A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (37 page)

It was not easy to obtain offers of aid and investments, since I was a mere candidate for president. However, we secured concrete promises for the Program for Social Aid of some four hundred million dollars (Taiwan, two hundred million, and South Korea and Japan, a hundred million each). On the tour, I could show the governments of those countries and many companies what we were going to do to change the self-destructive course that Peru had taken. The country’s image had fallen to lamentable extremes: an insecure and violent place, quarantined by the financial community, which, since the declaration of war by the Aprista administration against the International Monetary Fund, had removed Peru from its agenda, excluding it from all programs for credit or aid and with no interest in its continued existence.

To my arguments that Peru was endowed with resources that the Asian countries of the Pacific needed—beginning with petroleum and minerals—and that it was therefore possible to make both economies complementary by converting the Pacific into a bridge for exchanges, the answers always tended to be the same ones. Yes, but before that, Peru had to get out of its impasse with the International Monetary Fund, without whose endorsement no country, bank, or business enterprise would trust commitments made by the Peruvian government. The second condition was to bring a definite end to terrorism.

In the case of Japan, the matter was a particularly delicate one. Government officials and entrepreneurs told us, without beating about the bush, of their annoyance at the lack of compliance with the commitments made by Peru regarding the North Peru pipeline, financed by Japan. Many years ago, Peruvian administrations had stopped amortizing this debt that had been contracted in the days of the military dictatorship, but more serious still for a country where formality is everything, the present administration did not even offer any explanation. The officials in charge of the project answered neither letters nor telexes. And the special envoys that had been sent had been received neither by the president nor by government ministers but by second-level bureaucrats whose instructions appeared to be to answer with excuses and evasive promises (the famous Peruvian institution of the
meceo
: to keep shilly-shallying until one’s conversational partner gets tired of insisting). Was this any way to behave toward friendly countries?

I tirelessly repeated to bureaucrats and entrepreneurs that it was against this sort of procedure and political morality that I was fighting. And I explained to everyone that in our program renegotiation with the IMF and the fight against terrorism were absolute priorities. I don’t know whether they believed me or not. But I did obtain a number of things. Among them, an accord with the Keidanren to hold in Lima, immediately following the election, a meeting of Peruvian and Japanese entrepreneurs charged with laying the foundations of a collaboration that would include everything from the thorny subject of unpaid debts to the way in which Japan could aid Peru to reenter the financial world and the sectors in which Japanese businesses could invest in the country. Tireless Miguel Vega Alvear, who had organized the trip through the Orient, was placed in charge of making preparations for this meeting, at the end of April or the beginning of May (the elections were to be held on April 10 and we did not reject the idea that we might win in the first round of voting).

The most spectacular reception given me on the entire tour was in Taiwan. And I left there convinced that important investments would be forthcoming from that country as soon as we won the election. Officials from the Ministry of Foreign Relations were waiting for me as I got off the plane, two cars with sirens escorted me wherever I went, President Lee Teng-hui received me at an official audience, as did the minister of foreign relations, and we had a long working session with the leaders of the Kuomintang and with private entrepreneurs. And also something that I had insistently requested: a detailed account of the agrarian reform that had transformed the island of great semifeudal landholdings that Taiwan had been when Chiang Kai-shek arrived there into an archipelago of small and medium-sized farms in the hands of private owners. This reform was the driving force that led to the industrial takeoff that turned Taiwan into the economic power that it is today.

When I was a student, in the 1950s, Taiwan was a bad word in Latin America. The progressivist sectors considered that for a country to “Taiwanize itself” was the worst sort of opprobrium. For the ruling ideology—that confused mixture of socialism, nationalism, and populism that had ruined Latin America—the image of Taiwan was that of a semicolonial factory, a country that had sold its sovereignty for a mess of pottage: the U.S. investments that allowed the existence of manufacturing plants in which millions of miserably paid workers sewed trousers, shirts, and dresses for multinational corporations. In the middle of the 1950s, the Peruvian economy—whose export volume then amounted to as much as two billion dollars per year—was superior to Taiwan’s and the income per capita of both countries was under a thousand dollars. When I visited the island, income per capita in Peru had gone down to around half of what it was in the 1950s and Taiwan’s had increased more than 700 percent ($7,530 for 1990). And after having experienced an average annual growth rate of 8.5 percent between 1981 and 1989 (with its exports increasing at the rate of 12.1 percent over the same period),
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Taiwan now had reserves of $75 billion, whereas when Alan García’s tenure in office ended, Peruvian reserves were negative and the country was bearing the crushing burden of an external debt of $20 billion.

Unlike South Korea, whose development, no less impressive than Taiwan’s, had had as a driving force seven enormous conglomerates, in Taiwan businesses of small and medium size, working at a very high technological level, had multiplied: in 1990 80 percent of its factories, the majority of them oriented toward exports and highly competitive, had less than twenty workers. This was a model that suited us. Officials and businessmen in Taiwan spared no effort to satisfy my curiosity and arranged a program of visits for me which, although it was a killing one, turned out to be very instructive. I remember in particular the impression of science fiction conveyed to me by the scientific industrial park of Hsin Chu, where the world’s large corporations were invited to experiment with products and technologies for the future. In Taiwan I received the firmest promises of aid should the Democratic Front assume power.

Naturally, there was a political interest behind this. Peru broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in order to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in the days of Velasco’s dictatorship. Since that time, succeeding Peruvian administrations had reduced the country’s commercial contacts and exchanges with Taiwan; under Alan García, they had dwindled to nothing. In order to maintain a presence in Peru, Taiwan still had a commercial office in Lima, the manager of which was the semiofficial representative of his government. But he was not even authorized to give out visas. Although in none of the interviews of me was I asked any concrete questions, I volunteered to government authorities the information that my administration would engage in consular and commercial relations, as other countries had done, without breaking off diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.

As I had done with Mrs. Thatcher and with Felipe González, prime ministers of countries with problems of the same sort, I asked government leaders in Taiwan for advice concerning antiterrorist activities. Like the others, they too promised to advise me. And they immediately made me an offer to set up two scholarships, for a short eight-week course in antisubversive strategy. The Freedom Movement sent Henry Bullard, a jurist who was a member of the Democratic Front’s committee on civil peace and human rights, and another person, as enigmatic as he was efficient, about whom I never managed to find out very much, except that he was a karate black belt and a Nisei: Professor Oshiro. He was the trainer and technical director of the security personnel of Prosegur, and the person who replaced Óscar Balbi—or reinforced him—following me around like a shadow at rallies and on my trips around the country. Of an indefinable age—between forty and forty-five, perhaps—and slender and strong as a rock, invariably wearing a light sport shirt, his serene and peaceable air made me trust him. Professor Oshiro never opened his mouth, except to utter a few incomprehensible murmurs, and nothing appeared to irritate him or bring him out of his meditative mood: neither the attacks of the Aprista “buffaloes” at demonstrations nor the storms that, all of a sudden, would make the small plane in which we were flying shudder violently. But if need be, his reactions were extraordinarily fast. Like the time, in Puno, during the festivities to celebrate Candlemas. We had entered the stadium, where a performance of folk dances was being given, and were greeted by a hail of stones, thrown from one of the boxes. Before the thought of raising my arms to protect myself had even crossed my mind, Professor Oshiro had already spread out his big leather coat, like an umbrella—one against showers of stones—over me and stopped, or at least deadened, their impact. The antisubversive course in Taiwan did not greatly impress him, but he took the trouble to present me with a report on everything he had heard and learned in it.

Since the trip through Asia was political, and with an overloaded agenda, I had hardly any time in those weeks for cultural activities or for seeing writers. With two exceptions. In Taipei I had lunch with the leaders of the local PEN club and was able to have a brief conversation with the magnificent Nancy Ying, of whom I had become a very good friend when I was the international president of that organization. And, in Seoul, the Korean PEN center gave a reception for me, to which it invited those who had accompanied me on the tour. It was presided over by an imposing figure, dressed in a very beautiful silk kimono with a flower print and carrying painted paper fans. The banker and industrialist Gonzalo de la Puente, making a bow worthy of a Renaissance courtier, leaned over to kiss the figure’s hand: “
Chère madame…
” We discreetly informed him that the person was a
cher monsieur
, a venerable poet, and apparently a very popular one.

Just after my return to Lima I gave a press conference reporting on my trip and the good prospects for the development of Peru’s economic relations with the countries of the Pacific Rim. The tour received good reviews from the media. There seemed to be a unanimous feeling in favor of Peru’s improving its interchanges with countries possessing enormous excess financial funds available for industrial investment. Wasn’t it absurd not to have taken advantage of this opportunity which our neighbor, Chile, was already making such good use of?

Worried by the polls’ prediction of a crushing victory for the Democratic Front, on November 27, 1989, Alan García broke what, by a provision of the Constitution and by custom, should be the president’s attitude during the electoral process: a genuine or a feigned neutrality. And at a press conference, he appeared on the TV screens to say that if nobody “stands up to him” (by “him” meaning me), he would do so. By refuting, for example, the figures that I had given regarding the number of public employees in Peru. According to him, there were
only
507,000 people on the state payrolls. This was a subject of capital importance for us, and we had investigated it as thoroughly as was possible. Several times I had attended meetings of our committee on a national system of budget control, and the person who headed it, Dr. María Reynafarje, had given us a very interesting description of the underhanded tricks and crooked dealings which successive administrations had used to swell the number of employees in public enterprises. Alan García had exaggerated this practice to the point of perversion. The Peruvian Institute of Social Security, for instance, had a system of contracts with supposed firms employing security guards, and funds whose existence was kept as closely guarded as though they were a sort of military secret—a dodge that allowed the government to pay the salaries of hundreds of thugs and gunmen who belonged to its paramilitary groups. It was not hard for me, then, to argue with García and demonstrate the very next day, with figures in hand, that the number of Peruvians who received pay and salaries from the state (officially or through the subterfuge of temporary contracts) was over a million. The opinion surveys made after this polemical exchange showed that out of every three Peruvians, two believed me and only one believed him.

After that, and as a reprisal against my well-publicized trip through Asia, Alan García announced that Peru was granting recognition to Kim Il Sung’s regime and establishing diplomatic relations with North Korea. He hoped in this way to prevent or, at the least, put difficulties in the way of Peru’s economic interchanges with South Korea, and, indirectly, with the other countries of the Pacific Rim, for which Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship for life—under which North Korea was contending with Libya for the title of the state most actively promoting terrorism on a global scale—was an outcast regime.

But this was not the only reason. Through that gesture, Alan García was also repaying favors received by him and his party from that regime which, besides having been quarantined by the community of civilized countries, represented a survival of the most despotic form of Stalinist megalomania. During the 1985 presidential campaign, the communications media in Peru had pointed out with amazement the continual trips by Aprista leaders and by Alan García himself to Pyongyang, where, for instance, Representative Carlos Roca, dressed in a proletarian uniform, was in the habit of being photographed with North Korean officials. That the government of Kim Il Sung had given financial aid to Alan García’s campaign was something that went without saying, and there had even been a vitriolic denunciation in which a photographer from the periodical
Oiga
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had chanced upon a secret reunion of Aprista leaders and the semiofficial delegation of North Korea in Peru, at which, supposedly, one of the deliveries of campaign funds had been made in a shoe box!