidates had suited the purpose of someone who made himself out to poor Peruvians to be just one more “poor man,” disgusted with a “political class” that had never solved the country’s problems. I thought, however, that the vote for Fujimori — the vote meant to castigate us — couldn’t possibly amount to more than 10 percent or so of the electorate, the most uninformed and uncultured voters. Who else would vote for an unknown, without a program, without a team for governing, without any political credentials whatsoever, who had hardly campaigned outside of Lima, who had been jury-rigged overnight to serve as a candidate? No matter what the opinion polls said, it never entered my head that a candidacy so devoid of ideas and with no planning staff could carry weight in the face of the monumental effort we had put in over a period of almost three years of work. And secretly, without saying as much to Patricia, I was still cherishing the hope that Peruvians would give me a mandate for the “great change, in freedom” that Sunday.

A dream like that was nurtured, in large part, by a misinterpretation of the last rallies, all of which, beginning with the one in the Plaza de Armas of Cuzco, were most impressive. So was the one on April 4, on the Paseo de la República, in Lima, when I spoke of myself and my family in a very intimate way, explaining, against the propaganda that presented me as one of the privileged, that I owed everything I was and everything I possessed to my own work, and the one in Arequipa, the last one, on April 5, when I promised my countrymen that I would be “a rebellious and obstreperous president,” just as the part of the country that I was born in had been in the history of Peru. Those very well organized ceremonies, those public squares and avenues teeming with overexcited people hoarse from shouting our slogans in chorus — so many young people, above all — gave the impression of an overwhelming mobilization, of a country dazzled by the Front. Before the final rally, Patricia and my three children and I went through the streets of the city in an open touring car, in a motorcade that lasted for several hours, joined at every street corner in Arequipa by more and more people, with bunches of flowers or confetti, in an atmosphere of real delirium. During one of those tours of Arequipa, I had one of the most unexpected and nicest experiences of those years. A young woman approached the car, held up a baby just a few months old for me to kiss him, and shouted to me: “If you win, I’ll have another baby, Mario!”

But anyone who had sat down with a cool head to add and subtract and attentively observe the sort of people who attended those marches and rallies would have had reservations: those who took part in them represented almost exclusively the third of Peruvians with the largest incomes. Although a minority, there were enough of them to fill the main squares of Peruvian cities, above all now that, for one of the few times in our history, those middle and upper classes had backed, en bloc, a political plan. But there were the remaining two-thirds, all those Peruvians who had been most impoverished and most frustrated by the national decline of recent decades — including those who had once been interested by my proposals only to have their interest flag out of fear, confusion, and displeasure at the manifestation, in the last months of the campaign, of what appeared to be the old elitist, arrogant Peru of the whites and the rich, something that our advertising contributed as much to as did the campaign of our adversaries — and as I presided over those grandiose rallies that left me with the impression that I was retaining the very nearly absolute majority that the opinion polls said I enjoyed, these Peruvians, the other two-thirds, had already begun to change their minds in a way that would make the election results turn out quite differently.

A number of friends had arrived in Peru from abroad, among them Carmen Balcells, my literary agent from Barcelona who had kept me company in any number of my ups and downs, my English publisher, Robert McCrum, and the Colombian writer and journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, all of whom I had a chance to see on the eve of election day, in the midst of the killing series of interviews with foreign correspondents that figured on my schedule. I had another surprise when my Finnish publisher, Erkki Reenpaa, and Sulamita, his wife, also showed up in Barranco. Their snow-white Scandinavian faces had suddenly appeared as though by magic amid the crowd at the rally in Piura, without my being able to figure out how it was possible for those two friends from Helsinki to have turned up in that remote corner of Peru. I learned later that they had followed me, all during that last week, from one city to another, accomplishing miracles so that, by renting cars and taking planes, they could be present at all my final rallies. And that night, I found at home a telegram that had been sent to me from Geneva by the close friend of my youth, Luis Loayza, whom I hadn’t seen for years. It read: “An embrace, fierce little Sartrean,” and I was deeply touched.

On Sunday the 8th, Patricia, Álvaro, Gonzalo, and I went to vote early in the morning at the Colegio Mercedes Indacochea, in Barranco, and Morgana came with us, dying with envy because her brothers could already vote. Then, before leaving for the Hotel Sheraton, I checked to see how those tens of thousands of representatives of our alliance, which a team headed by Miguel and Cecilia Cruchaga had been training for this day for months, were doing at the electoral tables in polling places all over the country. Everything was in good order; the transportation arrangements had worked and our representatives had been at their posts since dawn.

We had reserved several floors of the Sheraton for election day. On the first floor were the press offices of the Front, with Álvaro and his team, and on the second floor fax machines, telephones, and desks for correspondents had been installed and the conference room where I was to speak after the results were in had been made ready. On the eighteenth floor there was a computer network office, where Mark Malloch Brown and his team received projections of how the vote was going, reports from our representatives, and the results of exit polls that came in via the computers that Miguel Cruchaga had installed, in semisecrecy, in San Antonio. They handed me the first projection around noon.

The nineteenth floor was reserved for my family and close friends, and the security service had orders to allow no one else to set foot on it. I had a suite in which I shut myself up around eleven in the morning, all by myself. I was watching on television as the leaders of the various political parties, or famous sports stars and singers, came to the polling places to vote, and all of a sudden I was tormented by the idea that for five years it was more than likely that I wouldn’t read or write anything literary again. Then I sat down and in a little book that I always carry around with me in my pocket I wrote this poem which, ever since I had read a book by Alfonso Reyes on Greece, I had been mulling over in my mind in my free moments:

ALCIDES

Pienso en el poderoso Alcides, Ilamado también Hércules. Era muy fuerte. Aún en la cuna Aplastó a dos serpientes, una por una. Y, adolescente, mató a un león, gallardamente. Cubierto con su piel, peregrino audaz, fue por el mundo. Lo imagino musculoso y bruñido, dando caza al león de Nemea. Y, en la plaza calcinada de Lidia, sirviendo como esclavo y entreteniendo a la reina Onfale. Vestido de mujer, el venido de Grecia hilaba y tejía y, en su gentil disfraz, divertía a la corte.

Allí lo dejo al invicto joven trejo: en el ridículo sumido y, paf, lo olvido.

ALCIDES

I think of the powerful Alcides, also called Hercules. He was very strong. In his cradle still he was known to have killed two serpents, crushed to death, one by one. And before reaching maturity he killed a lion, valiantly. Wearing its pelt, a fearless pilgrim, he roamed the world. An image I can't erase:

Muscular, burnished, giving chase to the lion of Nemea. And in the torrid public square in Lydia, serving as a slave and entertaining the Queen, Omphale. Dressed as a woman, the man arrived from Greece spun and wove and, in his charming disguise, amused the court.

There I leave the young man, unbeaten yet, neck deep in ridicule: whom, just like that, I forget.

Around one o’clock in the afternoon, Mark, Lucho, and Álvaro came up to see me with the first projection: I had close to 40 percent and Fujimori 25 percent. The dark horse was giving further proof of the remarkably solid base he had established everywhere in the country. Mark explained to me that my percentage would tend to go on increasing, but, seeking the look on his face, I could tell that he was lying. If these figures proved to be correct, the electorate hadn’t given me a mandate and there would be a congressional majority hostile to our program.

I went downstairs to talk to my mother and my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, and ate a couple of sandwiches with them without telling them what I knew. Even Uncle Lucho, despite his stroke and paralysis, was there, smiling behind his immobility and silence, keeping me company on the great day. I went back up to the suite on the nineteenth floor, where at two-thirty they brought me a second and more complete nationwide projection. I immediately saw that it was disastrous: I had lost three points — I now had 36 percent — Fujimori was maintaining his 25 percent, the APRA had just under 20 percent and the two parties of the left, taken together, 10 percent. It didn’t require gifts of prophecy to see into the future: there would be a second round in which Apristas, Socialists, and Communists would do an about-face and vote en bloc for Fujimori, making him the winner by a comfortable margin.

Álvaro stayed alone with me for a moment. He was very pale, with those dark blue circles underneath his eyes that, when he was a little boy, presaged a temper tantrum. Of my three children, he is the one who is most like me, in his passionate outbursts and in his enthusiasms, in his excessive surrender, without reserve or calculation, to his loves and his hates. He was twenty-four, and this campaign had been an extraordinary experience in his life. It was not my idea but Freddy Cooper’s to make him our communications director, because he was a journalist, because he was continually obsessed by Peru, because he was so close to me and so closely identified with liberal ideas. It had been hard work to get him to accept. He said no to Freddy and me, but finally Patricia, who is even more stubborn than he is, persuaded him. Because of this, we have been accused of nepotism and baptized by the Aprista press as “the royal family.” He had done his job very well, having fights with many people, of course, because he refused to make the slightest concession when it came to matters of principle or agree to anything that we might regret later, just as I had asked him to do. In all these months he had learned a great deal more than he had in his three years at the London School of Economics, about his country, about people, and about politics, a passion that he acquired in his adolescence and that had absorbed him ever since, just as in his childhood religion had absorbed him. (I still have the surprising letter he sent me, from boarding school, when he was twelve, informing me of his decision to leave the Catholic Church to be confirmed by the Church of England.) “Everything’s turned to shit,” he said, livid. “There won’t be any liberal reform. Peru won’t change and it’ll go on the way it always has. The worst thing that can happen to you now is to win.” But I knew that there was no longer any danger of that.

I asked him to locate our representative at the National Board of Elections, and when Enrique Elías Laroza came up to the nineteenth floor, I asked him if it were legally possible for one of the two candidates who had been finalists in the first round to give up competing in the second one, handing over the presidency to the other candidate once and for all. He assured me emphatically that this was possible.^* And still he egged me on: “Sure, offer Fujimori one or two ministries and let him give up the second round.” But what I was thinking of offering my rival was something more appetizing than a few ministerial portfolios: the presidential flag, in exchange for adopting key points of our economic program and getting himself teams capable of putting it into practice. My fear, from that moment on, was that, through an intermediary, Alan García and the APRA would go on governing Peru and the disaster of the last five years would continue, until Peruvian society broke down completely.

From that second projection on, I never had the slightest doubt about the outcome nor did I have the slightest illusion as to my chances of winning in the second round. In the previous months and years I had been able to feel physically the hatred borne me by the Apristas and the Communists, who found that my sudden appearance in Peruvian political life, defending liberal theses, filling public squares, mobilizing middle classes which they had previously kept constantly intimidated or bewildered, preventing the nationalization of the financial system, and demanding things that they had turned into taboos—“formal” democracy, private property and enterprise, capitalism, a market economy — had ruined what they took to be their unassailable monopoly of political power and of the future of Peru. The sensation, supported by opinion polls for almost three years, that there was no legal way of stopping that intruder who was bringing the “right” back to life, who would come to power with the enthusiastic backing of millions upon millions, had rendered their enmity even more poisonous, and with their ill-will further exacerbated by the intrigues orchestrated from the Presidential Palace by Alan García, their rancor toward me had been increased to the point of insanity. The appearance of Fujimori at the last minute was a gift of the gods for the APRA and the left, and it was obvious that both would devote themselves body and soul to working for his victory, without stopping for one minute to think of how dangerous it was to bring to power someone so ill-prepared to exercise it. Common sense, reason, are exotic flowers in Peruvian political life and I am sure that, even if they had known that, twenty months after he was elected, Fujimori was going to put an end to democracy, close down Congress, proclaim himself dictator, and begin to repress Apristas and Communists, they would have voted for him just the same, in order to keep a person whom they called enemy number one from taking office as president.

I reflected on all this after talking with Elías Laroza and, as the polling places closed and the television networks began broadcasting the first projections of the results, before I knew that they were still worse than what we had had hints of: between 28 and 29 percent for me and Fujimori a bare five points behind me with 24 percent. The APRA and the United Left won, between them, a third of the votes.

I mulled over in my mind what I ought to do. Negotiating with Fujimori as soon as possible, handing the presidency over to him there and then in return for his consenting to economic reform: putting an end to inflation, lowering tariffs, opening up the economy to competition, renegotiating with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to allow Peru to participate once again in the global financial system, and perhaps the privatization of certain public enterprises. We had the technical experts and the key personnel he lacked to put those measures into effect. My principal argument would be: “More than 50 percent of Peruvians have voted for a change. It is clear that there is not a majority in favor of the radical change that I am proposing; the results show a majority inclined toward moderate, gradual change — for that government by consensus which I have always said would be tantamount to paralysis and inconsistent with our principles. It is crystal clear that I am not the right person to carry out this policy. But it would be a mockery of the decision of the majority for Cambio 90 to serve for one purpose only — to allow the APRA to continue to govern Peru — when it is also obvious that only some 19 percent of Peruvians want to go on exactly as before.”

At 6:30 p.m. I went down to the second floor to talk to the press. The atmosphere in the hotel was funereal. In the corridors, on the stairs, in the elevators, all that I saw were long faces, eyes brimming with tears, expressions of indescribable surprise, and a few, also, of utter rage. The conference room was jam-packed with journalists, cameras, and spotlights, and people from the Democratic Front who even in their dejection marshaled the strength to applaud me. When I could finally speak, I thanked the voters for my “victory” and congratulated Fujimori for the high percentage of votes he had received. I said that the results indicated a clear-cut decision in favor of change on the part of the majority of Peruvians, and that therefore it should be possible to spare the country the risks and tensions of a second round of voting and negotiate a formula that would give rise once and for all to an administration that would put its shoulder to the wheel.

At that point, Miguel Vega interrupted me to whisper in my ear that Fujimori had turned up at the hotel. Could he come in? I said yes, and suddenly there he was on the platform alongside me. He was shorter than he looked in photographs of him and Japanese through and through, down to his slight Japanese accent in Spanish. I learned afterward that, when he appeared at the door of the Sheraton, a group of supporters of the Front had tried to attack him, but that another group had held them back and helped his bodyguards protect him and escort him to the auditorium. We gave each other a friendly embrace for the photographers and I told him that we must talk together, the very next morning.

The nineteenth floor had filled with friends and supporters who, once they had learned the results, had rushed to the hotel and overflowed the security barrier set up to isolate me. The suite had the air of a wake and, at times, of a madhouse. People’s faces reflected surprise, consternation, and great bitterness over the unforeseen results. The radio and television stations had begun to broadcast rumors that I was going to give up my candidacy, and the leaders of the APRA and the United Left were beginning to hint that in the runoff round they would throw their support to Fujimori’s “popular candidacy.” The owners of El Comercio, Alejandro and Aurelio Miró Quesada, the first to arrive, were adamant, insisting that there was no reason whatsoever for me to refuse to run in a second round since I still had every possibility of winning. Shortly thereafter, Belaunde Terry and Violeta arrived, and Lucho and Laura Bedoya and campaign directors of the Front. I stayed there until almost ten that night, saying and hearing the conventional things with which my friends, relatives, supporters, and I tried to hide the disappointment we felt.

As we left the Sheraton, Patricia firmly insisted that I get out of the car and say a few words to several hundred young people of Libertad who had been there since dusk, shouting slogans in chorus and singing. I recognized Johnny Palacios and Felipe Leno, the fervent secretary general of the young people’s section of Libertad, who had been at my side on all the speakers’ platforms everywhere in Peru, raising rallies to a fever pitch with his thundering voice. His eyes were damp, but he forced himself to smile. And on reaching home, despite its being almost midnight, I found myself again in the midst of a crowd of young people who had surrounded the house, whom I felt it my duty to thank for their loyalty.

When I was alone at last with Patricia and the children, dawn was breaking. Nonetheless, before going to bed, I made a first draft of the letter explaining to Peruvians why I would give up running for the presidency in the second round and urging those who had voted for the Front to support Fujimori’s administration. I was hoping to show it to my opponent the following day as an enticement that would encourage him to accept an agreement that would allow certain points of the program to “change Peru, in freedom” to be saved.