A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  That same week, as, in the short breaks between meetings that I had in planes or minivans, I was scribbling the speech that I would deliver in a meeting with liberal intellectuals of different countries that Libertad had organized for March 7 to 9, the news of the assassination of our leader in Ayacucho, Julián Huamaní Yauli, reached me. I immediately flew to Ayacucho to attend his funeral and arrived as they were enshrouding his remains, in a little mortuary chapel that had been set up on the second floor of an ancient, dark building that had once been a private dwelling and was now the School of Public Accounting. I had a strange feeling as I stood there contemplating the head of this modest Ayacuchan, shattered to bits by Sendero bullets, remembering how, on each one of my trips to his homeland, he had accompanied me in my travels, formal and reserved, as the people in that part of the country usually are. His murder was a good example of the irrationality and stupid cruelty of the terrorist strategy, since it was not intended to punish any violence, exploitation, or abuse committed by the extremely modest and previously apolitical Julián Huamaní, but simply to terrify through the crime those who believed that elections could change things in Peru. He was the first leader of Libertad who had been killed. How many others would there be, I asked myself as we were taking his remains to the church, through the streets of Ayacucho, experiencing for the first time that feeling of guilt that, especially during the runoff vote, would overcome me every time I learned that the lives of militants or candidates of ours had been cut short by the terrorists.

  Very shortly after the assassination of Julián Huamaní Yauli, on March 23, another of the Front’s candidates for a seat in the Chamber of Representatives, the populist José Gálvez Fernández, was murdered as he left the school that he was the head of, in Comas, one of the popular districts in Lima. Unaffected, simple and straightforward, likable, he was one of the local leaders of Popular Action who had worked the hardest for the close collaboration between the allied parties of the Front. When I went to the headquarters of Popular Action that night, where they were holding a wake for him, I found Belaunde and his wife Violeta badly shaken by the assassination of their colleague.

  But amid bloody events such as these, in the final days of the campaign there was also a stimulating contrast: the Freedom Revolution meeting. For many months, we had been planning to bring together in Lima intellectuals of various countries whose ideas had contributed to the extraordinary political and cultural changes in the world, in order to show that what we wanted to do in Peru was part of a process of the reappraisal of democracy, in which more and more peoples around the globe were participating, and in order to show our compatriots that the most modern thought was liberal.

  The meeting lasted for three days, in El Pueblo, on the outskirts of Lima, where conferences, round-table discussions, debates took place, and at night, serenades and fiestas to which the presence en masse of young people who belonged to Libertad lent a great deal of color. We had hopes that Lech Walesa would attend. The leader of Solidarity had promised Miguel Vega, who went to see him in Gdansk, that he would do his best to come, but at the last minute the internal problems of his country kept him from attending, and he sent us a message, through two leaders of the Polish labor movement, Stefan Jurczak and Jacek Chwedoruk, whose presence on the speakers’ platform, the night that they read the message aloud, gave rise to a great outburst of enthusiasm. (I remember Álvaro, more excited than usual, shouting Walesa’s name at the top of his lungs, in chorus with everyone else, with his arms upraised.)

  Cultural meetings are usually boring, but this one wasn’t, not to me at any rate, nor, it seems to me, to the young people we brought from all over the country so that they could hear about the liberal offensive that was traversing the world. Many of them heard for the first time the things that were said there. Perhaps because of my total immersion in the stereotyped language of the electoral campaign, in those three days it seemed to me that I was tasting an exquisite forbidden fruit by hearing words without political cunning behind them or servitude to the immediate situation, used in a personal way, to explain the great changes that were taking place or that could suddenly occur in countries willing to reform themselves by staking everything on political and economic freedom—that was the subject dealt with by Javier Tusell—or simply to describe in the abstract, as Israel Kirzner did, the nature of the market. I remember the splendid explanatory speeches by Jean-François Revel and Sir Alan Walters as the high points of the meeting, and the explanation given by José Piñera of the economic reforms that brought Chile development and democratization. It was very stimulating, above all, thanks to the speeches by the Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the Mexicans Enrique Krause and Gabriel Zaid, the Guatemalan Armando de la Torre, and others, to realize that all over Latin America there were intellectuals attuned to our ideas, who looked on our campaign with the hope that, if it was carried through successfully in Peru, the liberal revolution would spread to their countries.

  Among those who attended were two front-line Cuban freedom fighters: Carlos Franqui and Carlos Alberto Montaner. In the name of unequivocal democratic convictions, both of them had been fighting against Castro’s dictatorship for many years now, ever since they first felt that the revolution for which they had fought had been betrayed. It seemed to me that, as the meeting came to an end, I ought to make a public declaration of my solidarity with their cause, to say that the freedom of Cuba was also a flag we rallied round, and that, if we won the election, free Cubans would have in Peru an ally in their fight against one of the last vestiges of totalitarianism in the world. I did so, before reading my speech,* provoking the predictable wrath of the Cuban dictator who, two or three days later, answered from Havana with his usual vituperations.

  Octavio Paz, who was unable to come, sent a videotape with a recorded message, explaining why he now supported the candidacy which, two years before in London, he had tried to talk me out of, and Miguel Vega Alvear had trouble rounding up enough television sets so that everyone in the audience could hear the message. But he managed, and so Octavio Paz was there with us, through his image and his voice, during those days of the congress. His encouragement came at an opportune moment for me, for to tell the truth, every so often I could hear, still pounding in my ears, the reasons he’d given me, two years before, in a conversation in his London hotel on Sloane Street, as we were having the orthodox tea and scones, for not going into politics: incompatibility with intellectual work, loss of independence, being manipulated by professional politicians, and, in the long run, frustration and the feeling of years of one’s life wasted. In his message, Octavio, with that subtlety in developing a line of reasoning which, along with the elegance of his prose, is his best intellectual attribute, retracted those arguments and replaced them with other, more up-to-date ones, justifying my determination and connecting it with the great liberal and democratic mobilization in Eastern Europe. At that moment, it was invigorating for me to hear, from the lips of someone whom I had admired since my youth, the arguments in favor of my going into politics which I had put to myself sometime before. Not long afterward, however, I would have a chance to see how right his first reaction had been and how Peruvian reality hastened to prove this second one wrong.

  But still more than for intellectual reasons, the three days of the congress were a real vacation for me, since I could hobnob with friends I hadn’t seen for some time and meet wonderful people who came to the meeting bringing ideas and testimony that were like a breath of fresh air to this country with a marginal culture at a dead end that poverty and violence had turned Peru into. Except for the heavy security surrounding the meeting place, the foreign participants had no indication of the violence amid which the country was living, and they could even enjoy a spectacle of Peruvian music and folk dances to which, on the spur of the moment, Ana and Pedro Schwartz contributed several lively Sevillian dances. (I record this fact for history, for every time I have told people about it, nobody has believed me that the eminent S
panish economist was capable of such a feat.)

  These three days of relative relaxation gave me energy, moreover, for the last month, which was dizzying. I began campaigning again on Sunday, March 11, with rallies in Huaral, Huacho, Barranca, Huarmey, and Casma, and from that time on, up until the ceremony closing the campaign, on April 5 in Arequipa, I visited half a dozen cities and towns every day, talking, leading motorcades, and giving press conferences in all of them and flying back to Lima almost every night to meet with the Front’s national campaign leaders, with the team drawing up the Plan for Governing, and with the little group of advisers in the “kitchen cabinet,” meetings that Patricia, the coordinator of my agenda, also attended.

  Since the rallies almost always drew huge crowds and, in the final weeks, the internal rivalries seemed to have disappeared and the Front presented an image of cohesion and solidity, victory seemed certain to me. The opinion polls also predicted the same thing, although all of them discounted the possibility of a resounding victory in the first round. There would be a weeding out of the weaker candidates, and I preferred running against the APRA candidate in the second round, since I imagined that the anti-Aprismo of certain forces of the left would allow me to capture votes from that constituency. But, deep down inside, I didn’t lose hope that, at the last moment, the Peruvian people would agree to give me the mandate I was seeking as early as April 8.

  On March 28, my birthday, the reception given me in Iquitos was an apotheosis. A huge crowd accompanied me from the airport to the city, and Patricia, who was with me in the open-roofed touring car, and I were impressed to see that from all the houses and street corners more and more groups of enthusiasts came to join the dense procession that never stopped, not even for a moment, chanting in chorus the slogans of the Front and singing and dancing with indescribable happiness and fervor. (Every event in Amazonia turns into a fiesta.) A giant birthday cake awaited me on the speakers’ platform, with fifty-four little candles, and even though the lights kept going out and the microphones didn’t work well, the rally was so huge that Patricia and I were electrified.

  I slept in Iquitos that night, for the three or four hours that had become my sleep ration, and on the following morning, very early, I flew to Cuzco, where, beginning with Sicuani, Urcos, Urubamba, and Calca, I set out on a tour that was to end, two days later at five o’clock in the afternoon, in the main square of the ancient capital of the Inca empire. For historical and also political reasons, Cuzco, the traditional bastion of the left, has symbolic value in Peru. The Plaza de Armas, its main square, where the stones of the ancient Inca palaces serve as a foundation for the churches and dwellings built in the colonial era, is one of the most beautiful and imposing ones I know, as well as one of the largest. The Libertad committee in Cuzco had promised me that, on that afternoon, it would be full to overflowing, and that neither Apristas nor Communists would manage to spoil the rally. (They had tried to attack us on all my previous tours of the departamento.)

  I was getting ready to leave for the rally when Álvaro called me from Lima. I could tell that he was very upset. He was at the campaign headquarters, with Mark Malloch Brown, Jorge Salmón, Luis Llosa, Pablo Bustamante, and the analysts of the opinion polls. They had just received the final one before the election and had had a major surprise: in the marginal districts and young towns of Lima—60 percent of the capital—Alberto Fujimori had taken off in the last few days at a dizzying rate, displacing both the candidate of the APRA and that of the United Left as the one that voters intended to cast their ballot for, and there was every indication that his popularity was rising, “like foam, by the minute.” According to the analysts it was a phenomenon restricted to the poorest districts of Lima and the C and D sectors; in the other districts, and in the remainder of Peru, the proportion of forces was still the same as before. Mark considered the danger a very serious one and advised me to suspend the tour, including the rally in Cuzco, and return to Lima immediately, in order to concentrate all our efforts, from that day on until the election, on the districts and neighborhoods on the periphery of the capital so as to halt that phenomenon.

  I answered Álvaro that they were crazy if they thought I was going to leave my followers in Cuzco in the lurch, and told him that I would return to Lima the next day, after the rallies in Quillabamba and Puerto Maldonado. I left for the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco, and the spectacle there made me forget all the apprehensions of the campaign directors. It was late afternoon and a torrid sun was scorching the foothills of the Cordillera and the coast of Carmenca. The roofs of San Blas and the pre-Hispanic stones of churches and convents gave off flames. In the pure indigo-blue sky there were no clouds and a few stars were already out. The dense crowd that covered the enormous square seemed to be on the point of bursting with enthusiasm and in the transparent mountain air the weathered faces of the men and the bright colors of the women’s wide skirts and the placards and flags which that forest of hands was waving were sharp and clear and seemed to be within reach of anyone who, from the speakers’ platform erected in the atrium of the cathedral, stretched out an arm to touch them. During the entire campaign I have never been as moved as I was that late afternoon in Cuzco, in that ancient and beautiful Plaza de Armas where the ill-starred country in which I was born experienced its most sublime moments of glory and where, in days long gone, it was civilized and prosperous. I said as much, with a lump in my throat, to the architect Gustavo Manrique Villalobos of the Libertad committee, when, his eyes damp, he whispered to me, pointing to the impressive crowd: “We’ve kept our promise, Mario.”

  That night, at dinnertime, at the Hotel de Turistas, I asked who this Alberto Fujimori was, who now, only ten days before the election, seemed to begin to exist as a candidate, and where he came from. Up until then I don’t believe I’d given a single thought to him, or ever heard anyone mention him in the analyses and projected results of the election made within the Front and the Freedom Movement. On rare occasions I had seen, in passing, the few sparse placards of the ghostlike organization that registered him as its candidate, the name of which, Cambio 90, was plagiarized from a slogan of ours, “El gran cambio, en libertad”—“The great change, in freedom”—and picturesque photos of this figure whose campaign strategy consisted of riding around on a tractor, sometimes with an Indian cap with earflaps above his Oriental face, repeating a slogan—Honesty, Technology, and Work—which represented his entire proposal for governing the country. But not even as a folkloric eccentricity did this fifty-two-year-old agricultural engineer, the son of Japanese parents, with a twice-repeated surname—Fujimori Fujimori—reign supreme among the ten candidates for the presidency registered by the National Board of Elections, since in that domain he was bested by one even more bizarre: Señor Ataucusi Gamonal, also known as the prophet Ezequiel.

  The prophet Ezequiel was the founder of a new religion, the Israelite Church of the New Universal Covenant, which had sprung up in the mountain fastnesses of the Andes, and to a certain extent had taken root in rural communities and marginal neighborhoods of the cities. A humble man, born in the little town of La Unión (in the departamento of Arequipa), educated by an evangelical sect in the central highlands, he had left that sect after having had a “revelation” in Tarma and founded his own. His faithful could be easily recognized because the women went around dressed in severe tunics and wore kerchiefs on their heads and the men had inordinately long hair and fingernails, since one of the precepts of their creed was not to interfere with the development of the natural order. They lived in communes, working the land and sharing everything, and had had confrontations with Sendero Luminoso. At the beginning of the campaign, Juan Ossio, an anthropologist who was studying the “Israelites” and had a good relationship with them, had invited me to have lunch at his house with the prophet Ezequiel and his chief apostle, Brother Jeremías Ortiz Arcos, since he thought that the support of the sect might win us votes among peasants. That lunch lingers in my mind as an amusing memory, in whic
h all conversation with me was carried on by Brother Jeremías, a sturdy, astute mestizo who wore his hair in tangled braided dreadlocks and affected studied poses, as the prophet remained silent, lost in a sort of mystic rapture. Only over dessert, after having eaten like a Heliogabalus, did he return to this world. His eyes sought mine, and seizing my arm with his black talons, he uttered this definitive pronouncement: “I shall put you on the throne, Doctor.” Encouraged by what we took to be a promise of aid in the election, Juan Ossio and Freddy Cooper went to have lunch with the prophet Ezequiel and his apostles in an “Israelite” tent, in a slum district of Lima, and Freddy remembered that love-feast as one of the least digestible ordeals of his ephemeral political career. And a useless one, moreover, since a short time thereafter the prophet Ezequiel decided to place himself on the throne in my stead, by launching his own candidacy. Although he had never reached even one percent in the opinion surveys, the analysts of the Front sometimes speculated on the possibility of a shift in the rural vote toward the prophet, thereby destabilizing the political panorama. But none of them had any inkling that the surprise would come from agricultural engineer Fujimori.

  On my return to Lima, on the afternoon of March 30, I was confronted with a curious piece of news. Our security unit had gotten wind of an order given the evening before by President García to all the regional development corporations to the effect that, henceforth, they were to redirect their logistic support—transportation, communications, and advertising—withdrawing it from Alva Castro’s Aprista candidacy and giving it instead to Cambio 90. At the same time, from that day on, all the communications media dependent on the government and with ties to García—especially Channel 5, “Radioprogramas,” La República, Página Libre, and La Crónica—began to extol systematically a candidacy that, up until then, they had scarcely mentioned. The only person who didn’t appear to be surprised at the news was Fernando Belaunde, with whom I met on the night of my return to Lima. “Fujimori’s candidacy is a typical Aprista maneuver to take votes away from us,” the ex-president assured me. “They did the same thing to me, in 1963, inventing the candidacy of engineer Mario Samamé Boggio, who said the same things I did, was a professor at the same university as I was, and who, in the end, received even fewer votes than the number of signatures that got him on the official list of candidates.” Was the candidate in the cap with earflaps and the tractor an epiphenomenon invented by Alan García? In any event, Mark Malloch Brown was worried. The flash polls—we took one every day in Lima—confirmed that in the shantytowns the popularity of the “little Chinaman” was rapidly increasing.