A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (68 page)

I went back down to the living room and informed my friends on the political committee of Libertad of the interview with the archbishop, asking them to keep the news of it strictly confidential, joking with them, to relieve the tension a little, about what incredible occurrences took place in this incredible country in which, all of a sudden, the hopes of the Catholic Church of facing up to the offensive of the evangelicals appeared to have been placed square on the shoulders of an agnostic.

We went on exchanging ideas for a good while and finally I agreed to postpone my decision. I would take a couple of days off to rest, outside Lima. Meanwhile, I would avoid the press. In order to placate the reporters at the door, I asked Enrique Chirinos Soto to go talk to them. He was to limit himself to telling them that we had made an evaluation of the results of the election. But Enrique interpreted this as meaning that I had made him one of my permanent spokesmen, and both when I left my house and in New York, and then in Spain, he made foolish statements in the name of the Democratic Front—not even the most intelligent man is one for twenty-four hours out of twenty-four—such as the one in which he declared that in Peru there had never been a president who was a first-generation Peruvian, which cables relayed to Peru and which made me out to be endorsing antediluvian racist ideas. Álvaro hastened to deny it, regretting having to do so, because of the appreciation and gratitude he felt toward Enrique, who had been his mentor when he was a novice journalist at
La Prensa
, and I did so too, on this occasion and on all the others when I heard a similar argument in circles close to me.

But in those suffocating sixty days between April 8 and June 10, this did not prevent the two subjects that came up that morning in the meetings at my house from being turned into the two principal issues of the elections: racism and religion. From that time on, the electoral process was to assume an aspect that made me feel as though I had been trapped in a spider web of misunderstandings.

That same afternoon I went with Patricia—Álvaro, indignant at my having yielded under pressure, refused to go with us—to a beach in the South, to the house of some friends, hoping to have a couple of days by ourselves. But despite the complicated tactics we tried, the press discovered that very same afternoon that we were in Los Pulpos and laid siege to the house where I was staying. I was unable to go out onto the terrace to get a little sun without being besieged by TV cameramen, photographers, and reporters who attracted curiosity seekers and turned the place into a circus. I therefore confined myself to talking with friends who came to see me, and to taking a number of notes with an eye to the second round, in which I had to try to correct those errors that had contributed the most, in the final weeks, to the nosedive of our popular support.

The next morning Genaro Delgado Parker turned up on the beach, looking for me. Suspecting why he’d come, I didn’t receive him personally. Lucho talked with him, and as I had suspected, he was bringing a message to me from Alan García, proposing that we meet together in secret. I refused, nor did I accept that same proposal when it was later made to me twice by the president through other intermediaries. What could the aim of such a meeting be? Making a deal for securing the vote of the Apristas in the second round? Their backing had a price that I was unwilling to pay; and my mistrust of the man himself and his unlimited capacity for intrigue was such that, from the very start, it reduced to zero any possibility of coming to an understanding. Nonetheless, when a formal proposal of the Aprista party to begin a dialogue came, I named as my representatives Pipo Thorndike and Miguel Vega Alvear, who held several meetings with Abel Salinas and the former mayor of Lima, Jorge del Castillo (both of them very close to García). The dialogue led nowhere.

As soon as I returned to Lima, on the weekend of the 14th and 15th of April, I began making preparations for the second round. At the beach, I had reached the conclusion that there was no other alternative, since my withdrawal, besides creating a constitutional impasse that might serve as an alibi for a coup d’état, would be useless: all the forces of the Democratic Front were reluctant to make any agreement with Fujimori, whom they considered too involved with the APRA. It was necessary to put a good face on the bad times we were going through and try to raise the morale of my supporters, which, since April 8, had hit bottom, so that at least they would be good losers.

Criticisms and the search for those responsible for the results of the first round became more stubborn within our ranks; in the communications media accusations against various scapegoats proliferated. Opposing factions vented their fury on Freddy Cooper, as the campaign director, and also on Álvaro, Patricia—whom they accused of being the power behind the throne and of abusing her influence on me—and on Lucho Llosa and Jorge Salmón for the way in which they had managed the campaign publicity. There was no lack of criticism of me, for having permitted the extravagant advertising campaign by our candidates for seats in Congress, and for many other things, some of them quite justified and others motivated by downright racism in reverse: why had we brought to the fore so many white leaders and candidates in the Front, instead of balancing them with Indians, blacks, and mestizos? Why had it been a blond singer with blue eyes—Roxana Valdivieso—who got the rallies off to a lively start by singing the theme song of the Democratic Front, instead of a little mestiza from the coast or an Indian from the mountains with whom the darkskinned masses of the nation could have better identified themselves? Although they became milder later on, these attacks of paranoia and masochism continued to be heard in our ranks all during the two months of the campaign for the second round.

Freddy Cooper handed me his resignation but I did not accept it. I also persuaded Álvaro to stay on as communications director, even though he still thought I’d made a mistake by going on with my candidacy. To placate those who were touchy about it, Roxana didn’t sing at our meetings again and although Patricia went on working hard with Solidaridad and the Program for Social Aid (PAS), she did not give any more interviews or attend any more of the Front’s public ceremonies or accompany me on my travels throughout the interior (this was her decision, not mine).

That weekend I called a meeting of the “kitchen cabinet,” reduced now to those responsible for the campaign, for finances, for the media, and to the communications director, with the addition of a new member, Beatriz Merino, who had an excellent public image and had made a strong showing in the preferential voting, and we drew up a plan for the new strategy. Not the slightest modification would be made in the Plan for Governing, naturally. But we would talk less about sacrifices and more about the range of activities of the PAS and other social programs that we had begun to set up. My campaign would now be oriented toward demonstrating the activities to further solidarity and the social aspect of the reforms, and its efforts would be concentrated on the young towns and the marginal sectors of Lima and the principal urban centers of the country. Publicity would be reduced to a minimum and the amount of the campaign budget thus saved would be channeled toward the PAS. Since Mark Malloch Brown and his advisers insisted in no uncertain terms that it was indispensable to wage a negative campaign against Fujimori, whose image had to be exposed as a false one in the eyes of the general public, by demanding that he present his program for governing and thus reveal his weak points, I said that I would approve of such a strategy if it were based on the revelation of verifiable information. But after that meeting I could sense the scandalous levels of mudslinging in which both my supporters and my adversaries would indulge during the coming weeks. On Monday, April 16, on the Calle Tiziano, where it had its general headquarters, I met with the directors of the Plan for Governing and the heads of the principal committees. I urged them to go on working, as though in any event we were going to take over the presidency on July 28, and I asked Lucho Bustamante and Raúl Salazar to present me with a proposal for my ministerial cabinet. Lucho would be prime minister and Raúl would be in charge of the Ministry of Finance. It was indispensable for the teams of each branch of the administration to be ready for the changing of the guard. Moreover, it was advisable to evaluate the interrelationship between the forces in the Congress that had been elected on April 8 and to outline a policy for dealing with the legislative branch from July 28 on, so as to be able to carry out the most essential part of our program at least.

That same afternoon, at Pro-Desarrollo, I attended a meeting of the executive council of the Democratic Front, at which Bedoya and Belaunde Terry, as well as Orrego and Alayza, were present. It was a meeting marked by long faces, buried resentment, and visible apprehension. At that point not even the most experienced of those old pols could understand the Fujimori phenomenon. Like Chirinos Soto, Belaunde, with his deep-rooted idea of a mestizo, Indian-Hispanic Peru, was alarmed at the thought that someone with all his dead kin buried in Japan would get to be president. How could someone who was practically a foreigner have a profound commitment to the country? These arguments, which I heard from many of my supporters, among them a group of retired navy officers who visited me, made me feel that I was in the midst of a totally absurd situation, and left me wishing that Fujimori would win, just to see whether by his victory that ethnically biased vision of what was genuinely Peruvian had been expunged forever.

Yet something positive resulted from this meeting: a collaboration of the forces of the Democratic Front, in a fraternal spirit that had not existed before. From then on, until June 10, populists, members of the PPC, Libertad, and SODE worked together, without the quarrels, low blows, and pettiness of previous years, presenting a very different image from the one that they had previously offered. Because of the tremendous setback that the low number of votes they received signified for all of them, or because they sensed how risky it could be for Peru if there came to power someone who had come from nowhere and represented a leap in the dark or the continuation of García’s administration through a straw man, or because of an uneasy conscience resulting from the selfish factionalism that often characterized our coalition, or simply because there were no longer any seats in Congress at stake, the enmities, jealousies, envy, rancor disappeared during this second stage. On the part both of leaders and of militants of the various parties comprising the Front there was a will to collaborate, which, although it was almost too late to change the final result, allowed me to focus all my efforts on the adversary and not be distracted by the internal problems that had given me such headaches during the first round.

Freddy Cooper set up a small campaign commando team with leaders of Popular Action, the Christian Popular Party, the Freedom Movement, and SODE, and composite teams left for various areas to breathe life into mobilizing the forces of the Front. Almost none of those called on refused to travel and many leaders spent days or weeks at a time going back and forth throughout the provinces and districts of the interior, trying to win back the votes that had been lost. Eduardo Orrego stayed in Puno, Manolo Moreyra in Tacna, Alberto Borea of the PPC, Raúl Ferrero of Libertad, and Edmundo del Águila of Popular Action in the emergency zone, and I believe that there was not a single
departamento
or region where they failed to raise the spirits of our downcast political partners, all this in an atmosphere of increasing violence, for ever since the day after the elections, Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA had unleashed another terrorist offensive that left dozens of people injured and dead all over the country.

It had been with Popular Action that the leaders and activists of the Freedom Movement had had the most difficulties coordinating the campaign in the first stage. Now, however, it was from Popular Action that I received the strongest backing, especially from its young and diligent secretary for the
departamento
of Lima, Raúl Diez Canseco, who, from mid-April on, devoted himself day and night until election day to working side by side with me, organizing daily trips around the shantytowns and slum settlements on the outskirts of Lima. I scarcely knew Raúl, and the only thing I had heard about him concerned the squabbles that he inevitably became involved in with the Libertad activists at rallies—he was the man Belaunde relied on for mobilizing members of Popular Action—but in those two months I really came to appreciate him for the way in which he committed himself to the second-round campaign when in all truth he no longer had any personal reason for doing so, since he was already assured of his seat in the Chamber of Representatives. He was one of the most enthusiastic and dedicated people in the Front, sparing no effort to help get things organized, solving problems, raising the morale of those who were losing heart, and infecting everyone with his own enthusiasm and his conviction with regard to the possibilities of winning which, whether they were genuine or feigned, were a tonic to ward off the defeatism and exhaustion that surrounded all of us. He came out to my house each morning, very early, with a detailed list of the public squares, corners, markets, schools, cooperatives, projects of the PAS under way which we would be visiting, and during the many hours of the day’s tour he was never without a smile on his lips, making kindly remarks, and sticking very close to me in case I was attacked.

In order to demolish that image of a “haughty man,” someone “aloof” from the people, which, according to Mark Malloch Brown’s surveys, I had acquired in the eyes of humble voters, it was decided that, in this second stage, I would not tour the streets with my bodyguards. They would accompany me at a distance, melting into the crowd, which would be able to approach me, shake hands with me, touch me and embrace me, and also, at times, tear off bits of my clothes or push me to the ground and mangle me if they felt like it. I went along with these arrangements, but I readily admit that it cost me a heroic effort. I didn’t have—I don’t have—any appetite for mingling with crowds and I had to accomplish miracles to conceal my dislike for that sort of semihysterical pushing and pulling, kissing, pinching and pawing, and smile even when I felt that those demonstrations of affection were crushing my bones or tearing a muscle. Since, moreover, there was always the danger of an attack—on many occasions we were forced to confront groups of Fujimoristas, and I have already recounted how the good head of my friend Enrique Ghersi, who also was in the habit of accompanying me, stopped a stone hurled straight at my face on one of these tours—Raúl Diez Canseco always arranged things so that, if Ghersi wasn’t on hand, he himself would be close by to confront the aggressor. As darkness was falling, I would go back home, exhausted and aching all over, to bathe and change clothes, for at night I had meetings with those in charge of the Plan for Governing or the campaign commando team, and sometimes I had so many bruises that I had to rub myself all over with arnica as well before meeting with them. Every once in a while I recalled those terrific pages of Konrad Lorenz’s study
On Aggression
, where he recounts how wild ducks, in their impassioned amorous flights, suddenly become infuriated and kill each other. For, engulfed in a multitude of overexcited people who were tugging at me and embracing me, I often felt that I was only one step away from immolation.