A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (13 page)

After nearly a year of negotiations we finally agreed on the official constitution of the Democratic Front. I was entrusted with drawing up the declaration of principles, and Belaunde, invariably shrewd when it came to gestures, suggested that we go sign it, in a public ceremony, in the cradle and bastion of Aprismo: Trujillo. We did so on October 29, 1988, after each of us led rallies separately throughout all of the North (I went to Chiclayo). The demonstration was a success, inasmuch as it covered nearly three-quarters of Trujillo’s immense and orderly main square. But in the Declaration of Trujillo, an academic proceeding that took place prior to the rally, in which the delegates of AP, the PPC, and Libertad offered a diagnosis of the situation in Peru, the hidden quarrels and rivalries within the Front began to come to the surface. In what seemed like an ill omen at the very outset, minutes before the ceremony was to start in the main hall of the Santo Domingo de Guzmán cooperative, a heavy metal room divider fell down on top of the table that Belaunde, Bedoya and I were to occupy. Belaunde and I, who had already arrived, were still standing waiting for Bedoya, who was riding in a motorcade through the streets of Trujillo. “You see,” I said jokingly to the former president, “the Toucan’s lack of punctuality has its positive side: he’s saved our necks.” But this first public act of the allies proved to be far from a cheerful occasion. Contrary to what had been agreed on—everyone crying out the same slogans at the same time so as to demonstrate the fraternal spirit of the alliance—when the three of us appeared together in public, each of the three contingents hailed only its own leader and shouted only its own rallying cries in chorus, so as to show that it was the largest one. And once the joint meeting was over, the three forces separated so that each of them could hold its own meeting that night for its local supporters. (Since Libertad did not have its own headquarters yet, we held our festivities in the street.)

The order of speakers proved to be a bone of contention. Bedoya and my friends in Libertad insisted that as the leader and future candidate of the Front I ought to close the ceremony. Belaunde objected, on the grounds of his age and his status as the former president of Peru; I would be the principal speaker only after my candidacy had been publicly announced. In the end, we did as he wished. I spoke first, then Bedoya, and Belaunde ended the meeting. Idiocies of this sort took up a great deal of our time, giving rise to suspicions, and everyone agreed that they were
important
.

The Democratic Front never came to be a coherent and integrated force, in which the common objective prevailed over the interests of the parties that constituted it. Only when it became clear that there would be a second round of voting, after the tremendous surprise of the first round—the very high percentage attained by Alberto Fujimori, an unknown, and the certainty that in the final round the vote of Apristas and leftists would go to him—did the shock that we had had bring militants and leaders together and induce them to cooperate without the partisan pettiness that had predominated until April 8, 1990.

This shortsighted view of politics became particularly evident where the municipal elections were concerned. Scheduled to be held on November 12, 1989, barely five months before the presidential election, they were going to be the dress rehearsals for the contest for the presidency, since they would serve as a measure of the relative strength of the contending forces. Before we had even discussed the subject, Belaunde announced that AP would put up its own candidates, since, in his view, the Democratic Front existed only for the presidential election.

For months it was hard to discuss the subject with him. Bedoya agreed with me that if each of the three political forces went its separate way in the municipal elections it would create an image of division and antagonism that would drastically reduce our chances of taking root as an alliance. When we were by ourselves, Belaunde told me that the populist rank and file of his party wouldn’t stand for the idea of sharing the lists of municipal candidates with the PPC, which did not exist outside of Lima, and that he could not risk being the target of rebellion within his own party for that reason.

Since the whole problem appeared to be one of a bid for the most power, I proposed to the Freedom Movement that it give up the idea of putting up a single candidate for mayor or city councilor anywhere in Peru, so that AP and the PPC could share the candidacies between them. I thought that this gesture would make it easier for us allies to come to an agreement. But not even then would Belaunde let his arm be twisted. The matter finally attracted the attention of the communications media, and members of AP and the PPC, for the most part, but members of Libertad and supporters of SODE as well, got involved in a stupid debate that the media in thrall to the government and those on the left did their utmost to magnify in order to show the weakness and the groundswell of opposition that according to them was eating away at our alliance.

Finally, in mid-June of 1989, after innumerable and on occasion violent arguments, Belaunde gave in and accepted the idea of single candidacies. There then began another fight between AP and the PPC, this time over which of the two parties would put up the candidate for a given municipality. They never reached an agreement, and in addition, the provincial bases of each party contested the decisions of their national leaders, since all of them wanted nothing less than everything and neither party seemed prepared to make the slightest concession to its ally. The rank and file of Libertad too had cried to high heaven over our agreement not to put up any candidates, and there were a number of defections.

Alarmed by what this presaged for the future if the Front was elected, I managed to get Libertad to authorize me to offer the PPC and AP each 40 percent of the lists of candidates for Congress, instead of the 33 percent each that was their rightful share, in return for giving up any sort of ministerial quotas or reserved posts, something that, moreover, corresponded to a provision of the Constitution which regards the designation of the cabinet as the prerogative of the president. Belaunde and Bedoya agreed to this. My idea, naturally, was not to leave the allies out in the cold if we got into office, but to be free to be able to call upon as collaborators only those who were honest and capable, who believed in the reforms and were prepared to fight for them. That Libertad should have only 20 percent of the congressional candidates, and that the allies from SODE should also be included within this much-reduced percentage, demoralized many radical members of Libertad, to whom such altruism appeared to be both excessively generous and impolitic, because it barred many independents from competing and lent credence to those who said that I was a puppet of the traditional pols.

It had been Belaunde and Popular Action that had placed the most obstacles in the way of an agreement concerning the municipal elections, but it was Bedoya who brought on the crisis, with a statement on television, on the night of June 19, 1989, denying with a minimum of tact what I had just announced at a press conference: that AP and the PPC had finally reached an agreement concerning the municipal candidacies in Lima and Callao, the ones that up to that point had been the cause of the worst controversies between the two parties. I listened to Bedoya’s statement on the late news broadcast on television, just after getting into bed. His loud disclaimer was a resounding demonstration of how disunited we were and the trivial reasons for our being at odds. I got up out of bed, went to my desk, and spent the rest of the night reflecting.

For the first time, I was overcome by the idea that I had been badly mistaken to embark upon this political adventure. Perhaps Patricia was right. Was it worthwhile to go on? The future looked at once dark and ludicrous. AP and the PPC would go on squabbling to see who would head the electoral lists and how many candidates for municipal councilman each party would get and what places the candidates of each party would have on the lists, until the Front had lost all the prestige it had. Was it in this spirit that we would achieve the great peaceful transformation? Was it possible with such an attitude to dismantle the macrocephalic state and transfer our immense public sector into the hands of the citizenry? The moment our own supporters were elected to office, wouldn’t all of them immediately make a move—exactly as the Apristas had done—to divide up the administration into smaller units and demand that still more divisions be created so that there would be more public posts to fill?

The worst of all this was how blind we had been to what was going on around us. In mid-1989 armed attacks were becoming more and more frequent from one end of the country to the other; according to the government, they had already caused some eighteen thousand deaths. Whole regions—such as the Huallaga area, in the jungle, and nearly the whole of the central Andes—were little short of being completely under the control of Sendero Luminoso and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Alan García’s policy had caused the country’s hard currency reserves to vanish into thin air and the printing of paper money with no backing presaged an inflationary explosion. Companies were working at a half and in some instances a third of their proven capacity. Those Peruvians who were able to do so were taking their money out of the country and those who managed to find a job abroad left. Tax revenues had fallen to the point where we were suffering from a general collapse of public services. Every night the television screens showed heartbreaking scenes of hospitals without medicines or beds, of schools without desks, without blackboards, and sometimes without roofs or walls, of districts without water or light, of streets strewn with refuse, of production workers and office clerks on strike, in desperation over the dizzying fall in the standards of living of the population. And the Democratic Front was paralyzed—over which party would propose its list in each of the municipalities!

When dawn came, I drew up a stern letter
^*
addressed to Belaunde and Bedoya, informing them that, in view of their inability to reach an agreement, I was withdrawing as a presidential candidate. I woke Patricia up to read her the text, and it surprised me that, instead of rejoicing, she had certain reservations regarding my resigning as a candidate. We made plans to go abroad immediately so as to avoid the predictable pressures. I had been invited to receive a literary prize in Italy—the Scanno, in the Abruzzi—so the next day we bought our tickets, in secret, for twenty-four hours later. That afternoon I sent the letter, via Álvaro, my older son, to Belaunde and to Bedoya, after informing the executive committee of Libertad of my decision. I saw some of my friends with sad faces—I remember Cruchaga’s, paper-white, and Freddy’s, as red as a prawn’s—but none of them attempted to dissuade me. The truth is that they too were tired of the absurd way in which the Front had bogged down. I gave instructions to the security guards not to allow anyone to enter the house and we unplugged the telephone. The news reached the communications media early that evening and had the effect of a bombshell. All the channels began their nightly news program with it. Dozens of reporters surrounded my house and immediately a parade of people from all the political camps of the Front began. But I received no one nor did I appear when, later on, a spontaneous demonstration of some hundreds of members of Libertad surrounded the house, with Enrique Chirinos Soto, Miguel Cruchaga, and Alfredo Barnechea as speakers.

Early in the morning on June 22, the security guards took us to the airport and managed to get us aboard the Air France flight immediately, thereby enabling us to dodge another demonstration of members of Libertad, headed by Miguel Cruchaga, Chino Urbina, and Pedro Guevara, whom I glimpsed in the distance from the little window of the plane.

When we arrived in Italy, two journalists were waiting there for me, both of whom, heaven only knows how, had discovered where I was headed: Juan Cruz, from
El País
in Madrid, and Paul Yule, from the BBC, who was making a documentary on my candidacy. My conversation with them surprised me, since both of them were convinced that my resignation was simply a tactic to force the intractable allies to give in.

In the end, that was what everyone would believe, and the practical result, when the episode was over, was that after all, contrary to what many people thought, I wasn’t as bad a politician as I seemed to be. The truth of the matter is that my resignation was not planned with the intention of marshaling public opinion so as to put pressure on AP and the PPC. It was genuine, stemming from my loathing for the political maneuvering in which the Front was submerged, the conviction that the alliance was not going to work, that we would disappoint the expectations of many people, and that my effort was going to be useless. But Patricia, who never lets me get away with anything, says that that, too, is a debatable truth. For if I had really believed that there was no hope, I would have used the word
irrevocable
in my letter of resignation, something I had not done. So that perhaps, as she believes, in some secret compartment I harbored the illusion—the desire—that my letter would settle our differences.

It did settle them, temporarily. From the day I left the country, the independent communications media severely criticized the PPC and AP, and criticisms rained down on the heads of Bedoya and Belaunde in the form of editorials, articles, and statements. The number of people who announced their intention to vote for me suddenly rose impressively all over the country and in every social sector. Up until then public opinion polls had always shown me to be the leading candidate against the candidates of the APRA (Alva Castro) and the United Left (Alfonso Barrantes), but with a potential vote that never went beyond 35 percent of the total. At this point the figure rose to 50 percent, the highest I had attained at any point in the campaign. Libertad enrolled thousands of new members, to the point that membership cards gave out and more had to be printed in a great hurry. Our various local headquarters were filled to overflowing, day and night, by a multitude of supporters and members who urged us to break with AP and the PPC and go before the voters by ourselves. And on my return to Lima, I found 4,890 letters (according to Rosi and Lucía, who counted them) from all over Peru, congratulating me for having broken with the other parties (with Popular Action in particular, which had aroused more antagonisms).