This was, needless to say, a constant subject of conversation with Lucho and Abelardo. They used to drop by my shack at Panamericana after the 6 p.m. news bulletin and, until the next one, we could spend a little while together, having coffee in one of the old places on the Plaza de Armas or La Colmena. I spurred them on to go to Europe with me. We would face up to the problem of survival better if we were together; we would write there the volumes we yearned to write. The objective would be Paris, but if there was no way of getting there, we would stop for a while in Monte Carlo, principality of Monaco. This place, phrased as a name and surname, turned into our trio’s password, and sometimes, when we were with other friends, one of the three of us would pronounce the emblematic formula—Monte Carlo, principality of Monaco—leaving all the others puzzled.
Lucho was determined to leave. His law practice had convinced him, I believe, that that profession repelled him as much as it did me, and the idea of spending some time in Europe cheered him up. His father had promised to help him financially, once he’d graduated. This encouraged him to begin work on the thesis he needed to write so as to get his degree.
Abelardo’s trip was more complicated, since Pupi had just had a little girl. And with a family, everything became risky and costly. But Abelardo allowed himself to be infected at times by my enthusiasm and also began to dream: he would try for the postgraduate fellowship in law that got the winner to Italy. With that and some money he’d saved he’d have enough for the trip. He too would get to the Europe des anciens parapets and would show up at the rendezvous of literary honor, in Monte Carlo, principality of Monaco.
In addition to our shared projects and fantasies, certain skirmishes of the guerrilla warfare on the local literary scene contributed to reinforcing our friendship. I remember one episode in particular, because I was the one who lit the fuse that set it off. From time to time I wrote book reviews. Abelardo gave me an assignment to review an anthology of Hispano-American poetry, compiled and translated into French by the Hispanist Mathilde Pomès. In my review, a rather fierce one, I wasn’t content to limit myself to criticizing the book, but also slipped in several very harsh sentences about Peruvian writers in general, the “tellurics,” the indigenists, regionalists, and local colorists in particular, and above all the modernist José Santos Chocano.
Several writers submitted a rebuttal—among them Alejandro Romualdo, with an article in the review 1957 entitled “No sólo los gigantes hacen la historia” (“Not Only Giants Make History”), and the poet Francisco Bendezú, a great exponent of bad taste in literature and in life, who accused me of having offended the nation’s honor by abusing the eminent bard Santos Chocano. I answered him in a long article and Lucho Loayza intervened with a lapidary volley. Augusto Tamayo Vargas himself wrote a text in defense of Peruvian literature, reminding me that “adolescence ought to be over soon.” At that point I recalled that I was an assistant to the holder of the chair in that literature that I had just attacked (I believe that in my articles the only ones who were spared in the genocide were the poets César Vallejo, José María Eguren, and César Moro) and I was afraid that Augusto, in the face of such an incongruity, would take my job away from me. But he was too decent to do a thing like that, and no doubt thought that with the passage of time I would become more considerate and charitable toward native writers (and that is what has happened).
Although these petty controversies and literary and artistic fracases—they happened often—had very limited repercussions, they suggest that, however minor it might be, there was a certain cultural life in the Lima of that day. It was possible because Prado’s administration brought an economic bonanza to the country, and for some time Peru opened up and had interchanges with the world. It happened, to be sure, despite the fact that the discriminatory mercantilist structure of institutions scarcely changed at all—the poor Peruvians of the C and D sectors continued to be hemmed in by poverty, with few opportunities to climb higher—but it brought the middle and upper classes a period of prosperity. It was owed, basically, to one of those bold and surprising initiatives of which that clever, cunning scoundrel of a politician (what in Peru they call a really foxy one!) whose name was Manuel Prado was capable. The severest critic his administration had was the owner of La Prensa, Pedro Beltrán, who in his newspaper mounted a daily attack on the economic policy of the regime. One fine day, Prado called Beltrán and offered him the Ministry of Finance and the premiership, with carte blanche to do what he thought best. Beltrán accepted and for two years applied the conservative monetarist policy that he had learned during his years as a student at the London School of Economics: fiscal austerity, balanced budgets, opening up the country to international competition, encouragement of private enterprise and investment. The economy responded admirably to this treatment: Peruvian currency became stronger—the country has never again had the solvency it did at that time—and domestic and foreign investment grew, employment increased, and the country lived for several years in a climate of optimism and security.
In the cultural domain, the effects were that books arrived in Peru from all over, and also musicians and theatrical companies and foreign art exhibitions—the Institute of Contemporary Art, founded by a private group and for a time directed by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, brought the most outstanding artists of Latin America to Peru, among them Matta and Wilfredo Lam, and many North American and European ones—and the publication of books and cultural periodicals (Literatura was one of them, but there were several others, and not only in Lima, but in cities such as Trujillo and Arequipa). The poet Manuel Scorza was to begin bringing out during those years popular editions of books that proved to be enormous successes and made him a small fortune. His bold socialist stance had lost its audaciousness and there were symptoms of the worst sort of capitalism in his conduct: he paid his authors—when he paid them at all—miserable royalties, with the argument that they ought to make sacrifices for the sake of culture, and he went around in a brand-new fire-engine-red Buick, with a biography of Onassis in his pocket. So as to irritate him, when we were together, I used to recite to him the least memorable of his verses: “Peru, I spit in vain on your name.”
Nobody, however, outside of the little group of journalists who worked with him at La Prensa, appreciated Beltrán’s work to orient economic policy in a different direction. Nor did anybody draw from what happened in those years conclusions favoring free market policies, private enterprise, and opening of the country to internationalism. Quite to the contrary. Beltrán’s image continued to be fiercely attacked by the left. And socialism began in those years to break out of the catacomb in which it had been imprisoned and to win a place for itself in public opinion. Populist philosophy, in favor of economic nationalism, the growth of the state, and government interventionism as indispensable for development and social justice, which up until then had been the monopoly of the APRA and of the small Marxist left, multiplied and reproduced itself in other versions, thanks to the guiding hand of Belaunde Terry, who had founded Popular Action and in those years took its message from town to town throughout the whole of Peru; thanks to the Christian Democratic Party, in which Cornejo Chávez’s radical bent was growing stronger by the day; and thanks to a pressure group—the Movimiento Social Progresista (the Progressivist Social Movement)—formed by leftist intellectuals, which, although sorely lacking in mass support, was to have an important impact on the political culture of the era.
(After a little over two years in office in Prado’s administration, believing that the success of his economic policy had made him politically popular, Pedro Beltrán resigned from the Ministry of Finance to try his hand at organizing a political movement, with his eye on the presidential election of 1962. His attempt was a resounding failure, the first time he took to the streets. A rally called for by Beltrán at the Colegio La Recoleta was broken up by the Aprista “buffaloes” and he wound up being laughed at. Beltrán would never again hold a single political post, until finally, wit
h the advent of Velasco’s dictatorship, La Prensa was taken from him, as was his hacienda, Montalbán, and his fine old colonial house in the downtown area of Lima was torn down, on the pretext of opening up a new street. He left the country to go into exile, where I met him, thanks to the journalist Elsa Arana Freyre, in Barcelona in the 1970s. He was by then an old man who spoke with pathetic nostalgia of that old colonial house in Lima demolished because of the pettiness and the stupidity of his political enemies.)
And with the same boldness with which he had appointed Beltrán his minister of finance, one fine day President Prado appointed Porras Barrenechea minister of foreign relations. The latter, since his election as senator, had had a distinguished career in Congress. With other independents and with the members of Congress belonging to the Christian Democratic Party and to Popular Action, he led a campaign to get Congress to investigate the illegal political and economic acts committed by Odría’s dictatorship. The initiative did not get very far because the Pradist majority, along with its allies who were opposed to it (almost all of those on the list on which Porras had appeared as a candidate) and Odría’s own supporters, blocked his efforts. This converted Porras Barrenechea into a senator who opposed Prado’s administration, a role he played with great satisfaction and without thinking twice. Hence, his appointment as foreign minister came as a surprise to everyone, including Porras himself, who passed on the news, one afternoon, with stupefaction, to Carlos Araníbar and me: the president had just offered him the ministry, by telephone, in a two-minute conversation.
He accepted, out of a touch of vanity, I suppose, and also as another compensation for that rectorate that he had lost, a wound that went on bleeding as long as he lived. With his ministerial duties, his book on Pizarro came to a dead stop.
Shortly after this move, President Prado made another spectacular one, which brought Lima’s fondness of gossip to white-hot heat: he managed to have his Catholic marriage to his wife of more than forty years (and the mother of his children) annulled, on the grounds of a “formal defect” (he convinced the Vatican that he had been forced to marry without his consent). And immediately thereafter—he was a man capable of anything, and what was more, like all the brazen rascals of this world, utterly charming—was wedded, in the Presidential Palace, to his mistress of many years. On the night of that wedding, I saw with my own eyes, strolling about the main square of Lima, in front of the Presidential Palace, as though observing one of the traditions at the time of the viceroyalty, in a novel by Ricardo Palma, a group of ladies from families in Lima of noble lineage, with elegant mantillas and rosaries, and a huge placard that read: “Long live the indissolubility of Catholic marriage.”
Eighteen
The Dirty War
On January 8, 1990, the registration of candidates for the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives was closed. And the following day marked the start of a televised publicity campaign by our candidates for the two houses that had a devastating effect on everything that I had been saying since August 1987.
The Peruvian electoral system has what is known as the preferential vote. Candidates for the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives are not elected directly; their names appear on the ballot in a list made up by their party. Votes are cast for a party’s list, not for individual candidates, and votes are not split between parties; all votes are for the straight ticket. But a voter can, in addition, mark on the ballot his or her preference for two candidates on each one of the lists. The number of senators and representatives on each list who win seats is proportional to the percentage of votes won by the list as a whole. The order in which candidates qualify to enter Congress is determined by the preferential vote.
The reason for this system was to allow voters to rectify the decision of the parties as to the order of preference on their lists. This, it was thought, would be a way to counteract the influence of the party hierarchies which draw up the lists, giving the voter the possibility of correcting the partisan processes at work in the selection of candidates. In practice, however, the preferential vote turned out to be a perverse system that transfers the electoral contest to within the congressional lists, since each candidate tries to win the voter’s preference for himself rather than for his co-candidates.
In order to mitigate the bad effects of this practice, we drew up a little booklet with suggestions that set forth in didactic style the sore points in the system; it was distributed to our candidates in Libertad. In it, Lucho Bustamante, Jorge Salmón, Freddy Cooper, and I asked them not to promise anything in their publicity campaigns that I myself didn’t promise and not to go in for lies and contradictions. Since the CADE conference, the entire election campaign had been a massive attack against our program by Apristas and Socialists and they shouldn’t give our adversaries a chance to demolish what we had built up. It was also important to avoid wasting money. Jorge Salmón taught them about the risks of saturating TV screens with spot ads.
It was as if we’d been preaching to the deaf. A mere handful—less than ten, in any event—took the trouble to organize their campaign by coordinating what they said in their pitch to the voters with our Plan for Governing. I do not except from this charge the candidates of Libertad, several of whom shared responsibility for the excesses committed.
From January 9, when the Lima daily papers devoted an entire page to a full-face photo of Alberto Borea Odría, a PPC candidate for a Senate seat, until the end of March—that is to say, until a few days before the elections—the campaign for the preferential vote of our candidates kept growing, oppressively and anarchically, until it reached extremes that made me laugh and at the same time repelled me. “If what they are doing disgusts me all this much,” I said over and over again to Patricia, “what must the reaction of the man in the street be to such a spectacle?”
All the private television channels spewed out images of the faces of our candidates from morning till night, in ads in which the squandering of money often went hand in hand with bad taste, and in which many of them offered everything imaginable and unimaginable, without its mattering to them that this was in flagrant contradiction to the most elementary principles of that liberal philosophy which, I kept saying, was the one that was ours, and even contradicted common sense. Some promised public works and others price controls and the creation of new public services, but most of them didn’t offer any ideas whatsoever and limited themselves to promoting their face and their number on the list, in a strident voice, and as repetitively as a jackhammer. One senatorial candidate had his image enhanced by an aria from an operetta sung by a baritone, and a candidate for the Chamber of Representatives, to show his love for the people, appeared among the big backsides of mulattas dancing to Afro rhythms; another one was shown weeping, surrounded by elderly little men and women whose lot he sympathized with in a tremulous voice.
The propaganda of the Front’s candidates made such a clean sweep of the audiovisual media that, in February and the beginning of March, they gave the impression that they were the only ones who existed, and that their opponents on the other lists had disappeared, or made such sporadic appearances that they looked like pygmies competing with giants or, more precisely, victims of starvation confronting millionaires.
Alan García appeared on TV to explain that he had made a calculation, according to which a number of Democratic Front candidates for seats in the Senate or in the Chamber of Representatives had now spent more money in TV spots than they would earn in their five years in office if they were elected. Were they subsidized, then, by oligarchic groups, whose interests they were going to defend in the National Congress against those of the Peruvian people? How were those members of Congress going to pay back their generous patrons?
Although President García didn’t seem to be the ideal person to voice such scruples, it must have lingered in the minds of many people that all that excessive advertising concealed something shady. And other voters, those in the highlands, those who don’t make analyses, those wh
o follow their impulses, must simply have been indignant at that arrogant demonstration of economic power and suppressed the enthusiasm they had felt at the beginning for what appeared to be a proposal that was new and untouched by corruption. Many of those candidates were not new, but rather the cream of the crop of sharp political schemers, and of one or another of them it could not even be said that he had clean hands, since his passage through the previous administration had left behind him a wake that discredited him.
From the first opinion polls taken by the Sawyer/Miller Group it was evident that that extravagant publicity had had a negative impact on voters with small incomes, those into whose heads the official propaganda hammered the slogan that I was the candidate of the rich. What better parading of wealth than the ads that turned up on their television screens? All that might have been won in the previous year and a half with my preaching in favor of a liberal reform was lost in just days and weeks in the face of that assault of repeated appearances, ads, posters, which monopolized TV screens, radios, walls, newspapers, and magazines. In the midst of that vast and confusing overabundance in which the emblem of the Democratic Front—a pre-Hispanic staircase shown in profile—was used to promote the most contradictory proposals and formulas, my message lost its air of reform and of change. And my image as a person was confused with that of professional politicians and those who acted as though they were.
A Fish in the Water: A Memoir Page 49