A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (42 page)

Democracia
had only just come out when I was summoned by my father to his office. I found him livid, waving about the weekly on which my name appeared on the masthead as editor-in-chief. Had I forgotten that
La Crónica
belonged to the Prado family? That
La Crónica
had exclusive rights to material that came from the International News Service? That he was the director of the INS? Did I want
La Crónica
to cancel his contract and leave him without a job? He ordered me to take my name off the masthead. So as a result, after the second or third issue, my friend and comrade from San Marcos, Guillermo Carrillo Marchand, succeeded me as the supposed editor-in-chief—the real one was Luis Jaime. And since after a few issues Guillermo also had problems because of his being on the masthead in that capacity,
Democracia
then came out with a fictitious editor-in-chief, whose name we filched from one of Borges’s short stories.

The Christian Democrats played a major role in the downfall of Esparza Zañartu, which precipitated the death of the dictatorship. If he had continued to be in charge of the security forces of the dictatorship, the regime would perhaps have gone on beyond the elections of 1956, by faking the results, as it had done in 1950, in favor of Odría himself or of some figurehead (there were several individuals lining up to play that role). But the fall of the strongman of the regime weakened it and plunged it into a state of disorder in which the opposition seized the opportunity to take over the streets.

Throughout the dictatorship Esparza Zañartu had occupied a relatively unimportant post—administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior—which allowed him to remain in the background, for despite the fact that he made all the decisions with respect to security, the minister of the interior took public responsibility for them. The probable reason that led Odría to make Esparza Zañartu minister was that nobody wanted to occupy that puppet post. Legend has it that when General Odría summoned him to offer him the portfolio, Esparza answered that he would accept it, out of loyalty, but that this measure was the equivalent of suicide for the regime. And so it was. The moment that Esparza Zañartu became a visible target, all the weapons of the opposition were trained on him. The coup de grâce was the demonstration by Pedro Roselló’s National Coalition, in Arequipa, which Esparza tried to break up by sending hired gunmen and police in civvies as counterdemonstrators. The latter were routed by the Arequipans, and police began shooting at the dissidents, the result being a large number of casualties. The drama of 1950 seemed to be repeating itself, when, during the fraudulent elections, confronted with an attempted rebellion in the streets by the people of Arequipa, Odría had resorted to a wholesale slaughter. But this time the regime did not dare to bring tanks and soldiers out into the street to fire on the crowd, as rumor has it that Esparza Zañartu wanted to do. Arequipa declared a general strike, which the entire city took part in. At the same time, in accordance with the long-standing custom that had earned it the name of the caudillo city (since the majority of republican rebellions and revolutions began there), the Arequipans tore up the paving stones of the streets and set up barricades, where thousands upon thousands of men and women of every social sector waited on the alert for the regime’s response to their list of demands: Esparza Zañartu’s resignation, the abolition of the Law of Domestic Security, and a date set for free elections. After three days of tremendous tension, the regime sacrificed Esparza Zañartu, who, after resigning, hurriedly went abroad. And although the dictatorship named a military cabinet, it was evident to everyone, beginning with Odría himself, that the people of Arequipa—the home territory of Bustamante y Rivero—had dealt him a fatal blow.

In that Arequipan epic, which, in Lima, we students at San Marcos supported with lightning demonstrations at which Javier Silva and I were always in the first row, the leaders at various times were Mario Polar, Roberto Ramírez del Villar, Héctor Cornejo Chávez, Jaime Rey de Castro, and other Arequipans of the nascent Christian Democratic movement. They were attorneys who had great prestige, friends and even relatives of the Llosa family, and one of them, Mario Polar, had been a suitor, or as my Granny Carmen put it, a “beau” of my mother’s, to whom as a young man he had written some passionate poems that she kept hidden from my father, a man of retrospective fits of jealousy.

All these reasons finally aroused my wholehearted enthusiasm when the Christian Democratic movement organized itself as a party and I signed up as a member of it. I was immediately catapulted, I have no idea either how or by whom, to the departmental committee for Lima, of which Luis Jaime Cisneros, Guillermo Carrillo Marchand, and such respectable holders of academic chairs as the jurist Ismael Bielich and the psychiatrist Honorio Delgado were also members. The new party declared in its statutes that “it was not based on a creed,” so that it was not necessary to be a believer in order to be militant in it, but in all truth the headquarters of the party—an old house with walls made of cane reeds and clay, with balconies—on the Avenida Guzmán Blanco, very near the Plaza Bolognesi, seemed like a church, or at least a sacristy, since all the well-known ultrapious believers in Lima were there, from Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy to the leaders of Catholic Action and of UNEC (Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos: National Union of Catholic Students) and all the young people seemed to be students at the Catholic University. I wonder whether in those days there were any other students from San Marcos in the Christian Democratic Party except for myself and Guillermo Carrillo (Javier Silva was to sign up as a member sometime later).

What the devil was I doing there, among these people who were ultrarespectable, but light-years away from the Sartrean who ate priests alive, the leftist sympathizer not completely cured of the Marxist notions of the circle that I had belonged to, that I still felt myself to be? I wouldn’t be able to explain it. My political enthusiasm was quite a bit stronger than my ideological consistency. But I remember having experienced a certain uneasiness whenever I was obliged to explain intellectually my militancy in the Christian Democratic Party. And things got worse when, thanks to Antonino Espinoza, I was able to read material having to do with the social doctrine of the Church and Leo XIII’s famous encyclical
Rerum Novarum
, which the Christian Democrats always cited as proof of their commitment to social justice and their will to work for economic reform to favor the poor. The famous encyclical fell from my hands as I read it, because of its paternalistic rhetoric, its gassy sentiments and vague criticisms of the excesses of capital. I recall having commented on the subject to Luis Loayza—who, if I remember correctly, had also signed some Christian Democratic text or other or had enrolled as a member of the party—and having told him how ill at ease I felt after reading that celebrated encyclical that struck me as being extremely conservative. He too had tried to read it, and after a few pages had started retching.

Nonetheless, I did not part company with the Christian Democratic Party (I would abandon it only years later, from Europe, because of the lukewarmness of its defense of the Cuban revolution, when for me the latter became an impassioned cause), because its fight against dictatorship and for the democratization of Peru was impeccable and because I continued to believe that Bustamante y Rivero would end up being the leader of the party and perhaps its presidential candidate. But, above all, because I, along with other more or less radical young people, discovered among the leaders of the Christian Democratic Party an attorney from Arequipa, who, although as devout a believer as the others, seemed to us from the start to be a man of more advanced and more progressive ideas than his colleagues, someone determined not only to moralize and democratize Peruvian politics, but also to bring about a profound reform so as to put an end to the iniquities of which the poor were victims: Héctor Cornejo Chávez.

The fact that I speak of him in those terms today, in view of his repulsive activities later as the adviser of Velasco’s military dictatorship, the author of the monstrous law confiscating all the communications media, and the first editor-in-chief of
El Comercio
after the state had taken it over, will make many people smile. But the fact is that, in the middle of the 1950s, when he came to Lima from his native Arequipa, this young attorney appeared to be a model of a politician with clean hands, a man driven by his burning democratic zeal and an indignation that flared up on the slightest provocation against any and every form of injustice. He had been Bustamante y Rivero’s secretary, and I was only too eager to see in him a rejuvenated and radicalized version of the former president, with the same moral integrity and the same unbreakable commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

Dr. Cornejo Chávez spoke of agrarian reform, of a reform of business enterprises based on profit sharing and a voice in their management by their workers, and he condemned oligarchy, large landowners, the “forty families,” with Jacobin rhetoric. He was admittedly not a likable man, but, rather, cold and distant, with that ceremonious and rather pompous manner of speaking so frequent in Arequipans (especially those who had had experience before the bar), but his modest and almost frugal way of life made many of us think that, with him at the head, the Christian Democratic Party could accomplish the transformation of Peru.

Things turned out very differently. Cornejo Chávez eventually became the leader of the party—he was not its head in 1955 or 1956, when I was a militant in it—and was its candidate for the presidency in the election of 1962, in which he won an insignificant percentage of the vote. His authoritarianism and his personality little by little created tensions and factional quarrels within his own party, which culminated, in 1965, in the breakup of the Christian Democrats: a majority of the leaders and militants were to leave, with Luis Bedoya Reyes at their head, to form the Christian Popular Party, whereas Cornejo Chávez’s party, reduced to its nadir, was barely to survive General Velasco’s military coup in 1968. He then saw that his hour had come. What he was unable to secure by way of the ballot box, Dr. Cornejo Chávez obtained through the dictatorship: reaching power by virtue of the fact that the military entrusted him with tasks as undemocratic as gagging the communications media and gutting the power of the judiciary (since he was also to be responsible for the creation of the National Council of Justice, an institution through which the dictatorship placed judges in its service).

When Velasco fell from power—when he was replaced, after a palace coup led by General Morales Bermúdez, in 1975—Cornejo Chávez, after taking part in the Constituent Assembly (1978–1979), retired from politics, in which, surely, he had left behind him nothing but bad memories.

The nonexistent Christian Democratic Party—a handful of social climbers—figured, nonetheless, in the political life of Peru, allied to Alan García, who, in order to maintain the fiction of a liberalizing regime, always had a Christian Democrat in his administration. After Alan García Christian Democracy died out, or rather, its governing board went into hibernation to wait until circumstances would allow it to recover a few crumbs of power once it had become the parasite of another of the revolving heads of state.

But we are in 1955 and all that is still far in the future. After that summer, as I began classes in my third year at the university and discussed literature with Luis Loayza, was a militant in the Christian Democratic movement, wrote short stories, and made index cards from history books at Porras Barrenechea’s, there arrived in Lima someone who would represent another earth tremor of my existence: “Aunt” Julia.

On October 26, 1989,
El Diario
, the mouthpiece of Sendero Luminoso, published a communiqué in the name of a front organization, the MRDP (Movimiento Revolucionario en Defensa del Pueblo: Revolutionary Movement in Defense of the People), calling for a “class-based armed work stoppage” for November 3, “in support of the war of the people.”

The following morning, the United Left candidate for the mayoralty of Lima and the presidency, Henry Pease García, announced that on the day chosen by the Sendero Luminoso movement for the work stoppage he would take to the streets with his supporters with the aim of proving “that democracy [is] stronger than subversion.” I was with Álvaro, in my study—early each morning, before the meeting of the “kitchen cabinet,” we went over the program for the day—when I heard the news on the radio. The idea instantly occurred to me to join the demonstration and take to the streets too with my supporters on November 3 in answer to the challenge of Sendero Luminoso. Álvaro liked the idea, and to avoid its bogging down in complicated consultations with the allies, I wasted no time and made my decision public, in a telephone interview with “Radioprogramas.” In it, I congratulated Henry Pease and proposed to him that we march together.

It caused a sensation that someone who for years had been a target of native progressivist intellectuals, a group that included Pease, should lend his support to an initiative of the Marxist left, and it struck some of my friends as a political error. They feared that my gesture would give Pease’s candidacy a sort of backing (the opinion polls showed him as having the support of less than 10 percent of those intending to vote). But this was a typical case in which ethical considerations ought to prevail over political ones. Sendero Luminoso was behaving more and more daringly and extending its area of activity; its attacks took place daily, as did its murders. In Lima, its presence had greatly increased in factories, schools, and the young towns, where its schools and indoctrination centers functioned in plain sight of everyone. Wasn’t it a good idea for civil society to take to the streets to demonstrate in favor of peace on the same day that terrorism threatened to stage an armed work stoppage? The Peace March received a tidal wave of support, from political parties, unions, cultural and social institutions, and well-known figures. And it attracted a huge number of demonstrators, eager to show their repudiation of the horror into which Peru was gradually sinking through the messianic fanaticism of a minority.

Pressured by the prevailing mood, the candidates of the APRA (Alva Castro) and of the Socialist Alliance (Barrantes Lingán) joined the march too, although their lack of enthusiasm was evident. Both of them made a point of being present at the monument to Miguel Grau, on the Paseo de la República, and withdrew with their small delegations before the other contingents, the United Left column and that of the Democratic Front, which had begun the march, the former from the Plaza Dos de Mayo and ours from the monument to Jorge Chávez, had joined up together on the Avenida 28 de Julio.

After a slow, enthusiastic, and orderly march, the columns converged in front of the monument to Grau and there Henry Pease and I gave each other a friendly embrace. We laid bouquets of flowers at the foot of the monument and the national anthem was sung. The enormous crowd was made up not only of political militants but also of people who belonged to no party and had no interest in politics, who felt the need to express their condemnation of the murders, the kidnappings, the bombs, the disappearances, and other acts of violence that in recent years had so debased the value of life itself in Peru. There were many religious all round the monument to Grau—bishops, priests, nuns, lay Christians—who, amid the chorused slogans and locomotive cheers of the parties, let their own slogan be heard: “
Se siente, se siente, Cristo está presente
” (“We can feel it, we can feel it, Christ is here with us”).

I wouldn’t have joined the Peace March if the first move hadn’t come from Henry Pease, an adversary who, as an intellectual and as a politician, seemed to me to be a respectable person. There are many ways of defining what is respectable. As far as I am concerned, the intellectual or the politician who says what he believes, does what he says, and does not use ideas and words as a mere device to further his ambition deserves respect.

Respectable intellectuals in this sense do not abound in my country. I say this with sadness, but I know what I’m talking about. The subject kept me awake nights for years, until one day I thought I understood why signs of moral dishonesty seemed greater among people in my profession than among Peruvians with other vocations. And why so many of them had contributed so effectively to Peru’s political and cultural decadence. Before that, I had racked my brains trying to fathom why, among our intellectuals and above all the progressive-minded ones—the immense majority—there was such an abundance of rapscallions, scoundrels, impostors, con men. Why they could live so brazenly in a state of ethical schizophrenia, frequently belying by their actions in private what they promoted with such conviction in their writings and in their public conduct.

Anyone reading the manifestos, articles, and essays of these blustering anti-imperialists, anyone attending their classes or lectures, would have thought that hating the United States had become their apostolic mission. But almost all of them had applied for, received, and often literally
lived
on fellowships, aid funds, travel grants, special commissions, and assignments given them by U.S. foundations, and spent semesters and even entire academic years in the “entrails of the monster” (José Martí’s expression), fed by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, et cetera, et cetera. All of them frantically pulled strings and many of them succeeded, it is certain, in grafting themselves as professors onto those universities of the country which they had taught their students, disciples, and readers to detest as the party responsible for all the calamities suffered by Peru. How to explain this masochism of the intellectual species? Why this eager race of so many of them toward the country whose insanities they spent their lives denouncing, denunciations thanks to which they had built, in large part, their academic careers and acquired their petty prestige as sociologists, literary critics, political scientists, ethnologists, anthropologists, economists, archaeologists or poets, journalists, and novelists?

Some full-blown flowers, chosen at random. Julio Ortega began his career as an “intellectual” working at a salaried job for the Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura (the Congress for Cultural Freedom) in Lima in the 1960s, just at the time when it came out that this institution was receiving funds from the CIA, a revelation which led many writers who were there in good faith to withdraw from the Congress (he was not among their number). After that, he was avoided like the plague by progressives. With the advent of the revolutionary and socialist military dictatorship of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, he became a revolutionary and a socialist, thereby nailing down another salaried job. In the cultural supplement of one of the daily papers taken over by the dictatorship
—Correo—
of which he was named editor-in-chief, he devoted himself for several years to railing, in a “structuralist” jargon that combined intellectual ignorance with political baseness in symmetrical proportions, against those who did not accept as articles of faith the deportations, imprisonments, expropriations, censorship, and chicanery of Velasco-style socialism and to proposing, for instance, that diplomats who spoke up against the revolution be slapped in the face. When the dictator he was serving fell, because of an internal conspiracy by his own followers, many intellectuals were fired. Where did this pen pusher flee to earn his living? To the Cuba of his ideological affections? To North Korea? To Moscow? No. To Texas. To the university at Austin, for the time being, and when he was obliged to leave it, for the more tolerant Brown University, where, I suppose, he still is today, carrying on his battle in favor of an anti-imperialist revolution waged with tanks and drawn sabers. From there he sent articles during the election campaign to a Peruvian newspaper that fit him like a glove
—La República—
advising his far-distant compatriots not to waste this opportunity to vote for the “socialist choice.”

Another case, demonstrating the same baroque morality. Dr. Antonio Cornejo Polar, a literary critic and a “socialist Catholic,” as he was pleased to define himself—a way of reaching heaven without depriving himself of certain advantages of hell—had made himself a university career in that bastion of radicalism and of Sendero Luminoso sympathizers, San Marcos, which he managed to become rector of through the sole merits that, in his day and unfortunately even today, permit a candidate for the post to rise that high: his political ones. His “politically correct” progressivist line earned him the necessary votes, including those of the recalcitrant Maoists.

On March 18, 1987, in a talk in the United States, I spoke of the crisis in the national universities in Latin America and of how politicization and extremism had caused their academic levels to collapse and in some cases—such as that of my alma mater—had turned them into something that today scarcely deserved the name of university. In the predictable drumfire of protests that this caused in Peru, one of the most inflamed was that of the “socialist Catholic,” who, around that time, had withdrawn from the rectorate, maintaining that the problems of the university had placed him in the highly unusual condition of a pre-heart attack victim. Indignant, my critic asked himself how someone could attack the Peruvian popular and revolutionary university from the Metropolitan Club in New York.
^*
Up to that point everything appeared to be logically consistent. To my vast surprise, very shortly thereafter, the faculty advisory committee of a university of the imperialist monster asked me for a report on the intellectual competence of the person in question, a candidate for a lectureship in its Spanish department (a position which, naturally, he obtained). He is still there today, I presume, a living example of how one progresses in academic life by making the proper political choices at the proper moment.

I could mention a hundred other cases, all of them variants of this practice: create for yourself a public persona, convictions, ideas, and values for professional convenience, and at the same time, by your private conduct, belie them. The result of such inauthenticity is, in intellectual life, the devaluation of discourse, the triumph of clichés and empty rhetoric, of the dead language of slogans and platitudes over ideas and creativity. It is not by accident that, in the last thirty or forty years, Peru has produced almost nothing in the domain of thought worth remembering, while on the other hand it has built up a gigantic garbage dump of socialist, Marxist, and populist blather that has no contact with the reality of Peruvian problems.

In the realm of politics, the consequences have been even worse because those who had made a modus vivendi out of duplicity and ideological double-dealing won almost total control of the cultural life of Peru. And they produced almost everything that Peruvians studied or read, the ideological sustenance of the country, all that might satisfy the curiosity or appease the concerns of the young generations. Everything was in their hands: the universities and state schools and many private ones; the research institutes and centers; the magazines, the cultural supplements and publications, and, of course, the classroom textbooks. With their lack of culture and their contempt for any intellectual activity, the conservative sectors, which up until the 1940s or 1950s still had cultural hegemony over the country—with that brilliant generation of historians such as Raúl Porras Barrenechea and Jorge Basadre or philosophers such as Mariano Iberico and Honorio Delgado—had lost the battle sometime before and had not produced either individual talents or a concerted action capable of opposing the advance of the leftist intellectuals, who, once General Velasco took over as dictator, monopolized cultural life.

Yet leftist thought had an illustrious precursor in Peru: José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). In his short lifetime, he produced an impressive number of essays and articles to further the spread of Marxism, of analyses of Peruvian reality, and works of literary criticism or political commentaries on current events notable for their intellectual acuity, and often for their originality. In them the reader can find a freshness of concept and an individual voice that were never to appear again among his avowed followers. Although they all call themselves Mariateguists, from the most moderate to the most extreme (Abimael Guzmán himself, the founder and leader of Sendero Luminoso, maintains that he is a disciple of Mariátegui’s), passing by way of the PUM (Partido Unificado Mariateguista: Unified Mariateguist Party), the truth of the matter is that after the brief apogee that Mariátegui represented for socialist thought, the latter entered a decline in Peru which touched bottom during the years of the military dictatorship (1968–1980), in which the opposing positions in intellectual debate appeared to be confined to two: the opportunism of the left or terrorism.

Intellectuals had as much responsibility as the military for what happened in Peru during those years, especially in the first seven—1968 to 1975, those of General Velasco’s regime—in which all the wrong solutions for the nation’s great problems were adopted, making them worse and plunging Peru into a state of ruin to which Alan García was to give the last turn of the screw. They applauded the destruction by force of the democratic system, which, however defective and inefficient it may have been, permitted political pluralism, criticism, active unions, and the exercise of freedom. And with the argument that “formal” freedoms were the mask of exploitation, they justified the fact that political parties were forbidden, that no elections were held, that landed estates were confiscated and collectivized, that hundreds of businesses were nationalized and turned over to state control, that the freedom of the press and the right to criticize were suppressed, that censorship was institutionalized, that all the TV channels, the daily papers, and a large number of radio stations were expropriated, that a law was passed to subjugate the judicial power and place it in the service of the executive power, that hundreds of Peruvians were imprisoned and deported and a number of them assassinated. In all these years, having seized all the important communications media that existed in the country, they devoted themselves to harping on those slogans against democratic values and liberal democracy and to defending, in the name of socialism and the revolution, the abuses and iniquities of the dictatorship. And, of course, to raining down insults on those of us who did not share their enthusiasm for what Velasco’s sycophants called “the socialist, participationist and libertarian revolution.” And we lacked any forum for answering them.