A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I had voted for Belaunde every time he was a candidate, and even though I was aware of his shortcomings, I defended his second term as president, since it seemed to me that after twelve years of dictatorship, the reconstruction of democracy was the first priority and could best be attained if Popular Action remained in power. And also because those who attacked it—the APRA and the United Left—represented even worse choices. And, above all else, because there is, in the person of Belaunde, in addition to his wide reading of good books and his good manners, a profound decency, along with two qualities that I have always admired in him, inasmuch as they are not often found in Peruvian politicians: a genuine belief in democracy* and absolute honesty. He is one of the few presidents in our history who left the Presidential Palace poorer than when he entered it. But mine was qualified support, not exempt at times from criticism of his administration, of which, moreover, I was never a part. With just one exception, I refused all the posts he offered me: the embassies in London and in Washington, the Ministry of Education and that of Foreign Relations and, finally, the office of prime minister. The exception was the unremunerated, month-long appointment, the memory of which gave Patricia and me nightmares, as one of the members of the commission investigating the killing of eight journalists in a remote region of the Andes, Uchuraccay,† for which I had been mercilessly attacked and for which I was about to be taken to court.

  In the middle of Belaunde’s second term, I was unexpectedly summoned one night to the Presidential Palace. He is a reserved man who, even when he talks a great deal, never reveals his most intimate thoughts. But on that occasion—we had two or three meetings on the same subject in the next few months—he spoke to me in a much more explicit way than usual, with some emotion, and allowed me to catch a glimpse of certain matters that were tormenting him. He was deeply distressed at those experts to whom he had given carte blanche to manage the country’s economy. And what had been the result? He was certain that history would not remember them, but he for his part would not be forgotten. He was indignant that certain ministers had hired advisers whose salaries were paid in dollars when the entire country had been asked to make sacrifices. And there was melancholy and a sort of bitterness in his tone of voice and in his silences. His immediate preoccupation was the 1985 election. Popular Action wouldn’t stand a chance of winning, nor would the Christian Popular Party, since Bedoya, without detracting from his personal merits, lacked drawing power at the polls. This could mean the triumph of the APRA, with Alan García in the presidency. The consequences for the country would be frightful. In the years that followed, I would always remember, because of the confirmation that time brought, the prophecy Belaunde made that night: “Peru has no idea what that young man may be capable of if he comes to power.” His idea was that this could be avoided if I were the candidate of AP and the PPC. He thought that my candidacy would attract the independent vote. He answered my arguments that I was no good at politics (a prophecy that time would also confirm) with flattering phrases and with a kindliness—I would use the term affection, if this word were not so at odds with his sober, not at all emotional personality—that he never failed to show me even in the tensest moments of the life of the Democratic Front (as at the time of my resignation, in mid-1989, because of the dispute over municipal elections). That project of Belaunde’s never went any farther, in large part because of my own lack of interest, but also because it found no echo either in AP or in the PPC, which wanted to present their own candidates in the 1985 election.

  Bedoya, a witty man and with some ironic gibe or other always on the tip of his tongue, said that Belaunde was “a master at taking the syringe out of his backside.” And in fact there was no way of pinning down anything with Belaunde or even discussing it when a subject wasn’t to his liking or didn’t seem worthwhile to him. In such cases he always managed to take off on another tangent, telling anecdotes about his travels—he had been all over Peru, from top to bottom, on foot, on horseback, in a canoe, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the country’s geography—or about his two terms in office, without leaving anyone room to get a word in edgewise to interrupt him. And then, suddenly, he would look at his watch, get to his feet, and without further ado—“Well, just look how late it’s gotten”—bid us goodbye and disappear. One night I also saw him inflict these same clever evasive maneuvers that he used with Bedoya and me on three Aprista leaders high up in the administration hierarchy—the prime minister, Armando Villaneuva, the president of the Congress, Alva Castro, and the senator and historical relic of the party, Luis Alberto Sánchez—who had asked to talk with the leaders of the Democratic Front in view of a possible political truce. We met at the home of Jorge Grieve, in San Isidro, on September 12, 1988. But the Apristas didn’t even have the chance to propose such a thing to us, because Belaunde kept them silent all evening long, relating details of his first term in office, reminiscing about his travels and about well-known figures long since dead, cracking jokes and telling anecdotes, until in discouragement and, I suppose, driven half out of their minds, the Apristas gave up and left.

  What we practically never talked about with Belaunde and with Bedoya, throughout those three years, was what the policy of the Front would be for running the country—its ideas, reforms, initiatives to dig Peru out of its ruins and put it back on the road to recovery. The reason was simple: the three of us knew that the parties had very different points of view on what the plan for governing the country ought to be and we preferred to leave the discussion for a later time that never came round. We would talk about the political gossip of the moment, about what Alan García’s next machination would be—what ambush, intrigue, or infamy he was cooking up this time—and we would discuss, whenever we could manage to keep Belaunde from wandering off the subject, the question of whether the Front would present joint candidates in the municipal elections in November 1989 or whether each party would go its own way with its own candidates.

  Now that I had become involved, I made a depressing discovery in these tripartite meetings: that real politics, not the kind that one reads and writes about, thinks about and imagines (the only sort I was acquainted with), but politics as lived and practiced day by day, has little to do with ideas, values, and imagination, with ideological visions—the ideal society we would like to create—and, to put it bluntly, little to do with generosity, solidarity, and idealism. It consists almost exclusively of maneuvers, intrigues, plots, paranoias, betrayals, a great deal of calculation, no little cynicism, and every variety of con game. Because what really gets the professional politician, whether of the center, the left, or the right, moving, what excites him and keeps him going is power, attaining it, remaining in it, or returning to it as soon as possible. There are exceptions, of course, but they are just that: exceptions. Many politicians begin their careers impelled by altruistic sentiments—changing society, attaining justice, fostering development, bringing morality into public life. But along the way, in the petty, pedestrian practice of day-to-day politics, these fine objectives become, little by little, mere clichés of the speeches and statements of the public persona that they acquire, which in the end makes them all but indistinguishable from each other. What prevails in politicians, finally, is the gross and sometimes immeasurable appetite for power. Anyone who is not capable of feeling this obsessive, almost physical attraction to power finds it nearly impossible to be a successful politician.

  That was my case. Power had always aroused my mistrust, even in my early years as a revolutionary, and one of the functions of my vocation, literature, that had always seemed to me to be most important was to be, precisely, a form of resistance to power, an activity thanks to which power—all powers—might be permanently questioned, since good literature always ends up showing those who read it the shortcomings of life, the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires. It was this distrust of power, along with my biological allergy to any form of dictatorship, that had so attracted me, from
the 1970s on, to liberal thought, that of an Aron, a Popper, or a Hayek, of Friedman or of Nozick, with its commitment to defending the individual against the state, to decentralizing power by pulverizing it into multiple private powers that counterbalance each other, and to transferring economic, social, and institutional responsibilities to the citizenry as a whole instead of concentrating them in the political elite that rules the country.

  After nearly a year of negotiations we finally agreed on the official constitution of the Democratic Front. I was entrusted with drawing up the declaration of principles, and Belaunde, invariably shrewd when it came to gestures, suggested that we go sign it, in a public ceremony, in the cradle and bastion of Aprismo: Trujillo. We did so on October 29, 1988, after each of us led rallies separately throughout all of the North (I went to Chiclayo). The demonstration was a success, inasmuch as it covered nearly three-quarters of Trujillo’s immense and orderly main square. But in the Declaration of Trujillo, an academic proceeding that took place prior to the rally, in which the delegates of AP, the PPC, and Libertad offered a diagnosis of the situation in Peru, the hidden quarrels and rivalries within the Front began to come to the surface. In what seemed like an ill omen at the very outset, minutes before the ceremony was to start in the main hall of the Santo Domingo de Guzmán cooperative, a heavy metal room divider fell down on top of the table that Belaunde, Bedoya and I were to occupy. Belaunde and I, who had already arrived, were still standing waiting for Bedoya, who was riding in a motorcade through the streets of Trujillo. “You see,” I said jokingly to the former president, “the Toucan’s lack of punctuality has its positive side: he’s saved our necks.” But this first public act of the allies proved to be far from a cheerful occasion. Contrary to what had been agreed on—everyone crying out the same slogans at the same time so as to demonstrate the fraternal spirit of the alliance—when the three of us appeared together in public, each of the three contingents hailed only its own leader and shouted only its own rallying cries in chorus, so as to show that it was the largest one. And once the joint meeting was over, the three forces separated so that each of them could hold its own meeting that night for its local supporters. (Since Libertad did not have its own headquarters yet, we held our festivities in the street.)

  The order of speakers proved to be a bone of contention. Bedoya and my friends in Libertad insisted that as the leader and future candidate of the Front I ought to close the ceremony. Belaunde objected, on the grounds of his age and his status as the former president of Peru; I would be the principal speaker only after my candidacy had been publicly announced. In the end, we did as he wished. I spoke first, then Bedoya, and Belaunde ended the meeting. Idiocies of this sort took up a great deal of our time, giving rise to suspicions, and everyone agreed that they were important.

  The Democratic Front never came to be a coherent and integrated force, in which the common objective prevailed over the interests of the parties that constituted it. Only when it became clear that there would be a second round of voting, after the tremendous surprise of the first round—the very high percentage attained by Alberto Fujimori, an unknown, and the certainty that in the final round the vote of Apristas and leftists would go to him—did the shock that we had had bring militants and leaders together and induce them to cooperate without the partisan pettiness that had predominated until April 8, 1990.

  This shortsighted view of politics became particularly evident where the municipal elections were concerned. Scheduled to be held on November 12, 1989, barely five months before the presidential election, they were going to be the dress rehearsals for the contest for the presidency, since they would serve as a measure of the relative strength of the contending forces. Before we had even discussed the subject, Belaunde announced that AP would put up its own candidates, since, in his view, the Democratic Front existed only for the presidential election.

  For months it was hard to discuss the subject with him. Bedoya agreed with me that if each of the three political forces went its separate way in the municipal elections it would create an image of division and antagonism that would drastically reduce our chances of taking root as an alliance. When we were by ourselves, Belaunde told me that the populist rank and file of his party wouldn’t stand for the idea of sharing the lists of municipal candidates with the PPC, which did not exist outside of Lima, and that he could not risk being the target of rebellion within his own party for that reason.

  Since the whole problem appeared to be one of a bid for the most power, I proposed to the Freedom Movement that it give up the idea of putting up a single candidate for mayor or city councilor anywhere in Peru, so that AP and the PPC could share the candidacies between them. I thought that this gesture would make it easier for us allies to come to an agreement. But not even then would Belaunde let his arm be twisted. The matter finally attracted the attention of the communications media, and members of AP and the PPC, for the most part, but members of Libertad and supporters of SODE as well, got involved in a stupid debate that the media in thrall to the government and those on the left did their utmost to magnify in order to show the weakness and the groundswell of opposition that according to them was eating away at our alliance.

  Finally, in mid-June of 1989, after innumerable and on occasion violent arguments, Belaunde gave in and accepted the idea of single candidacies. There then began another fight between AP and the PPC, this time over which of the two parties would put up the candidate for a given municipality. They never reached an agreement, and in addition, the provincial bases of each party contested the decisions of their national leaders, since all of them wanted nothing less than everything and neither party seemed prepared to make the slightest concession to its ally. The rank and file of Libertad too had cried to high heaven over our agreement not to put up any candidates, and there were a number of defections.

  Alarmed by what this presaged for the future if the Front was elected, I managed to get Libertad to authorize me to offer the PPC and AP each 40 percent of the lists of candidates for Congress, instead of the 33 percent each that was their rightful share, in return for giving up any sort of ministerial quotas or reserved posts, something that, moreover, corresponded to a provision of the Constitution which regards the designation of the cabinet as the prerogative of the president. Belaunde and Bedoya agreed to this. My idea, naturally, was not to leave the allies out in the cold if we got into office, but to be free to be able to call upon as collaborators only those who were honest and capable, who believed in the reforms and were prepared to fight for them. That Libertad should have only 20 percent of the congressional candidates, and that the allies from SODE should also be included within this much-reduced percentage, demoralized many radical members of Libertad, to whom such altruism appeared to be both excessively generous and impolitic, because it barred many independents from competing and lent credence to those who said that I was a puppet of the traditional pols.

  It had been Belaunde and Popular Action that had placed the most obstacles in the way of an agreement concerning the municipal elections, but it was Bedoya who brought on the crisis, with a statement on television, on the night of June 19, 1989, denying with a minimum of tact what I had just announced at a press conference: that AP and the PPC had finally reached an agreement concerning the municipal candidacies in Lima and Callao, the ones that up to that point had been the cause of the worst controversies between the two parties. I listened to Bedoya’s statement on the late news broadcast on television, just after getting into bed. His loud disclaimer was a resounding demonstration of how disunited we were and the trivial reasons for our being at odds. I got up out of bed, went to my desk, and spent the rest of the night reflecting.

  For the first time, I was overcome by the idea that I had been badly mistaken to embark upon this political adventure. Perhaps Patricia was right. Was it worthwhile to go on? The future looked at once dark and ludicrous. AP and the PPC would go on squabbling to see who would head the electoral lists and how many candidates
for municipal councilman each party would get and what places the candidates of each party would have on the lists, until the Front had lost all the prestige it had. Was it in this spirit that we would achieve the great peaceful transformation? Was it possible with such an attitude to dismantle the macrocephalic state and transfer our immense public sector into the hands of the citizenry? The moment our own supporters were elected to office, wouldn’t all of them immediately make a move—exactly as the Apristas had done—to divide up the administration into smaller units and demand that still more divisions be created so that there would be more public posts to fill?

  The worst of all this was how blind we had been to what was going on around us. In mid-1989 armed attacks were becoming more and more frequent from one end of the country to the other; according to the government, they had already caused some eighteen thousand deaths. Whole regions—such as the Huallaga area, in the jungle, and nearly the whole of the central Andes—were little short of being completely under the control of Sendero Luminoso and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Alan García’s policy had caused the country’s hard currency reserves to vanish into thin air and the printing of paper money with no backing presaged an inflationary explosion. Companies were working at a half and in some instances a third of their proven capacity. Those Peruvians who were able to do so were taking their money out of the country and those who managed to find a job abroad left. Tax revenues had fallen to the point where we were suffering from a general collapse of public services. Every night the television screens showed heartbreaking scenes of hospitals without medicines or beds, of schools without desks, without blackboards, and sometimes without roofs or walls, of districts without water or light, of streets strewn with refuse, of production workers and office clerks on strike, in desperation over the dizzying fall in the standards of living of the population. And the Democratic Front was paralyzed—over which party would propose its list in each of the municipalities!