The Plaza San Martín
AT the end of July 1987, I found myself in the far north of Peru, on a half-deserted beach, where, years before, a young man from Piura and his wife had built several bungalows with the idea of renting them to tourists. Isolated, rustic, squeezed in between empty stretches of sand, rock cliffs, and the foamy waves of the Pacific, Punta Sal is one of the most beautiful sites in Peru. It has the air of a place outside time and history with its flocks of seabirds—gannets, pelicans, gulls, cormorants, little ducks, and albatrosses, which the locals call tijeretas—parading in orderly formations from the bright dawns to the blood-red twilights. The fishermen of this remote stretch of the Peruvian coast use rafts still made in exactly the same way as in pre-Hispanic times, simple and light: two or three tree trunks tied together and a pole that serves as both an oar and a rudder, with which the fisherman propels the craft along in sweeping gyres, as if tracing circles in the water. The sight of those rafts had greatly impressed me the first time I visited Punta Sal, since no doubt they were craft identical to the raft from Tumbes that, according to the chronicles of the Conquest, was found by Francisco Pizarro and his comrades, four centuries ago and not far from here, and taken to be the first concrete proof that the stories of a golden empire that had made them venture forth from Panama to these shores were a reality.
I was in Punta Sal with Patricia and my children, to spend the national holiday week there, far from winter in Lima. We had returned to Peru not long before from London, where, for some time now, we were in the habit of spending three months or so every year, and I had intended to take advantage of the stay in Punta Sal to correct the proofs of my latest novel, El hablador (The Storyteller), between dips in the ocean and to practice, from morning to night, the solitary vice: reading, constantly reading.
I had turned fifty-one in March. Everything seemed to indicate that my life, an unsettled one since the day I was born, would go by more calmly from now on: spent between Lima and London, and devoted exclusively to writing, with a stint of university teaching every so often somewhere in the United States. Now and again I scribble in my memo books a few work plans for the immediate future, ones that I never carry out altogether. When I reached fifty, I had dreamed up the following five-year plan:
1) A play about a little old Quixote-like man who, in the Lima of the 1950s, embarks on a crusade to save the city's colonial-era balconies threatened with demolition.
2) A novel, something between a detective story and a fictional fantasy, about cataclysms, human sacrifices, and political crimes in a village in the Andes.
3) An essay on the gestation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
4) A comedy about a businessman who, in a suite in the Savoy Hotel in London, meets his best friend from his school days, whom he has thought dead, but who has now turned into a good-looking woman, thanks to hormones and surgery; and
5) A historical novel inspired by Flora Tristan, the Franco-Peruvian revolutionary, ideologist, and feminist, who lived in the first third of the nineteeth century.
In the same memorandum book I had also jotted down, as less urgent projects, learning that devilishly difficult language, German; living for a while in Berlin; trying yet again to get through books that had always defeated me—such as Finnegans Wake and The Death of Virgil; going down the Amazon from Pucallpa to Belém do Pará in Brazil; and bringing out a revised edition of all my novels. Other vague projects of a less publishable nature also figured on the list. The one thing that wasn't even hinted at anywhere in these notes was the activity that, through the caprice of the wheel of fortune, was about to monopolize my life for the next three years: politics.
I didn't have the least inkling that that would be so, on that 28th of July, at noon, when we prepared to listen, on my friend Freddy Cooper's little portable radio, to the speech that the president of the Republic delivers in person to Congress on the national holiday. Alan García had been in office for two years and was still very popular. To me, his politics seemed like a time bomb. Populism had been a catastrophic failure in Allende's Chile and in Siles Suazo's Bolivia. Why would it go over well in Peru? Subsidizing consumption, in a country like Peru that depends on imports for a large share of its food and its industrial components, brings with it a deceptive bonanza that lasts only as long as the country has reserves of foreign currency available to allow the flow of incoming goods to be maintained. This was how things had gone so far, thanks to a massive expenditure of foreign currency reserves, which had increased owing to the government's decision to spend only 10 percent of the money earned by exports in servicing the country's foreign debt. But this policy was beginning to give signs of having been run into the ground. The country's reserves were being depleted; because of its confrontation with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—the bêtes noires of the speeches delivered by President García—Peru had seen all the doors of the international financial system slam shut; the printing of paper money with no backing so as to cover the fiscal deficit was making inflation worse; the dollar, maintained at an artificially low price, was increasingly discouraging exports on the one hand and encouraging speculation on the other: the best deal for a businessman was to get an import license that allowed him to pay for what he ordered from abroad with cheap dollars (there were any number of rates of exchange for the dollar, depending on the "social necessity" of the product). The traffickers in contraband goods saw to it that the products thus imported—sugar, rice, medicine—passed through Peru as fast as if over hot coals and went on to Colombia, Chile, or Ecuador, where their prices were not controlled. The system had enriched a handful of people but had plunged the rest of the country's population into poverty that was increasing by the day.
The president did not appear worried. Or so it seemed to me at least, a few days earlier, during the only interview I had with him while he was in power. When I arrived from London, at the end of June, he sent one of his aides-de-camp to welcome me back, and as protocol required, I went to the Presidential Palace to thank him for the courtesy. He received me personally and we talked together for about an hour and a half. Standing in front of a blackboard, he explained to me his goals for the current year and showed me a handmade bazooka, put together by Sendero Luminoso—Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla movement—with which terrorists had fired a projectile on the palace from Rímac. He was young, self-assured, and likable. I had seen him only once before, during the election campaign, at the home of a mutual friend—Manuel Checa Solari, the auctioneer and art collector—who was bent on our having lunch together. The impression García gave me then was that of a young man of limitless ambition capable of anything if it would bring him to power. For that reason, a few days after that first meeting, I said on two television interviews conducted by the journalists Jaime Bayly and César Hildebrandt that I would vote not for him but for the candidate of the PPC (the Partido Popular Cristiano: the Christian Popular Party), Luis Bedoya Reyes. Despite that fact, and despite an open letter that I wrote to him when he had been in power for exactly a year, condemning him for the massacre of the rioters in the Lima prisons in June of 1986,[1] he did not seem to bear me any ill will that morning at the Presidential Palace, for his attitude toward me was warm and friendly. At the beginning of his term in office he had sent word to me to ask if I would accept the ambassadorship to Spain, and now, even though he knew how critical I was of his policies, the conversation could not have been more cordial. I remember having said to him, jokingly, that it was a shame that having had the chance to be the Felipe González of Peru he was determined to be our Salvador Allende, or, worse still, our Fidel Castro. Wasn't the world headed in other directions?
Naturally, among all the things I heard from him that morning concerning his immediate political plans, the most important subject of all didn't come up—a measure that at the time he had already cooked up with a group of intimates, and that Peruvians first heard of by way of that speech on the 28th that Freddy and I heard, with García's voice broken and crackling on that ancient radio beneath the burning-hot sun of Punta Sal: his decision to "nationalize and bring under government control" all banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions in Peru.
"Eighteen years ago I learned in the daily papers that Velasco had taken my country estate away from me," a gentleman already well along in years, in a bathing suit and with an artificial hand hidden by a leather glove, exclaimed. "And now, from this little radio I learn that Alan García has just taken my insurance company away from me. That's quite something, wouldn't you say, my friend?"
He rose to his feet and dived into the ocean. Not all the vacationers in Punta Sal took the news in the same debonair spirit. They were professionals, executives, and a few businessmen associated with the threatened companies, and to one degree or another they were aware that the measure was going to go against their interests. They all remembered the years of the dictatorship (1968–80) and the massive nationalizations—at the beginning of Velasco's regime there had been seven public enterprises and at the end of it close to two hundred—which had turned the poor country that Peru was then into the poverty-stricken one it is today. At dinner that night in Punta Sal, a lady at the next table was lamenting her fate: her husband, one of the many Peruvians who had emigrated, had just left a good position in Venezuela to come back to Lima—to take over the management of a bank! Would the family have to take to the world's highways and byways yet again in search of work?
It was not difficult to imagine what was going to happen. The owners would be paid in worthless bonds, as had happened to those whose holdings had been expropriated in the days of the military dictatorship. But those proprietors would suffer less than the rest of the Peruvians. They were quite well off and, ever since General Velasco's plundering had begun, many had taken precautions by sending their money abroad. It was those who had no protection at all—workers and employees in banks, insurance agencies, and financial firms—who would become part of the public sector. Those thousands of families did not have accounts abroad, and no way to head off the people of the party in power, who would march in and take possession of the prey they coveted. From now on, the latter were the ones who would occupy the key posts, political influence would be the determining factor when it came to promotions and being named to important posts, and in no time the same corruption would take over in these companies as in the rest of the public sector.
"Once more in its history Peru has taken yet another step backward toward barbarism," I remember saying to Patricia the next morning, as we were going for a run along the beach toward the little village of Punta Sal, escorted by a flock of gannets. The nationalizations that had been announced would bring more poverty, discouragement, parasitism, and bribery to Peruvian life. And furthermore, in either the long run or the short, they would fatally damage the democratic system that Peru had recovered in 1980, after twelve years under military rule.
"Why all the fuss," I have often been asked, "over a few nationalizations? President Mitterrand nationalized the banks, and even though the measure was a failure and the Socialists had to reverse course, was French democracy ever endangered?" People who follow that line of argument have no understanding that one of the characteristics of underdevelopment is the total identity of the government and the state. In France, Sweden, or England, a public enterprise maintains a certain autonomy in relation to those who hold political power: it belongs to the state; and its administration, its personnel, and its functioning are more or less safe from the abuse of governmental power. But in an underdeveloped country, exactly as in a totalitarian one, the government is the state and those in power oversee it as though it were their own private property, or, rather, their spoils. Public enterprises are useful for providing cushy jobs for the protégés of those in power, for feeding the people under their patronage, and for making shady deals. Such enterprises soon turn into bureaucratic swarms paralyzed by the corruption and inefficiency introduced into them by politics. There is no danger that they will go broke; almost always they are monopolies protected against competition and their life is guaranteed indefinitely thanks to subsidies, that is to say, the taxpayer's money.[2] Peruvians have seen this process repeated, ever since the days of the "socialist, libertarian, and participatory revolution" of General Velasco, in all the nationalized companies—petroleum, electricity, mines, sugar refineries, et cetera—and now, as in a recurrent nightmare, the whole story was going to be repeated with the banks, insurance companies, and financial firms that Alan García's democratic socialism was getting ready to gobble up.
Moreover, the nationalization of the financial system involved an aggravating political factor. It was about to place absolute control over all credit in the hands of an ambitious leader capable of lying without the least scruple—not very long before, in late November 1984, Velasco had given his word, at CADE, the Conferencia Anual de Ejecutivos, that he would never nationalize the banks. Once he had taken them over, all the business enterprises in the country, beginning with the radio stations, the television networks, and the press, would be at the mercy of the government. There was no need to be possessed of the gift of prophecy to realize that in the future funds for the news media would have their price: subservience. General Velasco had placed the daily papers and television channels under state control so as to wrest them away "from the oligarchy" and place them in the hands "of the organized people." Through this, during the dictatorship, the communications media in Peru fell to levels of indescribable servility and contemptibility. Being more clever, Alan García was going to obtain total control of information through credits and publicity, in the meanwhile maintaining the appearance, in the Mexican fashion, that the media were independent.
The allusion to Mexico is not gratuitous. The system of the Mexican PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional: Institutional Revolutionary Party)—a party dictatorship that keeps up democratic appearances by dint of tolerating elections, a "criticar" press, and a civilian government—has traditionally been a temptation for Latin American dictators. But none of them has been able to duplicate the model, an authentic creation of Mexican culture and history, because one of the requisites of its "success" is something that none of its emulators can resign himself to: the ritual sacrifice, every certain number of years, of the president, in order that the party may continue in power. General Velasco dreamed of a Mexican-style regime—for himself alone. And it was a commonplace of public opinion that President García had dreams of perpetuating his presidency indefinitely. Sometime before that July 28, 1987, one of his faithful congressmen, Héctor Marisca, passing himself off as an independent, had formally proposed a constitutional amendment allowing the president to be reelected, a change that aroused vehement protest. The control of government funds by the executive branch was a decisive step toward the perpetuation in power of the APRA, to which one of Alan García's appointees, the minister of energy and mines, Wilfredo Huayta, had promised "fifty years in power."
"And the worst of it is," I said to Patricia, panting as I was about to finish the four-kilometer run, "that this proposal is going to be supported by 99 percent of Peruvians."
Is anyone in the world fond of bankers? Aren't they the symbol of affluence, of selfish capitalism, of imperialism, of everything to which the ideology of the Third World attributes the wretchedness and the backwardness of our countries? Alan García had found the ideal scapegoat to explain to the Peruvian people why his program did not produce the fruits that he had promised: it was all the fault of the financial oligarchies that made use of banks to take their dollars out of Peru and used the money of those with savings accounts to make loans under the table to the companies they controlled. Now, with the financial system in the hands of the people, all that was going to change.
Almost the moment I returned to Lima, a few days later, I wrote an article, "Hacia el Perú totalitario" ("Toward a Totalitarian Peru") that appeared in El Comercio on August 2,[3] outlining the reasons for my opposition to the measure and urging Peruvians to oppose it by any and every legal means if they wanted the democratic system to survive. I did so in order to put my reaction to it on record, even though I was convinced that my effort would be useless, and that, with the exception of a few protests, the measure would be passed by Congress with the approval of the majority of my compatriots.
But that was not how things turned out. At the same time that my article appeared, the employees of banks and of other threatened companies took to the streets, in Lima, in Arequipa, in Piura, participating in marches and small-scale meetings that surprised everyone, me first of all. In order to support them, along with four close friends with whom for years Patricia and I had gone out to have dinner and talk together once a week—three architects, Luis Miró Quesada, Frederick Cooper, and Miguel Cruchaga, and the painter Fernando de Szyszlo—we decided to draft a manifesto as quickly as possible, for which we were sure we could collect some hundred signatures. The text, affirming in part that "the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the party in power may well mean the end of freedom of expression and, should worst come to worst, of democracy," was given to me to read on television and published under my name in the newspapers of August 5 with the heading "Against the Totalitarian Threat."
What happened in the next few days unexpectedly turned my life upside down. My house was flooded with letters, phone calls, and visits of individuals who were in entire accord with the manifesto and brought piles of signatures that they had spontaneously collected. Lists of the names of hundreds of new supporters appeared every day in the press not controlled by the government. Even people from the provinces sought me out, asking how they could help. I was stunned. General Velasco had nationalized hundreds of companies without anyone's lifting a finger; on the contrary, he had the support of a large percentage of public opinion, which saw in these measures an act of social justice and the hope for a change. In Peru, as in the rest of Latin America, statism, the pillar of Third World ideology, had become the ruling doctrine not only of the left but also of vast sectors of the center and the right, to such a degree that Belaunde Terry's conservative government (1980–85), elected at the end of the military dictatorship, had not dared to privatize a single one of the companies nationalized by Velasco (with the exception of the communications media, returned to their owners immediately after Belaunde Terry took power). But in those feverish days of August 1987 it appeared that significant sectors of Peruvian society had become disenchanted with the statist formula.
Alan García, nervous over the protest moves, decided to "bring the masses out into the streets." He traveled through the north of the country, the traditional citadel of the APRA party, vituperating imperialism and bankers and voicing threats against those of us who were protesting. His party, a revolutionary one half a century before, had little by little, over the course of the years, turned into a bureaucratic and opportunistic party, and followed his lead with obvious reluctance. It had first attained power in 1985, after it had been in existence for sixty years, with a very clever electoral campaign, presenting a moderate social-democratic image, and the majority of the party leaders seemed to be quite satisfied to be enjoying the prerogatives of power. The business of going about making a revolution at this point seemed to set about as well with many Apristas as a kick in the belly. But the APRA, whose doctrine of state control is socialist, owes its hierarchical structure to fascism—its founder, Haya de la Torre, called the Jefe Máximo, the Maximum Leader, had imitated the organization, the stage effects, and the shortcut methods of Italian fascism—and for the sake of discipline, although without a great deal of enthusiasm, followed Alan García when he called for revolutionary mobilizations. Those, on the other hand, who supported him with sincere and irrepressible enthusiasm were the Socialists and Communists of the coalition of the IU (Izquierda Unida: United Left). Whether moderates or extremists, they could not believe their eyes. The APRA, their old enemy, was putting their very own program into effect. Were the good old days of General Velasco, when they had very nearly managed to seize power, being brought back to life, then? Socialists and Communists immediately adopted as their own the fight for nationalization. Their leader at the time, Alfonso Barrantes, appeared on television to read a speech in favor of the nationalization law, and the senators and representatives of the United Left became its most unyielding defenders in Congress.
Felipe Thorndike and Freddy Cooper turned up at my house one night at the beginning of the second week in August, all excited and in a conspiratorial mood. They had had meetings with groups of independents and had come to propose to me that we call for a public demonstration, at which I would be the main speaker. The idea was to show that if the Apristas and the Communists could take to the streets in defense of statism, we could too, to impugn their policy in the name of freedom. I accepted their proposal, and that night I had the first of a series of arguments with Patricia that were to go on for a year.
"If you go up onto that platform you'll end up going into politics, and literature can go to hell. And your family along with it. Can it be that you don't know what it means to go into politics in this country?"
"I headed the protest against nationalization. I can't back down now. It's just one demonstration, just one speech. That doesn't mean devoting one's life to politics!"
"Then there'll be another and another and you'll end up being a candidate for president. Are you going to leave your books, the quiet, comfortable life you're living now, to go into politics in Peru? Don't you know how they're going to pay you back? Have you forgotten Uchuraccay?"[4]
"I'm not going to go into politics or give up literature or be a candidate for any office. I'm going to speak at this one demonstration so that it will at least be clear to everyone that not all of us Peruvians are letting ourselves be taken in by Se?or Alan García."
"Don't you know what kind of thugs you're picking as enemies? I've noticed you don't answer the phone anymore."
Because, ever since the day our manifesto came out, the anonymous calls had started. They came in the daytime or at night. In order to be able to get some sleep we had to disconnect the phone. The voices sounded like different ones each time, so that I came to think that every Aprista's idea of fun, once he had a drink under his belt, was to call my house to threaten us. These calls went on for almost the entire three years this account covers. They finally became a part of the family routine. When the calls stopped, a sort of vacuum, a nostalgia even, lingered on in the house.
The demonstration—we called it A Meeting for Freedom—was set for August 21 in the classic place for rallies in Lima: the Plaza San Martín. The organizing of it was in the hands of independents who had never been political militants or had any experience in this sort of contention, people like the university professor Luis Bustamante Belaunde or the business leader Miguel Vega Alvear, with whom we were to become fast friends. Among the political novices that all of us were, the exception perhaps was Miguel Cruchaga, Belaunde Terry's nephew, who as a young man had been a member of the AP (Acción Popular: Popular Action) party. But he had kept his distance from active militancy for some time. My friendship with the tall, gentlemanly, grave Miguel was of long standing, but it had become a very intimate one after my return to Peru, after nearly sixteen years in Europe, in 1974, on the eve of the capture of the news media by the dictatorship. We always used to talk politics whenever we were together, and each time, somewhat cast over with sickly melancholy, we wondered why everything in Peru always tended to get worse, why we were wasting opportunities and persisting so perversely toward working for our ruin and our downfall. And each time, too, in a very vague way, we outlined projects to do something, at some time or other. That intellectual game took on, all of a sudden, in the fever and boiling fury of those August days, a disconcerting reality. Because of this background and because of his enthusiasm, Miguel took on the job of coordinating the arrangements for the protest rally. These were intense and exhausting days which, from a distance, seem to me to be the most generously motivated and the most exciting ones of those years. I had asked the shareholders of the threatened companies and the opposition parties—Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party—to remain on the sidelines, so as to make the event clearly a matter of principle, of Peruvians who were not taking to the streets to defend personal or political interests but to defend values that seemed to us to be endangered by nationalization.
So many people mobilized to help us—collecting money, printing pamphlets and placards, preparing pennants, lending their homes for meetings, offering transportation for the demonstrators, and going out to paint slogans and drive through the streets in vehicles with loudspeakers—that from the very beginning I had the premonition that the Meeting for Freedom would be a success. Since my place was a madhouse, on the evening of August 21 I hid out for a few hours at the home of Carlos and Maggie Ferreyros, two friends, to prepare the first political speech of my life. (Carlos was kidnapped shortly thereafter, by the MRTA [Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru: Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement] and held in captivity for six months, in a tiny cellar without ventilation.)
But, despite the favorable signs, not even the most optimistic person among us could have predicted the extraordinary number of people who packed the Plaza San Martín elbow to elbow that night and overflowed the neighboring streets. When I went up onto the speakers' platform I felt a mixture of boundless joy and terror: tens of thousands of people—130,000, according to the review Sí[5]—were waving flags and singing out in chorus at the top of their lungs the "Hymn to Freedom," the words and music of which had been written for the occasion by Augusto Polo Campos, a very popular composer. Something must have changed in Peru when a crowd like that fervently applauded on hearing me say that economic freedom was inseparable from political freedom, that private property and a market economy were the only guarantee of development, and that we Peruvians would not allow our democratic system to be "Mexicanized" or the APRA to be turned into the Trojan Horse of Communism in Peru.
The story has it that that night, on seeing on the little TV screen the magnitude of the Meeting for Freedom, Alan Garcia, in a fit of rage, smashed the set to smithereens. What is certain is that the immense demonstration had enormous consequences. It was a decisive factor in making it evident that the nationalization law, though already passed in Congress, could never be put into effect, and the law was later annulled. It was a death blow to Alan García's ambition to stay in office for an unlimited time. It opened the doors of Peruvian political life to liberal thought that up until then had lacked a public presence, since all of our modern history had been, practically speaking, a monopoly of the ideological populism of conservatives and socialists of various tendencies. It gave the initiative back to the opposition parties, Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party, which, following their defeat in 1985, had appeared to be invisible, and laid the foundations for what would become the Frente Democrático (Democratic Front)[6] and, as Patricia feared, for my candidacy for the presidency.
Buoyed up by our success in the Plaza San Martín, we immediately organized two other meetings, in Arequipa, on August 26, and in Piura, on September 2. Both of them were also attended by thousands. In Arequipa there was violence; we were attacked by Aprista counterdemonstrators—the famous buffaloes or bullies and armed hoodlums of the party—and by a Maoist faction of the United Left, the Patria Roja (Red Fatherland). They set off explosives and, armed with clubs, stones, and stink bombs, attacked just as I was beginning to speak, so as to start a stampede. The young people in charge of maintaining order on the outer edge of the Plaza, organized by Fernando Cháves Belaunde, resisted the attack, but several of them were injured. "You see? You see?" Patricia grumbled; she and María Amelia, Freddy Cooper's wife, had been obliged to dive underneath a policeman's riot shield that night in order to escape a hail of bottles. "What I predicted has already started happening." But the truth of the matter was that, despite her opposition in principle, she too worked morning and night organizing the meetings and was in the front row at all three of them.
It was the country's middle classes who filled those three plazas. Not the rich, since in the indescribably wretched country that bad governments have turned Peru into there would not be enough of them to fill a theater and perhaps not even a living room. And not the poor, the peasants or the inhabitants of the shantytowns that were euphemistically called "young towns," who listened to the debate pitting state ownership against a market economy, collectivism against free enterprise, from afar, as if it were no concern of theirs. These middle classes—office workers, professionals, technicians, tradesmen, state employees, housewives, students—had seen their lot worsen by the day. For three decades they had watched their standard of living decline and their hopes come to nothing under each succeeding government. Under the first administration of Belaunde Terry (1963–68), whose reformism had aroused great expectations. Under the military dictatorship and its repressive socialist policy, which had impoverished, ravished, and corrupted Peruvian society as no other previous government ever had. Under the second administration of Belaunde Terry, who had won by an overwhelming majority, and who did not remedy a single one of the disasters of the previous regime and left behind him an overt inflationary process. And under Alan García, who—in those days this was barely beginning to be perceived—would beat all records in the history of Peru for inefficient administration, bequeathing to his successor, in 1990, a country in ruins, in which real salaries had been reduced by half, paychecks by a third, and in which national production had fallen to the levels of thirty years before. Stunned, lurching in bewilderment from the political right to the left, overcome by fear and at times by desperation, these middle classes had rarely mobilized in Peru outside of election campaign periods. But they had done so this time, nonetheless, with an instinctive certainty that if the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, and financial firms came about, the situation would be worse still and Peru would be even farther away from being that decent, reliable country, with jobs and opportunities, that they longed for.
The recurrent theme of my three speeches had been that the way out of poverty does not lie in redistributing the little wealth that exists but in creating more. And in order to do that markets must be opened up, competition and individual initiative encouraged, private property not be fought against but extended to the greatest number, our economy and our psychology taken out of the grip of the state, and the handout mentality that expects everything from the state replaced by a modern outlook that entrusts the responsibility for economic life to civil society and the market.
"I see it but I don't believe it," my friend Felipe Thorndike said to me. "You talk about private property and popular capitalism, and instead of lynching you they applaud you. What's happening in Peru?"
That is how the story of my candidacy began. From that time on, whenever I've been asked why I was ready to give up my vocation as a writer and enter politics I've answered: "For a moral reason. Because circumstances placed me in a position of leadership at a critical moment in the life of my country. Because it appeared that the opportunity was at hand to accomplish, with the support of a majority of Peruvians, the liberal reforms which, ever since the early 1970s, I had been defending in articles and polemical exchanges as being necessary in order to save Peru."
But someone who knows me as well as I know myself, or perhaps even better, Patricia, doesn't see it that way. "The moral obligation wasn't the decisive factor," she says. "It was the adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk. Of writing the great novel in real life."
This may well hit the nail on the head. It is true that if the presidency of Peru had not been, as I said jokingly to a journalist, "the most dangerous job in the world," I might never have been a candidate. If the decadence, the impoverishment, the terrorism, and the multiple crises of Peruvian society had not made it an almost impossible challenge to govern such a country, it would never have entered my head to accept such a task. I have always believed that writing novels has been, in my case, a way of living the many lives—the many adventures—that I would like to have had myself and therefore I can't discard the possibility that, in those dark depths where the most secret motivations of our acts are plotted, it was the temptation of adventure, rather than some sort of altruism, that induced me to enter professional politics.
But if it is true that the temptation of adventure played a role, so did another one, either major or minor, which, in an attempt to be as far from grandiloquent as possible, I shall call a moral commitment.
I shall try to explain something that is not easy to put into words without lapsing into platitudes or into sentimental simplemindedness. Although I was born in Peru ("through an accident of geography," as the head of the Peruvian Army, General Nicolás de Bari Hermoza, put it, thinking that he was insulting me),[7] my vocation is that of a cosmopolitan and an expatriate who has always detested nationalism, which strikes me as one of the human aberrations that has made the most blood flow, and I also know that patriotism, as Dr. Johnson said, can be the last refuge of a scoundrel. I have lived a good part of my life abroad and I have never felt like a total stranger anywhere. Despite this, the relations I have with the country where I was born are more intimate and long-lasting than those I have with any other, including the ones in which I have come to feel completely at home: England, France, or Spain. I don't know why this is, but in any case it is not on account of a question of principle. But what happens in Peru affects me more—makes me happier or irritates me more—than what happens elsewhere, and in a way that I would be unable to justify rationally, I feel that between me and Peruvians of any race, language, and social status, for better or for worse—especially for worse—there is something that ties me to them in a seemingly invincible way. I don't know whether this is related to the stormy past that is our heritage, to the violent and miserable present of our country, to its uncertain future, or to the crucial experiences of my adolescence in Piura and Lima, or, simply, to my childhood, there in Bolivia, where, as tends to happen to expatriates, in my grandparents' and my mother's household, we lived Peru, the fact of being Peruvian, as the most precious gift ever bestowed on our family.
Perhaps saying that I love my country is not true. I often loathe it, and hundreds of times since I was young I have promised myself to live a long way from Peru forever and not write anything more about it and forget its aberrations. But the fact is that it is continually on my mind, and whether I am living in it or residing abroad as an expatriate, to me it is a constant torment. I cannot free myself from it; when it doesn't exasperate me, it saddens me, and often both at once. It has grieved me most of all ever since I have had ample evidence that it manages to interest the rest of the world only because of its natural cataclysms, its record rates of inflation, the activities of its drug traffickers, its terrorist massacres, or the villainies of those who govern it. And to know that it is spoken of, outside its borders, when it is spoken of at all, as a horrible, caricatural country that is dying by the inch because of the inability of Peruvians to govern themselves with a minimum of common sense. I remember having thought, when I read George Orwell's essay "The Lion and the Unicorn," in which he says that England is a good country of good folk with "the wrong people in control," how well that definition applied to Peru. For among us are decent people capable of accomplishing, for example, what the Spaniards have in Spain in the last ten years; but such people have rarely gone into politics, an area that in Peru has almost always been in dishonest and mediocre hands.
In June of 1912, the historian José de la Riva Agüero made a journey on muleback from Cuzco to Huancayo, following one of the highroads of the Inca empire, and left as testimony of the experience a beautiful book, Paisajes peruanos (Peruvian Landscapes), in which he evokes, in sculptural prose, the geography of the Andes and the historic epic deeds to which those brave territories, Cuzco, Apurímac, Ayacucho, and Junín, were witness. On reaching the great plain of Quinua, outside Ayacucho, the scene of the battle that put the final stamp on the emancipation of Peru, a somber reflection causes him to halt. A strange battle for liberation that one—in which the royalist band of the Viceroy La Serna was made up exclusively of Peruvian soldiers and the emancipating army was two-thirds Colombian and Argentine. This paradox sends him into an acid consideration concerning the failure as a republic of his country, which, ninety years after the battle that made it a sovereign nation, is a laughable shadow of what it was in its pre-Hispanic stage, and in the three colonial centuries, of the most prosperous viceroyalty of all the Spanish possessions. Who is responsible? The "poor colonial aristocracy," the "poor stupid Lima nobility, incapable of any sort of idea and of any effort"? Or "the military leaders" with "vulgar appetites," "greedy for gold and avid for command," whose "befuddled intelligences" and "depraved hearts" were incapable of serving their country, and when someone managed to do so, "all his rivals plotted to destroy him"? Or, perhaps, those "Creole bourgeois" possessed of "sordid and Phoenician selfishness" who "were ashamed later on in Europe, with the basest instincts for social climbing, of their condition as Peruvians, to which they owed everything they were and had"?
Peru had gone on ruining itself and was now more backward and perhaps with worse social iniquities than when it inspired in Riva Agüero this gloomy meditation. Ever since I read it, in 1955, for an edition being prepared by my professor and mentor, Porras Barrenechea, the pessimism that permeates it struck me as being the same one that very often paralyzed me with regard to Peru. And until those days in August 1987, that historical failure seemed to me to be a sort of sign of a country which, at some moment in its trajectory, "fucked itself all up" (this had been the obsessive rhetorical device I had deliberately hammered away at in my novel Conversation in The Cathedral, in which I had tried to represent Peruvian frustration) and had never discovered how to get over it without continuing to sink deeper and deeper into error.
Several times in my life, before the events of August 1987, I had lost all hope in Peru. Hope of what? When I was younger, hope that, skipping intermediate steps in one leap, it would become a prosperous, modern, cultivated country, and that I would live to see that day. Later on, the hope that, before I died, Peru would have at least begun to cease being poor, backward, and violent. There are no doubt many bad things about our era, but there is one very good one, without precedent in history. Countries today can choose to be prosperous. One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them. There is no better philosophy than that for keeping them in a state of backwardness for all time to come. Because today that theory is false. In the past, to be sure, prosperity depended almost exclusively on geography and power. But the internationalization of modern life—of markets, of technology, of capital—permits any country, even the smallest one with the fewest resources, if it opens out to the world and organizes its economy on a competitive basis, to achieve rapid growth. In the last two decades, by practicing, through its dictatorships or its civilian administrations, populism, exclusively economic nationalism, and government intervention in the economy, Latin America chose instead to go backward. And through its military dictatorship and Alan García, Peru pursued, farther than other countries, policies that lead to economic disaster. Up until those days of the campaign against the nationalization of the financial system, I had the impression that, though deeply divided on many subjects, among Peruvians there was a sort of consensus in favor of populism. The political powers that be disagreed as to the amount of intervention that was desirable, but all of them appeared to accept, as an axiom, that without it neither progress nor social justice would be possible. The modernization of Peru seemed to me to have been put off till pigs had wings.
In the public debate I had with my adversary, on June 3, 1990, the agricultural engineer Alberto Fujimori gibed: "It seems that you would like to make Peru a Switzerland, Doctor Vargas." Aspiring to see Peru "become a Switzerland" had come to be, for a considerable portion of my compatriots, a grotesque goal, whereas for others, those who would prefer to turn it into a Cuba or a North Korea, it was something intolerable, not to mention impossible.
One of the best essays of the historian Jorge Basadre is entitled "La promesa de la vida peruana" ("The Promise of Peruvian Life"), published in 1945. Its central idea is pathetic and splendid: there is an unfulfilled promise throughout the whole of the history of the Republic of Peru, an ambition, an ideal, a vague necessity that never managed to take shape, but that since emancipation was always there, buried and alive, amid the tumult of civil wars, the devastation wrought by military rule, and the eloquent oratory of the debates that took place on political speakers' platforms. A hope forever reborn and forever frustrated from saving us, someday, from the barbarism we had been brought to by our persistent inability to do what we ought to do.
But on the night of August 21, 1987, standing before that deliriously enthusiastic crowd in the Plaza San Martín, and then later in the Plaza de Armas of Arequipa, and on the Avenida Grau of the Piura of my childhood, I had the impression—the certainty—that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Peruvians had suddenly decided to do what was necessary to make our country "a Switzerland" someday—a country without people who were poor or illiterate, a country of cultivated, prosperous, and free citizens—and to make the promise at last become a part of history, thanks to a liberal reform of our incipient democracy.
Notes
[1] "Una monta?a de cadáveres: carta abierta a Alan García," El Comercio, Lima, June 23, 1986; reprinted in Contra viento y marea, III (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990), pp. 389–93.
[2] In 1988, the deficit of public enterprises in Peru amounted to $2,500,000,000, the equivalent of all the foreign currency brought in that year by exports.
[3] Contra viento y marea, III, pp. 417–20.
[4] In January 1983, eight journalists were killed in Uchuraccay, a remote village in the Andes. Vargas Llosa was one of the members of a commission appointed by Belaunde Terry's government to investigate the killings. This was the only government position that Vargas Llosa had held. He wrote the commission's report and came under fierce attack in the press. (Trans. note)
[5] Lima, August 24, 1987.
[6] The Frente Democrático, after joining with Acción Popular (AP) and the Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), was often also called La Alianza (the Alliance). (Trans. note)
[7] On July 8, 1992, in a ceremony that took place at the Rafael Hoyos Rubio barracks, in Rímac, in which all the leaders of the Peruvian Army supported the coup d'état of April 5 perpetrated by Alberto Fujimori, who until then had been the constitutional president.
