A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

Eight. The Freedom Movement

The Freedom Movement was organized in a painter’s studio. At the end of September 1987, those of us who had planned the Meetings for Freedom were summoned to Fernando de Szyszlo’s by Freddy Cooper. There, amid half-finished paintings and masks and pre-Hispanic feather cloaks, we exchanged ideas about the future. The success of the fight against Alan García’s attempt to nationalize the banks had filled us with enthusiasm and hope. Peru was changing, then. Should we return to our usual occupations, telling ourselves that our task was fulfilled, or was it worth our while to make this nascent organization a permanent one, with an eye to the coming elections?

The dozen friends gathered together there agreed to continue our political activity. We would create something of broader scope and more flexible than a political party, a movement, to be known as the Movimiento Libertad, that would bring together those independents who had mobilized against state control and put down roots in the popular sectors, in particular among the tradesmen and small businessmen working within the so-called informal or parallel economy, a form of popular black market capitalism. They were an example of the fact that, despite the triumph of the ideology of state control among the elite of the country, an instinct for free enterprise existed among the Peruvian people. At the same time that it was attempting to organize these sectors, Libertad would draw up a thoroughgoing reform program and modernize Peru’s political culture, opposing both socialist collectivism and mercantilist capitalism by putting forward a liberal policy.

Of the goals we set ourselves in that hours-long conversation under the bewitching spell of Szyszlo’s paintings, the only one we completely achieved was the program. The Plan for Governing that the team headed by Luis Bustamante Belaunde had been doing the preliminary work on was what we came up with that morning: a realistic program for putting an end to privileges, government handouts, protectionism, and state control, opening up the country to the world and creating a free society in which everyone would have access to the market and live under the protection of the law. This Plan for Governing, full of ideas, with a firm determination to take advantage of the opportunities of our time so that Peruvians of every estate could attain a decent life, is one of the things that make me proud of those three years. The serious commitment to the work at hand on the part of Lucho Bustamante, of Raúl Salazar (who, despite the fact that he belonged to SODE and not to Libertad, was the head of the economics team of the Democratic Front), and of the dozens of men and women who, along with them, devoted countless days and nights to drafting the first rough outline for a new country, was a marvelous source of encouragement for me. Each time I attended the meetings of the executive committee for the Plan for Governing, or one of the specialized committees, even the most technical ones — such as those on reform in the mining sector, customs, the port authority, administration, or the judicial system — politics ceased to be that frantic, inane, and often sordid activity that took up most of my time and became instead a task requiring intellect, technical knowledge, the comparing of ideas, imagination, idealism, generosity.

Of all the social groups that we did our best to attract to the Freedom Movement, the one we had the most success with was the one which produced those engineers, architects, attorneys, physicians, entrepreneurs, economists who made up the committees of the Plan for Governing. Most of them had never been in politics before and had no intention of being politically active in the future. They loved their professions and wanted only to be able to practice them successfully, in a Peru different from the one that they could see falling apart before their eyes. Though they were hesitant at first, we eventually managed to persuade them that only with the cooperation of people like themselves could we make Peruvian politics more decent and more effective.

Between that meeting in Szyszlo’s studio and March 15, 1988, when we opened the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, in Magdalena del Mar, there intervened five months of exhausting efforts to attract supporters. We worked long and hard, but unsystematically, feeling our way. Nobody in the original group had any experience as an activist or a gift for organization. And I to an even lesser degree than my friends. Having spent my life in a study, making up stories, was not the best possible preparation for founding a political movement. And my right arm in this task, a faithful and beloved friend, Miguel Cruchaga, the first secretary general of Libertad, who had lived shut up in his architect’s studio and was most unsociable, was in no position to make up for my ineffectiveness. But not for lack of dedication: he was the first, in a gesture that deserves to be called heroic, to give up his profession in order to devote himself full time to the Movement. Later others would do the same, making out as best they could or living in near poverty, with only the small amount of financial help that Libertad managed to give them. From public squares, we moved on to private houses in those last months of 1987 and the early ones of 1988. Friends or sympathizers invited young people of their neighborhoods in and Miguel Cruchaga and I talked to them, answered their questions, and provoked discussions that went on till late at night. One of those meetings took place at the home of Gladys and Carlos Urbina, who would later be great guiding spirits of the mobilization campaign. And another one at the home of Bertha Vega Alvear, who, with a group of women, would found, shortly thereafter, Acción Solidaria, the Solidarity program sponsored by Libertad.

It was also one of our goals to recover — to bring back to life — those intellectuals, journalists, or politicians who, in the past, had defended liberal positions, arguing against socialists and populists and countering, by promoting the theory of the free market, the tide of paternalism and protectionism that had submerged Peru. In order to attain that goal we organized the Jornadas por la Libertad: Freedom Days. They lasted from nine in the morning till nine at night. There were talks whose purpose was to show, with statistics, how greatly the various nationalizations had impoverished the country and increased discrimination and injustice, and how the policy of government intervention, besides destroying industry, went against the interests of consumers and favored small-scale mafias which the system of quotas and preferential dollar exchange rates enriched without their having to compete or to serve the public. And there were talks devoted to explaining the “informal economy” as an answer on the part of the poor to the discrimination of which they were the object, since proper legal licensing for even the smallest enterprise or business activity was expensive and selective, available only to those who had money or political pull. And to defending those itinerant peddlers, artisans, tradesmen, and small-scale businessmen, of modest origins, working as informales, who in many fields — transportation and housing in particular — had proved to be more efficient than the state and sometimes even more so than the large-scale, full-time entrepreneurs who were legally licensed.

During the Freedom Days, the criticism of socialism and mercantilist capitalism endeavored to point out the deep-seated identity of two systems which, beneath their divergences, were related by virtue of the predominant role played in both by the state, the “planner” of economic activity and the dispenser of privileges. A recurrent theme was the necessity of reforming that state — by strengthening it, by streamlining and paring away its excesses, by opening it up to technology, and by making it moral — as a fundamental requirement for development.

There was always a talk too on those countries of the Third World to which market-oriented policies and the promotion of exports and of private enterprise had brought rapid growth, countries such as the four “Asian dragons”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — or Chile. In all those countries, the more or less liberal economic reforms were in flagrant contradiction to the repressive and dictatorial activity of their governments, and in the course of the Freedom Days we did our best to show that this contradiction was neither acceptable nor necessary. Freedom had to be understood as something indivisible, politically and economically. The Freedom Movement must win an electoral mandate for these ideas that would allow us to concretize them in a democratic civilian regime. A great liberal reform was possible under democratic rule, provided that a clear majority voted for it. To achieve this, it was indispensable to be open and aboveboard, explaining in detail what we wanted to do and the price that it would exact.

We held the first Freedom Day in the Hotel Crillón, in Lima, on February 6, 1988; the second, devoted to agrarian subjects, at the San José hacienda in Chincha on February 18; on February 26, in Arequipa; a Young People’s Day, in Lima, on March 5; on March 12, a day in the young town of Huáscar, on the informal economy; and on March 14, a Women’s Day, in which there participated for the first time an economist who became yet another of the leaders of Libertad: Beatriz Merino.

During these Freedom Days we managed to line up hundreds of supporters, but their greatest importance lay in the field of ideas. For many of those who attended them it was unheard of for a political organization in Peru to speak out, in the most straightforward terms, in favor of a free market, to defend capitalism as more efficient and fairer than socialism and as the only system capable of safeguarding people’s freedoms, to see in private enterprise the driving force of development and call for a “culture based on success” instead of on resentment and the state handouts advocated by Marxists and conservatives alike, even though their rhetoric was different. The word capitalism had come to be taboo, except to denigrate it. (I received strong recommendations from leaders of AP and the PPC never to use it in speeches.)

Those who attended the Freedom Days were divided into study and discussion groups of eight or ten, and then, once the explanatory talks had been given, we held a general meeting. When it was over, Miguel Cruchaga, who was the one who worked out the format of the Freedom Days, gave me an enthusiastic introduction and I spoke, and we ended the Jornada by singing that song composed for the demonstration in the Plaza San Martín which had become the theme song of Libertad.

The distinction between “movement” and “party” that had taken up a great deal of our time in Szyszlo’s studio turned out to be too subtle for our political habits. For despite its name, the Movimiento Libertad functioned from the start as something indistinguishable from a party. The vast majority of its members took it to be one and there was no way to disabuse them of this notion. Laughable situations came up, indicative of customs deeply rooted in the national psychology, owing to the tradition of clientelismo—party patronage. Since the mere idea of the carnet—the individual membership book carried by party members — was associated with this system, which both the AP and the APRA administrations had put into practice, giving their own adherents (who could show their carnets) preference when it came to government jobs and favors, we decided that the Movement would not have carnets. Recording one’s name on a list written down on a plain sheet of paper was all that would be required to sign up as a member. It was impossible to get this idea across in the popular sectors, where the members of Libertad felt that their status was inferior to that of the Apristas, the Communists, the socialists, and so on, who were able to show off impressive-looking carnets full of seals and little flags. The pressure put on those of us on the executive committee to give out carnets—brought to bear by the section for young people, by Mobilization, by Solidarity, and by the committees in the provinces and the departamentos—was impossible to turn aside. We explained over and over again that we wanted to be different from other parties, that if we came to power we wanted to keep a Freedom Movement carnet from being used in the future as a symbol for abuses, but it was no use. Then I suddenly discovered that our committees in certain city districts and towns had begun to give out carnets, loaded with more and more signatures and bright-colored emblems, and some of them even bearing my photograph. Considerations of principle collided with the argument of activists: “If they aren’t given a carnet, they won’t sign up.” So at the end of the campaign there was not just one Movimiento Libertad carnet but a whole heterogeneous collection of them, invented by various local headquarters to suit themselves.

The philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada, an old friend, who came to visit me every so often or wrote me long letters to offer me political suggestions, had been a member of Popular Action at one time. His experiences had led him to the depressing conclusion that in Peru it was highly unrealistic to give a political party a democratic structure. “Whether rightist or leftist, our parties fill up with scoundrels,” he sighed. Libertad did not fill up with scoundrels, since, to our great good fortune, those persons whom we caught doing something dishonest — invariably something involving money — and whom we were obliged to ask to leave the Movement, were scarcely more than a handful in a group that, shortly before the first round of voting, had over a hundred thousand members. But it never became the modern, popular, democratic institution that I had dreamed of. From the very start it contracted the vices of Peruvian political parties: bossism, cliques, factionalism. There were groups that took over committees and encysted themselves in them, allowing no one else to participate. Or groups were paralyzed by internal squabbles over trivial matters, which drove away valuable people, who, although they sympathized with our ideas, did not care to waste their time in intrigues and petty rivalries.

There were departamentos, such as Arequipa, in which the organizing group, a tightly knit team of young men and women, managed to create an efficient infrastructure, which would produce members of Libertad like Óscar Urviola, who later was to become a first-class congressman. Or such as lea, where thanks to the prestige and the decency of the farmer Alfredo Elías, Libertad attracted valuable people. And something similar happened in Piura, owing to the deeply committed idealism of José Tejero. But in other departamentos, such as La Libertad, the original group split into two and later on three rival factions that fought among themselves for three whole years over the leadership of the departmental committee, and this naturally kept the membership from increasing. And there were several others, such as Puno, where we made the mistake of entrusting the organization to people without ability or dependability. I will not forget the impression it made on me to note, on a visit to the communities of the Altiplano, that our departmental secretary in Puno treated the peasants with the arrogance of the old-time political bosses.

That Libertad relied in certain places on such unsuitable leaders has an explanation (although it does not constitute a justification). Support in the provinces came to us from groups or individuals who offered to help lay the foundations of the Movement; in our impatience to cover the entire country, we accepted those offers without screening them, sometimes making precisely the right choice and at others making monumental errors. That should have been corrected by having the national leaders make regular swings around the interior so as to perform on the spot that basic, unsung, often boring missionary work of the activist, indispensable if the goal is to build a solid political organization. We didn’t do this, at least not in the first year of our existence, and it was owing to this that in many places Libertad was born crooked, and later on it proved to be difficult to twist it back into the proper shape. I was aware of what was going to happen but could do nothing about it. My admonitions, whether plaintive or enraged, in the executive and political committees, that the leaders must go out into the provinces had little effect. They traveled with me to appear at rallies, but lightning visits of that sort did not further the work of organization. The reason they resisted was not so much the fear of terrorist attack as it was the endless hardships which, owing to the near collapse of the country, they would be forced to endure wherever they went. I told my friends that their propensity for the sedentary life would have regrettable consequences. And that was how it turned out. With a few exceptions the organization of Libertad in the interior proved to be far from representative. And in our committees as well there reigned and handed down decisions in thundering tones that immortal figure: the cacique.

I met many of these political bosses in those three years, and whether they were from the coastal regions, the mountains, or the jungle, they all seemed to be cut from the same cloth by the same tailor. They were, or had been, or inevitably would become senators, representatives, mayors, prefects, subprefects. Their energy, their abilities, their Machiavellian machinations, and their imaginations were concentrated on just one goal: to attain, to hang on to, or to recover a modicum of power through every means, licit or illicit, at their disposal. They were all ardent followers of the moral philosophy summed up in the precept: “To live without money from the state is to live in error.” All of them had a little court or retinue of relatives, friends, and protégés whom they made out to be popular leaders — of teachers, of peasants, of workers, of technicians — and placed on the committees they presided over. They had all changed ideologies and parties the way one changes one’s shirt, and they had all been, or at some point would become, Apristas, populists, and Communists (the three principal sources of sinecures in the history of Peru). They were always there, waiting for me, on the roads, in the stations, at the airports, with bouquets of flowers, bands, and bags of herbs to throw for good luck, and theirs were the first arms to reach out and hug me wherever I arrived, with the same affection with which they had embraced General Velasco, Belaunde, Barrantes, Alan García, and they always managed things in such a way as to be at my side on the speakers’ platform, microphone in hand, introducing me to the audience and offering to organize rallies and doing everything possible to be seen with me in photographs in the newspapers and on television. They were always the ones who, when a rally was over, tried to carry me about in triumph on their shoulders — a ridiculous custom of Peruvian politicians in imitation of bullfighters, and one that I always refused to allow, even if I occasionally had to defend myself with a good swift kick — and they were the ones who sponsored the inevitable receptions, banquets, dinners, lunches, barbecues, which they made into even grander occasions by delivering flowery speeches. Usually they were attorneys, but among them there were also owners of garages or transportation companies, or former policemen or ex-members of the military, and I would even go so far as to swear that they all looked alike, with their tight-fitting suits, their ridiculous little hairline mustaches of present, past, or future members of Congress, and their thunderous, saccharine, high-flown eloquence, ready to rain down in torrents at the slightest opportunity.

I remember one of them, a perfect specimen of the species, in Tumbes. Going a bit bald, in his fifties, with a cheerful smile, a gold tooth, he was introduced to me on the first political junket I made to that department, in December 1987. He climbed out of a car that was belching smoke, with an entourage of half a dozen people, whom he defined in these words: “The pioneers of the Freedom Movement in Tumbes, Doctor. And I, sir, am the helmsman, at your service.” I found out later that at one time he had been a “helmsman” of the APRA, and after that of Popular Action, a party he deserted in order to serve the military dictatorship. And after going through our ranks, he contrived to become a leader of Francisco Diez Canseco’s UCI (Unión Cívica Independiente: Independent Civic Unión) and, finally, of our ally SODE, which put him up as a regional candidate of the Democratic Front.

Battling with political bosses, tolerating political bosses, using political bosses was something I never learned how to do. They doubtless read on my face the disgust and the impatience they aroused in me, representing as they did, at the provincial level, everything that I would have liked politics in Peru not to be. But this did not prevent the committees of Libertad in many provinces from falling into the hands of local bosses. How to change something that was so visceral a part of our political idiosyncrasy?

The organization of Libertad in Lima worked better. The first departmental secretary, Víctor Guevara, and his team whose guiding light was a brilliant young man who had just received his degree in architecture, Pedro Guevara, worked with all their might, bringing together the members of the Movement in each district of the city, using the best people to constitute the first nuclei and making plans for the elections. When Rafael Rey took Víctor Guevara’s place, we had more than fifty thousand members in the capital, from almost every district in the city. The Movement had much deeper roots in the neighborhoods with high and middle incomes than in the poorer districts, but over the months that followed we managed to make rather impressive inroads in the latter as well.

I still have a very vivid image of our first attempt to organize in the young towns. A group of residents of Huáscar, one of the poorest shantytowns in San Juan de Lurigancho, wrote a letter to Miguel Cruchaga asking for information about the Movement, and we suggested to them that we organize a Freedom Day there where they lived. We went out one Saturday in March 1988. When we arrived at the soup kitchen, on the edge of a stretch of stony ground, there was no one there. Little by little, some hundred people showed up: barefoot women, suckling babes, curious onlookers, a rather tipsy man who kept cheering for the APRA, dogs that ran in and out between the legs of the people who were giving explanatory talks. And there too were María Prisca, Octavio Mendoza, and Juvencio Rojas, who a few weeks later would make up the first Libertad committee in Peru. Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos explained how, by debureaucratizing the state and by simplifying the burdensome legal system, tradesmen and craftsmen of the informal economy could work legally, with proper permits accessible to everyone, and spoke of the stimulus that this would be for people’s welfare. We had also brought along a prosperous businessman, who had begun by doing his buying and selling in the informal economy, like many of those present, so that they, who knew everything there was to know about frustration and failure, would see that success too was possible.

A group of women who, from the days of the campaign against state ownership, had been working with tireless enthusiasm for Libertad, went out with us to San Juan de Lurigancho. These women had painted slogans and made banners, transported people to and from public squares, collected signatures, and in those days swept floors, scrubbed down walls, and nailed doors and windows in place so that the house that we had just rented on the Avenida Javier Prado would be in fit shape for the opening, on March 15. This building, the headquarters of the Movement, would fulfill its function thanks especially to women like them, all volunteers — Cecilia, María Rosa, Anita, Teche… — who stayed on there morning, noon, and night, signing up members, working the computer, writing letters, taking care of the secretarial work, the purchasing of supplies, the cleaning, the complex machinery of a political headquarters.

Six of them, headed by María Teresa Belaunde, decided, in those last days of the summer of 1988, to work in the new slum settlements and shantytowns on the outskirts of Lima. In that immense urban belt where émigrés from the Andes end up — peasants fleeing from drought, hunger, terror — a person can read, from the building material of the hovels — bricks, wood, sheets of tin, and straw mats — as though they were geological strata, the age of the migrations that are the best barometer of the great shift of the nation’s population toward the capital and of the country’s economic failure. It is in these pueblos jóvenes, the young towns, that the poor and the wretched who make up two-thirds of the population of Lima are to be found. And it is there that the problems faced by Peru are experienced in their starkest reality: the lack of housing, of potable water and proper sewage disposal, of work, of medical facilities, of food, of transportation, of education, of public order, of safety. But that world, so full of suffering and violence, is also ablaze with energy, with ingenuity and the will to survive: it was there in those shantytowns that the new popular capitalism, which came to be called the “informal,” or “parallel,” economy, had sprung up — a phenomenon that could be transformed, if one became politically aware of what it represented, into the driving force of a liberal revolution.

And so Acción Solidaria — the Solidarity program — was born, with my wife Patricia as president of it all through the campaign. At the beginning there were only six women who were members and two and a half years later there were three hundred of them, and in the whole of Peru some five hundred, since the example of the women members of Libertad spread to Arequipa, Trujillo, Cajamarca, Piura, and other cities. Theirs was not charity work but political militancy that translated into concrete facts the philosophy according to which the poor had to be given the means to emerge from their poverty by themselves. Acción Solidaria helped organize workshops, businesses, companies, gave technical training courses and instruction in arts and crafts, arranged for credit for public works projects chosen by popular vote of the people who lived in the neighborhood, and offered technical and administrative advice as these projects were under way. Thanks to its efforts, dozens of stores, artisans’ workshops, and small industries appeared in the neediest districts of Lima, along with countless mothers’ clubs and day-care centers. And schools and medical dispensaries were built, streets and avenues were opened up, water wells were put in, and an irrigation system was even installed in the peasant community of Jicamarca. All with no official support whatsoever but, rather, with the undisguised hostility of that state which Alan García’s administration had turned into a subsidiary of the APRA.

Just as in my meetings with the government planning committees, my visits to the workshops in cooking, mechanics, sewing, weaving, leather working, and so on, to the classes in reading and writing, nursing, running a business, or family planning, and to the construction projects sponsored by Acción Solidaria were a tonic to me that revived my enthusiasm. Such visits reassured me that I had done the right thing by entering politics.

I have been speaking of the women of Acción Solidaria, because for the most part it was women who took charge of that branch of the Movement, although many men worked hand in hand with them: Dr. José Draxl, for instance, who coordinated the basic courses on health, the engineer Carlos Hara, responsible for the community development projects, and tireless Pedro Guevara, who took over the work in the most remote and depressed areas as though they were a religious apostolate. The Solidarity program changed the life of many of the women members of Libertad, since before joining the Movement very few of them had had the same vocation for social service and the same practical experience in the field that the main leader of this part of the Movement, María Teresa Belaunde, did. The great majority of them were housewives, from families with moderate or high incomes, who up until then had lived a rather empty and even frivolous life, blind and deaf to the seething volcano that is the Peru of underdevelopment and wretched poverty. Beginning to rub elbows every day with people who lived amid ignorance, sickness, and unemployment, people who were the victims of multiple abuses — taking on a commitment that was ethical as well as political and social — transformed them in a short time into individuals who were clearheaded about the Peruvian drama and aroused in many of them the determination to do something concrete. I include my own wife among them. I saw Patricia transformed by working in Acción Solidaria and in what would be its best fruit, the PAS (Programa de Apoyo Social: Program for Social Aid), an ambitious project intended to counterbalance the sacrifices that the stabilization of the economy would call for among the poorest segments of society. Even though she so thoroughly detested politics, she became passionately devoted to work in the young towns, in which she spent many hours during those years, readying herself to help me in the task of governing our country.

The women of the Solidarity program lacked a political vocation, but I was hoping that at least some of them would assume public responsibilities later on. With individuals like that, the whole nature of Peruvian politics could be changed. Seeing what they were doing, discovering how quickly they became thoroughly familiar with the entire range of problems of marginality and transformed themselves into excellent social promoters of social change — without them the Movement would never have put down roots in the young towns — was a refreshing contrast to the shady dealings of provincial political bosses or the petty intrigues within the Democratic Front. When, at the beginning of 1990, we drew up the lists of congressional candidates, I did my best, using the authority granted me by the first Libertad Congress, to convince two of the most dedicated leaders of Acción Solidaria, Diana de Belmont and Nany Bonazzi, to be our candidates for seats representing Lima. But both refused to abandon their work in the southern districts of the city for a seat in Congress.

From the days of the Plaza San Martín on, the subject of money had come up. Organizing rallies, opening party headquarters, going on tours about the country, setting up a national infrastructure, and keeping a campaign going for three years costs a good deal of money. Traditionally, in Peru, election campaigns provide an opportunity to raise money, under cover of which part of it ends up in the pockets of those on the take, who abound in all parties, and in many cases frequent them with this end in view. There are no laws regulating the financing of parties or of political campaigns and even when there are such laws, they are a dead letter. In Peru, such laws do not even exist as yet. Individuals and companies make discreet contributions to various candidates — it is not unusual for them to give money to several different ones at the same time, according to the candidates’ standing in public opinion polls — as an investment in the future, so as to assure themselves of the ensuing privileges that are the daily bread of mercantilism: import licenses, tax exemptions, concessions, monopolies, commissions, that entire discriminatory framework that keeps an economy that is under government control functioning. The entrepreneur or industrialist who does not collaborate knows that tomorrow the winning party can get even with him by administrative means and that he will be at a disadvantage in comparison with his competitors.

All this, like the shady deals under cover of the power of those who occupy the presidency, the ministries, and important posts in the administration, is something so widespread that public opinion has come to resign itself to it as though it were a decree of fate: is there any sense in protesting against the movement of heavenly bodies or the law of gravitation? Corruption, illegal dealings, using a public post to line one’s pockets, have been congenital to Peruvian politics since time immemorial. And during Alan García’s administration, all this beat every previous record.

I had promised myself to put an end to this epiphenomenon of Peruvian underdevelopment, because without a moralization of power and of politicians democracy would not survive in Peru or would go on being a caricature. And also for a more personal reason: the thieves and the thievery associated with politics make me sick to my stomach. It is a human weakness I am unable to tolerate. Stealing while occupying a government post in a poor country, where democracy is still in diapers, has always struck me as an aggravating circumstance of the crime thus committed. Nothing takes away the prestige of democracy and works so unrelentingly for its downfall as corruption. Something in me rebels, beyond all reason, when I am confronted with this criminal use of power that has been obtained thanks to the votes of naïve and hopeful people, in order to fatten one’s own bank account and those of one’s bosom buddies. It was one of the reasons why my opposition to Alan García was so unrelenting: because under his administration political graft became the general rule in Peru, to extremes that made a person’s head swim.

The subject sometimes woke me up at night, in a fit of anxiety. If I were president, how could I keep thieves from doing as they pleased in my administration? I talked the matter over countless times with Patricia, with Miguel Cruchaga and other friends in Libertad. Doing away with state interventionism in the economy would, naturally, reduce graft. It would no longer be ministers or important officials in ministries who would decide, through decrees, the success or failure of businessmen, but consumers. It would no longer be bureaucrats who would fix the value of foreign currencies, but the market. There would be no more import or export quotas. And the privatization of state enterprises would drastically reduce the possibilities for graft and peculation on the part of bureaucrats and government officials. But until a genuine, functioning market economy existed, there would be any number of chances for underhanded deals. And even later on, power would always give the person who held it a chance to sell something under the table and enable him to reap a profit for himself from the privileged information that any government official possesses. An efficient and incorruptible judiciary is the best check against such excesses. But our system of justice had also been eaten away by venality, particularly in recent years, when the salary of judges had been reduced, in real terms, to a mere pittance. And President García, as a precaution against what the future might bring, had filled the judiciary with people devoted to him. In this field, too, we would have to be prepared, as in the fight to establish a free market economy, to wage a war without quarter. But winning this war would be more difficult than winning the other one, for in this one the enemy was not only on the side of our adversaries. It was crouching among our own followers.

I made a conscious decision not to find out who had given donations and contributions to Libertad and to the Democratic Front, nor how much the sums donated amounted to, so as not to find myself, later on, if I were president, unconsciously predisposed in favor of the donors. And I made it a rule that only one person would be authorized to receive financial contributions to the campaign: Felipe Thorndike Beltrán. Pipo Thorndike, a petroleum engineer, an entrepreneur, and an agricultural expert, had been one of the victims of General Velasco’s dictatorship, which had expropriated all his holdings. He had been obliged to go into exile. While he was abroad he built his businesses and his fortune back up, and in 1980, with a stubbornness as great as his love for his native land, he returned to Peru with his money and his determination to work with a will. I had confidence in his honesty, which I knew to be as great as his generosity — he was another of those who, ever since the days of the Plaza San Martín, had devoted himself to working full time alongside me — and that was why I entrusted such a thankless and time-consuming task to him. And I set up a committee of people of unquestionable probity to supervise the expenditures of the campaign: Freddy Cooper, Miguel Cruchaga, Fernando de Szyszlo, Miguel Vega Alvear, who were sometimes given a helping hand by the administrative secretary of the Freedom Movement, Rocío Cillóniz.^* I forbade all of them to give me any information whatsoever about what was received and what was spent, and laid down only the following rule: accept no money from foreign governments or from companies (all donations were to be made on a personal basis). These conditions of mine were fulfilled to the letter. I was very seldom consulted or informed about the subject. (One of the rare exceptions was the day that Pipo, deeply moved, could not keep himself from commenting to me that the head of government planning for the Front, Luis Bustamante Belaunde, had turned over to him the $40,000 that a group of businessmen had made certain he received so as to give him a helping hand in his campaign for a seat in the Senate.) The few times that, during an interview, someone mentioned the possibility of monetary aid being offered me, I interrupted him and explained that the financial circuits of Libertad and of the Democratic Front did not run through my house.

Between the first and second round of voting, one of the schemes thought up by the government to slander us consisted in having the Aprista and Communist majority in Congress appoint a committee that would summon the candidates before it to reveal how much their campaign expenditures amounted to and the sources of their financial funds. I remember the skeptical looks on the faces of the senators on that committee when I explained to them that I couldn’t tell them how much we had spent on the campaign because I didn’t know and gave them the reasons why I hadn’t wanted to know. Once the second round was over, and despite the fact that no law existed that required us to do so, through Felipe Thorndike and the head of the campaign of the Front, Freddy Cooper, we informed that committee of the amount that we had spent. And that was how I too learned that in those three years we had received and spent the equivalent of some four and a half million dollars (three-quarters of which went for TV ads).

This figure, modest by comparison with other Latin American campaigns — if one thinks, for instance, of Venezuela or Brazil — is, of course, a high one for Peru. But it is far from the astronomical sums that, according to our adversaries, we squandered in our efforts to win. (One United Left congressman, reputed to be an honest man, Agustín Haya de la Torre, stated, without one hair of his mustache trembling: “The Front has already spent more than forty million dollars.”)

We held the first congress of Libertad in the Colegio San Agustín in Lima, between April 14 and 16, 1989. It was organized by a committee headed by one of my most faithful friends, Luis Miró Quesada Garland, who, despite his formidable repugnance for politics, worked with me day and night for three years in a spirit of self-sacrifice. We elected him honorary president of the congress, to which delegates came from all over Peru. In the weeks before, there had been elections within the Movement to choose the members of the congress, and the Lima districts and neighborhoods participated enthusiastically. At the opening ceremonies, on the night of the 14th, the district committees arrived with orchestras and musical groups, and the gaiety of the young people turned the ceremony into a party. Instead of delivering my speech extemporaneously, it seemed to me that the occasion — in addition to the opening of this first congress, with Belaunde and Bedoya we had formally set up the Democratic Front, at Popular Action’s Asociación Perú, and SODE had joined the alliance — demanded that I write it beforehand and read it aloud.

Aside from this speech, I wrote only three others beforehand, though I improvised and delivered hundreds of others. During tours of the interior and the various districts of Lima I spoke several times each day, in the morning and at night, and in the last weeks there were rallies that took place at the rate of three or four a day. In order to keep my throat in good condition, Bedoya advised me to chew whole cloves between one speech and the next, and the physician who accompanied me — there were two or three of them, who took turns on duty, along with a small emergency team in case there was an attempt on my life — kept stuffing lozenges down my gullet or handing me the throat spray. I tried not to talk between rallies, so as to give my throat irritation time to go away. But even so it was sometimes impossible to keep my voice from turning hoarse or getting clogged up with phlegm. (In the jungle, late one afternoon, I arrived at the town of La Rioja with almost no voice left. And the moment I began speaking a stiff breeze came up that finished the job of ruining my vocal cords. In order to finish my speech, I had to beat myself on the chest, like Tarzan.)

Speaking in public squares was something I had never done before the Plaza San Martín. And it is something for which having given classes and lectures is of no help, and may even be a hindrance. For in Peru political oratory has remained at the romantic stage. The politician goes up onto the platform to charm, to seduce, to lull, to bill and coo. His musical phrasing is more important than his ideas, his gestures more important than his concepts. Form is everything: it can either make or destroy the content of what he says. The good orator may say absolutely nothing, but he says it with style. What matters to his audience is for him to sound good and look good. The logic, the rational order, the consistency, the critical acumen of what he is saying generally get in the way of his achieving that effect, which is attained above all through impressionistic images and metaphors, ham acting, fancy turns of phrase, and defiant remarks. The good Latin American political orator bears a much closer resemblance to a bullfighter or a rock singer than to a lecturer or a professor: his communication with the audience is achieved by way of instinct, emotion, sentiment, rather than by way of intelligence.

Michel Leiris compared the art of writing to bullfighting, a fine allegory for expressing the risk that the poet or the prose writer ought to be prepared to run when it comes time to confront the blank page before him. But the image is even more appropriate for the politician who, from atop a few boards, on a balcony, or in the atrium of a church, faces a crowd worked up to fever pitch. What he has before him is something as massive as a bull bred for the arena, an awesome creature and at the same time one so ingenuous and manipulable that it can be made to move in whatever direction he chooses, providing he makes skillful passes with the red cape of intonation and gesture.

That night in the Plaza San Martín I was surprised to discover how erratic, how fitful the attention of a crowd is and how elementary its psychology, the ease with which it can be made to pass from laughter to anger, be moved, be driven into a frenzy, be reduced to tears, in unison with the speaker. And how difficult it is to make contact with the reason, rather than with the passions, of those who attend a rally. If the language of politics all over the world is made up of platitudes, this is even more the case where it is a custom centuries old for public speaking to be an incantatory art.

I did what I could not to perpetuate that custom and did my best to use the speakers’ platforms to promote certain ideas and to disclose the program of the Front, avoiding demagoguery and clichés. To my way of thinking, those public squares were the ideal place to put across once and for all the fact that to vote for me was to vote for certain concrete reforms, so that there would be no misunderstandings concerning what I intended to do or the sacrifices that it would cost.

But I don’t believe that I succeeded in putting across either of these two things. For Peruvians did not vote for ideas in the elections, and despite all my precautions I very often noted — especially when fatigue got the better of me — that all at once I too was resorting to ham acting or an unexpected remark to milk applause from the audience. In the two months of the campaign for the second round, I tried to sum up our proposed program in just a few ideas, which I repeated, again and again, in the most simple and direct way, enveloped in familiar popular imagery. But the weekly polls showed each time that the decision as to which candidate to vote for was made, in the overwhelming majority of cases, on the basis of the personalities of the people running for office and out of obscure impulses, and never on account of the programs the voters were offered.

Of all the speeches I gave, I remember as the best ones, or in any event the least bad ones, two that I was able to prepare in the hospitable garden of my friends Maggie and Carlos Ferreyros — with no bodyguards, reporters, or telephones — for the launching of my candidacy, in the Plaza de Armas, the main square of Arequipa, on June 4, 1989, and the one closing the campaign, on the Paseo de la República, in Lima, on April 14, 1990, the most personal one of all. And also, perhaps, the brief address, on June 10, before the grief-stricken crowd that rushed to the doors of the headquarters of Libertad as soon as it became known that we had lost.

At the congress of the Movement there were speeches, but there was also an ideological debate which quite possibly did not interest all the delegates as much as it did me. Was the Freedom Movement going to promote a market economy or a social market economy? Enrique Ghersi defended the first thesis and Luis Bustamante Belaunde the second, in an intelligent interchange that caused a number of those attending to speak up in favor of one formula or the other. The discussion was more than a semantic itch. By way of the sympathy or the antipathy provoked by the adjective social, the heterogeneous composition of the Movement became clearly evident. Not only liberals had signed up as members of it, but also conservatives, Christian Socialists, Social Democrats, and a goodly number — the majority perhaps — without any ideological position, with an abstract loyalty to democracy or with no more than a negative definition: they were not Apristas or Communists and saw in us an alternative to whatever it was they detested or feared.

The most closely knit group and the one most closely identified with liberalism — or so it appeared at the time; things would change later — was one made up of young people between the ages of twenty and thirty, who had had their first passage at arms as journalists working together at La Prensa when that daily was released from state control by Belaunde in 1980, under the tutelage of two journalists who, for quite some time, had been defending the free market and combating government interventionism: Arturo Salazar Larraín and Enrique Chirinos Soto (both had joined Libertad). But these young people, among whom was my son Álvaro, had gone quite a bit further than their teachers. They were enthusiastic followers of Milton Friedman, of Ludwig von Mises, or of Friedrich Hayek, and the radicalism of one of them — Federico Salazar — bordered on anarchism. Several of them had worked or were still working at Hernando de Soto’s Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Freedom and Democracy Institute) and two of them, Ghersi and Mario Ghibellini, were co-authors with him of El otro sendero (The Other Path), for which I had written the foreword,^* and in which it was shown, supported by exhaustive research, how the informal economy, set up just outside the law, was a creative response of the poor to the discriminatory barriers imposed by that mercantilist version of capitalism which was the only variety with which Peru was acquainted.

That investigation, made by a team directed by Hernando de Soto, was of great importance to the furthering of liberal ideas in Peru, and marked off a sort of borderline. De Soto had organized, in Lima, in 1979 and 1982, two international symposia to which he brought a roster of economists and thinkers — Hayek, Friedman, Jean-François Revel, and Hugh Thomas among others — whose ideas were a strong breath of modernizing fresh air in that Peru that was just emerging from so many years of populist demagoguery and military dictatorship. I had collaborated with Hernando in staging these events, speaking at both, helped him set up the Instituto Libertad y Democracia, closely followed his studies on the informal economy, and continued to be enthusiastic about his conclusions. I urged him to put them together in a book and when he did so, besides writing the foreword for it, I promoted El otro sendero in Peru and in the outside world as I have never done for a book of my own. (I even went so far as to insist, to the point of brazenness, that The New York Times Magazine accept an article that I had written about it, which finally appeared on February 22, 1987, and later was widely reprinted in many countries.) I did so because I thought that Hernando would be a good president of Peru. He too believed that and thus our relationship seemed to be an excellent one. Hernando was as vain and touchy as a prima donna, and when I first met him in 1979, just after his arrival from Europe, where he had lived for a good part of his life, he struck me as a slightly pompous and ridiculous figure, with his Spanish studded with Anglicisms and Gallicisms and his aristocratic, affected snobbishness (he had added a coquettish “de” to his father’s name, and for that reason Belaunde sometimes referred to him as “that economist with the name of a conquistador”). But I soon had the impression that I had discovered, beneath his picturesque outward appearance, a more intelligent, more modern person than the ordinary run of our politicians, someone who could lead a liberal reform in Peru and who, despite his mania for publicity, was therefore worth all the support I could give him, both inside and outside the country. Support him I did, with great success and also, I confess, no little embarrassment, once I discovered that I was forging for him an image of an intellectual which, as my countrymen have it, wept when it was superimposed on the original.

At the time of the mobilization against nationalization, Hernando was on holiday, in the Dominican Republic. But I phoned him and he returned to Peru earlier than he had planned to. Although in the beginning he expressed reservations as to the rally in the Plaza San Martín — as an alternative, he proposed a symposium on the informal economy in the Amauta Coliseum, an indoor stadium, but then later he and all the people from the Instituto Libertad y Democracia collaborated with enthusiasm in organizing the Plaza San Martín demonstration. His right-hand man in those days, Enrique Ghersi, was one of the organizers and de Soto one of the three speakers who preceded me. His presence on that platform had given rise to much covert pressure, which I resisted, convinced that those of my friends who were opposed to his speaking, maintaining that his odd words in English would make people burst out laughing, were behaving as they did out of jealousy and not, as they kept assuring me, because he seemed to them a man with more ambitions than principles and one whose loyalty was dubious.

His later conduct proved that my friends had been absolutely right. On the very eve of the rally on August 21, in which in theory he was to play an active part, de Soto had a discreet interview with Alan García at the Presidential Palace, which established the foundations of a close and advantageous collaboration between the administration and the Instituto Libertad y Democracia and which was to launch de Soto on a headlong career as an opportunist (one that was to reach new heights later under the administration and the dictatorship of Fujimori, the new president). That collaboration was cleverly contrived by Alan García in order to publicize himself, all of a sudden, after 1988, in one of those somersaults of which demagogues are capable, as a promoter of private property among Peruvians of scant means, a president who was fulfilling one of the fundamental aspirations of the Democratic Front: to make of Peru “a country of proprietors.” To this end, he had himself photographed right and left, arm in arm with de Soto, Peru’s “liberal,” and sponsored sensational and above all inordinately expensive projects — because of the publicity costing millions that surrounded them — in the young towns, which Hernando and his Institute carried out for him, in what he maintained was open competition with the Front. The maneuver had no major political effect, though as far as I was personally concerned, it admittedly was of great help to me to learn of the unsuspected abilities of the star performer involved, whom, with my characteristic naïveté, I had at one time believed capable of cleaning up Peruvian politics and saving the country.

While — impelled by the spite toward which he was so easily inclined or for more practical reasons — de Soto turned out in Peru to be a sly and sneaky enemy of my candidacy, in the United States he showed, wherever and whenever he got the chance, the video of the rally in the Plaza San Martín as proof of his popularity.^* But the person who in this barefaced way doubtless attracted more sympathy and support from liberal institutions and foundations in the United States for his Instituto Libertad y Democracia contrived, at the same time, to let slip out insinuations against the Democratic Front at the Department of State and various international agencies in the presence of individuals who sometimes came to me, all upset, to ask me what these Machiavellianisms meant. They simply meant that the person who had described the mercantilist system in Peru with such preciseness had ended up being its prototype. Those of us who aided and abetted him — and, in a manner of speaking, invented him — must admit frankly, without mincing words: we had not contributed to the cause of freedom or to that of Peru, but, rather, whetted the appetites of a homegrown Rastignac.

But his swift passage through the world of ideas and liberal values left behind a good book. And also, to a certain extent, that group of young radicals who, at the first congress of Libertad, so heatedly defended the deletion of an adjective.

The radicalism and the excitement of the young Turks headed by Ghersi — above all of the Jacobin Federico Salazar, always prompt to denounce any symptom of mercantilism or deviation tending toward state control — rather frightened Lucho Bustamante, a prudent man and, as the person responsible for the Plan for Governing, someone who was determined that our program should be realistic as well as radical (since liberal utopias also exist). Hence his insistence, with the backing of a number of the economists and professionals on his team, that the Movement should adopt as its own the formula that Ludwig Erhard (or rather, his adviser Alfred Müller-Armack) had used to label the economic policy which, after 1948, launched Germany’s amazing economic takeoff: the social market economy.

My own inclination was to drop the adjective “social.” Not because I believe a market economy incompatible with any form of redistribution of wealth — a thesis to which no liberal would subscribe, although there are varying points of view on the scope that a policy of the redistribution of wealth should have in an open society — but because in Peru it is more closely associated with socialism than with the equality of opportunity that is a feature of liberal philosophy. My objection also had to do with conceptual clarity. The military dictatorship had applied the label “social” to everything that it collectivized and brought under state control and Alan García martyrized Peruvians by repeating it in every one of his speeches, explaining that he was nationalizing banking so that it would fulfill a “social function.” The word used in that odd sense cropped up so often in political discourse that it had become more of a populist catchword than a concept. (I have always felt affection toward those young extremists, even though every so often one of them accused me of heterodoxy as well and, with the passage of time, two of them — Ghibellini and Salazar — turned out to be rather contemptible. But during the period to which I am referring, they appeared to be generous and idealistic. And their incorruptibility and their intransigence, I told myself, would be useful when the day came to undertake the arduous task of making the country moral.)

The congress did not come to any decision with regard to the adjective “social” and the debate remained an open-ended one, but the interchange marked the best intellectual moment of the meeting and served to set many members to thinking. The real conclusion came with the practical efforts of the two following months, in which Lucho Bustamante’s team drew up the most advanced liberal project thus far proposed in Peru, and none of the “young Turks” found anything in it to object to.

To what point did we manage to make ideas put down roots among members of Libertad? To what degree did Peruvians who voted for me vote for liberal ideas? I don’t know. This is a doubt that I would like very much to clear up. In any event, the effort we made to give ideas a primordial role in the life of the Freedom Movement was a many-sided one. The national committee on basic principles and culture was established, which the congress chose Enrique Ghersi to head, together with a school for party leaders that was Miguel Cruchaga’s idea and enthusiastically conducted by Fernando Iwasaki and Carlos Zuzunaga.

Shortly after the congress Raúl Ferrero Costa, who had been dean of the Bar Association, and a group of professionals and students associated with him joined Libertad. His handling of affairs as dean had been magnificent, and had been the occasion for his traveling extensively throughout Peru. When Víctor Guevara gave up his position as head of the national committee for organization, I asked Raúl to take his place, and despite the fact that he knew how difficult a post it was, he agreed. At that time, the secretary general, Miguel Cruchaga, aided by his wife Cecilia, had taken on an almost overwhelming task: recruiting and training the sixty thousand election supervisors we needed in order to have a representative at every single one of the tables for registering voters in the entire country. (The election supervisor is the sole guarantee against fraud when voters register or cast their ballots.) All the work of organizing was thus left in Ferrero’s hands.

Raúl made a tremendous effort to improve the status of Libertad in the provinces. Aided by some twenty co-workers, he traveled tirelessly throughout the interior, setting up committees where none existed as yet and reorganizing the ones that did. The infrastructure of Libertad was expanding. On my travels I was impressed to see that in remote provinces in Cajamarca, Ancash, San Martín, or Apurímac I was received by organized groups of members of Libertad on the front of whose headquarters there could be made out, from a long way away, that red and black emblem of Libertad whose calligraphy bore a family resemblance to Poland’s Solidarno$$$$$$$$$$. (In 1981, when the repressive laws against the labor movement headed by Lech Walesa were made public, I had led, along with the journalist Luis Pásara, a protest demonstration, and I suppose that because of this precedent, many people believed that the similarity of the two symbols had been my idea. But in all truth, although the close resemblance struck me as a happy coincidence, I didn’t plan it, nor do I know to this day whether it was devised by Jorge Salmón, who was responsible for publicity for Libertad, or Miguel Cruchaga or Fernando de Szyszlo, who, in order to help us raise funds, had designed a splendid lithograph with the Libertad insignia.)

We agreed to hold elections within the Movement before the national ones. This decision impressed many of our members as being an imprudent one, which was going to divert both our resources and our energies and serve as an excuse for squabbles inside the Movement, when what we ought to be doing was concentrate on fighting against our adversaries now that we were going into the final stretch of the campaign. I was one of those who defended the idea of these internal elections. It was my belief that they would serve to democratize many committees in the provinces, which thanks to these elections would free themselves of the entrenched local political bosses and emerge from them much stronger, with genuine representatives from the rank and file.

But I would venture the guess that in two-thirds of the provinces the caciques managed to rig the election procedures and get themselves elected handily. The clever tactics they used were technically unobjectionable. They published or spread word of the time limits for the registration of candidates or the date of the election in such a way that it was only their partisans who found out about them, or else they had the list of members drawn up in such a way that their potential adversaries were not registered to vote or were recorded as having registered after the date that had been set as the limit to participate in the elections. The head of our national committee on electoral affairs, Alberto Massa — an irresistibly humorous member of the political committee whom all the other members could hardly wait to hear ask for the floor because his remarks were always sparklingly witty and made us roar with laughter — on whose head there had rained down the condemnations, protests, and criticisms of the victims of such maneuvers, left us openmouthed with astonishment at the ruses and the cunning tricks that he had been learning of.

We did what we could to undo the chicanery. We declared null and void the elections in those provinces where the number of voters had been suspiciously low, and passed judgment on the internecine accusations wherever it was possible to do so. But in other cases — the national elections were already upon us — we were obliged to resign ourselves to recognizing certain committees of questionable legitimacy in the interior of the country.

In Lima it was different. The elections for the secretariat of the departamento, which Rafael Rey’s list was to win, were carefully planned and it was possible to avoid or to stop any dirty tricks in time. I made the rounds of the districts on election day, and it was exciting to see the long lines of members of the Freedom Movement waiting outside on the street to vote. But the one who had been Rey’s opposing candidate on our ticket — Enrique Fuster — could not bear having been defeated: he resigned from Libertad, attacked us in the government-controlled press and turned up a few months later as a candidate for a congressional seat on the list of a rival party.

The new departmental committee in Lima went on expanding the work of organizing all through the capital and, aided by the Solidarity program, in the young towns as well, from which, in the last months of 1989 and the first of 1990, Patricia and I had received invitations nearly every day to inaugurate new committees. We went every time we could. At this point my obligations began at seven or eight in the morning and ended after midnight.

In those inaugurations one rule was observed without exception: the more humble the neighborhood, the more elaborate the ceremony. Peru is an “old country,” as the novelist José María Arguedas reminded his readers, and nothing betrays how far back in time the Peruvian psyche goes as does the people’s love of ritual, form, ceremony. There was always a very colorful speakers’ platform, with flowers, little flags, noisemakers, paper garlands hanging from the walls and ceilings, and a table with things to eat and drink after the official ceremony. There was invariably a group of musicians and sometimes folk dancers, from the mountains and the coast. The parish priest never failed to show up, to sprinkle holy water about and bless the local headquarters (which might well be a crude structure made of reeds and rush matting in the middle of nowhere) and a crowd dressed in vivid colors, wearing what were obviously their very best clothes, as for a wedding or a baptism. The national anthem had to be sung at the beginning and the theme song of Libertad at the end. And in between the crowd had to listen to a great many speeches. For every last member of the directorate — the district secretary general, along with the heads of the district committees on basic principles and culture, on women’s initiatives, on youth programs, on voting registration, on social issues, et cetera, et cetera — had to speak, so that no one would feel left out. The ceremony went on and on — seemingly forever. And afterward a document in baroque legalese, complete with a great many seals, had to be signed, bearing witness to the fact that the ceremony had taken place, and anointing and sanctifying it. And then came the show, folk music and dances, huaynitos from the high country, marineras from Trujillo, black dances from Chincha, pasillos from Piura. Though I begged, ordered, pleaded — explaining that with such grand and glorious activities the whole campaign schedule went to hell — I very seldom managed to get them to make these inaugurations any shorter, or to beg off from the picture taking and the autograph sessions, or of course to get out of being the target of handfuls of pica-pica, a demoniacal powder that worked its way all over my body and into my most hidden recesses and made me itch like crazy. Despite all that, it was hard not to be won over by the extraordinary warmth and the unrestrained emotionalism of these popular sectors, so different in that respect from middle- and upper-class Peruvians, inhibited and emotionally undemonstrative.

Patricia, whom to my surprise I had already seen giving interviews on television — something she had always refused to do before — and delivering speeches in the young towns, used to ask me, when she saw me come back from these inaugurations covered from head to foot with confetti: “Do you still remember that once upon a time you were a writer?”