A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Twenty. Period

On the day following the first round of voting, Wednesday, April 9, 1990, I phoned Alberto Fujimori early in the morning at the Hotel Crillón, his headquarters, and told him I needed to talk with him that same day, without witnesses. He agreed to inform me of the time and place for our meeting, and did so shortly thereafter: an address in the vicinity of the San Juan de Dios clinic, a house next door to a gas station and auto body shop.

The surprising results at the polls on the day before had created an atmosphere of consternation and Lima was a wasp’s nest of rumors, among them one about an imminent coup d’état. The frustration and stupefaction of the supporters of the Front had been succeeded by anger, and during the day the radio stations broadcast news bulletins of incidents, in Miraflores and San Isidro, in which Japanese were insulted on the street or thrown out of restaurants. Such a reaction, besides being stupid, was terribly unjust, since the small Japanese community of Peru had given me many proofs of their support ever since the beginning of the campaign. A group of businessmen and professionals of Japanese origin met every so often with Pipo Thorndike to make financial contributions to the Front. I had held talks with them on three occasions, so as to explain our program to them and listen to their suggestions. And the Freedom Movement had chosen a Nisei agriculturalist, from Chancay, as its candidate for representative for the departamento of Lima. (He lost his life, shortly before the elections, when the firearm that he was cleaning went off accidentally.)

I had a great liking for the Peruvian-Japanese community, because of its industriousness and productivity — it had developed the agriculture of the northern section of the departamento of Lima in the 1920s and 1930s — and great sympathy for the dispossessions and abuses of which it had been the victim during Manuel Prado’s first administration (1939–1945), which, after declaring war on Japan, expropriated the property of Japanese and expelled from the country a number of them who were second- or third-generation Peruvians. During Odría’s dictatorship as well, Peruvians of Asian origin had been persecuted, by having their passports taken away from many of them and being forced to go into exile. In the beginning, I thought that those news reports concerning insults and attacks directed against the Japanese were the handiwork of the Aprista propaganda machine, that it signaled the beginning of the campaign to ensure Fujimori’s victory in the second round of voting. But those news broadcasts had a basis in fact. Racial prejudice — an explosive factor that up until then had never been brazenly exploited in our elections, although it had always been present in Peruvian life — would come to play a primary role in the weeks that followed.

The results of the election had caused real trauma in the Democratic Front and in Libertad, whose leaders, in those first hours after our disastrous showing, had not hit on the proper reaction and fled from the press or answered the questions of correspondents with evasive and confused analyses. Nobody could explain the outcome of the election. The rumors that I was going to withdraw from a second round — which radio and television stations kept repeating — brought on a torrent of phone calls to my house, as well as an endless line of visitors, none of whom I received. Unable to understand what was happening, many friends also called from abroad — Jean-François Revel among them. Beginning shortly before noon, crowds of supporters gathered on the Barranco embankment, in front of my house. With others taking their place every so often, the horde of supporters stayed there all day, till nightfall. They remained silent and sad-faced, or else cried out catch-phrases that betrayed their disappointment and anger.

Since I knew that the interview with my adversary would come to nothing if it took place under the siege to which the press had subjected me, Lucho Llosa and I organized a clandestine getaway from my house, in his station wagon, that fooled even the team in charge of security. He parked in the garage, I hunched down in the seat and the only thing that demonstrators, photographers, and security guards saw come out of the garage was Lucho, at the wheel of the station wagon. When, a block farther on, I was able to sit up straight again and saw that nobody was following us, I felt greatly relieved. I had forgotten what it was like to go about Lima without an escort and a wake of reporters.

Fujimori’s house was near the exit ramp of the main highway, hidden behind a wall and the gas station and body shop. Fujimori himself appeared at the door to receive me, and it came as a surprise to me to discover, in that modest district, a Japanese garden, bonsai, ponds with little wooden bridges and small lamps, and an elegant residence furnished in the way an Oriental house would be, the whole secluded by high walls. I felt as though I were in a chifa or in a traditional dwelling in Kyoto or Osaka, rather than in Lima.

There was no one there except for the two of us, at least no one visible. Fujimori led me to a little reception room, with a large window overlooking the garden, and invited me to sit down at a table on which there was a bottle of whisky and two glasses, each of us directly facing the other, as though for a duel. He was a slender, rather rigid man, a little younger than I am, whose small eyes subjected me to such close scrutiny from behind his glasses that it made me feel ill at ease. He expressed himself in hesitant Spanish, making grammatical errors, and with the defensive mildness and formality of those who are not entirely comfortable with the language.

I told him that I wanted to share with him my interpretation of the outcome of the first round. Two-thirds of Peruvians had voted for change — the “gran cambio” of the Front and his Cambio 90, that is to say, against “politics as usual” and populist policies. If, in order to win the second round, he turned into a prisoner of the APRA and the United Left, he would do the country enormous harm and betray the majority of voters, who wanted something different from what they had had for the last five years.

The one-third of the total votes cast that I had received was not enough for the radical program of reforms that, in my judgment, Peru needed. The majority of Peruvians appeared to be inclined toward gradualism, consensus, compromises made on the basis of mutual concessions, a policy which, in my opinion, was incapable of ending inflation, of giving Peru a place in world affairs again, and of reorganizing Peruvian society on modern foundations. He seemed better qualified for furthering such a national accord; I felt that I was incapable of backing policies in which I didn’t believe. In order to be consistent with the voters’ message, Fujimori should try to seek the support of all the forces that in one way or another represented “change,” that is to say, the forces of Cambio 90, those of the Democratic Front, and the most moderate ones of the United Left. I agreed that we should spare Peru the tension and waste of energy of a second round. With this aim in view, at the same time that I made public my decision not to take part in it, I would urge those who had supported me to respond in a positive way to a summons from him to collaborate. This collaboration was indispensable if his administration was not to be a failure, and would be possible if he accepted certain basic ideas of my proposal, particularly in the field of economics. There was a very tense atmosphere, dangerous for the safeguarding of democracy, so that it was indispensable for the new team to begin work immediately, restoring the country’s confidence after such a long and violent election campaign.

He looked at me for quite some time as though he didn’t believe me, or as though in what I had just told him there were some sort of hidden trap. Finally, once he had recovered from his surprise, he began, in a hesitant tone of voice, to speak of my patriotism and my generosity, but I interrupted him by saying to him that we should have a drink and speak of practical matters. He poured a finger of whisky in each of the glasses and asked me when I was going to make my decision public. The next morning, I said. It would be a good thing if we kept in contact so that, once my letter had been publicly disclosed, Fujimori could reinforce its message and call on the parties to collaborate. We agreed to proceed in this way.

We went on talking for a little while longer, in a less general way. He asked me if I had made this decision on my own or after consulting with someone, since, he assured me, he always made all important decisions all by himself, without discussing them even with his wife. He asked me who was the best economist among those who were my advisers and I replied that it was Raúl Salazar, and that of everything that had happened what I perhaps most regretted was the fact that Peruvians, by voting as they had, would be left without a minister of finance equal to Salazar, but that Fujimori could repair that damage by calling him. From his questions I noted that he didn’t understand what I meant by the mandate that I had sought from the voters; he seemed to believe that it meant carte blanche to govern in whatever way a head of state with a mandate pleased, with no restraints. I told him that, on the contrary, it implied a very precise pact between a president and the majority of voters who had elected him in order to carry out a specific program for governing the country, something indispensable if thoroughgoing reforms in a democracy were the goal. We went on talking for a moment about several leaders of the moderate left, such as Senator Enrique Bernales, whom he told me he would include in the agreement we had arrived at.

Three-quarters of an hour had not yet gone by when I rose to my feet. He accompanied me to the front door and as we reached it I made a little joke by bidding him goodbye in the traditional Japanese way, with a bow and murmuring “Arigato gosai ma su.” But he held his hand out to me without so much as a smile.

I went home hunched down in Lucho’s station wagon, and once there, in my study, with all the “royal family” present — Patricia, Álvaro, Lucho and Roxana — we held a conclave during which I described to them my meeting with Fujimori and read them my letter withdrawing as a presidential candidate in a second round of voting. Outside on Malecón, the number of demonstrators had grown. There were now several hundred of them. They kept shouting for me to come outside and were chanting Libertad and Democratic Front slogans in chorus. With that din as background music, we had an argument — I believe it was the first time we had had such a heated one — since only Álvaro agreed with my decision to resign; Lucho and Patricia thought that the forces of the Front wouldn’t go along with collaborating with Fujimori and that the latter was already too deeply committed to Alan García and the APRA for my gesture to destroy their alliance. Moreover, it was their belief that we could win the second round.

We were in the midst of the argument when I heard that outside the house the demonstrators had begun to shout slogans in chorus that had a racist and nationalist ring to them—“Mario is a real Peruvian,” “We want a Peruvian,” in addition to others that were downright insulting — and in indignation I went out to talk to them from the terrace of my house, with the aid of a megaphone. It was inconceivable that those who supported me should discriminate between Peruvians on the basis of the color of their skin. Having so many races and cultures was our greatest source of wealth, the phenomenon that created ties between Peru and the four cardinal points of the globe. It was possible to be a Peruvian whether a person was white, Indian, Chinese, black, or Japanese. Agricultural engineer Fujimori was as Peruvian as I was. The cameramen from Channel 2 were there and managed to broadcast this part of my talk on the news program “Ninety Seconds.”

Early the following morning, Tuesday, April 10, I had the usual work session with Álvaro, during which we planned how we should disclose the news of my letter of resignation. We decided to do so through Jaime Bayly, who had never wavered in his support for me throughout the entire campaign and whose programs had a large audience. As soon as I had informed the political committee of Libertad, with which I had an appointment at 11 a.m, in Barranco, we would go with Bayly to Channel 4.

When, shortly before ten in the morning on that memorable day, the candidates for the first and second vice presidencies, Eduardo Orrego and Ernesto Alayza Grundy, arrived, there was already a horde of reporters on Malecón, struggling with my security forces, and the first of those groups which by noon had turned the grounds around my house into a rally were beginning to arrive. There was already a blazing sun and the morning was clear and bright, and very hot.

I gave Eduardo and Don Ernesto my reasons for not taking part in the second round and read them my letter. I had foreseen that both of them would try to dissuade me, as in fact they did. But I was disconcerted by the categorical statement made by Alayza Grundy, who, as a legal scholar, assured me that the step I was about to take was unconstitutional. A candidate could not refuse to compete in a second round. I told him that I had consulted Elías Laroza, who represented us before the National Election Board, and that he had assured me that there was no legal obstacle. In the present circumstances, my refusal to run a second time was the one thing that could keep Fujimori from becoming a prisoner of the APRA and ensure even a partial change of the policies that were destroying Peru. Wasn’t that a stronger reason than any other? Hadn’t a legal technicality been found to support Barrantes’s refusal to run against Alan García in a second round in 1985? Eduardo Orrego had been informed early that morning of my intention to give up my candidacy by a call from Fernando Belaunde, telephoning from Moscow, where he was attending a congress. The ex-president told Orrego that Alan García had phoned him from Lima, “all upset, since it had been learned that Vargas Llosa was thinking of giving up running as a candidate in a second round, which would invalidate the entire electoral process.” How had President García come by the news of my resignation? Through the one and only possible source: Fujimori. The latter, after his talk with me, had hastened to discuss our conversation with the president and ask for his advice. Wasn’t this the best proof that Fujimori was acting in collusion with Alan García? My resignation would be useless. On the contrary, if we went ahead and proved that Fujimori represented the continuation of the present government, we could reverse what appeared to be a desertion by so many independent voters who had turned to someone whom they believed, out of naïveté and ignorance, to be a candidate without ties to the APRA.

We were in the midst of this discussion when an uproar outside the front door drowned out our voices. Fujimori had unexpectedly turned up there, and our security force was trying to protect him from the avalanche of reporters who were questioning him as to his reasons for coming, and from supporters of mine who were jeering at him and catcalling. I showed him into the living room, as Don Ernesto and Eduardo went off to inform Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party of our talk.

Unlike the day before, when he struck me as being calm and serene, I noted that Fujimori was extremely tense, owing either to the hubbub at the front door or to what he had come to tell me. He began by thanking me for having expressed my strong disapproval of the racist slogans the night before (he had seen the telecast of my talk on Channel 2), and without hiding how upset he was, he added that constitutional problems might arise if I gave up my candidacy. This was unconstitutional and would invalidate the election process. I told him that it was my belief that this was not the case, but that, in any event, I would make certain that it would not bring about a crisis that would lead to a coup d’état. I saw him to the door, but I did not go out onto the street with him.

At the time the inside of my house was full to overflowing, as were the grounds outside. Every last member of the political committee of Libertad had arrived — the one time, it seems to me, that not one of them failed to show up — along with several of my closest advisers such as Raúl Salazar, and Jaime Bayly having been alerted by Álvaro. Patricia was holding a meeting in the patio with a fair number of the leaders of Acción Solidaria. We found room as best we could for some thirty people in the living room on the ground floor, and despite the heat, we closed the windows and drew the curtains so that the reporters and supporters gathered in the street wouldn’t hear us.

I explained the reasons why a second round impressed me as useless and dangerous, and given the outcome on Sunday, the advantage if the forces of the Front reached some sort of agreement with Fujimori. Keeping Alan García’s policy from continuing any longer was now the top priority. The Peruvian people had refused to give us the mandate that we had sought from them and there was no longer any possibility of carrying out our reforms — not even in the hypothetical case of winning in the second round, since we would have a majority against us in Congress — and therefore we should spare the country another campaign the result of which we already knew, since it was obvious that the APRA and the United Left would make common cause with my adversary. I then read them my letter.

I believe that all of those present spoke, a number of them in dramatic terms, all of them, with the exception of Enrique Ghersi, urging me not to drop out. Only Ghersi pointed out that, in principle, he did not reject the idea of negotiating with Fujimori if that would allow us to salvage certain key points of our program; but Enrique too had his doubts about the independence of the Cambio 90 candidate to make decisions about anything on his own, since, like all the other advisers, he believed him to be a vassal of Alan García’s.

One of the most lively contributions to the discussion was the one made by Enrique Chirinos Soto, whom the monumental surprise of the election had pulled out of his lethargy and driven into a state of lucid paroxysm. He abounded with technical reasons proving that resigning from the second round went against the letter and the spirit of the Constitution; but it seemed to him even graver still to abandon the fight and offer a free field to a candidate who had been made up out of whole cloth, without a program or ideas or a team — to a political adventurer who, once in power, might well mean the collapse of democratic rule. He did not believe in my thesis that in the second round there would be a holy APRA-Socialist-Communist alliance backing Fujimori; he was certain that the Peruvian people would not vote for a “first-generation Peruvian, who did not have a single one of his dead kinfolk buried in Peru.”^* This was the first time that I had heard such an argument, but not the last. I was frequently to hear it from partisans of mine as cultivated and intelligent as Enrique: because Fujimori was the son of Japanese parents, because he didn’t have roots in Peruvian soil, because his mother was a foreigner who still hadn’t learned Spanish, he was less Peruvian than I was, less Peruvian than those who — whether Indians or whites — had shared Peruvian life for many generations.

Many times in the course of the next two months, I had to come out and say that arguments of that sort made me want Fujimori to win, since they betrayed two aberrations against which I have written and spoken throughout my life: nationalism and racism (two aberrations that, in fact, are one and the same).

Alfredo Barnechea delivered a long historical disquisition on Peruvian crises and decadence, which, according to him, had in recent years reached a critical point, which could be the source of an irreparable catastrophe, not only for the survival of democracy, but for the fate of the nation. The governing of the country could not be entrusted to someone who represented sheer dyed-in-the-wool knavery or was very probably a front for Alan García; my resignation was not going to appear to be a generous gesture to facilitate a change in the current situation. It would appear to be the haughty flight of a vain man whose self-esteem had been wounded. Moreover, it could lead to a ridiculous outcome. For, since it was constitutionally illegal, the National Election Board could call for a second round and allow my name to remain on the ballot, even though I wanted it removed.

At that point, Patricia interrupted our meeting to whisper in my ear that the archbishop of Lima had come to see me, in secret. He was upstairs in my study. I apologized to those present for leaving the meeting and, thunderstruck, went upstairs to see my illustrious visitor. How had he managed to get into the house? How had he been able to get past the barrier of reporters and demonstrators without being discovered?

Many versions of this visit have made the rounds, and I admit that it was a determining factor in my reversing my decision not to participate in the second round. I have only now learned the true version, through Patricia, who, in order that this book might be a true account, finally made up her mind to tell me what had really happened. On the day after the elections, several calls had come from the archbishop’s office, saying that Monsignor Vargas Alzamora would like to see me. In all the confusion, no one passed the message on to me. That morning, as we were holding our discussion in the meeting of the political committee, Lucho Bustamante, Pedro Cateriano, and Álvaro had left several times so as to keep Patricia and the leaders of Solidaridad, gathered together in the garden, informed about our heated discussion: “There is no way to convince him. Mario is going to give up running as a candidate in the second round.” At that point, it was Patricia, who remembered the splendid impression that Monsignor Vargas Alzamora had made on me the day I met him, who suddenly had an idea. “Have the archbishop come here to talk with him. He can convince him.” She conspired with Lucho Bustamante, and he telephoned to Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, explained to him what was happening, and the archbishop agreed to come out to my house. In order to get inside without being recognized, the car with reflecting plate-glass windows that I myself used when I went out and about was sent to fetch him, and brought him straight into the garage.

When I went upstairs to my study, which also had the blinds down so as to keep people from peering in from the street — there the archbishop was, taking a look at the books on the shelves. The half- or three-quarters of an hour that we talked together has become confused in my memory with certain of the most unusual episodes of the good novels that I have read. Although the conversation had the political situation of the moment as its only reason for being, subtle person that he is, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora managed to transform it into an interchange having to do with high culture, sociology, history, and lofty spirituality.

With a cheerful laugh, he remarked on his fantastic trip to my house, crouching down in the car, and like someone who is talking in order to while away the time, he told me that every morning, as soon as he got up, he always read a few pages of the Bible, opened at random. What chance had placed before his eyes that morning amazed him: it seemed to be a commentary on current events in Peru. Did I have a Bible at hand? I fetched the Jerusalem version and he told me which chapter and verses he was referring to. I read them aloud and the two of us burst out laughing. Yes, it was true, the intrigues and misdeeds ablaze with the fires of hell committed by that Evil One of the holy book were reminiscent of those of yet another one, more terrestrial and closer at hand.

Had it come as a surprise to him that, in the elections two days before, some fifteen evangelical representatives and senators on agricultural engineer Fujimori’s lists had won? Well, yes, just as it had surprised all of Peru, although the archbishop had had advance notice, through parish priests, of a very resolute mobilization on the part of pastors of evangelical sects, in the urban slum settlements and in the villages and small towns in the mountains, to further Fujimori’s candidacy. These sects had become more and more deeply involved with the marginal sectors of Peruvian society, filling the vacuum left by the Catholic Church because of the scarcity of priests. Naturally, nobody wanted to revive the wars of religion, altogether dead and buried now. In these days of tolerance and ecumenism, the Church got along quite harmoniously with the historic religious institutions that had come into existence at the time of the Reformation. But weren’t these sects, frequently small and sometimes given to extravagant practices and doctrines, whose mother houses were located in Tampa and Orlando, going to add yet another factor leading to factionalism and division in a society already as fragmented and divided as our Peruvian one was? Above all if, as appeared to be the case, judging from the belligerent declarations of some of the brand-new evangelical representatives and senators, the aim of these sects in coming to our country was to make war on Catholics. (One of the evangelicals just elected had declared that there would now be a Protestant church alongside every temple of popery in Peru.) Despite all the commentaries and criticisms that could be made against it, the Catholic Church was one of the most widespread bonds of kinship between Peruvians of different ethnic groups, languages, regions, or economic levels. One of the few ties that had resisted the centrifugal forces that had increasingly been separating one group from another, furthering their enmities and stirring up trouble between them. It would be a shame for religion to be turned into another factor of division and controversy among Peruvians. Didn’t it seem so to me?

Since so many things had been lost or were going badly, it was necessary to try to preserve, as precious objects, the good ones that still remained. Democracy, for instance. It was indispensable for it not to disappear, yet again, from our history. Not to offer pretexts to those who were endeavoring to put an end to it. This was a subject which, even though it was not officially within his sphere of responsibilities, he took very seriously. There were alarming rumors that had been circulating in the last few hours, and the archbishop believed that it was his duty to inform me of them. Rumors of a coup d’état, even. If a vacuum and a state of confusion came about, as would happen, for instance, if I withdrew from the electoral contest, that could be the pretext for those who were nostalgic for a dictatorship to strike their blow, maintaining that the interruption of the electoral process was giving rise to instability, anarchy.

The evening before, he had held a meeting with certain bishops and they had exchanged ideas concerning such subjects and they had all agreed that he should tell me the things he had just spoken of. He had also seen Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, a friend of mine, and he too advised me to go on with the runoff round.

I thanked Monsignor Vargas Alzamora for his visit and assured him that I would bear firmly in mind everything that I had heard him tell me. And I did just that. Until his arrival at my house I was convinced that the best thing I could do was to create, through the withdrawal of my candidacy in the runoff round, a de facto situation in which there were enormous possibilities that Fujimori would eventually form an alliance with the Democratic Front, which would give the future government solidity and prevent its becoming a mere continuation of Alan García’s populism. But his warning that my decision might well unleash a coup d’état—“I have sufficient facts at my disposal for judging the situation to enable me to say such a thing”—made me hesitate. Among all the catastrophes that might suddenly happen to Peru, the worst would be to return once again to the era of barracks coups.

I saw Monsignor Vargas Alzamora to the car in the garage, from which he emerged once again in secret. I went upstairs to my study to get a notebook and at that point I saw robust María Amelia Fort de Cooper emerge from the little adjoining bathroom, as though she were levitating. The archbishop’s arrival had caught her by surprise in the bathroom and she remained there, bashful and silent, listening to our conversation. She had heard every word. She appeared to be in a trance. “You’ve read the Bible with the archbishop,” she murmured in ecstasy. “I heard him and I could swear that the dove of the Holy Spirit has passed this way.” María Amelia, who has four passions in life — theology, the theater, and psychoanalysis, but above all else waffles with chocolate syrup, and whipped cream — had climbed up, the night of the rally in the Plaza San Martín in 1987, onto the roof of the building alongside the speakers’ platform, with sacks of pica-pica, whose contents she kept throwing down onto my head as I was delivering my speech. At the rally in Arequipa, the bottle-hurling by Apristas and Maoists saved me from new doses of that concoction, which causes a person to itch like mad, since she had to take refuge, with Patricia, underneath the shield of a policeman, but at the rally in Piura she perfected her technique and secured a sort of bazooka with which, from a strategic point of the platform, she cannonaded me with pica-pica, one blast of which, as the last cheers were ringing out, hit me square in the mouth and almost smothered me. I had persuaded her to forget pica-pica for the remainder of the campaign and work instead on the cultural committee of Libertad, which in fact she did, rounding up in it a fine group of intellectuals and cultural celebrities. Like other Catholic militants of Libertad, she always clung to the hope that I would come back to the religious fold. Hence the scene in my study enraptured her.

I went back down to the living room and informed my friends on the political committee of Libertad of the interview with the archbishop, asking them to keep the news of it strictly confidential, joking with them, to relieve the tension a little, about what incredible occurrences took place in this incredible country in which, all of a sudden, the hopes of the Catholic Church of facing up to the offensive of the evangelicals appeared to have been placed square on the shoulders of an agnostic.

We went on exchanging ideas for a good while and finally I agreed to postpone my decision. I would take a couple of days off to rest, outside Lima. Meanwhile, I would avoid the press. In order to placate the reporters at the door, I asked Enrique Chirinos Soto to go talk to them. He was to limit himself to telling them that we had made an evaluation of the results of the election. But Enrique interpreted this as meaning that I had made him one of my permanent spokesmen, and both when I left my house and in New York, and then in Spain, he made foolish statements in the name of the Democratic Front — not even the most intelligent man is one for twenty-four hours out of twenty-four — such as the one in which he declared that in Peru there had never been a president who was a first-generation Peruvian, which cables relayed to Peru and which made me out to be endorsing antediluvian racist ideas. Álvaro hastened to deny it, regretting having to do so, because of the appreciation and gratitude he felt toward Enrique, who had been his mentor when he was a novice journalist at La Prensa, and I did so too, on this occasion and on all the others when I heard a similar argument in circles close to me.

But in those suffocating sixty days between April 8 and June 10, this did not prevent the two subjects that came up that morning in the meetings at my house from being turned into the two principal issues of the elections: racism and religion. From that time on, the electoral process was to assume an aspect that made me feel as though I had been trapped in a spider web of misunderstandings.

That same afternoon I went with Patricia—Álvaro, indignant at my having yielded under pressure, refused to go with us — to a beach in the South, to the house of some friends, hoping to have a couple of days by ourselves. But despite the complicated tactics we tried, the press discovered that very same afternoon that we were in Los Pulpos and laid siege to the house where I was staying. I was unable to go out onto the terrace to get a little sun without being besieged by TV cameramen, photographers, and reporters who attracted curiosity seekers and turned the place into a circus. I therefore confined myself to talking with friends who came to see me, and to taking a number of notes with an eye to the second round, in which I had to try to correct those errors that had contributed the most, in the final weeks, to the nosedive of our popular support.

The next morning Genaro Delgado Parker turned up on the beach, looking for me. Suspecting why he’d come, I didn’t receive him personally. Lucho talked with him, and as I had suspected, he was bringing a message to me from Alan García, proposing that we meet together in secret. I refused, nor did I accept that same proposal when it was later made to me twice by the president through other intermediaries. What could the aim of such a meeting be? Making a deal for securing the vote of the Apristas in the second round? Their backing had a price that I was unwilling to pay; and my mistrust of the man himself and his unlimited capacity for intrigue was such that, from the very start, it reduced to zero any possibility of coming to an understanding. Nonetheless, when a formal proposal of the Aprista party to begin a dialogue came, I named as my representatives Pipo Thorndike and Miguel Vega Alvear, who held several meetings with Abel Salinas and the former mayor of Lima, Jorge del Castillo (both of them very close to García). The dialogue led nowhere.

As soon as I returned to Lima, on the weekend of the 14th and 15th of April, I began making preparations for the second round. At the beach, I had reached the conclusion that there was no other alternative, since my withdrawal, besides creating a constitutional impasse that might serve as an alibi for a coup d’état, would be useless: all the forces of the Democratic Front were reluctant to make any agreement with Fujimori, whom they considered too involved with the APRA. It was necessary to put a good face on the bad times we were going through and try to raise the morale of my supporters, which, since April 8, had hit bottom, so that at least they would be good losers.

Criticisms and the search for those responsible for the results of the first round became more stubborn within our ranks; in the communications media accusations against various scapegoats proliferated. Opposing factions vented their fury on Freddy Cooper, as the campaign director, and also on Álvaro, Patricia — whom they accused of being the power behind the throne and of abusing her influence on me — and on Lucho Llosa and Jorge Salmón for the way in which they had managed the campaign publicity. There was no lack of criticism of me, for having permitted the extravagant advertising campaign by our candidates for seats in Congress, and for many other things, some of them quite justified and others motivated by downright racism in reverse: why had we brought to the fore so many white leaders and candidates in the Front, instead of balancing them with Indians, blacks, and mestizos? Why had it been a blond singer with blue eyes — Roxana Valdivieso — who got the rallies off to a lively start by singing the theme song of the Democratic Front, instead of a little mestiza from the coast or an Indian from the mountains with whom the darkskinned masses of the nation could have better identified themselves? Although they became milder later on, these attacks of paranoia and masochism continued to be heard in our ranks all during the two months of the campaign for the second round.

Freddy Cooper handed me his resignation but I did not accept it. I also persuaded Álvaro to stay on as communications director, even though he still thought I’d made a mistake by going on with my candidacy. To placate those who were touchy about it, Roxana didn’t sing at our meetings again and although Patricia went on working hard with Solidaridad and the Program for Social Aid (PAS), she did not give any more interviews or attend any more of the Front’s public ceremonies or accompany me on my travels throughout the interior (this was her decision, not mine).

That weekend I called a meeting of the “kitchen cabinet,” reduced now to those responsible for the campaign, for finances, for the media, and to the communications director, with the addition of a new member, Beatriz Merino, who had an excellent public image and had made a strong showing in the preferential voting, and we drew up a plan for the new strategy. Not the slightest modification would be made in the Plan for Governing, naturally. But we would talk less about sacrifices and more about the range of activities of the PAS and other social programs that we had begun to set up. My campaign would now be oriented toward demonstrating the activities to further solidarity and the social aspect of the reforms, and its efforts would be concentrated on the young towns and the marginal sectors of Lima and the principal urban centers of the country. Publicity would be reduced to a minimum and the amount of the campaign budget thus saved would be channeled toward the PAS. Since Mark Malloch Brown and his advisers insisted in no uncertain terms that it was indispensable to wage a negative campaign against Fujimori, whose image had to be exposed as a false one in the eyes of the general public, by demanding that he present his program for governing and thus reveal his weak points, I said that I would approve of such a strategy if it were based on the revelation of verifiable information. But after that meeting I could sense the scandalous levels of mudslinging in which both my supporters and my adversaries would indulge during the coming weeks. On Monday, April 16, on the Calle Tiziano, where it had its general headquarters, I met with the directors of the Plan for Governing and the heads of the principal committees. I urged them to go on working, as though in any event we were going to take over the presidency on July 28, and I asked Lucho Bustamante and Raúl Salazar to present me with a proposal for my ministerial cabinet. Lucho would be prime minister and Raúl would be in charge of the Ministry of Finance. It was indispensable for the teams of each branch of the administration to be ready for the changing of the guard. Moreover, it was advisable to evaluate the interrelationship between the forces in the Congress that had been elected on April 8 and to outline a policy for dealing with the legislative branch from July 28 on, so as to be able to carry out the most essential part of our program at least.

That same afternoon, at Pro-Desarrollo, I attended a meeting of the executive council of the Democratic Front, at which Bedoya and Belaunde Terry, as well as Orrego and Alayza, were present. It was a meeting marked by long faces, buried resentment, and visible apprehension. At that point not even the most experienced of those old pols could understand the Fujimori phenomenon. Like Chirinos Soto, Belaunde, with his deep-rooted idea of a mestizo, Indian-Hispanic Peru, was alarmed at the thought that someone with all his dead kin buried in Japan would get to be president. How could someone who was practically a foreigner have a profound commitment to the country? These arguments, which I heard from many of my supporters, among them a group of retired navy officers who visited me, made me feel that I was in the midst of a totally absurd situation, and left me wishing that Fujimori would win, just to see whether by his victory that ethnically biased vision of what was genuinely Peruvian had been expunged forever.

Yet something positive resulted from this meeting: a collaboration of the forces of the Democratic Front, in a fraternal spirit that had not existed before. From then on, until June 10, populists, members of the PPC, Libertad, and SODE worked together, without the quarrels, low blows, and pettiness of previous years, presenting a very different image from the one that they had previously offered. Because of the tremendous setback that the low number of votes they received signified for all of them, or because they sensed how risky it could be for Peru if there came to power someone who had come from nowhere and represented a leap in the dark or the continuation of García’s administration through a straw man, or because of an uneasy conscience resulting from the selfish factionalism that often characterized our coalition, or simply because there were no longer any seats in Congress at stake, the enmities, jealousies, envy, rancor disappeared during this second stage. On the part both of leaders and of militants of the various parties comprising the Front there was a will to collaborate, which, although it was almost too late to change the final result, allowed me to focus all my efforts on the adversary and not be distracted by the internal problems that had given me such headaches during the first round.

Freddy Cooper set up a small campaign commando team with leaders of Popular Action, the Christian Popular Party, the Freedom Movement, and SODE, and composite teams left for various areas to breathe life into mobilizing the forces of the Front. Almost none of those called on refused to travel and many leaders spent days or weeks at a time going back and forth throughout the provinces and districts of the interior, trying to win back the votes that had been lost. Eduardo Orrego stayed in Puno, Manolo Moreyra in Tacna, Alberto Borea of the PPC, Raúl Ferrero of Libertad, and Edmundo del Águila of Popular Action in the emergency zone, and I believe that there was not a single departamento or region where they failed to raise the spirits of our downcast political partners, all this in an atmosphere of increasing violence, for ever since the day after the elections, Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA had unleashed another terrorist offensive that left dozens of people injured and dead all over the country.

It had been with Popular Action that the leaders and activists of the Freedom Movement had had the most difficulties coordinating the campaign in the first stage. Now, however, it was from Popular Action that I received the strongest backing, especially from its young and diligent secretary for the departamento of Lima, Raúl Diez Canseco, who, from mid-April on, devoted himself day and night until election day to working side by side with me, organizing daily trips around the shantytowns and slum settlements on the outskirts of Lima. I scarcely knew Raúl, and the only thing I had heard about him concerned the squabbles that he inevitably became involved in with the Libertad activists at rallies — he was the man Belaunde relied on for mobilizing members of Popular Action — but in those two months I really came to appreciate him for the way in which he committed himself to the second-round campaign when in all truth he no longer had any personal reason for doing so, since he was already assured of his seat in the Chamber of Representatives. He was one of the most enthusiastic and dedicated people in the Front, sparing no effort to help get things organized, solving problems, raising the morale of those who were losing heart, and infecting everyone with his own enthusiasm and his conviction with regard to the possibilities of winning which, whether they were genuine or feigned, were a tonic to ward off the defeatism and exhaustion that surrounded all of us. He came out to my house each morning, very early, with a detailed list of the public squares, corners, markets, schools, cooperatives, projects of the PAS under way which we would be visiting, and during the many hours of the day’s tour he was never without a smile on his lips, making kindly remarks, and sticking very close to me in case I was attacked.

In order to demolish that image of a “haughty man,” someone “aloof” from the people, which, according to Mark Malloch Brown’s surveys, I had acquired in the eyes of humble voters, it was decided that, in this second stage, I would not tour the streets with my bodyguards. They would accompany me at a distance, melting into the crowd, which would be able to approach me, shake hands with me, touch me and embrace me, and also, at times, tear off bits of my clothes or push me to the ground and mangle me if they felt like it. I went along with these arrangements, but I readily admit that it cost me a heroic effort. I didn’t have — I don’t have — any appetite for mingling with crowds and I had to accomplish miracles to conceal my dislike for that sort of semihysterical pushing and pulling, kissing, pinching and pawing, and smile even when I felt that those demonstrations of affection were crushing my bones or tearing a muscle. Since, moreover, there was always the danger of an attack — on many occasions we were forced to confront groups of Fujimoristas, and I have already recounted how the good head of my friend Enrique Ghersi, who also was in the habit of accompanying me, stopped a stone hurled straight at my face on one of these tours — Raúl Diez Canseco always arranged things so that, if Ghersi wasn’t on hand, he himself would be close by to confront the aggressor. As darkness was falling, I would go back home, exhausted and aching all over, to bathe and change clothes, for at night I had meetings with those in charge of the Plan for Governing or the campaign commando team, and sometimes I had so many bruises that I had to rub myself all over with arnica as well before meeting with them. Every once in a while I recalled those terrific pages of Konrad Lorenz’s study On Aggression, where he recounts how wild ducks, in their impassioned amorous flights, suddenly become infuriated and kill each other. For, engulfed in a multitude of overexcited people who were tugging at me and embracing me, I often felt that I was only one step away from immolation.

When I officially opened the runoff contest, on April 28, with a TV message entitled “De nuevo en campaña”—“On the Campaign Trail Again”—I already had two weeks of arduous work touring the marginal districts of Lima behind me. In that message I promised that I would do “everything in my power to get through not only to the intelligence but also to the heart of Peruvians.”

In line with the new strategy, I was to inform the public of the work being accomplished by Solidaridad and, in particular, by the PAS, which by that time had dozens of work projects under construction in the districts on the periphery of Lima. Shown viewing the classrooms, playgrounds, day-care centers, soup kitchens, wells, irrigation ditches large and small, or roads built by the organization headed by Patricia, I explained that my plan for government included a vast, concerted aid program so that those Peruvians with the lowest incomes would be the least affected by the sacrifice required to get out of the trap set by state controls and inflation. The PAS was not a move to garner publicity. I didn’t wish to talk about it before its basic infrastructure was in place and I had the ironclad guarantee of the two men responsible for getting it started — Jaime Crosby and Ramón Barúa — that the sum of $1.6 billion needed in order to keep the twenty thousand small-scale public works projects in the marginal towns and villages in Peru going over a period of three years would be definitely forthcoming, thanks to international organizations, friendly countries, and the Peruvian business class. The PAS was a reality already taking shape in April and May of 1990, and despite the fact that aid still reached us in minuscule amounts, as though doled out with an eyedropper — it was dependent on the implementation of our program by the administration in power, especially with regard to funds from the World Bank — it was impressive to see so many technicians and engineers and hundreds of workers turning these projects, chosen by local residents themselves as those most urgently needed for their community, into concrete realities. In all my speeches I devoted half the time allotted me to demonstrating that what we were doing gave the lie to those who accused me of lacking a sensitivity to social problems. That sensitivity ought to be measured in terms of accomplishments, not rhetorical promises.

To many leaders of the Front and friends of Libertad, the new strategy, more modest and popular, less ideological and polemical, seemed a timely rectification, and they thought that in this way we would win back the voters we had lost, the ones who had voted for Fujimori. For no one had any illusions about the Aprista vote or that of its Socialist and Communist variations. We were also encouraged by the increasingly resolute support of the Church. Wasn’t Peru a Catholic country to its very marrow?

The last thing I had imagined was finding myself converted, overnight, into a defender of the Catholic Church in an electoral battle. But that is what began to happen, once the campaign was renewed, when it was evident that among the senators and representatives elected from the Cambio 90 list, there were at least fifteen evangelical pastors (among them Fujimori’s second vice president, Carlos García y García, who had been president of the National Evangelical Council of Peru). The nervousness of the Catholic hierarchy over this sudden political rise of organizations that had previously been marginal was exacerbated by imprudent statements by several of the pastors who had been elected, Guillermo Yoshikawa for instance (the congressman for Arequipa), who had had a letter circulated among his faithful urging them to vote for Fujimori, with the argument that, when the latter became president, evangelical schools and churches would receive the same recognition and the same state subsidies as Catholic ones. The archbishop of Arequipa, Monsignor Fernando Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio, appeared on TV on April 18 and reproached Señor Yoshikawa for using religious arguments in the campaign and for his defiant attitude toward the religion practiced by the majority of the Peruvian people.

Two days later, on April 20, the bishops of Peru issued a statement declaring that “it is not honest to employ religion to serve partisan political ends,” along with the assurance that, as an institution, the Church was not supporting any candidacy. This pastoral letter from Peru’s bishops was an attempt to calm the storm of criticisms that had been caused, in media with close ties to the government — where there were a large number of progressive-minded Catholics — by an interview granted to the program “Panorama,” on Channel 5, on Easter Sunday (April 15, 1990) by the archbishop of Lima. When the interviewer confronted the prelate with a question concerning my agnosticism, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, in a polemical theological interpretation, expatiated on the question to demonstrate that an agnostic was not a man without God, but, rather, someone seeking God, and a man who does not believe but would like to believe, a being in prey to an agonizing search not unlike Unamuno’s, at the end of which lay a return to religious faith. The Aprista media and those on the left, already embarked on a battle-hardened campaign for Fujimori, reproached the archbishop for his bare-faced backing of the “agnostic” candidate, and a “leftist intellectual,” Carlos Iván Degregori, stated in an article that with that definition of an agnostic, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora “wouldn’t pass a theology exam.”

On April 19, early in the afternoon, who should arrive at my house but the archbishop of Arequipa, he too hidden in a car that entered directly into the garage, for the reporters’ siege of the place didn’t let up until June 10. A short little man with a great booming voice, brimming over with congeniality and homespun charm, Monsignor Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio had such good humor that we spent a very entertaining brief interlude — one of the few, if not the only one, in all those two months — as he told me that it was best for me to forget about “all that nonsense about having declared me an agnostic,” because as the son of Catholic parents, baptized and married in the Church and the father of children who had also been baptized, I was Catholic for all practical purposes, whether I admitted it or not. And that, if I wanted to win the election, I shouldn’t insist on continuing to tell the whole truth about the necessary economic adjustment, since that was tantamount to working for the adversary, especially since the latter said only the things that would win him votes. Not lying was a very good thing, of course; but revealing everything in an election campaign was to commit hara-kiri.

Joking aside, the archbishop of Arequipa was greatly alarmed by the offensive mounted by the evangelical sects in the young towns and marginal districts of Arequipa in favor of Fujimori, a campaign that had an obvious religious and sometimes anti-Catholic slant, because of the sectarianism of certain pastors who didn’t spare their criticisms of the Church and even attacked the Pope, the saints, and the Virgin Mary in their harangues. Like Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, he too was of the opinion that this religious war could contribute to the social disintegration of Peru. Although the Catholic Church could not explicitly come out in my favor, he told me that, in his own diocese, he had encouraged those faithful who, in answer to the challenge from the evangelical sects, had decided to campaign for me.

From that time on, the electoral battle little by little came to resemble a religious war, in which naïve fears, prejudices, and clean weapons clashed with the dirty ones and the low blows and most treacherous maneuvers on both sides, to extremes that bordered on farce and surrealism. Very early in the campaign, three years previously, an activist of Solidaridad, Regina de Palacios, who worked in the young town of San Pedro de Choque, had shut me up in a room at the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, with some twenty men and women of that shantytown, without telling me who they were. Once we were alone, one of them began to speak as though inspired and to quote from the Bible from memory, and all of a sudden the others, getting to their feet and raising their hands on high, began to accompany that sermon with exclamations of “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” At the same time, they urged me to do likewise, since the Holy Spirit had just made its appearance in the room, and to get down on my knees as a sign of humble submission to the newcomer. Completely taken aback and not knowing how I ought to react to this unexpected “happening”—some of those present had burst into tears, others were on their knees praying, with their eyes closed and their arms upraised — I could foresee the impression that would be made on those committees that constantly wandered about the corridors of the Libertad headquarters looking for a place to hold a meeting, if they chanced to open the door and come across such a spectacle. The evangelicals finally calmed down, composed themselves, and left, assuring me that I was the Anointed One and that I would win the election.

I believe that this was my first personal experience of the way in which evangelical sects had penetrated the marginalized sectors of the country. But even though I had many other such experiences later on, a number of them as surprising as that one, and I became accustomed to seeing, on all my visits to outlying urban districts, in the doorways of flimsy shacks and huts the ever-present emblem of Pentecostalists, Baptists, the Christian Missionary Alliance, the People of God, or dozens of other churches with names sometimes possessed of a picturesque syncretism, it was only during the campaign for the second round that I realized the magnitude of the phenomenon. It was true: in many poor parts of Perú where Catholic parishes were no longer served by the Church, either because the campaign of terrorist violence against parish priests (many had been assassinated by Sendero Luminoso) had led to the departure of those who remained or because there were no new priests to be assigned, the vacuum had been filled by Protestant preachers. These latter, men and women almost always of very humble origin, armed with the tireless and fervent zeal of pioneers, lived there on the spot, amid the same primitive conditions as the settlers of these towns, and had succeeded in making converts to those churches that required total surrender and permanent apostleship — so different from the lax and sometimes merely social commitment required by Catholicism — which proved, paradoxically, to attract those who, because of the precariousness of their lives, found in the sects an order and a feeling of security to which to cling. With Catholicism, by tradition and custom, the official — the formal — religion of Peru, the evangelical churches came to represent the informal religion, a phenomenon perhaps as widespread as, in the economic sphere, that of the tradesmen and “informal” businessmen of the parallel economy — whom Fujimori had been clever enough to enroll as allies of his candidacy, by proposing as his first vice president Máximo San Román, a humble “informal” businessman from Cuzco, the president of Fenapi Perú (Federación de Asociaciones de Pequeñas Empresas Industrials del Perú: Federated Associations of Small Industrial Enterprises in Peru), which since 1988 had brought together the principal provincial organizations of the parallel economy, and the APEMEPE (Asociación de Pequeños y Medianos Empresarios del Perú: Association of the Owners of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in Peru).

I had no antipathy whatsoever against the evangelicals, and on the contrary, a great deal of sympathy for the way in which its sects’ pastors had risked their lives in the highlands and in city shantytowns (where they were victims both of terrorists and of military repression) and for the way in which throughout the world the evangelical position had been, almost always, in favor of liberal democracy and a market economy. But the fanaticism and the intolerance with which some of them assumed their apostleship annoyed me as much as when such attitudes appeared among Catholics or politicians. Throughout the campaign, I held a number of meetings with pastors and leaders of Protestant churches, but I never wanted to establish any sort of organic relationship between them and my candidacy nor did I make them any promise other than that, during my administration, the freedom of religious worship in Perú would be respected to the letter. Precisely because I had declared myself to be an agnostic, I was careful to keep the religious question from rearing its head during the three years of the campaign, although I never refused to receive men of the cloth, whatever their religion, who wanted to see me. I received dozens of them, from the most diverse denominations, confirming to my own satisfaction yet again in those interviews that nothing attracts madness as surely (or exacerbates it as much) as does religion. One afternoon, my son Gonzalo came into the room, in a panic, to get me to leave a meeting: “What’s happening to my mother? I’ve just opened a door and seen her, with her eyes closed and her hands joined, with a fellow leaping all around her like a redskin and giving her little blows on the head.” It was a sorcerer, pastor, and layer-on of hands, Jesús Linares, a protégé of Senator Roger Cáceres, of the Frenatraca, who had urged me to receive him, assuring me that Linares was a man with spiritual powers and a seer, who had always been of help to him in his electoral battles. I didn’t have time to see him and he was received in my place by Patricia, whom the pastor convinced that she should submit to that strange rite which, he said, would assure our spiritual welfare and victory at the polls.^* This was one of the most eccentric, though not the only person with “occult powers” who tried to work in favor of my candidacy. Another one was a female soothsayer who, shortly before the second election, sent me a card proposing to me that, in order to win, she, Patricia, and I should take an “astral bath” together (without specifying what this consisted of).

With precedents such as these it did not appear to be impossible, then, that emboldened by the high percentage of the vote obtained by Fujimori in the first round and the number of evangelicals elected to Congress, some of the most overexcited or delirious of those pastors should attack the Church or say and write things that the latter regarded as offensive. And that was indeed what happened. At the same time a famous evangelical preacher, a “Hispanic” from the United States, Brother Pablo — whose radio programs were heard throughout Latin America — was brought from California and filled a number of provincial stadiums in Peru, openly campaigning for Fujimori. In Arequipa, in Chimbote, in Huancayo, in Huancavelica, leaflets began to circulate in which Christians were urged to vote for my adversary; it was stated in them, moreover, that with the presidency of the latter the papist monopoly would come to an end, and the Church was accused of being in collusion with the exploiters of the people and the rich and of being the cause of many of Peru’s misfortunes. And as though that were not enough, graffiti insulting Catholicism, the saints, and the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared on the façades and walls of Catholic churches.

I had given explicit instructions to the campaign commando team and to the leaders of Libertad not to employ such tricks, and forbade our militants to engage in the tactics of a dirty campaign, because in the first place they were immoral and also because unleashing a religious war could turn out to be counterproductive. But there was no way to avoid it. I learned later that members of the Libertad section for young people, passing themselves off as evangelicals who were for Fujimori, had gone through towns and markets slandering Catholics, and they were no doubt responsible for defacing some of the walls, but not all of them. For, incredible as it may seem — though nothing is incredible when it comes to fanaticism — some of the evangelical organizations, above all the most bizarre of them, believed, following the success attained by their candidates for seats in Congress, that the time had come to declare open war on the “papists.” In Ancash, for instance, the Sons of Jehovah (not to be confused with Jehovah’s Witnesses, also active pro-Fujimori militants) circulated a leaflet which, to the outrage of the local bishop, Monsignor Ramón Gurruchaga, they even distributed to nuns in a convent, saying that the moment had come for the Peruvian people to free themselves from servitude to a “pagan and fetishistic Church,” and to emancipate children from the Church-run schools that “teach them to adore idols.” Leaflets of a similar or even more aggressive tenor circulated in Huayanco, Tacna, Huancavelica, Huánuco, and above all in Chimbote, where the implantation of evangelical churches in neighborhoods inhabited by fishermen and workers in the fish-meal factories went back many years.^* The evangelical mobilization in Chimbote had such sharp-honed anti-Catholic connotations that the bishop, Monsignor Luis Bambarén — a distinguished “progressivist” of the Peruvian Church — intervened in the polemic with forceful denunciations against sects that “hurl epithets at the Catholic faith” and with expressions of firm support for the archbishop.^†

Religion was the main subject of the electoral debate. Ill-will, chicanery, spectacular moves, or comic misunderstandings entered into it, in a way that had no precedent in the history of Peru, where, unlike Colombia or Venezuela, countries in which there had been religious wars, the nineteenth-century rivalries between the Church and liberalism had never led to bloodshed. In the third week in May, the archbishop and primate of the Church in Peru, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, published a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Lima, stating that “charity moves us to be silent no longer” and that he felt obliged to condemn “the insidious campaign against our faith” initiated by the evangelical sects “because of the political power they attained in the last legislative elections.”

Without allowing himself to be scared off by the storm of criticism that this letter brought on in Aprista and leftist publications, which accused him of “having adopted the headband” (the militants of Libertad wore headbands at rallies), Monsignor Vargas Alzamora gave a press conference on May 23, declaring that he could not remain silent—“because silence means admission”—when confronted with publications that offended the Virgin Mary and the Pope and called the Church “pagan, iniquitous and fetishistic.” He said that he did not hold all evangelical groups responsible for those attacks, only those few whose insults “ought to have a limit.” And he announced that on May 31 the effigy of the Lord of Miracles, Lima’s most popular object of devotion, would leave its shrine and be carried in procession through the downtown section of the city, in order to accompany the image of the Virgin Mary, in amends for the insults heaped upon her and as a demonstration that the Peruvian people were Catholic. A short time before, in Arequipa, Archbishop Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio had called upon the faithful, for the same reasons, to hold a procession on May 26 with the most highly venerated image of the southern region: that of the Virgin of Chapi.

In one of those early-morning balance sheets that I was in the habit of drawing up with Álvaro, in my study, I remember having said to him, around that time, as I began to put more stock in the whole business of “magic realism” because of the hallucinatory proportions that the religious quarrel was taking on, that my supporters who, without my either wanting or seeking it, were creating an image of me as the “defender of Catholicism against the evangelical sects” were mistaken if they believed that that was going to bring me victory at the polls. The Catholic Church in Perú had been deeply divided since the years of liberation theology, and I was well acquainted with enough progressive middle-class Catholics to know that they were much more progressive than they were Catholic. Irritated by the attitude of the hierarchy favoring my candidacy, they would resolutely turn, with holy zeal and in the name of their status as believers, which they were not at all embarrassed about turning into political capital, to exhorting the faithful not to allow themselves to be manipulated by the “reactionary hierarchy” and to vote for Fujimori in the name of “the popular Church.” In this way, I would not only lose the election in any event, but would lose it in the worst possible way, in ideological confusion, religious misunderstanding, and political absurdity.

That is what happened. The bishop of Cajamarca, Monsignor José Dammert, a progressive in the Church, turned up on May 28 in La República, the daily paper capable of any imaginable calumny, to criticize the archbishop of Lima, who, according to him, “had fallen into the trap” and allowed himself to be used as a tool by the Front, and to condemn him for seeking to revive “the Catholicism of the Crusades, the Catholicism of the Conquest — what used to be called in Spain national Catholicism.” That was how this prelate interpreted the archbishop’s decision to bring out for the procession, along with the Lord of Miracles, an image brought to Perú by the conquistadors: the Virgin of Evangelization. (Other “progressives” would wonder whether this meant that Monsignor Vargas Alzamora wanted to bring the Inquisition back to life.) While many personalities and institutions of the sector of the Church regarded as being “conservative,” such as Catholic Action, the CCEC (Consorcio de Centros Educativos Católicos: Association of Catholic Educational Centers), Opus Dei, Sodalitium, the Legion of Mary, closed ranks around the primate of the Peruvian Church, in the media controlled by the government and those of the left criticisms of the hierarchy by well-known “progressive” Catholics proliferated, such as the one by Senator Rolando Ames (in La República, May 30, 1990), protesting against the political pressure the episcopate was trying to bring to bear in my favor and against the conspiracy on the part of “certain bishops who are opposed to one of the presidential candidacies.” In Página Libre there appeared daily lists of “progressive Catholics” urging voters to cast their ballots for Fujimori, and announcements that thousands of humble women who were members of clubs for mothers, “belonging to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church,” had sent to the Pope a protest — with 120 pages of signatures! — against those Church authorities who were inducing the faithful to vote against Fujimori, “the candidate of the people” (June 1, 1990).

Going himself one better in this clown act, President García announced that he would attend the procession to amend the insult to the Virgin Mary, because for ten years he had been a member of the “Ninth Company of the Brotherhood of the Christ Clad in Purple,” and that “those who believe that it is an act in bad taste and proclaim themselves to be agnostics” did not have the right to attend. Comparable to the unwitting humor of these declarations was a proposal, put forward in all seriousness, which I received at a meeting of the Democratic Front’s campaign command, for me to give my permission for a miracle to take place in the course of that procession. Through clever electronic devices, the mouth of the Lord of Miracles could be made to open at a peak moment of the procession and utter my name. “If the Christ Clad in Purple speaks we win,” Pipo Thorndike stammered excitedly.

Naturally, neither Patricia nor Álvaro nor I had planned to attend the procession (though my mother went to join it, sincerely alarmed that evangelical demons were about to take over Peru), but neither did the most militant of the Catholics among the leaders of the Freedom Movement attend, heeding Monsignor Vargas Alzamora’s request that political leaders refrain from “altering the nature” of the ceremony. A great multitude covered the Plaza de Armas that day, just as the crowd that escorted the Virgin of Chapi, in Arequipa, had been huge.

Ever since the beginning of this campaign, Fujimori handled the religious question deftly, thanking the archbishop and the bishops for their good offices, proclaiming himself a convinced and avowed Catholic — his children were studying with the Augustinian Fathers — and promising that during his administration the relations between the Catholic Church and the state would not be modified one iota and expressing his pleasure at the appearance of “our highly venerated Lord of Miracles…something that an agnostic would not be able to say,”^* on the streets out of season — for this procession is traditionally held in October. From then on, he never missed an opportunity to be photographed and filmed in churches or proudly showing the photograph of his son Kenji on the occasion of his first communion. He did not appear to have the slightest memory of the efforts made in his behalf by his allies, the evangelicals, whom, moreover, he hastened to dump the moment he assumed office.^†

In the midst of this religious imbroglio, in which I felt completely lost, not knowing how to act so as not to make a faux pas, not to appear to be an opportunist and a cynic, and not to retract what I had said I believed and did not believe, I received a discreet request from the apostolic nuncio for us to have a talk together. We met in Alfredo Barnechea’s apartment, and there the purple-clad prelate (as my longago staff writer Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui would have put it), a refined Italian diplomat, informed me, without spelling it out word by word, of the concern on the part of the Church because of the rise to political power of evangelical sects in a traditionally Catholic country such as Peru. Couldn’t something be done? I told him jokingly that I was doing everything possible to prevent it, but that winning the second round did not depend on me alone. A few days later, Freddy Cooper came out to my house to announce to me that Pope John Paul II would receive me at a special private audience in Rome in three days’ time. I could go, meet with the Pope, and be back in just over forty-eight hours, so that the timetable of the campaign wouldn’t be affected. Such an interview would banish the last scruples that certain Peruvian Catholics of the old school might still have, despite what was happening, about voting for an agnostic. This opinion was also shared by several members of the campaign commando team and of the “kitchen cabinet.” But even though there was a moment when I was tempted — more out of curiosity about the person of the Pope than because I placed any confidence in the beneficial effect of the meeting on the election — I decided not to make the trip. It would have been a move so obviously opportunistic that it would have made us all feel ashamed.

And along with religion, another equally unexpected, and more sinister, subject suddenly made its appearance: racism, ethnic prejudice, social resentment. All that has existed in Perú since before the arrival of Europeans, when the civilized Quechuas of the mountain regions had had the most profound contempt for the small and primitive cultures of the Yungas on the coast, and it has been a factor making for violence and an important obstacle to the integration of Peruvian society throughout the entire history of the Republic. But in no previous election campaign has it appeared as openly as in the second round of voting, placing in full public view one of the worst of our national flaws.

When racial prejudice is mentioned, one immediately thinks of the sort harbored by the person who is in a privileged position against the person who finds himself or herself discriminated against and exploited, that is to say, in the case of Peru, the prejudice of the white against the Indian, the black, and the different types of mestizos (all the possible combinations of Spanish, Indian, black, or Chinese blood, et cetera), since, to simplify — and, as far as the last few decades are concerned, to simplify a great deal — it is true that economic power has ordinarily been concentrated in the small minority with European ancestors, and poverty and wretchedness (this without exception) in aboriginal Peruvians or those of African origin. That minuscule minority which is white or can pass for white, thanks to money or their climb up the social ladder, has never concealed its scorn for Peruvians of another color and another culture, to the point that expressions such as cholo, mulato, zambo, chinocholo have in the mouth of this minority a pejorative connotation. Although nowhere written down, nor favored by any piece of legislation, there has always been among this small white elite a tacit discriminatory attitude against other Peruvians, which at times caused fleeting scandals, such as a famous one in the 1950s, for instance, when the Club Nacional blackballed a distinguished agriculturalist and entrepreneur from Ica, Emilio Guimoye, because of his Asian origin, or when in the puppet Congress of Odría’s dictatorship, a legislator by the name of Faura tried to get a law passed whereby highlanders (meaning Indians) would have to ask for a safe-conduct pass in order to come to Lima. (In my own family, when I was a child, Aunt Eliana was discreetly ostracized for having married an Oriental.)

Furthermore, parallel and reciprocal to these sentiments and complexes, there exist the prejudices and rancors of other ethnic or social groups against whites and among each other, with disparaging attitudes inspired by geographic and local loyalties superimposing themselves on them and commingling with them. (Since the time that, following the Conquest, the axis of Peruvian economic and political life shifted from the highlands to the coast, the people from the coast have come to despise the highlander and to look on him as an inferior.) It is not an exaggeration to say that, if one took a penetrating X-ray of Peruvian society, setting aside those “proper forms” that cover them over and that are so deeply rooted in almost all the inhabitants of this “ancient realm” of ours — being “ancient” always involves formality and ritual, that is to say pretense and fiction — what appears is a veritable cauldron of hatreds, resentments, and prejudices, in which the white despises the black and the Indian, the Indian the black and the white, and in which each Peruvian, from his little social, ethnic, racial, and economic segment of the whole, asserts himself by holding in contempt the person he believes to be beneath him and by turning his envious resentment against the person he feels is above him. This phenomenon, which occurs to a greater or lesser degree in all the countries of Latin America with different races and cultures, is aggravated in Perú because, unlike in Mexico or Paraguay, for instance, racial crossbreeding among us has been slow, and social and economic differences have been maintained to a degree that is above the average in Latin America. That great social leveler, the middle class, which up until the mid-1950s had gradually been growing, began to come to a standstill in the 1960s and since then has been gradually decreasing. By 1990 it was very small, fragile, and incapable of slackening and lessening the tremendous tension between the few who were at the top economically — the immense majority of whom were white — and the millions of dark-skinned, poor, poverty-stricken, and wretched Peruvians.

Those subterranean tensions and divisions were aggravated in Perú with the advent of Velasco’s dictatorship, which used racial prejudice and ethnic resentment in a quite explicit way in its propaganda campaigns to put a good face on the Velasco rule: his regime was that of mestizo and Indian Peruvians. He never managed to bring this off, since it never reached the point of taking root among the most underprivileged sectors, not even at the times when he carried out those populist reforms that aroused expectations in this part of the population — the nationalization of haciendas and businesses and state control of the oil industry — but some of that contentiousness, until then more or less repressed, surfaced and began to make its weight felt in public life in a more visible way than in days gone by, and to become tenser and more oppressive as, in large part because of those mistaken reforms, Perú became more impoverished still and fell even farther behind, and the economic imbalances between Peruvians increased. In the months of April and May 1990, all that suddenly overflowed, like a stream of mud, into the electoral contest.

Certain of my supporters, as I have already said, were the first to commit the error of openly giving proof of racist attitudes, and therefore I had been obliged, on the night of April 9, to remind those who shouted racist slogans in chorus at the doors to my house that Fujimori was as Peruvian as I was. When Fujimori, during his unexpected visit on the following morning, thanked me for having done so, I told him that we ought to try to make the subject of race disappear from the campaign, inasmuch as it was an explosive one in a country as violent as Peru. He assured me that he shared that belief. But in the weeks to come he resorted to the subject of race, to his benefit.

Since, on reopening the campaign, there were still reports of incidents in which Asians were the object of mistreatment or insults, in the second half of April I engaged in many gestures meant to demonstrate my rapprochement and solidarity with the Nisei community. I met with leaders of it, within the Freedom Movement, on April 20 and 25, and summoned the press on both occasions in order to condemn every sort of discrimination in a country that was lucky enough to be a crossroads of races and cultures. On that same April 20, I spoke with all the reporters and correspondents hastily sent from Tokyo to cover the second runoff election, in which, for the first time in history, a Nisei might become the head of state of a country outside Japan.

The Japanese colony published a communiqué on May 16, protesting against the racist incidents and emphatically stating that it had not sided as a group with either of the two candidates, and the Japanese ambassador, Masaki Seo — who had proved to be extremely cordial to me and to the Democratic Front — also made a statement denying that his country had made promises to any candidate. (Fujimori had been hinting that if he were elected gifts and credits from Japan would rain down on Peru.)

I believed that, in the light of all this, the subject of race would gradually fade away and that the electoral debate could focus on the two subjects in which I held an advantage: the Plan for Governing and the Program for Social Aid.

But the racial subject had poked only its head out. Soon its whole body would take part in the wrestling match, now pushed into the arena through the main entry by my adversary. On the pretext of protesting against racial discrimination, beginning with his first public rally, Fujimori began to repeat what would be the leitmotif of his campaign from that time on: that of “el chinito y los quatro cholitos,” the little Oriental and the four little mestizos. That is what the Vargasllosistas thought his candidacy represented; but they were not ashamed of being the same thing as millions and millions of Peruvians: chinitos, cholitos, indiecitos, negritos. Was it fair that Peru should belong only to blanquitos? Peru belonged to chinitos like him and to cholitos like the first vice president on his ticket. And then he introduced the likable Máximo San Román, who with his arms upraised showed the audience his strong Indian face of a cholo from Cuzco. When I was shown the video of a rally in Villa El Salvador on May 9, in which Fujimori used the racial subject in this undisguised way — he had already done the same thing before, in Tacna — defining the electoral contest before a crowd of impoverished Indians and cholos from the city’s squatter slums as a confrontation between whites and coloreds, I greatly regretted it, for stirring up racial prejudice in that way meant playing with fire, but I thought that it was going to bring him good results at the polls. Rancor, resentment, frustration of people exploited and marginalized for centuries, who saw the white man as someone who was powerful and an exploiter, could be wondrously well manipulated by a demagogue, if he continually repeated something that, moreover, had an apparent basis in fact: my candidacy had seemed to enjoy the support of the “whites” of Peru en bloc.

In this way, the racial theme assumed a central place in the campaign. That racist tactic managed to make my own partisans feel out of place and cause them to experience some very uncomfortable moments. I remember having seen an interview on TV with one of the leaders of Popular Action, Jaime de Althaus, who was working on the committee for the Plan for Governing and was minister of agriculture in the cabinet proposed by Lucho Bustamante and Raúl Salazar, defending himself from the charge of a Channel 5 journalist that my candidacy was that of the whites, and pointing out that various leaders of ours were mestizos, of very humble origins, and with skin as dark as that of any Fujimorista. Jaime seemed to be trying to apologize for his having fair hair and blue eyes.

If we followed that route, we were lost. It goes without saying that, if it was a question of that, we could have shown that not only were there whites in the Front but hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned Peruvians, of every racial background imaginable. But it was not a question of that, and to me prejudices against a Japanese or an Indian Peruvian were as repugnant as those against a white Peruvian, and I said as much every time that I found myself forced to mention the subject. It could not be brushed to one side of the campaign now and an undetermined number — though I think it was a high percentage — of voters were sensitive to it, feeling that, by voting for a yellow man against a white one (that is what it appears that I am, in the mosaic of Peruvian races), they were engaging in an act of ethnic solidarity and retaliation.

If the electoral campaign had been a dirty one in the first round, it was now an obscene one. Thanks to spontaneous reports that reached us from different sources, and to verifications made by the people of the Democratic Front themselves or by reporters and media that backed my candidacy, such as the daily papers Expreso, El Comercio, and Ojo, Channel 4, the magazine Oiga, and above all César Hildebrandt’s television program “En Persona” (“In Person”), the mystery surrounding the person of agricultural engineer Fujimori Fujimori began to fade. A reality quite different from the mythological one with which he had been invested by the communications media controlled by the APRA and the left began to emerge. For one thing, the “candidate of the poor” was not at all poor and enjoyed an estate considerably more substantial than mine, judging from the dozens of houses and buildings he owned, had bought, sold, and resold in the last few years, in different districts of Lima, understating their worth in the Property Registry so as to lower his income tax payments, as had been proved by the independent congressman Fernando Olivera, who had made the fight for morality in politics the warhorse of his entire term in office and who for that reason instituted criminal proceedings against the candidate of Cambio 90 before the 32nd District Tax Court for “tax fraud and betraying public faith,” which, naturally, didn’t get anywhere.^*

Moreover, it was discovered that Fujimori was the owner of a farm of some thirty-five acres — Pampa Bonita — that had been given to him gratis by the Aprista government, on extremely rich land, in Sayán, not too far north of Lima, using, in order to justify that land grant, a provision of the Agrarian Reform Law that provided for the free distribution of land — to poor peasants! Nor was this his only tie to the Aprista administration. For a year Fujimori had had a weekly program on the state television channel, given to him by order of President García; he had been the head of a governmental committee on ecology; he had been the adviser on agriculture of the Aprista candidate in the 1985 campaign; and the APRA had frequently made use of him in various capacities in the course of their five-year administration. (President García had sent him, for instance, as the government delegate to a regional convention in the departamento of San Martín.) If not an Aprista militant, agricultural engineer Fujimori had been assigned missions and been granted privileges by the Aprista government that were conceivable only if he were someone who enjoyed the administration’s confidence. His allegations against “traditional parties” and his persistence in presenting himself as someone undefiled by political service rendered was an electoral pose.

All this appeared in the press as information coming from us, but the one who beat the record for revelations was César Hildebrandt, in his Sunday TV program “En Persona.” A splendid journalist because of his qualities as a tenacious bloodhound, a diligent and tireless investigator, quite a bit more cultivated than the general run of his colleagues, and courageous to the point of rashness, Hildebrandt is also a man with a touchy, surly disposition that makes him very hard to get along with, one whose independence has made him many an enemy and involved him in all sorts of quarrels with the owners or editorial directors of the magazines, newspapers, and TV channels on which he has chanced to work, with all of whom he broke off relations (although very often he made up with them later, only to invariably break off with them once again) whenever he felt that his freedom had been limited or was endangered. This sort of behavior had made him many enemies, of course, to the point that in the end he was even obliged to leave Peru. But it also earned him a prestige and a guarantee of independence and a moral reliability that enabled him to pass judgment and to criticize that no TV journalist had had before (nor, I fear, will have again for a long time to come) in Peru. Though a friend of several sectors of the left and rather close to them, always giving them a platform from which to speak on his programs, Hildebrandt gave clear evidence of a sympathy for my candidacy throughout the primary campaign, without that stopping him, naturally, from criticizing me and my collaborators whenever he thought it necessary.

But in the runoff election campaign Hildebrandt took it upon himself as a moral duty to do whatever was in his power to prevent what he called “the leap into the dark,” for it seemed to him that a victory at the polls by someone who combined improvisation with cunning, plus a lack of scruples, could be like the final, fatal kick for a country which the politics of the last few years had left in ruins and more divided and violent than ever before in its history. Each Sunday “En Persona” presented both more and more attestations and the most severe denunciations concerning Fujimori’s personal business deals — whether open and aboveboard or suspect — together with his hidden ties to Alan García and his authoritarian and manipulative character, of which he had shown signs during his term in office as rector of the National Agrarian University of La Molina. Many of Fujimori’s colleagues in this research center campaigned actively as well, out of fear that he would be elected. Two delegations of professors and employees of the Agrarian University came to see me (on May 19 and June 4) in a public act of support, headed by the new rector, Alfonso Flores Mere (at that time I had a chance to see once again a friend of my early years, Baldomero Cáceres, now a professor at that research center and a stubborn defender of the growing of coca leaves as a crop, for historical and ethnic reasons), and in those meetings the professors from La Molina put forth any number of arguments, which some of them made public on Hildebrandt’s program, concerning the risks that the country could incur by electing as president someone who, as rector of that university, had given obvious signs of an authoritarian personality.

Would those humble Peruvians who, in the first round, had voted for Fujimori because of his image as a person who was independent, with clean hands, poor, politically and racially discriminated against, a David confronting the Goliath of millionaires and powerful whites, become disillusioned with him? I had had indications that that was not going to be how it was one day, around the end of May, when Mark Malloch Brown and Freddy Cooper took me to an advertising agency to watch unseen, thanks to a one-way observation window, one of the periodic explorations that they were making of the mood of the voters of the C and D sectors. It was becoming clear then and it became increasingly clear that, however aggrieved Chirinos Soto or former President Belaunde might feel, humble Peruvians did not have the slightest misgivings about finding themselves to be more closely identified with a “first-generation” compatriot than with one who had had deep roots in the country for centuries. The elections were two or three weeks away and I had already been making tours through the young towns of the capital, inaugurating hundreds of public works projects of the PAS. To judge from what I saw and heard through the observation window during that session, the effort had not borne the slightest fruit. The people who had been asked to come to the agency, some twelve of them, were men and women chosen from among the poorest of Lima’s slum dwellers. The session was being directed by a woman who, with an ease that was proof of long practice, turned those interviewed into veritable chatterboxes. Their identification with Fujimori was unconditional and, if I may use the expression, irrational. They attributed no importance whatsoever to the revelations about his real estate deals and the farm he’d been given and, instead, approved of them as something to be chalked up to his credit: “He’s a really clever rascal, in a word,” one of them said, opening his eyes wide with admiration. Another man confessed that, if it were proved that Fujimori was a tool of Alan García’s, he would feel troubled. But he said that he would vote for him anyway. When the woman interviewing the group asked what impressed them most about Fujimori’s “program,” the only one to come up with an answer was a pregnant woman. The others looked at each other in surprise, as though they were being asked something incomprehensible; she mentioned that the “chinito” would give $5,000 to all students who graduated from school so as to be able to set up their own business. When they were asked why they wouldn’t vote for me, it was noticeable that they were disconcerted at having to offer an explanation of something that they hadn’t thought about. Finally, someone mentioned the stands we had taken that were most often criticized: the economic “shock treatment” and education for the poor. But the answer that appeared to sum up best the feeling of all of them was: “Rich people are for him, right?”

In the midst of the “dirty war,” there were comical episodes reminiscent of the days of Pataphysics.^* The winner’s laurels went to a news report that appeared on May 30 in the Aprista daily Hoy. It assured readers that it was a word-for-word transcription of a secret report by the CIA concerning the election campaign, in which I was attacked with arguments that bore a noticeably close resemblance to those of Peru’s indigenous left. Because of my friendly attitude toward the United States and my criticisms of Cuba and Communist regimes, on taking over the presidency I might well create a dangerous polarization in the country and stir up anti-American sentiments. The United States should not support my candidacy, since it did not further Washington’s interests in the region. I barely glanced at the article, presented with the scare headline “U.S. Fears MVL’s Arrogance and Obstinacy,” taking it for granted that it was one of those hoaxes thought up by the government-controlled press. To my vast surprise, on June 4, the U.S. ambassador, obviously ill at ease, came to offer me explanations concerning that text. So it wasn’t a hoax, then? The ambassador, Anthony Quainton, confessed to me that it was authentic. It was the opinion of the CIA alone, not that of the embassy or of the State Department, and he had come to so inform me. I remarked to him that the good side of the matter was that the Communists could no longer accuse me of being an agent of that world-renowned agency.

I didn’t have many contacts with the United States government during the campaign. Information in that country concerning what I was proposing was abundant and I took it for granted that, both at the State Department and at the White House, as well as in the political and economic organizations having to do with Latin America, there would be a positive attitude toward someone who defended a model of liberal democratic society and close and friendly ties with Western countries. Contacts with financial and economic organizations based in Washington — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Bank for Development, in which the U.S. government had a decisive influence — were handled by Raúl Salazar and Lucho Bustamante and their collaborators and they kept me up to date on what appeared to be a good relationship. Before the campaign, on the basis of an article I wrote on Nicaragua for The New York Times, the secretary of state, George Shultz, had invited me to lunch in his office in Washington, a meeting at which we spoke of the relations between the United States and Latin America, as well as the specific problems of Peru, and in conjunction with that trip, thanks to the White House director of protocol, Selwa Roosevelt, an old friend, I had received an invitation to the White House, to a dinner dance, at which she introduced me, very briefly, to President Reagan. (My conversation with him didn’t deal with politics but with the writer Louis L’Amour, whom he admired.) On another occasion, I was invited to the State Department by Elliott Abrams, the under-secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, to exchange ideas, with him and with other officials who dealt with that subregion, about Latin American problems. During the campaign itself I went to the United States on three occasions, on very short visits, to address the Peruvian communities in Miami, Los Angeles, and Washington, but only on the last of these trips did I pay a call on the leaders of both parties in Congress, to explain to them what I was attempting to do in Peru and what we hoped would be forthcoming from the United States should we win. Senator Edward Kennedy, who was not in the capital at the time, telephoned me to inform me that he was following my campaign closely and that he wished me luck. That was the sum total of my relations with the United States in those three years. The Democratic Front did not receive one cent of economic aid disbursed at the request of the United States, where, as is revealed by that CIA document, there were agencies which, because of my overly explicit defense of liberal democracy, were of the opinion that I represented a danger to the interests of the United States in the hemisphere.

Not all of the other episodes of the “dirty war” were as amusing as this one. Aside from the daily news of assassinations of activists of the Front in various places throughout the country, which sent the campaign into a state of shock, the government, in order to counteract the campaign of accusations concerning Fujimori’s real estate holdings and his business dealings, had relaunched its own campaign regarding my supposed income tax evasions, through the director of the Tax Office at the time, the diligent Major General Jorge Torres Aciego (whom Fujimori was later to reward for his services by appointing him minister of defense and later on ambassador to Israel), who kept sending his bureaucrats to the Tax Office daily with fantastic marginal annotations questioning my sworn tax declarations from previous years, amid stupendous publicity. Leaflets with the most absurd denunciations proliferated beyond measure throughout the streets of Lima and the provinces, and Álvaro found it impossible to take the time to deny all the lies or even read those dozens or hundreds of leaflets and pamphlets distributed to intoxicate public opinion, a campaign tactic employed by Hugo Otero, Guillermo Thorndike, and other of Alan García’s public relations amanuenses, who, in those final weeks, beat all previous records in the fabrication of printed shit. Álvaro selected a few pearls from that proliferating dung heap for our meetings together early each morning, and sometimes we exchanged ironic comments about my angelical intention of waging a campaign of ideas. One of the tracts dealt with my drug addiction; another showed me surrounded with naked women, along with a doctored version of an interview of me that had appeared in Playboy, and mused: “Could this be why he’s an atheist?” another invented a declaration by a National Committee of Women Catholics exhorting believers to “close ranks against the atheist” and another reproduced a news item from La República, with the dateline “La Paz, Bolivia,” in which “Aunt Julia,” my first wife, urged Peruvians not to vote for me but for Fujimori, something that she too promised to do (Lucho Llosa telephoned her to ask her if that statement was true, and she sent back a letter full of indignation at such slander). Another of the leaflets was a supposed letter from me to the militants of Libertad, in which, making a show of that brutal frankness I boasted of, I told them that, yes, we had to take jobs away from a million employees for the shock (the economic reform) to be a success, and that, without doubt, many thousands of Peruvians would die of hunger during the early days of the reforms, but after that there would be prosperous times, and that if, with the reform of education, hundreds of thousands of poor never learned how to read and write, things would be better for their children or their grandchildren, and that it was also true that I’d married one of my aunts and then a first cousin of mine and later on I might possibly marry a niece, and that I wasn’t ashamed of it because that was what freedom was for. That campaign ended with a masterstroke, two days before the election, a date when, according to the law, no more electoral propaganda was allowed, with an invention of the state-controlled TV channel, which announced that in Huancayo children had begun to die, “infected by food from the PAS, which is headed by Señora Patricia.”

Naturally, there were also a goodly number of fliers that attacked my adversary, some of them in such a base way that I wondered whether they’d come from us or whether they’d been conceived by the APRA to justify through such barefaced lies their accusations that we were racists. They almost invariably mentioned Fujimori’s Japanese origin, supposed brothels that he owned from which his father-in-law had made a fortune, accusations that he raped minors, and other such outrageous nonsense. Álvaro and Freddy Cooper assured me that those fliers had not come from our press office or from the campaign commando team, but I am certain that more than a few of them originated in one or another of the numerous — and at this juncture frenetic — authorities or offices of the Front.

The high point of the second campaign stage was to be my public debate with Fujimori. It was something we had been looking forward to and methodically preparing for. I had announced from the start of the campaign that I would not participate in a debate during the first round — a pointless waste of time for someone who was many points ahead in the polls — but that, if there were a second round, I would. Ever since I resumed campaigning, in mid-April, we had carefully placed a share of our hopes in that public debate in which I would strive to demonstrate conclusively the superiority of the Front’s proposal, with its Plan for Governing, its model of development, and its team of technicians, over Fujimori’s. The latter, aware of the weakness of his position in a public debate in which it would be impossible for him to avoid discussing concrete plans, tried to diminish that risk by challenging me not to one, but to several debates — four at first, and then six — on various subjects, and in different places around the country, while at the same time he thought up all sorts of subterfuges to get out of what had been his own proposal. But, in this regard, we were helped along by stories on the subject in the press and the impatience of public opinion, which demanded that the spectacle be shown on the TV screen. I said I would agree to no more than a single, thoroughgoing debate, on all the subjects of the program, and named a committee, made up of Álvaro, Luis Bustamante, and Alberto Borea, the aggressive leader of the Christian Popular Party, to negotiate the details. Álvaro has amusingly recounted the details of the negotiation,^* in which Fujimori’s representatives went to unimaginable lengths to put obstacles in the way of the debate, and since they were given a great deal of daily coverage in the media, they contributed to creating what we were seeking: an enormous audience. The atmosphere of intensive preparation was such that almost all the television channels and radio networks in the country broadcast the debate live.

It was held under the auspices of the University of the Pacific, and the Jesuit Juan Julio Wicht performed veritable epic feats so as to make the whole thing come off impeccably. It took place on the night of June 3, in the Civic Center of Lima, filled to overflowing with three hundred journalists who had to be accredited beforehand, and twenty invited guests per candidate. It was directed by the journalist Guido Lombardi, who had very little to do, since, practically speaking, the debate never even got off the ground. Aware of the vulnerability of his situation once he would be obliged to refer specifically to a program for governing which he lacked entirely, Fujimori had brought along with him, written out, his speeches (each of them six minutes long) on all the subjects agreed on — Civil Peace, the Economic Program, Agricultural Development, Education, Work and the Informal Economy, and the Role of the State — and unbelievable as it may seem, he also had, all written out, the three-minute replies and one-minute rebuttals to which each of us had a right. As a result, during the so-called debate I felt, I imagine, like one of those chess players who match skills with robots or computers. I would speak and then Fujimori would read, although not even then did he fail to make mistakes in gender and number in Spanish now and again. Whoever had written those cards for him had tried to make up for the vacuousness of Cambio 90’s proposal by repeating ad nauseam all the clichés of the “dirty war”: the terrible economic shock, the million Peruvians who would lose their jobs (the average figure of half a million in the first round had become twice as many in the second), the disappearance of education for the poor, and the usual personal attacks (pornography, drug addiction, Uchuraccay). The spectacle of that tense man, frowning in concentration, reading in a monotone, without daring to depart from the libretto that he had brought with him on the little white cards, written out in large letters, despite my efforts to get him to answer concrete questions or specific charges having to do with his proposal for governing, had something about it that was half comic and half pathetic, and at times he made me feel ashamed, for him and for me as well. (He used up the five minutes allotted each one of us to say a few last words to the Peruvian people to wave a copy of the latest edition of the daily paper Ojo around and denounce the fact that it was already claiming that I had won the debate.)

What was owed to a people readying itself to exercise the most important right in a democracy — electing its leaders — was, surely, not this caricature of a debate. Or was it? Was it perhaps inevitable in a country with the characteristics of Peru? Nevertheless the practice of democracy in other poor countries with great economic and cultural inequalities does not descend to the depths it did in Peru, where every effort to elevate the campaign to a certain level of intellectual decorum was swept away by an uncontainable wave of demagoguery, lack of culture, shoddiness, and baseness. I learned many things in this election campaign, and the worst one of all was the discovery that the Peruvian crisis should not be measured only in terms of impoverishment, the decrease in standards of living, the aggravation of contrasts, the collapse of institutions, the acceleration of the rate of violence, but that all of that together had created conditions in which the functioning of democracy became a sort of parody, in which the most cynical and crafty always came up with the winning hand.

This said, if I must choose one episode of all the three years that the campaign lasted that leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction, it is my performance in that debate. For even though I went to it with no illusions as to the result of the election, I was then able, despite my adversary, or rather, thanks to him, to show to the Peruvian people, in those two and a half hours, the seriousness of our program of reforms and the preponderant role played in it by the fight against poverty, the gigantic effort that we had made to remove all those privileges that Peru had seen accumulating to ensure the prosperity of a privileged elite while the majority fell farther and farther behind.

The preparations were meticulous and amusing. During several days’ retreat, in Chosica, I had a number of training sessions with journalists who were friends of mine, such as Alfonso Baella, Fernando Viaña, and César Hildebrandt, who (the latter in particular) turned out to be better grounded and more incisive than the combatant I was preparing myself to confront. Moreover, taking time I really didn’t have, I had prepared a number of syntheses, as didactic as possible, of what we wanted to do in the domain of agriculture, in education, in the economy, in employment, and to restore civil peace. I kept to these subjects, despite the fact that, from time to time, I was obliged to allow myself to be distracted for a few moments so as to respond to the personal attacks, as when I asked him, since he boasted of his superiority as a technocrat, what had been done to the cows at the Agrarian University to make their production mysteriously decrease from 2,400 liters of milk per day to a mere 400 during the time that he was rector, or when, confronted with his concern because I had had an experience with drugs when I was fourteen years old, I advised him that he should worry, instead, about something more contemporary that concerned him more directly — like Madame Carmelí, the astrologist and candidate for a representative’s seat in the list of Cambio 90, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for trafficking in drugs.

That night a great many people from the Front gathered at my house — there were members of the PPC, populists, members of SODE, mingling with the members of Libertad in an atmosphere that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks before — to watch with me the result of the opinion polls on the debate. Since all of them reported that I was the winner, and some of them gave me fifteen or twenty points’ advantage, many of the people gathered together there thought that thanks to the debate we had ensured our victory on June 10.

Even though, as I have already pointed out, almost all my efforts in the campaign for the second round of voting were concentrated on making tours around the periphery of Lima — the shantytowns and marginal districts that had crept across the deserts and the mountains until they had turned into a gigantic belt of poverty and misery that squeezed the old part of Lima more and more tightly — I also made two trips to the interior, to the two departamentos which I visited most often in those three years and to which I felt the closest ties: Arequipa and Piura. The results of the first round, in both cities, had saddened me, since, because of the affection that I had always felt for both and because of the dedication that I bestowed on both during the campaign, I took it for granted that there would be a sort of reciprocity and that the vote of the people of Piura and Arequipa would favor me. But we won only in Arequipa with 32.53 percent against a very high 31.68 percent for Cambio 90; in Piura the APRA won the first round with 26.09 percent compared to 25.91 for us. Considering the high demographic density of both regions, the Front decided that I should make one last tour of them, above all to explain to Piurans and Arequipans the range of activities of the PAS, which had begun work in both places. During my trip to Arequipa I was present at the signing of an accord between the Municipality of Cayma and the PAS of Arequipa for the installation of medical dispensaries and first-aid centers, thanks to the financing and professional support received by that program. (In April and May close to five hundred dispensaries were installed by the PAS in marginal sectors of Lima and the interior.)

Both were very different trips from the ones I had made in the first campaign; instead of the multicolor rallies in the town squares and the dinners and receptions at night, there were only visits to markets, cooperatives, associations of informales, itinerant peddlers, and dialogues and meetings with labor unions, members of communes, leaders of neighborhoods, and communities and associations of all sorts, which began at dawn and ended after the stars had come out — held usually out of doors, by candlelight, and during which dozens of times, hundreds of times, I lost my voice and even my sense of discernment, as I tried to disprove the lies concerning the economic shock, education, and the million unemployed. I was so exhausted that, in order to preserve the little energy I had left, I remained silent as we moved about from place to place, and even when the trips lasted only a few minutes, I usually fell fast asleep. Despite such efforts to overcome my fatigue, I was unable, amid an endless interchange of questions and answers, in the Central Market of Arequipa, to keep myself from losing consciousness for a few minutes. The amusing thing is that when I came to, in a daze, the same leader was still perorating, not realizing what had happened to me.

I noticed the tension and the paroxysm reached by the electoral confrontation within Piura, in particular — a part of the country considered relatively peaceful — where I was obliged to tour the towns and villages that separate Sullana from San Lorenzo Colony amid great violence, and where my speeches frequently had as their audio background the jeers and catcalls of counterdemonstrators or the insults and punches my supporters and my adversaries were exchanging round about me. My grimmest memory of those days is that of my arrival, one torrid morning, in a little settlement between Ignacio Escudero and Cruceta, in the valley of Chira. Armed with sticks and stones and all sorts of weapons to bruise and batter, an infuriated horde of men and women came to meet me, their faces distorted by hatred, who appeared to have emerged from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings and animals were indistinguishable, since for both life was a blind struggle for survival. Half naked, with very long hair and fingernails never touched by a pair of scissors, surrounded by emaciated children with huge swollen bellies, bellowing and shouting to keep their courage up, they hurled themselves on the caravan of vehicles as though fighting to save their lives or seeking to immolate themselves, with a rashness and a savagery that said everything about the almost inconceivable levels of deterioration to which life for millions of Peruvians had sunk. What were they attacking? What were they defending themselves from? What phantoms were behind those threatening clubs and knives? In the wretched village there was no water, no light, no work, no medical post, and the little school hadn’t been open for years because it had no teacher. What harm could I have done them, when they no longer had anything to lose, even if the famous “shock” had proved to be as apocalyptic as propaganda made it out to be? Of what free education could those poor creatures have been deprived, when their only school had already long since been closed by national poverty? With their tremendous defenselessness, they were the best possible living proof that Peru could not continue to exist any longer in the populist delirium, in the demagogic lie of the redistribution of a wealth decreasing by the day, providing instead dramatic evidence of the need for changing direction, for creating work and wealth through forced marches, for rectifying policies that were each day driving more new masses of Peruvians into a state of precariousness and primitivism that (with the exception of Haiti) no longer had any equivalent in Latin America. There was no way even to try to explain this to them. Despite the shower of stones, which Professor Oshiro and his colleagues tried to ward off with their coats spread out like an awning over my head, I made several attempts to talk to them over a loudspeaker, from the flatbed of a truck, but the outcries and the contention made such a din that I was forced to give up. That night, in the Hotel de Turistas in Piura, those faces and fists of exacerbated Piurans, who would have given anything to lynch me, made me reflect for a good while, before falling into my usual troubled sleep, on the incongruousness of my political adventure, and wish even more impatiently than on other days for June 10, liberation day, to arrive.

On May 29, 1990, shortly after 9 p.m., an earthquake shook the northeastern area of the country, causing large-scale damage in the Amazon departamentos of San Martín and Amazonas. One hundred fifty people were killed and at least a thousand were injured in localities in the departamento of San Martín: Moyobamba, Rioja, Soritor, and Nueva Cajamarca, as well as in Rodríguez de Mendoza in Amazonas, where more than half the dwellings had collapsed or were damaged. This tragedy allowed me to confirm the good work that had been done by Ramón Barúa and Jaime Crosby with the PAS, which, the moment the news of the earthquake reached us, we put to work mobilizing all possible aid. On the morning after the catastrophe, Patricia and former president Fernando Belaunde left for the devastated areas on a plane loaded with fifteen tons of medicine, clothing, and food supplies. It was the first help to arrive there, and I believe the only help, for a week later, when I visited the region on June 6, on another plane loaded with field tents, boxes of serum and medicine kits, the few doctors, nurses, and medical assistants who were doing their best to aid the survivors and the injured had only the resources of the PAS to count on. This program, organized with the limited resources of an opposition party, which the government harassed, was capable under those circumstances of accomplishing all by itself something that the Peruvian government was unable to do. The images in Soritor, Rioja, and Rodríguez de Mendoza were monstrous: hundreds of families were sleeping in the open, under the trees, after having lost everything, and men and women were continuing to dig in the rubble, in search of people who were still missing. In Soritor there was practically not a single habitable dwelling left, for the ones that had not entirely collapsed had lost their roofs and walls and risked tumbling down from one moment to the next. As though terrorism and political raving had not been enough, nature too was venting its fury on the Peruvian people.

A cheerful and pleasant note during the second round of campaigning — sunbeams amid a sky almost always covered with dark clouds or jarred by thunder and rent by lightning — was provided by popular celebrities from the world of radio, TV, and sports who, in the last weeks, came out in favor of my candidacy, and accompanied me on my visits to the squatter settlements of the young towns and the popular districts of Lima, where their presence gave rise to touching scenes. The famous women’s volleyball team selected to represent Peru, which won the world semifinals — Cecilia Tait, Lucha Fuentes, and Irma Cordero in particular — couldn’t get out of giving demonstrations with the volleyball in each place we visited, and Gisela Valcárcel’s admirers besieged her to the point that our bodyguards had to rush to her rescue. From May 10 on, when the soccer star Teófilo Cubillas came to Barranco to offer me his public support, until the eve of the election, this was my routine each morning: receiving delegations of singers, composers, sports stars, actors, comedians, commentators, folklorists, ballerinas, whom, after a brief chat, I accompanied to the front door opening onto the street, where, before the press, they urged their colleagues to vote for me. Lucho Llosa was the one who had the idea of making these shows of support public and the one who thought up and orchestrated the first of them; others then sprang up spontaneously, and there were so many of them that I found myself obliged, for lack of time, to receive only those that could have a contagious effect on the voters.

The great majority of these shows of support had no ulterior motives, since they happened when, unlike what had gone on before the first round, I wasn’t leading in the opinion surveys and sheer logic indicated that I was going to lose the second round. Those who decided to take that step knew that they risked reprisals in their occupations and in their professional future, since in Peru those who assume power usually tend to be resentful and for their revenge count on the far-reaching hand of the state, which Octavio Paz has rightfully called “the philanthropic ogre”—incapable of providing help to the victims of an earthquake but quite capable of enriching its friends and impoverishing its adversaries.

But not all those professions of support were as honestly motivated as those of a Cecilia Tait or a Gisela Valcárcel. There were others who tried to turn a profit out of their public backing of me, and I fear that, in more than one case, money was involved, despite my having asked those who were financially responsible for the campaign not to spend any funds for that purpose.

One of the most popular TV emcees, Augusto Ferrando, publicly invited me, on one of his series of programs called “Trampolín a la fama”—“Trampoline to Fame”—to join forces and take a gift of food supplies to the prisoners of Lurigancho, who had written him protesting the inhuman conditions of existence in this penitentiary. I agreed to do so, and the PAS readied a truckful of provisions that we took to Lurigancho on May 29, early in the afternoon. I had a gloomy memory of a visit to this prison that I had made several years before,^* but now conditions appeared to have become even worse, since in this penitentiary built to hold 1,500 prisoners there were now around 6,000, and among them a fair number accused of terrorism. The visit was therefore frenzied, no more and no less so than society on the outside; the prison was divided between Fujimoristas and Vargasllosistas, who, during the hour that Ferrando and I were there, as the food supplies were being unloaded, insulted each other and tried to drown each other out by shouting refrains and slogans at the top of their lungs. The prison authorities had allowed supporters of the Front to approach the courtyard, which we entered, while our adversaries stayed on the rooftops and against the walls of the prison wings, waving banners and insulting placards. As I spoke, aided by a loudspeaker, I saw the Civil Guards, with their rifles at the ready, aimed at the Fujimoristas on the rooftops, in case there were any shots fired from there or stones thrown our way. Ferrando, who had worn an old watch in case anyone tried to steal it, felt frustrated when none of the Vargasllosistas with whom we mingled tried their luck, and he ended up giving it to the last prisoner who gave him a friendly embrace.

Augusto Ferrando came to see me one night, shortly after that visit to the prison, to tell me that he was prepared, on his program, which had millions of TV viewers in the young towns, to announce that he would leave television and Peru if I didn’t win the election. He was certain that, with a threat like that, countless humble Peruvians, for whom “Trampolín a la fama” was manna from heaven each Saturday, would make me the winner. I gave him my heartfelt thanks, of course, but I remained silent when, in a very vague way, he led me to understand that, by doing a thing like that, he would find himself in a very vulnerable position in the future. When Augusto left, I earnestly entreated Pipo Thorndike not to come to any agreement, for any reason, with the famous TV emcee that might involve any sort of economic reward. And I hope he paid attention to me. The fact is that, on the next Saturday, or the one after that, Ferrando announced, as a matter of fact, that he would end his weekly program and leave Peru if I lost the election. (After June 10, he was as good as his word and moved to Miami. But with his audience clamoring for him, he came back and resumed “Trampolín a la fama,” a turn of events that made me happy: I would not have liked to be the cause of the disappearance of such a popular program.)

The declarations of popular support that most impressed me were the ones of two persons unknown to the general public, who had both suffered a personal tragedy and who, by publicly lending me their support, placed their peace of mind and even their lives in danger: Cecilia Martínez de Franco, the widow of the Aprista martyr Rodrigo Franco, and Alicia de Sedano, the widow of Jorge Sedano, one of the journalists murdered in Uchuraccay.

When my secretaries told me that the widow of Rodrigo Franco had asked for a meeting with me in order to offer me her support, I was dumbfounded. Her husband, a young Aprista leader on very intimate terms with Alan García, had occupied highly important posts within the administration, and when he was murdered by a terrorist commando unit, on August 29, 1987, he was president of ENCI (Empresa Nacional de Comercialización de Insumos: National Enterprise for the Commercialization of Raw Materials), one of the large state corporations. His murder greatly upset the country, because of the cruelty with which it was carried out — his wife and a little son of his very nearly died in the fierce hail of bullets that raked his little house in Naña — and because of the personal qualities of the victim, who, despite being a party politician, was universally respected. I didn’t know him, but I knew about him, through a leader of Libertad, Rafael Rey, a friend and companion of his in Opus Dei. As though his tragic death had not been enough, after his death Rodrigo Franco was subjected to the ignominy of having his name adopted by a paramilitary force of the Aprista administration, which committed numerous murders and attacks against persons and local headquarters of the extreme left, claiming responsibility in the name of the Rodrigo Franco Commando Unit.

On the morning of June 5, Cecilia Martínez de Franco came to see me. I had not met her before either, and I needed only to see her to be aware of the tremendous pressures that she must have had to overcome in order to take that step. Her own family had tried to dissuade her, warning her of what she was exposing herself to. But, making great efforts to control her emotion, she told me that she believed it to be her duty to make such a public statement, since she was certain that, in the present circumstances, that was what her husband would have done. She asked me to summon the press. With great composure, she made her declaration of support for me to the horde of reporters and cameramen who filled the living room; it predictably brought her threats of death, calumny in the press under government control, and even personal insults from President García, who called her a “dealer in corpses.” Despite all this, two days later, on one of César Hildebrandt’s programs, with a dignity that, for a few moments, seemed suddenly to ennoble the regrettable farce that the campaign had turned into, she explained her gesture once again, and again asked the Peruvian people to vote for me.

Alicia Sedano’s public declaration of support for me took place on June 8, two days before the election, without prior announcement. Her unexpected arrival at my house, with two of her children, took both the journalists and me by surprise, inasmuch as since the tragedy of January 1983, when her husband, the photographer for La República, Jorge Sedano, was murdered with seven other of his colleagues by a mob of communal landholders in Ica, in the highlands of Huanta, in a place called Uchuraccay, like all the widows or parents of the victims she had frequently been exploited by the leftist press to attack me, accusing me of having deliberately falsified the facts, in the report of the investigating commission of which I was a part, so as to exonerate the armed forces from being in any way responsible for the crime. The indescribable levels of fraud and filth reached by that long campaign, in the writings of Mirko Lauer, Guillermo Thorndike, and other professional purveyors of intellectual trash, were what had convinced Patricia of how useless political commitment was, in a country like ours, and the reason why she had tried to dissuade me from mounting the speakers’ platform on the night of August 21, 1987, in the Plaza San Martín. The “widows of the martyrs of Uchuraccay” had signed public letters against me, had appeared, always dressed from head to foot in black, at all the demonstrations of the United Left, had been unmercifully exploited by the Communist press, and, during the campaign for the second round, had been made the most of to further his campaign by Fujimori, who seated them in the first row at the Civic Center on the night of our “debate.”

What had caused Sedano’s widow to change her mind and back my candidacy? The fact that she suddenly felt revolted by the way she had been used by the real dealers in corpses. That was what she told me, in front of Patricia and her children, weeping, her voice trembling with indignation. The night of the debate at the Civic Center had been the last straw, for, in addition to demanding that they be present, they had obliged her and the other widows and relatives of the eight journalists to dress all in black so that the press would find their appearance more striking. I didn’t ask her about the names or the faces of the “they” to whom she had referred, but I could well imagine who they were. I thanked her for her gesture and her support and took advantage of the occasion to tell her that, if I had reached the situation in which I now found myself, fighting to be elected to the presidency of Peru, something that had never before been an ambition of mine, it had been, in large part, because of the tremendous experience represented in my life by that tragedy of which Jorge Sedano (one of the two journalists killed in Uchuraccay whom I had known personally) had been a victim. While investigating it, so that the truth would come out, amid all the deception and lying that surrounded what had happened in those mountain fastnesses of Ayacucho, I had been able to see from close up — to hear and touch, literally — the depths of violence and injustice in Peru, the savagery amid which so many Peruvians lived their lives, and that had convinced me of the need to do something concrete and urgent so that our unfortunate country would change direction at last.

I passed the eve of election day at home, packing suitcases, since we had tickets to fly to France on Wednesday. I had promised Bernard Pivot to appear on his program “Apostrophes”—the next to the last in a series that had appeared on French TV for fifteen years — and was determined to keep that promise whether I won or lost the election. I was quite certain that the latter would be the case and that, therefore, this trip abroad would be a long one, so I spent several hours selecting the papers and file cards I needed in order to work in the future, a long way away from Peru. I felt completely exhausted, but at the same time happy that everything was nearly over. That afternoon, Freddy, Mark Malloch Brown, and Álvaro brought me the last-minute opinion surveys, from various agencies, and they all agreed that Fujimori and I were so evenly matched that either of the two of us could win. That evening Patricia, Lucho and Roxana, and Álvaro and his girlfriend and I went out to eat at a Miraflores restaurant, and the people at the other tables were uncommonly discreet all evening long, forbearing to engage in the usual demonstrations. It was as if they too had been overcome with fatigue and were anxious for the seemingly endless campaign to be over and done with.

On the morning of June 10, I went once again with my family to vote in Barranco, very early in the morning, and then I received a mission of foreign observers come to act as witnesses of the election procedures. We had decided that this time, instead of meeting the press at a hotel as I had done after the first round, I would go, as soon as the results were in, to the headquarters of Libertad. Shortly before noon, the results of the absentee balloting in European and Asian countries began to come in, on a computer set up in my study. I had won in all of them — even in Japan — with the one exception of France, where Fujimori had obtained a slight advantage. In my room, I was watching on television the last or the next to the last of the soccer matches for the world championship, when around one in the afternoon Mark and Freddy arrived with the first projections of the vote in Peru. The surveys had been wrong again, for Fujimori was ten points ahead of me throughout the country, with the exception of Loreto. This difference had increased when the first results were announced on television, at three that afternoon, and some days later the official computation count, by the National Election Board, would certify that he had won by 23 points (57 percent to my 34 percent).

At five in the afternoon I went to the headquarters of Libertad, at whose doors a great crowd of downhearted supporters had gathered together. I conceded that I had lost, congratulated the winner, and thanked the activists of Libertad. There were people who were openly shedding tears, and as we shook hands or embraced, a number of men and women friends of Libertad made a superhuman effort to hold back their tears. When I embraced Miguel Cruchaga, I saw that he was so moved he could barely speak. From there I went to the Hotel Crillón, accompanied by Álvaro, to greet my adversary. I was surprised at how small the demonstration by his partisans was, a thin crowd of rather apathetic people, who came to life only when they recognized me, some of them shouting, “Get out of here, gringo!” I wished Fujimori luck and went back home, where, for many hours, a parade of friends and leaders of all the political forces of the Front came by. Outside in the street, young people staging a spontaneous demonstration stayed until midnight, singing refrains in chorus. They came back the next afternoon and the one after that and stayed till far into the night, even after we had turned out all the lights in the house.

But only a very small group of friends of Libertad and of Solidarity found out the hour of our departure and came to the plane in which Patricia and I were embarking for Europe, on the morning of June 13, 1990. When the plane took off and the infallible clouds of Lima blotted the city from sight and we were surrounded only by blue sky, the thought crossed my mind that this departure resembled the one in 1958, which had so clearly marked the end of one stage of my life and the beginning of another, in which literature came to occupy the central place.