A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  But compared with other regions, impoverished Piura was enviable—prosperous, almost. In the central Andes, in Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Junín, Cerro de Pasco, Apurímac, as well as in the Altiplano bordering on Bolivia—the departamento of Puno—that zone referred to as one of critical poverty, which was also the one to which terrorism and counterterrorism had brought the most bloodshed, the situation was even worse. The few roads had been disappearing little by little because of lack of maintenance and in many places Sendero Luminoso had dynamited the bridges and blocked the trails with boulders. It had also destroyed experimental crops and livestock, wrecked the buildings and killed off hundreds of vicuñas in the Pampa Galeras Reserve, pillaged agricultural cooperatives—principally those of the Valle de Mantaro, the most dynamic ones in all the high country—assassinated local agents from the Ministry of Agriculture and foreign experts in rural development who had come to Peru on international cooperation projects, murdered small-scale farmers and miners or caused them to flee for their lives, blown up tractors, power plants, hydroelectric installations, and in many places killed the cattle and rubbed out the members of cooperatives and communes who tried to oppose their razed earth policy, whereby they intended to throttle the cities to death, Lima above all, by allowing no food to reach them.

  Words do not offer a precise account of what expressions such as “subsistence economy” or “critical poverty” mean in terms of human suffering, of the bestialization of life through lack of jobs and any hope of change for the better, through the impoverishment of the environment. This was the state of affairs in the mountain country in the center of Peru. Life there had always been poor, but now, with the closing of so many mines, the abandonment of crop-bearing lands, the isolation, the lack of investment, the nearly total disappearance of interchange with other regions, and the sabotage of centers of production and public services, it had been reduced to horrifying levels.

  Seeing those Andean villages, daubed with the hammer and sickle and the slogans of Sendero Luminoso, from which entire families were fleeing, abandoning everything, driven half mad with desperation because of the violence and the wretched poverty, to go off to swell the armies of unemployed in the cities—villages in which those who stayed appeared to be the survivors of some biblical catastrophe—I often thought: “A country can always be worse off. Underdevelopment is bottomless.” And for the last thirty years Peru had done everything possible to ensure that there would be more and more poor people and that its poor would each day be more impoverished still. In the face of those millions of Peruvians who were literally dying of hunger, in that Andean Cordillera that has the richest mining potential on the continent—that Cordillera from which there came the gold and the silver that made the name of Peru ring out all over the world with a music of precious metals and become a synonym of munificence—wasn’t it obvious that politics ought to be oriented toward attracting investments, starting up industries, stimulating trade, restoring land values, developing mining, agriculture, and cattle raising?

  The principle of the redistribution of wealth has an unquestionable moral force, but it often blinds its advocates and keeps them from seeing that it does not promote social justice if the policies that it gives rise to paralyze production, discourage initiative, drive away investments: that is to say, if they result in an increase in poverty. And redistributing poverty, or in the case of the Andes, the severest privation, as Alan García was doing, does not feed those who confront the problem as a matter of life or death.

  Ever since my disillusionment with Marxism and socialism—in theory on the one hand, but above all in reality, the kind I had become acquainted with in Cuba, in the Soviet Union, and in the so-called popular democracies—I suspected that the fascination of intellectuals with state control had to do not only with their vocation for seeking handouts or a regular income, a vocation nurtured by the patronage system that had caused them to live under the sheltering shadow of the Church and of princes and had been continued by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, in which intellectuals, on condition that they proved docile, automatically formed part of the privileged elite, but also with their lack of economic knowledge. From that time on, I tried—in a very undisciplined way, unfortunately—to remedy in one way or another my ignorance in this field. After 1980, thanks to a year’s fellowship at the Wilson Center, in Washington, I did so in a more orderly way and with growing interest, on discovering that despite appearances economics, far from being an exact science, was as open to creativity as the arts. When I entered the political arena, in 1987, two economists, Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos and Raúl Salazar, who was to become the head of the economic team of the Democratic Front, began to give me weekly lessons on the Peruvian economy. We met in a little room overlooking Freddy Cooper’s garden, at night, for a couple of hours, and I learned many things there. I also learned to respect the talent and the decency of Raúl Salazar, the key figure in the detailed development of the program of the Front, the person who, had we won, would have been our minister of finance. I once asked Raúl and Felipe to figure out for me how much each Peruvian would get if an egalitarian-minded administration redistributed all the wealth that existed in the country at that time. The answer: approximately fifty dollars per capita.* In other words, Peru would go on being the same country of poor people that it was, with the aggravating circumstance that after even such a measure it would never cease to be just that.

  In order for a country to emerge from poverty, redistributive policies don’t work. Others do work, the ones which, since they take into account an inevitable inequality between those who produce more and those who produce less, lack the intellectual and ethical fascination that has always surrounded socialism, and have been condemned because they encourage the profit motive. But egalitarian-oriented economies based on solidarity have never raised a country out of poverty; they have impoverished it even further. And they have frequently limited freedoms or caused them to disappear altogether, since egalitarianism requires strict planning, which starts out by being economic and gradually spreads to the rest of life. From this there results inefficiency, corruption, and privileges for those in power that are a negation of the very concept of egalitarianism. The rare cases of the economic takeoff of countries of the Third World have all, without exception, followed the plan of a market economy.

  In each of my trips to the central mountain region between 1987 and 1990, and I made many of them, I felt a tremendous sadness on seeing what life there had become for at least a third of Peruvians. And I returned from each of these trips more convinced than ever of what had to be done. Reopen the mines that had been closed for lack of incentives to export, since the artificially low value of the dollar had caused small and medium-sized mining operations to come close to disappearing altogether, so that only large-scale mining had survived, in extremely precarious conditions. Attract capital and technology in order to open new companies. Put an end to the price controls on agricultural products whereby the Aprista administration condemned peasants to subsidize the cities, the pretext being to lower the price of food for the masses. Give title deeds to the hundreds of thousands of peasants whose land had been divided up by the cooperatives and do away with the regulations forbidding corporations to invest in rural holdings.

  But in order to accomplish all this, it was imperative to put an end to the terror that had taken hold in the Andes, allowing the revolutionaries to do as they pleased.

  Traveling in the Andes was arduous. In order to avoid ambushes, it had to be done suddenly and unexpectedly, with a small party, sending Mobilization activists ahead to alert the most reliable people no more than one or two days in advance. It was impossible to go overland to many provinces of the central mountain region—Junín, after Ayacucho, had been victimized by the most attacks. The journey had to be made in small planes that landed in unbelievable places—cemeteries, soccer fields, riverbeds—or in light helicopters which, if a storm suddenly overtook us, had to set down wh
erever they could—on top of a mountain sometimes—until the weather cleared. These acrobatics completely unnerved some of the friends of Libertad. Beatriz Merino took out crosses, rosaries, and holy medals she wore over her heart, and invoked the protection of the saints without self-consciousness. Pedro Cateriano intimidated the pilots into giving him reassuring explanations about the flight instruments, and kept pointing out to them the threatening thunderheads, the sharp peaks that suddenly loomed up, or the snaky rays of lightning that zigzagged all about us. The two of them were more afraid of flying than of terrorists, but never refused to go with me when I asked them to.

  I remember the very young little soldier, practically a child, whom they brought to me at the abandoned airport of Jauja on September 8, 1989, so that we could take him back to Lima with us. He had survived an attack that noon in which two of his buddies had died—we had heard the bombs and the shots from the speakers’ platform in the main square in Huancayo, where we were holding our rally—and he was losing a lot of blood. We made room for him in the very small craft by having one of the bodyguards stay behind. The boy was surely under the army’s legal age limit of eighteen. He was holding a container of plasma above his head, but his strength gave out. We took turns holding it up. He didn’t complain once during the flight. He stared blankly into space, with an astonished, wordless desperation, as though trying to understand what had happened to him.

  I remember how, on February 14, 1990, as we were leaving the Milpo mine, in Cerro de Pasco, the triple glass of a side window of our light van shattered, turning into a spider web, as we were driving past a hostile group. “This was supposed to be an armored van,” I said. “It is,” Óscar Balbi assured me. “Against bullets. But that was a stone.” It wasn’t armored against cudgels either, because at a sugar mill in the North, a handful of Apristas had smashed all its windowpanes to smithereens a few weeks before. The theoretical armor, moreover, turned the vehicle into an oven (the air conditioning never worked), so that, as a general rule, we jolted over the roads with a door held open by my security guard Professor Oshiro’s foot.

  I remember the members of the Libertad committee of Cerro de Pasco, who turned up at a regional meeting, some of them battered and bruised and others injured, since that morning a terrorist commando unit had attacked their headquarters. And I remember the members of the committee in Ayacucho, the capital of the Sendero Luminoso insurrection, where human life was worth less than anywhere else in Peru. Every time I went to Ayacucho in those three years to meet with our committee, I had the feeling that I was with men and women who could die at any moment and was assailed by a sense of guilt. When the lists of candidates for national and regional legislative posts were agreed on, we knew that the risk for the men and women of Ayacucho whose names were on them would be even greater than before, and like other political organizations, we offered to get the candidates out of Ayacucho and hide them until after the election. They didn’t take us up on the offer. They asked me, rather, to see if I could arrange with the politico-military head of the region to allow them to go about armed. But Brigadier General Howard Rodríguez Málaga refused me permission for them to do so.

  Shortly before that meeting, Julián Huamaní Yauli, a Freedom Movement candidate for a seat in the regional legislature, had heard people climbing up onto the roof of his house and ran out into the street for safety’s sake. The second time, on March 4, 1990, he didn’t have time to get out of the house. They surprised him at the front door, in broad daylight, and after gunning him down, the killers calmly walked off through a crowd which ten years of terror had taught not to see anything, hear anything, or lift a finger in such cases. I remember the badly mangled body of Julián Huamaní Yauli in his coffin, on that sunny morning in Ayacucho, and the weeping of his wife and his mother, a peasant woman who, with her arms around me, sobbed out words in Quechua that I was unable to understand.

  The possibility of a terrorist attack on my life or my family was something that Patricia, my children, and I looked on from the start as a reality that we must be aware of. We agreed not to do things that were imprudent, but not to allow the danger to take our freedom of movement away from us. Gonzalo and Morgana were studying in London, so that the risk to them was confined to the months when they were on vacation from school. But Álvaro was in Peru; he was a journalist and the communications director of the Front and did not mince words when he attacked extremism and the government day and night; moreover, he kept giving the security service the slip, so that Patricia lived in constant fear that someone would come to announce to us that he had been murdered or kidnapped.

  It was obvious that, as long as no one attempted to put an end to the insecurity that political violence was causing to reign in the country, the possibilities of an economic recovery were nil, even if inflation were brought under control. Who was going to come to open mines or drill oil wells or set up factories if he ran the risk of being kidnapped, assassinated, obliged to make regular payoffs to revolutionaries, and having his installations blown up? (The very next week after I had visited, in Huacho, in March 1990, the cannery for the export company Industrias Alimentarias, SA, whose owner, a courageous young entrepreneur, Julio Fabre Carranza, told us how he had escaped an attempt on his life, Sendero Luminoso reduced the cannery to rubble, leaving a thousand workers out of jobs.)

  Bringing peace to the country was one of the first priorities, along with the fight against inflation. This was not a task for police and soldiers alone, but for civil society as a whole, since everyone would suffer the consequences if Sendero Luminoso turned Peru into the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge or the Túpac Amaru revolutionaries turned it into another Cuba. Leaving the fight against terrorism in the hands of police and military forces had not produced positive results. On the contrary. The abuses of human rights, the disappearances, the extrajudicial executions had embittered the populace, which offered the forces of law and order no cooperation whatsoever. And without the aid of its citizens a democratic government cannot put down a subversive movement. The Aprista administration had aggravated the situation with its counterterrorist groups, such as the so-called Rodrigo Franco Commando Unit. These groups, as was common knowledge, were armed and directed from the Ministry of the Interior; they had assassinated attorneys and union leaders on close terms with Sendero Luminoso, placed bombs in print shops and institutions suspected of complicity with terrorism, and in addition hounded the president’s most belligerent adversaries, such as Representative Fernando Olivera, who, in view of the fact that he persisted in denouncing in Congress the unlawful acquisition of property by Alan García, had been the target of terrorist threats.

  My thesis was that terror should not be combated in an underhanded way, but openly and resolutely, mobilizing peasants, workers, students, and personally headed by the civil authorities. I had said that if I were elected, I would assume the leadership of the fight against terrorism in person, that I would replace the politico-military heads of the emergency area by civil authorities and arm the patrols formed by the peasants to confront the Sendero Luminoso detachments.

  In Peru, in the departamento of Cajamarca, peasant patrols had shown how effective they could be. Working together with the authorities, they had cleared the countryside of cattle rustlers, and constituted an effective brake on terrorism, since thus far Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA (the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) had been unable to get a foothold in the countryside in Cajamarca. In all the indigenous communities, cooperatives, and villages of the Andes that I visited, I encountered an immense frustration on the part of the peasants, because they were unable to defend themselves against the terrorist detachments. They were obliged to feed, clothe, and lend logistical aid to the terrorists, and obey their sometimes absurd orders, such as to produce only enough for their own needs, not engage in commercial dealings, and not attend market fairs. Aid lent the cause of subversion exposed these people to often merciless reprisals on the part of the forces of order. Many communi
ties had formed patrols that confronted the tommy guns and automatic rifles of the Sendero Luminoso and Túpac Amaru movements with clubs, knives, and hunting rifles.

  I therefore asked Peruvians for a mandate to provide these patrols with arms that would allow them to defend themselves effectively against those who were killing them wholesale.* This proposal was severely criticized, especially outside Peru, where it was said that by arming the peasants I would open the gates to civil war (as though one didn’t already exist) and that, in a democracy, it is the police and the military that are the institutions responsible for reestablishing public order. This criticism doesn’t take into account the actual political conditions in underdeveloped countries. In a democracy that is taking its first steps, the introduction of free elections, independent political parties, and a free press does not mean that all of its institutions have become democratic. The democratization of the whole of society is a much slower process, and it is a long time before labor unions, political parties, the government, and business begin to act as they are expected to in a state ruled by law. And the institutions that are perhaps the slowest at learning how to function democratically, within the law and with respect for civil authority, are those which, in dictatorial systems, semidictatorial ones, and sometimes even apparently democratic ones, have long been accustomed to the authoritarian exercise of power: the police and the military.

  The ineffectiveness demonstrated by the forces of order in the fight against the terror campaign in Peru had several causes. One of them: their inability to win over the civilian population and obtain active support from it, especially when it came to providing information, which is indispensable in fighting an enemy that doesn’t show its face, whose action is based on its successfully mingling with civil society, from which it emerges in order to make its attacks and to which it returns to conceal itself. And this inability was a result of the methods employed in the fight against subversion by institutions which had not been prepared for this sort of war, so different from a conventional one, and which often limited themselves to following the strategy of showing the villagers that they could be as cruel as the terrorists. The result was that, in many places, the forces of order aroused as much fear and hostility among the peasants as the guerrilla bands of Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA.