A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Six. Religion., Municipal Elections, and Backsides

Once the conflict with Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party over the municipal candidacies had been settled, I returned to Lima, on July 14, 1989, after having been gone twenty-two days. A motorcade of cars, trucks, and buses met me at the airport, headed by Chino and Gladys Urbina and the handful of boys and girls from the young people’s section of the Freedom Movement, with whom Chino and Gladys were to organize all our campaign rallies throughout Peru. Speaking from the terrace of the house to those who had accompanied me to my home in Barranco, I made my peace with the allies and thanked AP and the PPC for having put an end to their municipal quarrels.

The next day I went to say hello to Belaunde and Bedoya and the three of us were completely reconciled. In my absence a committee of both their parties, made up of Eduardo Orrego and Ernesto Alayza Grundy — candidates for the first and second vice presidencies — had made a Solomon-like distribution of the offices of councilmen and mayors that would fall to each party throughout the country.

The problem was the mayoralty of Lima, the one that would have the greatest political effect on the presidential campaign. It fell to Popular Action to designate the candidate and it was taken for granted that it would be the architect Eduardo Orrego. Born in Chiclayo in 1933, and a disciple of Belaunde Terry’s who shared his political beliefs from the start, Orrego was regarded as the natural heir to the populist throne. The AP congress, held at the end of April 1989 in Cuzco, had elected him as the party’s candidate for the first vice presidency. After Belaunde, he was the leader with the best image in his party. He had been mayor of Lima between 1981 and 1983 and had experience on the municipal level. His administration had been spirited although not successful, because of the lack of funds, which the heads of Popular Action had cut down on for his office, dooming him to powerlessness. The most important thing he did was to obtain from the World Bank a credit of 85 million dollars for the mayor’s office. But the bureaucracy saw to it that those funds would not materialize until after he had left office, so that only the mayor who succeeded him, the leader of the United Left, Alfonso Barrantes, the winner of the 1983 municipal election, could use them.

I was not at all intimately acquainted with Eduardo Orrego before the election campaign. I regarded him as one of the populists who had done the most to keep alive the romantic spirit of renewal that gave birth to Popular Action during Odría’s dictatorship. I knew that Orrego had traveled far and wide in a sort of process of political self-instruction — he had worked in Algeria and traveled in Africa, Asia and, extensively, in the People’s Republic of China — and I had a hunch that, unlike what had happened with others of his fellow party members, the years hadn’t dulled the enterprising spirit of his youth. Thus, when, some time later, Belaunde asked me whom I preferred as first vice president among the three or four names that were being bruited about, I answered, without hesitation: Orrego. I knew that Eduardo had been in very delicate health, because of a heart operation, but I was assured that he had made a good recovery. I was pleased to have him as a running mate, although at that juncture — July 1989—I was still wondering, not without apprehension, what it would be like to deal and work on a day-to-day basis with the person called upon to replace me should the presidency become vacant.

He turned out to be likable, intelligent, and amusing, always prepared to intercede with Popular Action to smooth rough edges and expedite accords with the other allies, and his anecdotes and witticisms made the long trips and the wearisome social gatherings of the campaign enjoyable. I don’t know how he managed it, but in every city and town he would invariably disappear for a few hours to explore the markets and craft workshops or visit hidden diggings, and would infallibly reappear with a handful of archaeological finds or handicrafts or with some little live animal underneath his arm (I understand that his passion and that of Carolina, his wife, for animals have turned their house into a zoo). I envied him that ability to preserve, in the middle of our absorbing and hectic public activities, his personal enthusiasms and sense of curiosity, since I had the feeling that, as far as I myself was concerned, politics had deprived me of mine forever. During the entire campaign we never had a single argument and I was convinced that he would loyally collaborate with me in governing the country.

But, although he never told me so, Eduardo struck me as a man disillusioned with politics and, deep down, completely skeptical as to the possibilities of changing Peru. Despite the fact that, in a very Peruvian way, he tempered it with jokes and cheerful anecdotes, something sour and sad, a bitter underside, showed through his words when he recalled how, during the time he spent in public office — in the mayoralty of Lima or in his brief term as head of the Ministry of Transport and Communications — he had discovered on every hand, among friends and among adversaries, and even on the part of persons above all suspicion, shady deals, influence peddling, and thefts. Hence, he did not seem to be at all surprised by the corruption in Alan García’s administration, as though he had seen it coming and it was an inevitable culmination of inveterate practices. It was as if that experience, in addition to the gloomy evolution of Peruvian politics since his years of youthful populist enthusiasms, had put a damper on Eduardo’s dynamism and his confidence in Peru.

At rallies he spoke ahead of me. He always did so briefly, with one or two jokes about the Aprista administration, and addressing me as “President Mario Vargas Llosa,” which usually brought an ovation. The frantic, all-absorbing campaign never allowed me to have what I was often tempted to have with Orrego: a frank conversation, in which I would have perhaps come to learn the profound reasons for what seemed to me to be his irremediable disenchantment with politics, politicians and, perhaps, with Peru.

My other companion on the presidential list, Dr. Ernesto Alayza Grundy, was very different. Quite a bit older than we were — he was going on seventy-seven — Don Ernesto was named by the PPC as the candidate for the second vice presidency as a compromise between Senator Felipe Osterling and Representative Celso Sotomarino, when, at the congress of their party, held between April 28 and the first of May 1989, it looked as though Sotomarino would win the nomination in preference to Osterling, who, up until then, had been thought to be a sure thing. A very independent, combative, bad-tempered man, Sotomarino had been a stubborn opponent of the idea of the Front, had frequently attacked Popular Action and Belaunde, and harshly questioned my candidacy, so that naming him would have been inconsistent. With good judgment, Bedoya proposed to the congress a compromise candidate behind whom all the members of his party closed ranks: the venerable figure of Alayza Grundy.

Many people — including me, since I had a high opinion of him — regretted that Osterling, an attorney and a prestigious university professor with an excellent record in Congress, was not on the ticket, because of what his energy and good image would have contributed to it. But I soon discovered that, despite his advanced age, Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy was a splendid substitute.

We were friends, at a distance. At one time or another we had exchanged private letters, engaging affectionately in controversy on the subject of the state, which, in a lecture, I had characterized, following Karl Popper, as a “necessary evil.” Don Ernesto, an orthodox follower of the social doctrine of the Church, and like the latter, suspicious of liberalism, reprimanded me in polite terms, setting forth to me his views on the matter. I answered him by giving him a detailed account of mine, and it is my opinion that from that interchange it was clear to both of us that despite their differences, a liberal and a follower of the Church’s social doctrine such as he could understand each other, since they shared a broad ideological common denominator. On other occasions, and always with the same exquisite manners, Don Ernesto had sent me the Church encyclicals outlining its position in the social domain, and his own writings. Although the aforementioned texts usually aroused in me more hesitations than enthusiasm — the Christian social theory of “supplementarity,” besides being a tongue twister, always seemed to me to be a door through which a state control of all economic life could secretly slip through — these overtures of Don Ernesto’s made a gratifying impression on me. Here, among Peruvian politicians, was someone interested in ideas and doctrines, who understood politics as a cultural phenomenon.

My not being a believer was a reason for concern, and perhaps for anxiety, to the Catholics who backed me in Libertad and in the Christian Popular Party, in particular those who were not, as were the majority of those I knew, perfunctory, purely social believers out of habit, but sincere members of the Church who took great pains to live according to the dictates of their faith. I know few Catholics of this sort, and Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy is one of them — as is attested by his participation, always in the front ranks, in activities promoted by the Church in the educational or social field, his own exemplary professional and family life (he has eleven children), and his image of integrity and impeccable honesty, which had not suffered the slightest blemish, and that is saying a great deal, in over half a century of public life.

When I began my political activity, anticipating what my adversaries would obviously attempt to exploit to the limit in the coming months and years, I explained in an interview with César Hildebrandt that I was not a believer, nor was I an atheist either, but, rather, an agnostic, and that I would refuse to discuss religion during the campaign — for religious beliefs, like friendships, a person’s sex life, and sentimental ties, belong to the realm of what is private, and this realm must be rigorously respected and never turned into a subject of public debate. I also stated forcefully that, as was evident, whoever governed Peru, whatever his convictions might be, ought to be aware that the great majority of Peruvians were Catholics and act with due respect for their concerns.

Throughout the entire campaign I abided by this rule and never again touched on the subject, nor did I respond when, in the final months, the administration sent its spokesmen to ask the people, their faces distorted by anxiety: “Do you want to have an atheist president? Do you know what an atheist president will mean for Peru?”

(For a fair number of my compatriots, it turned out to be impossible to differentiate atheism from agnosticism, however hard I tried, in that interview, to explain that an atheist is also a type of believer — someone who believes that God does not exist — whereas an agnostic affirms the same uncertainty about the nonexistence of a divine being and life beyond this earthly one as about their existence.)

But despite my refusal to discuss it again the subject pursued me like a shadow. Not only because the APRA and the administration made use of it unrestrictedly — there were innumerable articles in all the Aprista and Neoaprista pamphlets and scandal sheets, radio and television spots, fliers distributed in the streets, et cetera — but also because it tormented many of my supporters. I could write a book of anecdotes on the subject. I have hundreds of affectionate letters, especially from humble people, telling me that they were making novenas and vows and reciting prayers for my conversion, and many others from prying questioners, asking me what sort of religion the one I practiced — agnosticism — was, what its doctrine, its morality, and its principles were, and where one could find its churches and priests. At every rally, popular meeting, and tour of the streets, dozens of hands invariably slipped little holy images, medals, rosaries, talismans, written prayers, crosses, flagons of holy water into my pockets. And there arrived at my house anonymous gifts of religious images, lives of saints, manuals of piety — the most frequent one: Camino (The Path) by Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer — or very pretty little boxes with Catholic relics, water from Lourdes or Fátima or soil from Jerusalem inside. On the day of the close of the campaign, in Arequipa, on April 5, 1990, after the rally in the Plaza de Armas there was a reception at the convent of Santa Catalina. A lady came over to me and with an air of mystery said to me that the mother superior wanted to see me. Taking me by the arm, she led me through the iron grille that partitions off the area where the cloistered nuns live. A door opened. A little nun in glasses, smiling and charmingly courteous, appeared. It was the mother superior. She invited me to cross the threshold and pointed out to me a little chapel where in the half-shadow I could make out white coifs and dark habits. “We’re praying for you,” she whispered to me. “And I don’t need to tell you why.”

Very early on, I brought up the subject in a closed meeting of Libertad. The political committee agreed with me that, in conformity with the rule of sincerity that we had established for ourselves, I could not hide my status as an agnostic for the sake of an easier win at the polls. At the same time, it was imperative for us, no matter how great the provocations, to avoid controversy over the religious question. None of us suspected at the time — toward the end of 1987—the importance that the subject of religion would take on between the first and the second round of voting, as a result of the successful mobilization of the evangelical churches in favor of Fujimori.

Among the leaders of the Freedom Movement there were a fair number of Catholics cut from the same cloth as Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy: dedicated, consistent, and on very close terms with the hierarchy or with certain ecclesiastical orders or institutions, to the point that I once hinted that, surrounded by people like them, it was likely that the Holy Spirit would preside over the sessions of our political committee. In the 1960s, Miguel Cruchaga had been the organizer of the Catholic renewal movement in Peru. Lucho Bustamante kept up a very close friendship with the Jesuits, in whose school he had studied, and taught at the University of the Pacific, which had ties to the order. Our brand-new secretary of the departamento of Lima, Rafael Rey, was a member of Opus Dei, someone who had taken the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity (the latter of which, let me say in passing, he defended like a besieged fortress against the disrespectful assaults of many female members of Libertad). And on the political committee there were several dyed-in-the-wool Catholics—“catholic, apostolic, Roman, and holier than thou,” as one of them joked. (Among the best-known ones I shall mention Beatriz Merino, Pedro Cateriano, and Enrique Chirinos Soto.)

Even though, I am certain, my religious position perturbed all of them, I must thank them for never making me aware of it, not even in a veiled way, and not even at the times when the campaign against my “atheism” became more violent still. It is true that, in accordance with what we advocated with regard to privacy, we never discussed religion in the Freedom Movement. Nor did my Catholic friends come forth to make public use of their status to put a stop to the attacks: they were, as I have already said, believers who tried to live in accordance with their beliefs, for whom it was not conceivable to exploit their faith, either to attack the adversary or to promote themselves.

This was also how Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy comported himself. Throughout the entire campaign he maintained an absolute discretion regarding the subject of religion, which never turned up in our conversations, not even when thorny questions arose, such as birth control, which I explicitly defended and which he would have found it hard to approve of.

But apart from his being discreet and completely honest — I was happy with the image of moral purity that he brought with him to his candidacy for the office of second vice president — Don Ernesto was a marvelous fellow campaigner. He was tireless and invariably good-humored, and his physical resistance left all of us amazed, as did his tact and his spirit of solidarity: he never used his advanced age or his prestige to ask for or to accept the slightest privilege. I sometimes had to firmly demand that he not accompany me — when it was a question, for instance, of going to places such as Huancavelica or Cerro de Pasco, where it was necessary to go up to altitudes of more than twelve thousand feet — because he was always all set to climb steep slopes in the Andes, sweat bullets in the jungle, or shiver from the cold on high mountain plateaus in order to reach all the towns on the planned itinerary. His joyousness, his naturalness and straightforwardness, his ability to adapt to the rigors of the campaign, and his youthful enthusiasm for what we were doing helped to make the endless trips back and forth to towns, districts, and regions bearable. He was usually the first speaker at our rallies. He spoke slowly, his long arms stretched out and his ascetic silhouette towering over all of us on the speakers’ platform. And with his little piping, slightly falsetto voice and a roguish twinkle in his eyes he would end his brief speech with a metaphor: “I have leaned over to listen to the pulse of the depths of Peru. And what did I hear? What did that deep throbbing say? Fre-de-mo! Fre-de-mo! Fre-de-mo!”

I had heard, since before my trip to Europe, that Eduardo Orrego refused to accept the candidacy for the mayoralty of Lima that Popular Action offered him. He left for France with his wife, Carolina, almost at the same time as I returned, and in the press there were many speculations about this. Belaunde confirmed to me that Orrego was hesitant, but he told me that he was confident that he could make him change his mind before the final date for candidates to register — August 14—and asked me to help persuade him.

I phoned him in Paris. Eduardo seemed to me to have his mind firmly made up. The reason he put forward was a tactical one. The opinion polls for the mayoralty predicted that he would win 20 percent, half of what I would receive in the two rounds of voting for the presidency. If he won fewer votes or lost the municipal election, he told me, his failure would be a millstone around my neck for my campaign. We ought not to take the risk of his losing. When judged from the perspective of what occurred in the municipal elections, his refusal to run proved that his intuition was correct. Had he had a presentiment that he’d be beaten?

Perhaps there was another, more secret, reason. At the time of my withdrawal as a presidential candidate and the uproar that followed, Congressman Francisco Belaunde Terry — the brother of the former president, the founder of Popular Action, and one of the populists who had suffered from the most harassment by Velasco’s dictatorship — had held Orrego responsible for the intransigence of Popular Action concerning the lists of joint candidates, saying, if the newspapers weren’t lying, very harsh things about him. Although I never heard Orrego make the slightest allusion to the incident, this episode may have influenced his decision.

(Let me say, between parentheses, that Francisco Belaunde Terry had always been one of the populists whom I respected most, one of those rare politicians who lend dignity to politics. Because of his independence, which sometimes made him stand up to his own party when his conscience so dictated, and because of that maniacal uprightness of his that led him, despite his meager financial means, never to accept the raises in salaries, bonuses, and reimbursements that the members of Congress continually passed to increase their incomes, and to give back his paychecks or donate them to the doormen and congressional employees when the APRA forced though a measure that prohibited a congressman or a senator from refusing the increases. Because of his utter scorn for the conventions and the calculations that rule the life of the politician, Francisco Belaunde — tall and gaunt, a living historical encyclopedia, a voracious reader and an elegant speaker, yet one who gave the impression of having stepped out of literature and the past — always struck me as being a man from another time or from another country, a lamb set down in the middle of a pack of wolves. He was capable of saying what he thought and believed, although that trait put him in prison and sent him into exile, as happened to him during the dictatorships of Odría and Velasco, and yet he persisted, even though it made enemies of the members of his own party or of the institutions which every good politician fears and fawns over: the communications media. In the 1985 election campaign, on the occasion when I announced on television that I would not vote for Alan García but for Bedoya Reyes for president, I added that, on the lists of congressional candidates, I would cast my ballot for two candidates whom, for the welfare of Peru, I would like to see in Congress: Miguel Cruchaga and Francisco Belaunde Terry.

(Ever since the demonstration in the Plaza San Martín — and perhaps even before that — Francisco Belaunde Terry had been a persistent advocate of the idea of the Front and of my candidacy. And he had said very clearly that he disagreed with the populists who insisted, violently at times, not hiding their hostility toward the Freedom Movement and toward me, that his brother Fernando be a candidate once again. This, as is only natural, had earned him the animosity of many of his fellow party members, in particular those nobodies whose only credential for occupying leadership posts in Popular Action and being its candidates for Congress was their adulation of its leader, and hence they had hindered, by every possible means, the creation of the alliance. This situation was made worse for Francisco Belaunde Terry when, on the night of my withdrawal in June 1989, he appeared at my house, in the very middle of a demonstration by members of the Freedom Movement, and immediately after went to the headquarters of Libertad to express his support for the movement. Moreover, his wife, Isabelita, was a devoted activist in Acción Solidaria — the Solidarity program — and worked for months with Patricia to promote social aid programs in the shantytowns of San Juan de Lurigancho.

(Those mediocrities who, as happens in every party and particularly in those most ridden with bossism, are the ones who usually take over the leadership posts, plotted together to keep Francisco Belaunde Terry — without the shadow of a doubt the most mainstream populist member of Congress — from being the candidate of his party on the lists of the Democratic Front. Libertad then proposed that he be one of our candidates for the congressman’s seat for Lima and he accepted, honoring our quota with his name. But, to the misfortune of the Peruvian Congress, he was not elected.)

When I told Belaunde Terry of my conversation with Orrego, he resigned himself to finding a replacement for him. He asked me what I thought of Juan Incháustegui and I hastened to tell him that he seemed to me to be a magnificent choice. An engineer and a man from the provinces, he had been a good minister of energy and mines and had signed up as a member of AP not before but after having been minister, in the last days of Belaunde’s second term in office. Although I knew him only by sight, I was very much aware of the laudatory terms in which Belaunde had referred to him in our conversations in the Presidential Palace, at the midpoint of his presidency.

After certain hesitations — he was a man of modest financial resources and the income for the mayor of Lima was minimal — Incháustegui agreed to represent the Front. The PPC, for its part, chose Lourdes Flores Nano as its candidate for representative mayor. A young attorney, Lourdes had become very popular because of her likable nature and her fine oratory during the mobilization against the nationalization of the banks.

The pair of them were magnificent and I breathed a sigh of relief, certain that we would win the municipal election in Lima. The affable presence of Incháustegui, his flashes of wit, his lack of cutting polemic, won the sympathies of voters. His status as a man from the provinces was another good credential. Although he had been born in Arequipa, he had studied and lived in Cuzco and considered himself a native of that city, so that this ought to win many people over in the city of provincials that the capital of Peru had become. And, there alongside him, the warmth, youth, and intelligence of Lourdes Flores Nano — a new face in Peruvian politics — was an excellent complement.

However, from September on the opinion polls began to predict that the most votes would go not to Incháustegui but to a newcomer, Ricardo Belmont Cassinelli. The owner of a radio station and of a small-scale television channel, on which for several years he had been the emcee of a very popular talk show—“Habla el Pueblo” (“The People Speak”) — Belmont had never entered politics before, nor did he seem interested in doing so. His name was associated, rather, with sports, which he engaged in and promoted — he had been a boxing impresario — and in TV marathons to raise funds for the San Juan de Dios Clinic, which he had organized for several years. His image was that of a likable emcee and a favorite of the masses — because of his manner of speaking filled with “in” words, such as manito, for “pal,” patita, for “getting the bounce,” chelita, for “blondie,” and all the picturesque expressions of the latest slang popular with teenagers — associated with the world of show business, of popular singers, comedians, and vedettes, and not with public affairs. However, in the preceding municipal election certain publications, among them Caretas, had mentioned his name as a possible independent candidate for the mayoralty of Lima.

In mid-June of 1989, Belmont suddenly sent out the call for a rally in the Plaza Grau, in the district of La Victoria, in which, backed by Augusto Polo Campos, the composer of traditional Peruvian music, he announced the creation of the civic movement Obras and his candidacy for mayor.

In the interviews on TV that he took part in during the weeks that followed, Belmont put forth very simple ideas, which he was to repeat all through his campaign. He was an independent disillusioned by political parties and by politicians, since they had never fulfilled their promises. It was time for professional experts and technicians to take over the solution of problems. He always added that his ideology could be expressed in just one formula: he was for private enterprise. He also said that he was going to vote for me in the presidential election, “because my ideas are the same as Vargas Llosa’s,” but that he didn’t trust my allies: hadn’t AP and the PPC already been in power? And what had they done?

(These are the things that Mark Malloch Brown would have liked for me to say; or better put, those that, according to his opinion polls, Peruvian voters wanted to hear. Among those who heeded this message, ranting against politics and parties, was someone who was as much of a novice in such contests as Belmont, an obscure former rector of a technical university named Alberto Fujimori, who must have pricked up his ears and picked up a goodly number of hints.)

Since the day Belmont announced his candidacy, I was sure that this call to independent voters and his attacks on the political establishment would make an impression on our electorate. But the one who foresaw events most accurately was Miguel Cruchaga. I recall a conversation with him in which he regretted that Belmont was not our candidate: a new face and yet a well-known one, which, beneath the apparent superficiality and tastelessness of his statements, represented the sort of candidate that we were eager to promote: a self-made young entrepreneur, in favor of private initiative and a market economy, without the stigma of a political past.

On July 27, I had a long meeting with Ricardo Belmont, at my house in Barranco, at which Miguel Vega Alvear was also present. Because of the agreements within the Front, I was not able to propose to him what, no doubt, he would have accepted — being our candidate for the mayoralty — but instead limited myself to making him see the danger that his candidacy, by dividing the independent and the democratic vote, would end up handing over, once again, the municipality of Lima to the APRA (its candidate was Mercedes Cabanillas) or to the United Left (whose internal crisis, which had long been brewing, exploded at that point and brought about its division).

Belmont was very confident. My alliance with the other parties struck him as a mistake, because in the most impoverished sector, whose sentiments he sounded out every day on his programs, there was a widespread rejection of them and above all of Popular Action. He shared this opinion. He was aggrieved, moreover, because Belaunde’s administration had discriminated against him, refusing to give him back the channel that the military dictatorship had expropriated from him, as it had done in the case of the other TV channels.

“The people who will vote for me will come above all from sectors C and D, from the poor and the very poor,” he assured me, “and the party that I am going to take votes away from isn’t going to be the Democratic Front but the United Left. My own class, the bourgeoisie, has nothing but contempt for me, because I talk slang and because they think I lack culture. However, even though I’m a whitie, mestizos and blacks from the shantytowns like me a lot and will vote for me.”

It turned out the way he said it would. And what he promised me in that conversation was also true, expressed in terms of an allegory that he was to repeat many times: “The municipal elections are the preliminary bout and the Front and I must do our handkerchief dance in them. But the presidential election is the main bout and then I’ll come out in favor of you. Because I share your ideas. And because I need you to be president in order to be a success as the mayor of Lima.”

Belmont’s campaign was very clever. He used fewer television commercials than we and the APRA did, he visited over and over again the humblest neighborhoods, he declared until we were fed up with hearing it that he was in favor of me but against “the parties that are all burned out,” and to everyone’s surprise, in the televised debate with Juan Incháustegui, when we were certain that Juan would steamroller him with his technical marshaling of facts, Belmonte came out very well, thanks to the advisers that he brought with him, and above all to his slangy impudence and his experience in front of the camera.

The municipal elections brought on the break between the factions of the left, held together up until then in a precarious coalition under the leadership of Alfonso Barrantes Lingán. This leadership had been disputed for some time by the most radical sectors of the United Left, who accused the former mayor of Lima of bossism, of having toned down his Marxism to the point of changing it into a social-democratic position and, even graver still, of having put up such a respectful opposition to Alan García’s administration that the two of them gave the appearance of being hand in glove.

Despite inordinate efforts of the Communist Party to avoid the rupture, it took place nonetheless. The United Left presented as its candidate for the mayoralty of Lima a Catholic with leftist leanings, the sociologist and university professor Henry Pease García, who was also to be their candidate for the presidency of the Republic. The sector that supported Barrantes, for its part, under the label of Acuerdo Socialista (Socialist Alliance), put up another sociologist, Senator Enrique Bernales, as its candidate for the first vice presidency on the ticket with Barrantes.

The second anniversary of Libertad was approaching — we had designated the rally in the Plaza San Martín on August 21, 1987, as the event that marked its beginning — and those of us on the political committee thought that this was a good chance to show that, unlike the Communists and Socialists, we had really managed to achieve unity.

We had celebrated the first anniversary of Libertad on August 21, 1988, in the city of Tacna, with a demonstration on the Paseo Cívico. Until just a short while before the time announced for the rally, almost the only people about were a handful of curiosity seekers standing around by the rostrum. I was waiting in a nearby house that belonged to friends of my family, and a few minutes before 8 p.m., I went up to the roof to sneak a look around. On the platform was Pedro Cateriano, with his stentorian voice and assertive gestures, delivering his harangue to empty air. Or just about, since the Paseo Cívico could be seen to be deserted, while on the corners and the sidewalks leading to the Paseo, groups of bystanders were indifferently watching what was going on. But half an hour later, when the ceremony had already begun and we had started singing the de rigueur anthems, the people of Tacna began to congregate, and crowds of them continued to flock onto the Paseo until they filled several blocks. Finally, a crowd accompanied me through the streets and I had to speak again from the hotel balconies.

To celebrate the second anniversary we chose the Amauta Coliseum in Lima, which Genaro Delgado Parker allowed us to use without charge, because it was a vast space — there was room for 18,000 people — and because we believed that it would be a good opportunity to put forward a serious explanation of the aim of the Democratic Front, by bringing together all our candidates for mayors and councilmen in the various districts of Lima. We also invited the principal leaders of AP, the PPC, SODE, and the UCI (a small group, headed by Francisco Diez Canseco, at that time a congressman, which was later to withdraw from the alliance).

The program was in two parts. The first, made up of dances and songs, was entrusted to Luis Delgado Aparicio, who was, on the one hand, an attorney who specialized in labor questions and, on the other, a popular figure on radio and television thanks to his salsa programs, or, as he puts it in his inimitable style, programs of Afro-Latin-Caribbean-American music, as well as a famous professional dancer. The second part, the political one properly speaking, would consist of Miguel Cruchaga’s speech and mine.

The group that we had named Movilización, the youth movement, the district committees, and Solidarity all made a great effort to fill the Amauta. The problem was transportation. The person responsible for it, Juan Checa, had hired a number of buses and trucks and given us the use, for nothing, of others that belonged to his company, but on the appointed day many of these vehicles failed to turn up at the meeting places agreed upon. Hence the men and women of Libertad in charge of mobilization found themselves, in many districts, with hundreds of people who had no way to get to the Coliseum. Charo Chocano, in Las Delicias de Villa, went out onto the highway and hired two buses that were passing by, and in Huaycán, the indefatigable Friedel Cillóniz and her helpers literally took a truck by storm and persuaded its driver to take them to the Amauta. But thousands of people were left hopping mad. Despite this, the stands of the Coliseum were full.

I had been there since seven that night, all ready, in the car, accompanied by the security guards, driving round and round the Amauta. But, over the radio, those inside who were responsible for the ceremony, Chino Urbina and Alberto Massa, held me back, telling me that people were still coming in and that the emcees — Pedro Cateriano, Enrique Ghersi, and Felipe Leno — had to be given time to warm up the crowd. So half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half went by. To control our impatience, we drove all around Lima several times and, whenever we mentioned the Coliseum, the answer was the same: “Just a little while longer.”

When, finally, they gave me the green light and I entered the Amauta, there was a contagious, festive, euphoric atmosphere, with pennants and placards of the various committees waving on the stands, and the supporters from each district competing by way of songs and repeated refrains. But nearly two hours had gone by since the time that had been set! Roxana Valdivieso was singing, on the rostrum, a theme song of the Movement. Just a short time before, Juan Incháustegui and Lourdes Flores had made a triumphal entry that they topped off by dancing a huaynito. And Lucho Delgado Aparicio’s show had long since ended. The daily papers and television channels hostile to Libertad were then enabled to create a scandal, because between the folklore numbers popular dancers in scanty costumes suddenly appeared, dancing a frenetic salsa. According to the press, the sight of those wildly wiggling hips, backsides, breasts, and thighs had caused many respectable members of Congress belonging to the PPC to feel embarrassed and their faces to turn beet-red, and someone said that Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy, the embodiment of probity, had been affronted by the performance. But Eduardo Orrego assured me afterwards that all that was false and that, as a matter of fact, Don Ernesto had contemplated the dancers with perfect stoicism. And it was obvious to me that Enrique Chirinos Soto was brimming over with pleasure at what he had seen.

In any event, when I began to speak, after a Proustian introduction by Miguel Cruchaga (because, in accordance with his fondness for allegories, this time Miguel used Proust to construct one of them), it was about 10 p.m. I hadn’t taken five minutes developing the first subject — the changes in the national political panorama, in which, previously, the ruling ideas were those focused on state control, whereas now public debate was centered on a market economy, privatization, and popular capitalism — when I began noticing a stir in the stands. The spotlights blinded me and I couldn’t see what was happening, but it seemed to me that the stands were emptying. As a matter of fact, people were leaving in a stampede. Only the section that I was facing directly, the two or three hundred municipal candidates, and leaders of the Democratic Front remained in their seats until the end of my speech, which I brought to a hasty close, wondering what the devil was going on. The buses and trucks had been hired till 10 p.m. and the audience, especially the people from distant “young towns”—the shantytowns that had grown up on the outskirts of Lima — didn’t want to return home by walking five, ten, or twenty kilometers.

In short, our inexperience and lack of coordination turned the festivities of the second anniversary of the Movement into a disaster as far as publicity was concerned. La República, La Crónica, El National, and other semiofficial government publications made particular mention of the half-empty stands of the Amauta as I was speaking and illustrated the news stories with the shapely backsides of Delgado Aparicio’s salsa dancers. In order to counteract the bad effect, Lucho Llosa produced in the days that followed a TV spot showing another aspect of the celebration: stands jammed full of people, and ancient Inca princesses dancing a stately huaynito.