A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (18 page)

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.”