A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (60 page)

Of all those meetings the one that left me with a better impression was a conversation I had with General Jaime Salinas Sedó, at that time the head of the Second Sector whose armored division has almost always been the source of military coups in Peru. With him in that post democracy seemed assured. Cultivated, well-spoken, with elegant manners, he appeared to be very concerned about the traditional lack of communication between civil society and the military sphere in Peru, which, he said, was a continual danger for the rule of law. He spoke to me of the necessity of modernizing the armed forces and bringing them up to date technically, of eradicating politics from them, and of severely punishing cases of corruption, frequent in recent years, so that the military institutions in our country would have the prestige that they had in France or Great Britain.
^*
Both he and Admiral Panizo, at the time chairman of the Joint Command, with whom I had a couple of private meetings, assured me emphatically that the armed forces would not permit any electoral fraud.

The speech I gave at the CAEM was one of three that I wrote and published during the campaign.
^†
It seemed important to me to speak in depth, before the cream of the crop from the various military branches, about subjects which were central to the liberal reform of Peru and which involved the armed forces.

Unlike the situation that obtains in modern democracies, in Peru there has never been a deep solidarity between the armed forces and civil society, because of the military coups and the almost total lack of communication between civilians and the military. In order to achieve that solidarity and professionalism, the total independence and impartiality of the armed forces in the face of political factionalism and contention were necessary. And it was necessary that military officers be aware of the fact that, in the economic situation in which Peru found itself, military expenditures would be nonexistent in the immediate future, except for giving the armed forces adequate equipment for the battle against terrorism. This battle would be won only if civilians and military personnel fought shoulder to shoulder against those who had already caused damages amounting to ten billion dollars. As president, I would assume the leadership of this fight, to wage which peasants and workers would be called upon to join together in armed patrols, advised by the military. And I would not tolerate abuses of human rights, for such tactics were incompatible with a state under the rule of law and counterproductive if the aim was to win the support of the people.

It is an error to confuse nationalism and patriotism. The latter is a legitimate feeling of love for the land where one was born; the former, a nineteenth-century doctrine, restrictive and antiquated, which in Latin America had brought on fratricidal wars between countries and ruined our economies. Following the example of Europe, we had to put an end to that nationalistic tradition and work toward integration with our neighbors, the disappearance of borders, and continental disarmament. My government would make every effort, from the very first day, to remove all economic and political barriers that hindered close collaboration and friendship with other Latin American countries, and with our neighbors in particular. I ended my speech with an anecdote that went back to the days when I was teaching at King’s College at London University. I discovered there one day that two of my most diligent students were young officers in the British Army, which had awarded them scholarships so that they could earn a master’s degree in Latin American studies: “I learned from them that in Great Britain entering Sandhurst or the Naval Academy or the Air Corps was a privilege reserved for the most capable and hardworking young men—neither more nor less so than entering the most prestigious universities—and that the training that they received there prepared them not only for the din of battle (though naturally it also prepared them for that), but also for peace: that is to say, for serving their country effectively as scientists, as researchers, as technical experts, as humanists.” The reorganization of the armed forces in Peru would be oriented toward that goal.

Two or three days after the CAEM meeting, the Sawyer/Miller Group had the results of a new national opinion poll, the most important one that had been taken up until then because of the number of people interviewed and the places included in the sample. I was first overall, with 41 or 42 percent of those in the sample intending to vote for me. Alva Castro had managed to climb to 20 percent, while Barrantes was at a standstill with 15 percent and Henry Pease at 8 percent. The results didn’t seem bad to me, since I was expecting a sharp drop because of the excessive propaganda put out for the preferential vote. But I didn’t accept Mark Malloch Brown’s proposal that I cancel the tours of the interior and concentrate on a media campaign and on visits to the marginal districts of Lima. My person and my program were well known in the capital, whereas in many places in the interior they still were not.

That same week, as, in the short breaks between meetings that I had in planes or minivans, I was scribbling the speech that I would deliver in a meeting with liberal intellectuals of different countries that Libertad had organized for March 7 to 9, the news of the assassination of our leader in Ayacucho, Julián Huamaní Yauli, reached me. I immediately flew to Ayacucho to attend his funeral and arrived as they were enshrouding his remains, in a little mortuary chapel that had been set up on the second floor of an ancient, dark building that had once been a private dwelling and was now the School of Public Accounting. I had a strange feeling as I stood there contemplating the head of this modest Ayacuchan, shattered to bits by Sendero bullets, remembering how, on each one of my trips to his homeland, he had accompanied me in my travels, formal and reserved, as the people in that part of the country usually are. His murder was a good example of the irrationality and stupid cruelty of the terrorist strategy, since it was not intended to punish any violence, exploitation, or abuse committed by the extremely modest and previously apolitical Julián Huamaní, but simply to terrify through the crime those who believed that elections could change things in Peru. He was the first leader of Libertad who had been killed. How many others would there be, I asked myself as we were taking his remains to the church, through the streets of Ayacucho, experiencing for the first time that feeling of guilt that, especially during the runoff vote, would overcome me every time I learned that the lives of militants or candidates of ours had been cut short by the terrorists.

Very shortly after the assassination of Julián Huamaní Yauli, on March 23, another of the Front’s candidates for a seat in the Chamber of Representatives, the populist José Gálvez Fernández, was murdered as he left the school that he was the head of, in Comas, one of the popular districts in Lima. Unaffected, simple and straightforward, likable, he was one of the local leaders of Popular Action who had worked the hardest for the close collaboration between the allied parties of the Front. When I went to the headquarters of Popular Action that night, where they were holding a wake for him, I found Belaunde and his wife Violeta badly shaken by the assassination of their colleague.

But amid bloody events such as these, in the final days of the campaign there was also a stimulating contrast: the Freedom Revolution meeting. For many months, we had been planning to bring together in Lima intellectuals of various countries whose ideas had contributed to the extraordinary political and cultural changes in the world, in order to show that what we wanted to do in Peru was part of a process of the reappraisal of democracy, in which more and more peoples around the globe were participating, and in order to show our compatriots that the most modern thought was liberal.

The meeting lasted for three days, in El Pueblo, on the outskirts of Lima, where conferences, round-table discussions, debates took place, and at night, serenades and fiestas to which the presence en masse of young people who belonged to Libertad lent a great deal of color. We had hopes that Lech Walesa would attend. The leader of Solidarity had promised Miguel Vega, who went to see him in Gdansk, that he would do his best to come, but at the last minute the internal problems of his country kept him from attending, and he sent us a message, through two leaders of the Polish labor movement, Stefan Jurczak and Jacek Chwedoruk, whose presence on the speakers’ platform, the night that they read the message aloud, gave rise to a great outburst of enthusiasm. (I remember Álvaro, more excited than usual, shouting Walesa’s name at the top of his lungs, in chorus with everyone else, with his arms upraised.)

Cultural meetings are usually boring, but this one wasn’t, not to me at any rate, nor, it seems to me, to the young people we brought from all over the country so that they could hear about the liberal offensive that was traversing the world. Many of them heard for the first time the things that were said there. Perhaps because of my total immersion in the stereotyped language of the electoral campaign, in those three days it seemed to me that I was tasting an exquisite forbidden fruit by hearing words without political cunning behind them or servitude to the immediate situation, used in a personal way, to explain the great changes that were taking place or that could suddenly occur in countries willing to reform themselves by staking everything on political and economic freedom—that was the subject dealt with by Javier Tusell—or simply to describe in the abstract, as Israel Kirzner did, the nature of the market. I remember the splendid explanatory speeches by Jean-François Revel and Sir Alan Walters as the high points of the meeting, and the explanation given by José Piñera of the economic reforms that brought Chile development and democratization. It was very stimulating, above all, thanks to the speeches by the Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the Mexicans Enrique Krause and Gabriel Zaid, the Guatemalan Armando de la Torre, and others, to realize that all over Latin America there were intellectuals attuned to our ideas, who looked on our campaign with the hope that, if it was carried through successfully in Peru, the liberal revolution would spread to their countries.

Among those who attended were two front-line Cuban freedom fighters: Carlos Franqui and Carlos Alberto Montaner. In the name of unequivocal democratic convictions, both of them had been fighting against Castro’s dictatorship for many years now, ever since they first felt that the revolution for which they had fought had been betrayed. It seemed to me that, as the meeting came to an end, I ought to make a public declaration of my solidarity with their cause, to say that the freedom of Cuba was also a flag we rallied round, and that, if we won the election, free Cubans would have in Peru an ally in their fight against one of the last vestiges of totalitarianism in the world. I did so, before reading my speech,
^*
provoking the predictable wrath of the Cuban dictator who, two or three days later, answered from Havana with his usual vituperations.

Octavio Paz, who was unable to come, sent a videotape with a recorded message, explaining why he now supported the candidacy which, two years before in London, he had tried to talk me out of, and Miguel Vega Alvear had trouble rounding up enough television sets so that everyone in the audience could hear the message. But he managed, and so Octavio Paz was there with us, through his image and his voice, during those days of the congress. His encouragement came at an opportune moment for me, for to tell the truth, every so often I could hear, still pounding in my ears, the reasons he’d given me, two years before, in a conversation in his London hotel on Sloane Street, as we were having the orthodox tea and scones, for not going into politics: incompatibility with intellectual work, loss of independence, being manipulated by professional politicians, and, in the long run, frustration and the feeling of years of one’s life wasted. In his message, Octavio, with that subtlety in developing a line of reasoning which, along with the elegance of his prose, is his best intellectual attribute, retracted those arguments and replaced them with other, more up-to-date ones, justifying my determination and connecting it with the great liberal and democratic mobilization in Eastern Europe. At that moment, it was invigorating for me to hear, from the lips of someone whom I had admired since my youth, the arguments in favor of my going into politics which I had put to myself sometime before. Not long afterward, however, I would have a chance to see how right his first reaction had been and how Peruvian reality hastened to prove this second one wrong.

But still more than for intellectual reasons, the three days of the congress were a real vacation for me, since I could hobnob with friends I hadn’t seen for some time and meet wonderful people who came to the meeting bringing ideas and testimony that were like a breath of fresh air to this country with a marginal culture at a dead end that poverty and violence had turned Peru into. Except for the heavy security surrounding the meeting place, the foreign participants had no indication of the violence amid which the country was living, and they could even enjoy a spectacle of Peruvian music and folk dances to which, on the spur of the moment, Ana and Pedro Schwartz contributed several lively Sevillian dances. (I record this fact for history, for every time I have told people about it, nobody has believed me that the eminent Spanish economist was capable of such a feat.)

These three days of relative relaxation gave me energy, moreover, for the last month, which was dizzying. I began campaigning again on Sunday, March 11, with rallies in Huaral, Huacho, Barranca, Huarmey, and Casma, and from that time on, up until the ceremony closing the campaign, on April 5 in Arequipa, I visited half a dozen cities and towns every day, talking, leading motorcades, and giving press conferences in all of them and flying back to Lima almost every night to meet with the Front’s national campaign leaders, with the team drawing up the Plan for Governing, and with the little group of advisers in the “kitchen cabinet,” meetings that Patricia, the coordinator of my agenda, also attended.