A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The subject sometimes woke me up at night, in a fit of anxiety. If I were president, how could I keep thieves from doing as they pleased in my administration? I talked the matter over countless times with Patricia, with Miguel Cruchaga and other friends in Libertad. Doing away with state interventionism in the economy would, naturally, reduce graft. It would no longer be ministers or important officials in ministries who would decide, through decrees, the success or failure of businessmen, but consumers. It would no longer be bureaucrats who would fix the value of foreign currencies, but the market. There would be no more import or export quotas. And the privatization of state enterprises would drastically reduce the possibilities for graft and peculation on the part of bureaucrats and government officials. But until a genuine, functioning market economy existed, there would be any number of chances for underhanded deals. And even later on, power would always give the person who held it a chance to sell something under the table and enable him to reap a profit for himself from the privileged information that any government official possesses. An efficient and incorruptible judiciary is the best check against such excesses. But our system of justice had also been eaten away by venality, particularly in recent years, when the salary of judges had been reduced, in real terms, to a mere pittance. And President García, as a precaution against what the future might bring, had filled the judiciary with people devoted to him. In this field, too, we would have to be prepared, as in the fight to establish a free market economy, to wage a war without quarter. But winning this war would be more difficult than winning the other one, for in this one the enemy was not only on the side of our adversaries. It was crouching among our own followers.

  I made a conscious decision not to find out who had given donations and contributions to Libertad and to the Democratic Front, nor how much the sums donated amounted to, so as not to find myself, later on, if I were president, unconsciously predisposed in favor of the donors. And I made it a rule that only one person would be authorized to receive financial contributions to the campaign: Felipe Thorndike Beltrán. Pipo Thorndike, a petroleum engineer, an entrepreneur, and an agricultural expert, had been one of the victims of General Velasco’s dictatorship, which had expropriated all his holdings. He had been obliged to go into exile. While he was abroad he built his businesses and his fortune back up, and in 1980, with a stubbornness as great as his love for his native land, he returned to Peru with his money and his determination to work with a will. I had confidence in his honesty, which I knew to be as great as his generosity—he was another of those who, ever since the days of the Plaza San Martín, had devoted himself to working full time alongside me—and that was why I entrusted such a thankless and time-consuming task to him. And I set up a committee of people of unquestionable probity to supervise the expenditures of the campaign: Freddy Cooper, Miguel Cruchaga, Fernando de Szyszlo, Miguel Vega Alvear, who were sometimes given a helping hand by the administrative secretary of the Freedom Movement, Rocío Cillóniz.* I forbade all of them to give me any information whatsoever about what was received and what was spent, and laid down only the following rule: accept no money from foreign governments or from companies (all donations were to be made on a personal basis). These conditions of mine were fulfilled to the letter. I was very seldom consulted or informed about the subject. (One of the rare exceptions was the day that Pipo, deeply moved, could not keep himself from commenting to me that the head of government planning for the Front, Luis Bustamante Belaunde, had turned over to him the $40,000 that a group of businessmen had made certain he received so as to give him a helping hand in his campaign for a seat in the Senate.) The few times that, during an interview, someone mentioned the possibility of monetary aid being offered me, I interrupted him and explained that the financial circuits of Libertad and of the Democratic Front did not run through my house.

  Between the first and second round of voting, one of the schemes thought up by the government to slander us consisted in having the Aprista and Communist majority in Congress appoint a committee that would summon the candidates before it to reveal how much their campaign expenditures amounted to and the sources of their financial funds. I remember the skeptical looks on the faces of the senators on that committee when I explained to them that I couldn’t tell them how much we had spent on the campaign because I didn’t know and gave them the reasons why I hadn’t wanted to know. Once the second round was over, and despite the fact that no law existed that required us to do so, through Felipe Thorndike and the head of the campaign of the Front, Freddy Cooper, we informed that committee of the amount that we had spent. And that was how I too learned that in those three years we had received and spent the equivalent of some four and a half million dollars (three-quarters of which went for TV ads).

  This figure, modest by comparison with other Latin American campaigns—if one thinks, for instance, of Venezuela or Brazil—is, of course, a high one for Peru. But it is far from the astronomical sums that, according to our adversaries, we squandered in our efforts to win. (One United Left congressman, reputed to be an honest man, Agustín Haya de la Torre, stated, without one hair of his mustache trembling: “The Front has already spent more than forty million dollars.”)

  We held the first congress of Libertad in the Colegio San Agustín in Lima, between April 14 and 16, 1989. It was organized by a committee headed by one of my most faithful friends, Luis Miró Quesada Garland, who, despite his formidable repugnance for politics, worked with me day and night for three years in a spirit of self-sacrifice. We elected him honorary president of the congress, to which delegates came from all over Peru. In the weeks before, there had been elections within the Movement to choose the members of the congress, and the Lima districts and neighborhoods participated enthusiastically. At the opening ceremonies, on the night of the 14th, the district committees arrived with orchestras and musical groups, and the gaiety of the young people turned the ceremony into a party. Instead of delivering my speech extemporaneously, it seemed to me that the occasion—in addition to the opening of this first congress, with Belaunde and Bedoya we had formally set up the Democratic Front, at Popular Action’s Asociación Perú, and SODE had joined the alliance—demanded that I write it beforehand and read it aloud.

  Aside from this speech, I wrote only three others beforehand, though I improvised and delivered hundreds of others. During tours of the interior and the various districts of Lima I spoke several times each day, in the morning and at night, and in the last weeks there were rallies that took place at the rate of three or four a day. In order to keep my throat in good condition, Bedoya advised me to chew whole cloves between one speech and the next, and the physician who accompanied me—there were two or three of them, who took turns on duty, along with a small emergency team in case there was an attempt on my life—kept stuffing lozenges down my gullet or handing me the throat spray. I tried not to talk between rallies, so as to give my throat irritation time to go away. But even so it was sometimes impossible to keep my voice from turning hoarse or getting clogged up with phlegm. (In the jungle, late one afternoon, I arrived at the town of La Rioja with almost no voice left. And the moment I began speaking a stiff breeze came up that finished the job of ruining my vocal cords. In order to finish my speech, I had to beat myself on the chest, like Tarzan.)

  Speaking in public squares was something I had never done before the Plaza San Martín. And it is something for which having given classes and lectures is of no help, and may even be a hindrance. For in Peru political oratory has remained at the romantic stage. The politician goes up onto the platform to charm, to seduce, to lull, to bill and coo. His musical phrasing is more important than his ideas, his gestures more important than his concepts. Form is everything: it can either make or destroy the content of what he says. The good orator may say absolutely nothing, but he says it with style. What matters to his audience is for him to sound good and look good. The logic, the rational order, the consistency, the critical acumen of what he is saying generally get in
the way of his achieving that effect, which is attained above all through impressionistic images and metaphors, ham acting, fancy turns of phrase, and defiant remarks. The good Latin American political orator bears a much closer resemblance to a bullfighter or a rock singer than to a lecturer or a professor: his communication with the audience is achieved by way of instinct, emotion, sentiment, rather than by way of intelligence.

  Michel Leiris compared the art of writing to bullfighting, a fine allegory for expressing the risk that the poet or the prose writer ought to be prepared to run when it comes time to confront the blank page before him. But the image is even more appropriate for the politician who, from atop a few boards, on a balcony, or in the atrium of a church, faces a crowd worked up to fever pitch. What he has before him is something as massive as a bull bred for the arena, an awesome creature and at the same time one so ingenuous and manipulable that it can be made to move in whatever direction he chooses, providing he makes skillful passes with the red cape of intonation and gesture.

  That night in the Plaza San Martín I was surprised to discover how erratic, how fitful the attention of a crowd is and how elementary its psychology, the ease with which it can be made to pass from laughter to anger, be moved, be driven into a frenzy, be reduced to tears, in unison with the speaker. And how difficult it is to make contact with the reason, rather than with the passions, of those who attend a rally. If the language of politics all over the world is made up of platitudes, this is even more the case where it is a custom centuries old for public speaking to be an incantatory art.

  I did what I could not to perpetuate that custom and did my best to use the speakers’ platforms to promote certain ideas and to disclose the program of the Front, avoiding demagoguery and clichés. To my way of thinking, those public squares were the ideal place to put across once and for all the fact that to vote for me was to vote for certain concrete reforms, so that there would be no misunderstandings concerning what I intended to do or the sacrifices that it would cost.

  But I don’t believe that I succeeded in putting across either of these two things. For Peruvians did not vote for ideas in the elections, and despite all my precautions I very often noted—especially when fatigue got the better of me—that all at once I too was resorting to ham acting or an unexpected remark to milk applause from the audience. In the two months of the campaign for the second round, I tried to sum up our proposed program in just a few ideas, which I repeated, again and again, in the most simple and direct way, enveloped in familiar popular imagery. But the weekly polls showed each time that the decision as to which candidate to vote for was made, in the overwhelming majority of cases, on the basis of the personalities of the people running for office and out of obscure impulses, and never on account of the programs the voters were offered.

  Of all the speeches I gave, I remember as the best ones, or in any event the least bad ones, two that I was able to prepare in the hospitable garden of my friends Maggie and Carlos Ferreyros—with no bodyguards, reporters, or telephones—for the launching of my candidacy, in the Plaza de Armas, the main square of Arequipa, on June 4, 1989, and the one closing the campaign, on the Paseo de la República, in Lima, on April 14, 1990, the most personal one of all. And also, perhaps, the brief address, on June 10, before the grief-stricken crowd that rushed to the doors of the headquarters of Libertad as soon as it became known that we had lost.

  At the congress of the Movement there were speeches, but there was also an ideological debate which quite possibly did not interest all the delegates as much as it did me. Was the Freedom Movement going to promote a market economy or a social market economy? Enrique Ghersi defended the first thesis and Luis Bustamante Belaunde the second, in an intelligent interchange that caused a number of those attending to speak up in favor of one formula or the other. The discussion was more than a semantic itch. By way of the sympathy or the antipathy provoked by the adjective social, the heterogeneous composition of the Movement became clearly evident. Not only liberals had signed up as members of it, but also conservatives, Christian Socialists, Social Democrats, and a goodly number—the majority perhaps—without any ideological position, with an abstract loyalty to democracy or with no more than a negative definition: they were not Apristas or Communists and saw in us an alternative to whatever it was they detested or feared.

  The most closely knit group and the one most closely identified with liberalism—or so it appeared at the time; things would change later—was one made up of young people between the ages of twenty and thirty, who had had their first passage at arms as journalists working together at La Prensa when that daily was released from state control by Belaunde in 1980, under the tutelage of two journalists who, for quite some time, had been defending the free market and combating government interventionism: Arturo Salazar Larraín and Enrique Chirinos Soto (both had joined Libertad). But these young people, among whom was my son Álvaro, had gone quite a bit further than their teachers. They were enthusiastic followers of Milton Friedman, of Ludwig von Mises, or of Friedrich Hayek, and the radicalism of one of them—Federico Salazar—bordered on anarchism. Several of them had worked or were still working at Hernando de Soto’s Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Freedom and Democracy Institute) and two of them, Ghersi and Mario Ghibellini, were co-authors with him of El otro sendero (The Other Path), for which I had written the foreword,* and in which it was shown, supported by exhaustive research, how the informal economy, set up just outside the law, was a creative response of the poor to the discriminatory barriers imposed by that mercantilist version of capitalism which was the only variety with which Peru was acquainted.

  That investigation, made by a team directed by Hernando de Soto, was of great importance to the furthering of liberal ideas in Peru, and marked off a sort of borderline. De Soto had organized, in Lima, in 1979 and 1982, two international symposia to which he brought a roster of economists and thinkers—Hayek, Friedman, Jean-François Revel, and Hugh Thomas among others—whose ideas were a strong breath of modernizing fresh air in that Peru that was just emerging from so many years of populist demagoguery and military dictatorship. I had collaborated with Hernando in staging these events, speaking at both, helped him set up the Instituto Libertad y Democracia, closely followed his studies on the informal economy, and continued to be enthusiastic about his conclusions. I urged him to put them together in a book and when he did so, besides writing the foreword for it, I promoted El otro sendero in Peru and in the outside world as I have never done for a book of my own. (I even went so far as to insist, to the point of brazenness, that The New York Times Magazine accept an article that I had written about it, which finally appeared on February 22, 1987, and later was widely reprinted in many countries.) I did so because I thought that Hernando would be a good president of Peru. He too believed that and thus our relationship seemed to be an excellent one. Hernando was as vain and touchy as a prima donna, and when I first met him in 1979, just after his arrival from Europe, where he had lived for a good part of his life, he struck me as a slightly pompous and ridiculous figure, with his Spanish studded with Anglicisms and Gallicisms and his aristocratic, affected snobbishness (he had added a coquettish “de” to his father’s name, and for that reason Belaunde sometimes referred to him as “that economist with the name of a conquistador”). But I soon had the impression that I had discovered, beneath his picturesque outward appearance, a more intelligent, more modern person than the ordinary run of our politicians, someone who could lead a liberal reform in Peru and who, despite his mania for publicity, was therefore worth all the support I could give him, both inside and outside the country. Support him I did, with great success and also, I confess, no little embarrassment, once I discovered that I was forging for him an image of an intellectual which, as my countrymen have it, wept when it was superimposed on the original.

  At the time of the mobilization against nationalization, Hernando was on holiday, in the Dominican Republic. But I phoned him and he returned to Peru earlie
r than he had planned to. Although in the beginning he expressed reservations as to the rally in the Plaza San Martín—as an alternative, he proposed a symposium on the informal economy in the Amauta Coliseum, an indoor stadium, but then later he and all the people from the Instituto Libertad y Democracia collaborated with enthusiasm in organizing the Plaza San Martín demonstration. His right-hand man in those days, Enrique Ghersi, was one of the organizers and de Soto one of the three speakers who preceded me. His presence on that platform had given rise to much covert pressure, which I resisted, convinced that those of my friends who were opposed to his speaking, maintaining that his odd words in English would make people burst out laughing, were behaving as they did out of jealousy and not, as they kept assuring me, because he seemed to them a man with more ambitions than principles and one whose loyalty was dubious.

  His later conduct proved that my friends had been absolutely right. On the very eve of the rally on August 21, in which in theory he was to play an active part, de Soto had a discreet interview with Alan García at the Presidential Palace, which established the foundations of a close and advantageous collaboration between the administration and the Instituto Libertad y Democracia and which was to launch de Soto on a headlong career as an opportunist (one that was to reach new heights later under the administration and the dictatorship of Fujimori, the new president). That collaboration was cleverly contrived by Alan García in order to publicize himself, all of a sudden, after 1988, in one of those somersaults of which demagogues are capable, as a promoter of private property among Peruvians of scant means, a president who was fulfilling one of the fundamental aspirations of the Democratic Front: to make of Peru “a country of proprietors.” To this end, he had himself photographed right and left, arm in arm with de Soto, Peru’s “liberal,” and sponsored sensational and above all inordinately expensive projects—because of the publicity costing millions that surrounded them—in the young towns, which Hernando and his Institute carried out for him, in what he maintained was open competition with the Front. The maneuver had no major political effect, though as far as I was personally concerned, it admittedly was of great help to me to learn of the unsuspected abilities of the star performer involved, whom, with my characteristic naïveté, I had at one time believed capable of cleaning up Peruvian politics and saving the country.