A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (61 page)

Since the rallies almost always drew huge crowds and, in the final weeks, the internal rivalries seemed to have disappeared and the Front presented an image of cohesion and solidity, victory seemed certain to me. The opinion polls also predicted the same thing, although all of them discounted the possibility of a resounding victory in the first round. There would be a weeding out of the weaker candidates, and I preferred running against the APRA candidate in the second round, since I imagined that the anti-Aprismo of certain forces of the left would allow me to capture votes from that constituency. But, deep down inside, I didn’t lose hope that, at the last moment, the Peruvian people would agree to give me the mandate I was seeking as early as April 8.

On March 28, my birthday, the reception given me in Iquitos was an apotheosis. A huge crowd accompanied me from the airport to the city, and Patricia, who was with me in the open-roofed touring car, and I were impressed to see that from all the houses and street corners more and more groups of enthusiasts came to join the dense procession that never stopped, not even for a moment, chanting in chorus the slogans of the Front and singing and dancing with indescribable happiness and fervor. (Every event in Amazonia turns into a fiesta.) A giant birthday cake awaited me on the speakers’ platform, with fifty-four little candles, and even though the lights kept going out and the microphones didn’t work well, the rally was so huge that Patricia and I were electrified.

I slept in Iquitos that night, for the three or four hours that had become my sleep ration, and on the following morning, very early, I flew to Cuzco, where, beginning with Sicuani, Urcos, Urubamba, and Calca, I set out on a tour that was to end, two days later at five o’clock in the afternoon, in the main square of the ancient capital of the Inca empire. For historical and also political reasons, Cuzco, the traditional bastion of the left, has symbolic value in Peru. The Plaza de Armas, its main square, where the stones of the ancient Inca palaces serve as a foundation for the churches and dwellings built in the colonial era, is one of the most beautiful and imposing ones I know, as well as one of the largest. The Libertad committee in Cuzco had promised me that, on that afternoon, it would be full to overflowing, and that neither Apristas nor Communists would manage to spoil the rally. (They had tried to attack us on all my previous tours of the
departamento
.)

I was getting ready to leave for the rally when Álvaro called me from Lima. I could tell that he was very upset. He was at the campaign headquarters, with Mark Malloch Brown, Jorge Salmón, Luis Llosa, Pablo Bustamante, and the analysts of the opinion polls. They had just received the final one before the election and had had a major surprise: in the marginal districts and young towns of Lima—60 percent of the capital—Alberto Fujimori had taken off in the last few days at a dizzying rate, displacing both the candidate of the APRA and that of the United Left as the one that voters intended to cast their ballot for, and there was every indication that his popularity was rising, “like foam, by the minute.” According to the analysts it was a phenomenon restricted to the poorest districts of Lima and the C and D sectors; in the other districts, and in the remainder of Peru, the proportion of forces was still the same as before. Mark considered the danger a very serious one and advised me to suspend the tour, including the rally in Cuzco, and return to Lima immediately, in order to concentrate all our efforts, from that day on until the election, on the districts and neighborhoods on the periphery of the capital so as to halt that phenomenon.

I answered Álvaro that they were crazy if they thought I was going to leave my followers in Cuzco in the lurch, and told him that I would return to Lima the next day, after the rallies in Quillabamba and Puerto Maldonado. I left for the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco, and the spectacle there made me forget all the apprehensions of the campaign directors. It was late afternoon and a torrid sun was scorching the foothills of the Cordillera and the coast of Carmenca. The roofs of San Blas and the pre-Hispanic stones of churches and convents gave off flames. In the pure indigo-blue sky there were no clouds and a few stars were already out. The dense crowd that covered the enormous square seemed to be on the point of bursting with enthusiasm and in the transparent mountain air the weathered faces of the men and the bright colors of the women’s wide skirts and the placards and flags which that forest of hands was waving were sharp and clear and seemed to be within reach of anyone who, from the speakers’ platform erected in the atrium of the cathedral, stretched out an arm to touch them. During the entire campaign I have never been as moved as I was that late afternoon in Cuzco, in that ancient and beautiful Plaza de Armas where the ill-starred country in which I was born experienced its most sublime moments of glory and where, in days long gone, it was civilized and prosperous. I said as much, with a lump in my throat, to the architect Gustavo Manrique Villalobos of the Libertad committee, when, his eyes damp, he whispered to me, pointing to the impressive crowd: “We’ve kept our promise, Mario.”

That night, at dinnertime, at the Hotel de Turistas, I asked who this Alberto Fujimori was, who now, only ten days before the election, seemed to begin to exist as a candidate, and where he came from. Up until then I don’t believe I’d given a single thought to him, or ever heard anyone mention him in the analyses and projected results of the election made within the Front and the Freedom Movement. On rare occasions I had seen, in passing, the few sparse placards of the ghostlike organization that registered him as its candidate, the name of which, Cambio 90, was plagiarized from a slogan of ours, “El gran cambio, en libertad”—“The great change, in freedom”—and picturesque photos of this figure whose campaign strategy consisted of riding around on a tractor, sometimes with an Indian cap with earflaps above his Oriental face, repeating a slogan—Honesty, Technology, and Work—which represented his entire proposal for governing the country. But not even as a folkloric eccentricity did this fifty-two-year-old agricultural engineer, the son of Japanese parents, with a twice-repeated surname—Fujimori Fujimori—reign supreme among the ten candidates for the presidency registered by the National Board of Elections, since in that domain he was bested by one even more bizarre: Señor Ataucusi Gamonal, also known as the prophet Ezequiel.

The prophet Ezequiel was the founder of a new religion, the Israelite Church of the New Universal Covenant, which had sprung up in the mountain fastnesses of the Andes, and to a certain extent had taken root in rural communities and marginal neighborhoods of the cities. A humble man, born in the little town of La Unión (in the
departamento
of Arequipa), educated by an evangelical sect in the central highlands, he had left that sect after having had a “revelation” in Tarma and founded his own. His faithful could be easily recognized because the women went around dressed in severe tunics and wore kerchiefs on their heads and the men had inordinately long hair and fingernails, since one of the precepts of their creed was not to interfere with the development of the natural order. They lived in communes, working the land and sharing everything, and had had confrontations with Sendero Luminoso. At the beginning of the campaign, Juan Ossio, an anthropologist who was studying the “Israelites” and had a good relationship with them, had invited me to have lunch at his house with the prophet Ezequiel and his chief apostle, Brother Jeremías Ortiz Arcos, since he thought that the support of the sect might win us votes among peasants. That lunch lingers in my mind as an amusing memory, in which all conversation with me was carried on by Brother Jeremías, a sturdy, astute mestizo who wore his hair in tangled braided dreadlocks and affected studied poses, as the prophet remained silent, lost in a sort of mystic rapture. Only over dessert, after having eaten like a Heliogabalus, did he return to this world. His eyes sought mine, and seizing my arm with his black talons, he uttered this definitive pronouncement: “I shall put you on the throne, Doctor.” Encouraged by what we took to be a promise of aid in the election, Juan Ossio and Freddy Cooper went to have lunch with the prophet Ezequiel and his apostles in an “Israelite” tent, in a slum district of Lima, and Freddy remembered that love-feast as one of the least digestible ordeals of his ephemeral political career. And a useless one, moreover, since a short time thereafter the prophet Ezequiel decided to place himself on the throne in my stead, by launching his own candidacy. Although he had never reached even one percent in the opinion surveys, the analysts of the Front sometimes speculated on the possibility of a shift in the rural vote toward the prophet, thereby destabilizing the political panorama. But none of them had any inkling that the surprise would come from agricultural engineer Fujimori.

On my return to Lima, on the afternoon of March 30, I was confronted with a curious piece of news. Our security unit had gotten wind of an order given the evening before by President García to all the regional development corporations to the effect that, henceforth, they were to redirect their logistic support—transportation, communications, and advertising—withdrawing it from Alva Castro’s Aprista candidacy and giving it instead to Cambio 90. At the same time, from that day on, all the communications media dependent on the government and with ties to García—especially Channel 5, “Radioprogramas,”
La República, Página Libre
, and
La Crónica—
began to extol systematically a candidacy that, up until then, they had scarcely mentioned. The only person who didn’t appear to be surprised at the news was Fernando Belaunde, with whom I met on the night of my return to Lima. “Fujimori’s candidacy is a typical Aprista maneuver to take votes away from us,” the ex-president assured me. “They did the same thing to me, in 1963, inventing the candidacy of engineer Mario Samamé Boggio, who said the same things I did, was a professor at the same university as I was, and who, in the end, received even fewer votes than the number of signatures that got him on the official list of candidates.” Was the candidate in the cap with earflaps and the tractor an epiphenomenon invented by Alan García? In any event, Mark Malloch Brown was worried. The flash polls—we took one every day in Lima—confirmed that in the shantytowns the popularity of the “little Chinaman” was rapidly increasing.

Who was he? Where did he come from? He had been a professor of mathematics and rector of the Agrarian University, and in that capacity headed for a time the CONUP (Asamblea Nacional de Rectores: National Assembly of University Rectors). But his candidacy couldn’t be weaker. He hadn’t even been able to fill the quotas for senators and congressmen on his list. Among his candidates there were many pastors of evangelical churches, and all of them, without exception, were unknowns. We discovered later that he had included on his list of candidates his own gardener and a prophetess and palmist, implicated in a trial having to do with drugs, named Madame Carmelí. But the best proof of the lack of seriousness of his candidacy was that Fujimori himself was also a candidate for a Senate seat. The Peruvian Constitution allows this duplication, which is taken advantage of by many aspirants to seats in Congress who, in order to garner more publicity, register at the same time as presidential candidates. Nobody with a real possibility of being elected president runs for a senatorship at the same time, since according to the Constitution the two offices create a conflict of interest.

Although I did not cancel all the remainder of the tours scheduled for the last days before the election—Huancayo, Jauja, Trujillo, Huaraz, Chimbote, Cajamarca, Tumbes, Piura, and Callao—I made lightning visits, almost every morning before leaving for the provinces, to the young towns in Lima where Fujimori seemed to have the firmest support, and I also made a series of TV spots, talking with people from the C and D sectors who asked me questions about the points in my program under heaviest attack. With the brand-new support of planes and minivans belonging to the government, Fujimori began a series of junkets in the provinces, and news programs showed large audiences of humble Peruvians at all his meetings, people whom the “little Chinaman” with the poncho, the cap with earflaps, and the tractor who attacked all politicians in his speeches seemed to have bewitched overnight.

On Friday, March 30, the new mayor of Lima, Ricardo Belmont, endorsed my candidacy. He did so from my house in Barranco, after a conversation that proved to be very instructive to me. Fujimori’s takeoff had greatly disturbed him, because not only had he repeated everything that Belmont had said in his municipal campaign—“I am not a politician,” “All politicians have been failures,” “The time for independent candidates has come”—but in addition the committees of Belmont’s own organization, OBRAS, were being cannibalized by Cambio 90 in the marginal districts of Lima. His local offices were switching banners and the posters with his face were being replaced by others with the face of the “little Chinaman.” In Ricardo’s opinion, there wasn’t the slightest doubt about it: Fujimori was a creation of the APRA. And he told me that the former Aprista mayor of Lima, Jorge del Castillo, had tried to get him to include Fujimori on his list of city councilmen, something he hadn’t gone along with since Fujimori, though a university professor, was an absolute political unknown. Six months back, the presidential candidate of Cambio 90 had aspired to no higher office than that of municipal councilman.

As he had told Álvaro, with whom he had had several meetings prior to this one with me and with whom he had made friends, in the talk we had together Ricardo Belmont assured me: “I’m going to stop Fujimori.” And in those last eight days of the campaign he did everything in his power to back my candidacy, in a press conference, on a television program he planned with that very purpose in mind, and by coming up onto the speakers’ platform to offer me his support at the rally on April 4, on the Paseo de la República, with which we ended the campaign in Lima. None of this helped to hold back what reporters were soon to baptize as “the tsunami,” but it left me with an image of Belmont as a likable person, who, predictably, was made to pay dearly for that display of loyalty to me by the future Peruvian government, which asphyxiated the mayoralty of Lima by depriving it of financial resources and condemning Belmont to a city administration that could accomplish next to nothing.
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