A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (73 page)

The preparations were meticulous and amusing. During several days’ retreat, in Chosica, I had a number of training sessions with journalists who were friends of mine, such as Alfonso Baella, Fernando Viaña, and César Hildebrandt, who (the latter in particular) turned out to be better grounded and more incisive than the combatant I was preparing myself to confront. Moreover, taking time I really didn’t have, I had prepared a number of syntheses, as didactic as possible, of what we wanted to do in the domain of agriculture, in education, in the economy, in employment, and to restore civil peace. I kept to these subjects, despite the fact that, from time to time, I was obliged to allow myself to be distracted for a few moments so as to respond to the personal attacks, as when I asked him, since he boasted of his superiority as a technocrat, what had been done to the cows at the Agrarian University to make their production mysteriously decrease from 2,400 liters of milk per day to a mere 400 during the time that he was rector, or when, confronted with his concern because I had had an experience with drugs when I was fourteen years old, I advised him that he should worry, instead, about something more contemporary that concerned him more directly—like Madame Carmelí, the astrologist and candidate for a representative’s seat in the list of Cambio 90, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for trafficking in drugs.

That night a great many people from the Front gathered at my house—there were members of the PPC, populists, members of SODE, mingling with the members of Libertad in an atmosphere that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks before—to watch with me the result of the opinion polls on the debate. Since all of them reported that I was the winner, and some of them gave me fifteen or twenty points’ advantage, many of the people gathered together there thought that thanks to the debate we had ensured our victory on June 10.

Even though, as I have already pointed out, almost all my efforts in the campaign for the second round of voting were concentrated on making tours around the periphery of Lima—the shantytowns and marginal districts that had crept across the deserts and the mountains until they had turned into a gigantic belt of poverty and misery that squeezed the old part of Lima more and more tightly—I also made two trips to the interior, to the two
departamentos
which I visited most often in those three years and to which I felt the closest ties: Arequipa and Piura. The results of the first round, in both cities, had saddened me, since, because of the affection that I had always felt for both and because of the dedication that I bestowed on both during the campaign, I took it for granted that there would be a sort of reciprocity and that the vote of the people of Piura and Arequipa would favor me. But we won only in Arequipa with 32.53 percent against a very high 31.68 percent for Cambio 90; in Piura the APRA won the first round with 26.09 percent compared to 25.91 for us. Considering the high demographic density of both regions, the Front decided that I should make one last tour of them, above all to explain to Piurans and Arequipans the range of activities of the PAS, which had begun work in both places. During my trip to Arequipa I was present at the signing of an accord between the Municipality of Cayma and the PAS of Arequipa for the installation of medical dispensaries and first-aid centers, thanks to the financing and professional support received by that program. (In April and May close to five hundred dispensaries were installed by the PAS in marginal sectors of Lima and the interior.)

Both were very different trips from the ones I had made in the first campaign; instead of the multicolor rallies in the town squares and the dinners and receptions at night, there were only visits to markets, cooperatives, associations of
informales
, itinerant peddlers, and dialogues and meetings with labor unions, members of communes, leaders of neighborhoods, and communities and associations of all sorts, which began at dawn and ended after the stars had come out—held usually out of doors, by candlelight, and during which dozens of times, hundreds of times, I lost my voice and even my sense of discernment, as I tried to disprove the lies concerning the economic shock, education, and the million unemployed. I was so exhausted that, in order to preserve the little energy I had left, I remained silent as we moved about from place to place, and even when the trips lasted only a few minutes, I usually fell fast asleep. Despite such efforts to overcome my fatigue, I was unable, amid an endless interchange of questions and answers, in the Central Market of Arequipa, to keep myself from losing consciousness for a few minutes. The amusing thing is that when I came to, in a daze, the same leader was still perorating, not realizing what had happened to me.

I noticed the tension and the paroxysm reached by the electoral confrontation within Piura, in particular—a part of the country considered relatively peaceful—where I was obliged to tour the towns and villages that separate Sullana from San Lorenzo Colony amid great violence, and where my speeches frequently had as their audio background the jeers and catcalls of counterdemonstrators or the insults and punches my supporters and my adversaries were exchanging round about me. My grimmest memory of those days is that of my arrival, one torrid morning, in a little settlement between Ignacio Escudero and Cruceta, in the valley of Chira. Armed with sticks and stones and all sorts of weapons to bruise and batter, an infuriated horde of men and women came to meet me, their faces distorted by hatred, who appeared to have emerged from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings and animals were indistinguishable, since for both life was a blind struggle for survival. Half naked, with very long hair and fingernails never touched by a pair of scissors, surrounded by emaciated children with huge swollen bellies, bellowing and shouting to keep their courage up, they hurled themselves on the caravan of vehicles as though fighting to save their lives or seeking to immolate themselves, with a rashness and a savagery that said everything about the almost inconceivable levels of deterioration to which life for millions of Peruvians had sunk. What were they attacking? What were they defending themselves from? What phantoms were behind those threatening clubs and knives? In the wretched village there was no water, no light, no work, no medical post, and the little school hadn’t been open for years because it had no teacher. What harm could I have done them, when they no longer had anything to lose, even if the famous “shock” had proved to be as apocalyptic as propaganda made it out to be? Of what free education could those poor creatures have been deprived, when their only school had already long since been closed by national poverty? With their tremendous defenselessness, they were the best possible living proof that Peru could not continue to exist any longer in the populist delirium, in the demagogic lie of the redistribution of a wealth decreasing by the day, providing instead dramatic evidence of the need for changing direction, for creating work and wealth through forced marches, for rectifying policies that were each day driving more new masses of Peruvians into a state of precariousness and primitivism that (with the exception of Haiti) no longer had any equivalent in Latin America. There was no way even to try to explain this to them. Despite the shower of stones, which Professor Oshiro and his colleagues tried to ward off with their coats spread out like an awning over my head, I made several attempts to talk to them over a loudspeaker, from the flatbed of a truck, but the outcries and the contention made such a din that I was forced to give up. That night, in the Hotel de Turistas in Piura, those faces and fists of exacerbated Piurans, who would have given anything to lynch me, made me reflect for a good while, before falling into my usual troubled sleep, on the incongruousness of my political adventure, and wish even more impatiently than on other days for June 10, liberation day, to arrive.

On May 29, 1990, shortly after 9 p.m., an earthquake shook the northeastern area of the country, causing large-scale damage in the Amazon
departamentos
of San Martín and Amazonas. One hundred fifty people were killed and at least a thousand were injured in localities in the
departamento
of San Martín: Moyobamba, Rioja, Soritor, and Nueva Cajamarca, as well as in Rodríguez de Mendoza in Amazonas, where more than half the dwellings had collapsed or were damaged. This tragedy allowed me to confirm the good work that had been done by Ramón Barúa and Jaime Crosby with the PAS, which, the moment the news of the earthquake reached us, we put to work mobilizing all possible aid. On the morning after the catastrophe, Patricia and former president Fernando Belaunde left for the devastated areas on a plane loaded with fifteen tons of medicine, clothing, and food supplies. It was the first help to arrive there, and I believe the only help, for a week later, when I visited the region on June 6, on another plane loaded with field tents, boxes of serum and medicine kits, the few doctors, nurses, and medical assistants who were doing their best to aid the survivors and the injured had only the resources of the PAS to count on. This program, organized with the limited resources of an opposition party, which the government harassed, was capable under those circumstances of accomplishing all by itself something that the Peruvian government was unable to do. The images in Soritor, Rioja, and Rodríguez de Mendoza were monstrous: hundreds of families were sleeping in the open, under the trees, after having lost everything, and men and women were continuing to dig in the rubble, in search of people who were still missing. In Soritor there was practically not a single habitable dwelling left, for the ones that had not entirely collapsed had lost their roofs and walls and risked tumbling down from one moment to the next. As though terrorism and political raving had not been enough, nature too was venting its fury on the Peruvian people.

A cheerful and pleasant note during the second round of campaigning—sunbeams amid a sky almost always covered with dark clouds or jarred by thunder and rent by lightning—was provided by popular celebrities from the world of radio, TV, and sports who, in the last weeks, came out in favor of my candidacy, and accompanied me on my visits to the squatter settlements of the young towns and the popular districts of Lima, where their presence gave rise to touching scenes. The famous women’s volleyball team selected to represent Peru, which won the world semifinals—Cecilia Tait, Lucha Fuentes, and Irma Cordero in particular—couldn’t get out of giving demonstrations with the volleyball in each place we visited, and Gisela Valcárcel’s admirers besieged her to the point that our bodyguards had to rush to her rescue. From May 10 on, when the soccer star Teófilo Cubillas came to Barranco to offer me his public support, until the eve of the election, this was my routine each morning: receiving delegations of singers, composers, sports stars, actors, comedians, commentators, folklorists, ballerinas, whom, after a brief chat, I accompanied to the front door opening onto the street, where, before the press, they urged their colleagues to vote for me. Lucho Llosa was the one who had the idea of making these shows of support public and the one who thought up and orchestrated the first of them; others then sprang up spontaneously, and there were so many of them that I found myself obliged, for lack of time, to receive only those that could have a contagious effect on the voters.

The great majority of these shows of support had no ulterior motives, since they happened when, unlike what had gone on before the first round, I wasn’t leading in the opinion surveys and sheer logic indicated that I was going to lose the second round. Those who decided to take that step knew that they risked reprisals in their occupations and in their professional future, since in Peru those who assume power usually tend to be resentful and for their revenge count on the far-reaching hand of the state, which Octavio Paz has rightfully called “the philanthropic ogre”—incapable of providing help to the victims of an earthquake but quite capable of enriching its friends and impoverishing its adversaries.

But not all those professions of support were as honestly motivated as those of a Cecilia Tait or a Gisela Valcárcel. There were others who tried to turn a profit out of their public backing of me, and I fear that, in more than one case, money was involved, despite my having asked those who were financially responsible for the campaign not to spend any funds for that purpose.

One of the most popular TV emcees, Augusto Ferrando, publicly invited me, on one of his series of programs called “Trampolín a la fama”—“Trampoline to Fame”—to join forces and take a gift of food supplies to the prisoners of Lurigancho, who had written him protesting the inhuman conditions of existence in this penitentiary. I agreed to do so, and the PAS readied a truckful of provisions that we took to Lurigancho on May 29, early in the afternoon. I had a gloomy memory of a visit to this prison that I had made several years before,
^*
but now conditions appeared to have become even worse, since in this penitentiary built to hold 1,500 prisoners there were now around 6,000, and among them a fair number accused of terrorism. The visit was therefore frenzied, no more and no less so than society on the outside; the prison was divided between Fujimoristas and Vargasllosistas, who, during the hour that Ferrando and I were there, as the food supplies were being unloaded, insulted each other and tried to drown each other out by shouting refrains and slogans at the top of their lungs. The prison authorities had allowed supporters of the Front to approach the courtyard, which we entered, while our adversaries stayed on the rooftops and against the walls of the prison wings, waving banners and insulting placards. As I spoke, aided by a loudspeaker, I saw the Civil Guards, with their rifles at the ready, aimed at the Fujimoristas on the rooftops, in case there were any shots fired from there or stones thrown our way. Ferrando, who had worn an old watch in case anyone tried to steal it, felt frustrated when none of the Vargasllosistas with whom we mingled tried their luck, and he ended up giving it to the last prisoner who gave him a friendly embrace.