A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (69 page)

When I officially opened the runoff contest, on April 28, with a TV message entitled “De nuevo en campaña”—“On the Campaign Trail Again”—I already had two weeks of arduous work touring the marginal districts of Lima behind me. In that message I promised that I would do “everything in my power to get through not only to the intelligence but also to the heart of Peruvians.”

In line with the new strategy, I was to inform the public of the work being accomplished by Solidaridad and, in particular, by the PAS, which by that time had dozens of work projects under construction in the districts on the periphery of Lima. Shown viewing the classrooms, playgrounds, day-care centers, soup kitchens, wells, irrigation ditches large and small, or roads built by the organization headed by Patricia, I explained that my plan for government included a vast, concerted aid program so that those Peruvians with the lowest incomes would be the least affected by the sacrifice required to get out of the trap set by state controls and inflation. The PAS was not a move to garner publicity. I didn’t wish to talk about it before its basic infrastructure was in place and I had the ironclad guarantee of the two men responsible for getting it started—Jaime Crosby and Ramón Barúa—that the sum of $1.6 billion needed in order to keep the twenty thousand small-scale public works projects in the marginal towns and villages in Peru going over a period of three years would be definitely forthcoming, thanks to international organizations, friendly countries, and the Peruvian business class. The PAS was a reality already taking shape in April and May of 1990, and despite the fact that aid still reached us in minuscule amounts, as though doled out with an eyedropper—it was dependent on the implementation of our program by the administration in power, especially with regard to funds from the World Bank—it was impressive to see so many technicians and engineers and hundreds of workers turning these projects, chosen by local residents themselves as those most urgently needed for their community, into concrete realities. In all my speeches I devoted half the time allotted me to demonstrating that what we were doing gave the lie to those who accused me of lacking a sensitivity to social problems. That sensitivity ought to be measured in terms of accomplishments, not rhetorical promises.

To many leaders of the Front and friends of Libertad, the new strategy, more modest and popular, less ideological and polemical, seemed a timely rectification, and they thought that in this way we would win back the voters we had lost, the ones who had voted for Fujimori. For no one had any illusions about the Aprista vote or that of its Socialist and Communist variations. We were also encouraged by the increasingly resolute support of the Church. Wasn’t Peru a Catholic country to its very marrow?

The last thing I had imagined was finding myself converted, overnight, into a defender of the Catholic Church in an electoral battle. But that is what began to happen, once the campaign was renewed, when it was evident that among the senators and representatives elected from the Cambio 90 list, there were at least fifteen evangelical pastors (among them Fujimori’s second vice president, Carlos García y García, who had been president of the National Evangelical Council of Peru). The nervousness of the Catholic hierarchy over this sudden political rise of organizations that had previously been marginal was exacerbated by imprudent statements by several of the pastors who had been elected, Guillermo Yoshikawa for instance (the congressman for Arequipa), who had had a letter circulated among his faithful urging them to vote for Fujimori, with the argument that, when the latter became president, evangelical schools and churches would receive the same recognition and the same state subsidies as Catholic ones. The archbishop of Arequipa, Monsignor Fernando Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio, appeared on TV on April 18 and reproached Señor Yoshikawa for using religious arguments in the campaign and for his defiant attitude toward the religion practiced by the majority of the Peruvian people.

Two days later, on April 20, the bishops of Peru issued a statement declaring that “it is not honest to employ religion to serve partisan political ends,” along with the assurance that, as an institution, the Church was not supporting any candidacy. This pastoral letter from Peru’s bishops was an attempt to calm the storm of criticisms that had been caused, in media with close ties to the government—where there were a large number of progressive-minded Catholics—by an interview granted to the program “Panorama,” on Channel 5, on Easter Sunday (April 15, 1990) by the archbishop of Lima. When the interviewer confronted the prelate with a question concerning my agnosticism, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, in a polemical theological interpretation, expatiated on the question to demonstrate that an agnostic was not a man without God, but, rather, someone seeking God, and a man who does not believe but would like to believe, a being in prey to an agonizing search not unlike Unamuno’s, at the end of which lay a return to religious faith. The Aprista media and those on the left, already embarked on a battle-hardened campaign for Fujimori, reproached the archbishop for his bare-faced backing of the “agnostic” candidate, and a “leftist intellectual,” Carlos Iván Degregori, stated in an article that with that definition of an agnostic, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora “wouldn’t pass a theology exam.”

On April 19, early in the afternoon, who should arrive at my house but the archbishop of Arequipa, he too hidden in a car that entered directly into the garage, for the reporters’ siege of the place didn’t let up until June 10. A short little man with a great booming voice, brimming over with congeniality and homespun charm, Monsignor Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio had such good humor that we spent a very entertaining brief interlude—one of the few, if not the only one, in all those two months—as he told me that it was best for me to forget about “all that nonsense about having declared me an agnostic,” because as the son of Catholic parents, baptized and married in the Church and the father of children who had also been baptized, I was Catholic
for all practical purposes
, whether I admitted it or not. And that, if I wanted to win the election, I shouldn’t insist on continuing to tell the whole truth about the necessary economic adjustment, since that was tantamount to working for the adversary, especially since the latter said only the things that would win him votes. Not lying was a very good thing, of course; but revealing
everything
in an election campaign was to commit hara-kiri.

Joking aside, the archbishop of Arequipa was greatly alarmed by the offensive mounted by the evangelical sects in the young towns and marginal districts of Arequipa in favor of Fujimori, a campaign that had an obvious religious and sometimes anti-Catholic slant, because of the sectarianism of certain pastors who didn’t spare their criticisms of the Church and even attacked the Pope, the saints, and the Virgin Mary in their harangues. Like Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, he too was of the opinion that this religious war could contribute to the social disintegration of Peru. Although the Catholic Church could not explicitly come out in my favor, he told me that, in his own diocese, he had encouraged those faithful who, in answer to the challenge from the evangelical sects, had decided to campaign for me.

From that time on, the electoral battle little by little came to resemble a religious war, in which naïve fears, prejudices, and clean weapons clashed with the dirty ones and the low blows and most treacherous maneuvers on both sides, to extremes that bordered on farce and surrealism. Very early in the campaign, three years previously, an activist of Solidaridad, Regina de Palacios, who worked in the young town of San Pedro de Choque, had shut me up in a room at the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, with some twenty men and women of that shantytown, without telling me who they were. Once we were alone, one of them began to speak as though inspired and to quote from the Bible from memory, and all of a sudden the others, getting to their feet and raising their hands on high, began to accompany that sermon with exclamations of “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” At the same time, they urged me to do likewise, since the Holy Spirit had just made its appearance in the room, and to get down on my knees as a sign of humble submission to the newcomer. Completely taken aback and not knowing how I ought to react to this unexpected “happening”—some of those present had burst into tears, others were on their knees praying, with their eyes closed and their arms upraised—I could foresee the impression that would be made on those committees that constantly wandered about the corridors of the Libertad headquarters looking for a place to hold a meeting, if they chanced to open the door and come across such a spectacle. The evangelicals finally calmed down, composed themselves, and left, assuring me that I was the Anointed One and that I would win the election.

I believe that this was my first personal experience of the way in which evangelical sects had penetrated the marginalized sectors of the country. But even though I had many other such experiences later on, a number of them as surprising as that one, and I became accustomed to seeing, on all my visits to outlying urban districts, in the doorways of flimsy shacks and huts the ever-present emblem of Pentecostalists, Baptists, the Christian Missionary Alliance, the People of God, or dozens of other churches with names sometimes possessed of a picturesque syncretism, it was only during the campaign for the second round that I realized the magnitude of the phenomenon. It was true: in many poor parts of Perú where Catholic parishes were no longer served by the Church, either because the campaign of terrorist violence against parish priests (many had been assassinated by Sendero Luminoso) had led to the departure of those who remained or because there were no new priests to be assigned, the vacuum had been filled by Protestant preachers. These latter, men and women almost always of very humble origin, armed with the tireless and fervent zeal of pioneers, lived there on the spot, amid the same primitive conditions as the settlers of these towns, and had succeeded in making converts to those churches that required total surrender and permanent apostleship—so different from the lax and sometimes merely social commitment required by Catholicism—which proved, paradoxically, to attract those who, because of the precariousness of their lives, found in the sects an order and a feeling of security to which to cling. With Catholicism, by tradition and custom, the official—the formal—religion of Peru, the evangelical churches came to represent the informal religion, a phenomenon perhaps as widespread as, in the economic sphere, that of the tradesmen and “informal” businessmen of the parallel economy—whom Fujimori had been clever enough to enroll as allies of his candidacy, by proposing as his first vice president Máximo San Román, a humble “informal” businessman from Cuzco, the president of Fenapi Perú (Federación de Asociaciones de Pequeñas Empresas Industrials del Perú: Federated Associations of Small Industrial Enterprises in Peru), which since 1988 had brought together the principal provincial organizations of the parallel economy, and the APEMEPE (Asociación de Pequeños y Medianos Empresarios del Perú: Association of the Owners of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in Peru).

I had no antipathy whatsoever against the evangelicals, and on the contrary, a great deal of sympathy for the way in which its sects’ pastors had risked their lives in the highlands and in city shantytowns (where they were victims both of terrorists and of military repression) and for the way in which throughout the world the evangelical position had been, almost always, in favor of liberal democracy and a market economy. But the fanaticism and the intolerance with which some of them assumed their apostleship annoyed me as much as when such attitudes appeared among Catholics or politicians. Throughout the campaign, I held a number of meetings with pastors and leaders of Protestant churches, but I never wanted to establish any sort of organic relationship between them and my candidacy nor did I make them any promise other than that, during my administration, the freedom of religious worship in Perú would be respected to the letter. Precisely because I had declared myself to be an agnostic, I was careful to keep the religious question from rearing its head during the three years of the campaign, although I never refused to receive men of the cloth, whatever their religion, who wanted to see me. I received dozens of them, from the most diverse denominations, confirming to my own satisfaction yet again in those interviews that nothing attracts madness as surely (or exacerbates it as much) as does religion. One afternoon, my son Gonzalo came into the room, in a panic, to get me to leave a meeting: “What’s happening to my mother? I’ve just opened a door and seen her, with her eyes closed and her hands joined, with a fellow leaping all around her like a redskin and giving her little blows on the head.” It was a sorcerer, pastor, and layer-on of hands, Jesús Linares, a protégé of Senator Roger Cáceres, of the Frenatraca, who had urged me to receive him, assuring me that Linares was a man with spiritual powers and a seer, who had always been of help to him in his electoral battles. I didn’t have time to see him and he was received in my place by Patricia, whom the pastor convinced that she should submit to that strange rite which, he said, would assure our spiritual welfare and victory at the polls.
^*
This was one of the most eccentric, though not the only person with “occult powers” who tried to work in favor of my candidacy. Another one was a female soothsayer who, shortly before the second election, sent me a card proposing to me that, in order to win, she, Patricia, and I should take an “astral bath” together (without specifying what this consisted of).

With precedents such as these it did not appear to be impossible, then, that emboldened by the high percentage of the vote obtained by Fujimori in the first round and the number of evangelicals elected to Congress, some of the most overexcited or delirious of those pastors should attack the Church or say and write things that the latter regarded as offensive. And that was indeed what happened. At the same time a famous evangelical preacher, a “Hispanic” from the United States, Brother Pablo—whose radio programs were heard throughout Latin America—was brought from California and filled a number of provincial stadiums in Peru, openly campaigning for Fujimori. In Arequipa, in Chimbote, in Huancayo, in Huancavelica, leaflets began to circulate in which Christians were urged to vote for my adversary; it was stated in them, moreover, that with the presidency of the latter the papist monopoly would come to an end, and the Church was accused of being in collusion with the exploiters of the people and the rich and of being the cause of many of Peru’s misfortunes. And as though that were not enough, graffiti insulting Catholicism, the saints, and the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared on the façades and walls of Catholic churches.