A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Yet something positive resulted from this meeting: a collaboration of the forces of the Democratic Front, in a fraternal spirit that had not existed before. From then on, until June 10, populists, members of the PPC, Libertad, and SODE worked together, without the quarrels, low blows, and pettiness of previous years, presenting a very different image from the one that they had previously offered. Because of the tremendous setback that the low number of votes they received signified for all of them, or because they sensed how risky it could be for Peru if there came to power someone who had come from nowhere and represented a leap in the dark or the continuation of García’s administration through a straw man, or because of an uneasy conscience resulting from the selfish factionalism that often characterized our coalition, or simply because there were no longer any seats in Congress at stake, the enmities, jealousies, envy, rancor disappeared during this second stage. On the part both of leaders and of militants of the various parties comprising the Front there was a will to collaborate, which, although it was almost too late to change the final result, allowed me to focus all my efforts on the adversary and not be distracted by the internal problems that had given me such headaches during the first round.

  Freddy Cooper set up a small campaign commando team with leaders of Popular Action, the Christian Popular Party, the Freedom Movement, and SODE, and composite teams left for various areas to breathe life into mobilizing the forces of the Front. Almost none of those called on refused to travel and many leaders spent days or weeks at a time going back and forth throughout the provinces and districts of the interior, trying to win back the votes that had been lost. Eduardo Orrego stayed in Puno, Manolo Moreyra in Tacna, Alberto Borea of the PPC, Raúl Ferrero of Libertad, and Edmundo del Águila of Popular Action in the emergency zone, and I believe that there was not a single departamento or region where they failed to raise the spirits of our downcast political partners, all this in an atmosphere of increasing violence, for ever since the day after the elections, Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA had unleashed another terrorist offensive that left dozens of people injured and dead all over the country.

  It had been with Popular Action that the leaders and activists of the Freedom Movement had had the most difficulties coordinating the campaign in the first stage. Now, however, it was from Popular Action that I received the strongest backing, especially from its young and diligent secretary for the departamento of Lima, Raúl Diez Canseco, who, from mid-April on, devoted himself day and night until election day to working side by side with me, organizing daily trips around the shantytowns and slum settlements on the outskirts of Lima. I scarcely knew Raúl, and the only thing I had heard about him concerned the squabbles that he inevitably became involved in with the Libertad activists at rallies—he was the man Belaunde relied on for mobilizing members of Popular Action—but in those two months I really came to appreciate him for the way in which he committed himself to the second-round campaign when in all truth he no longer had any personal reason for doing so, since he was already assured of his seat in the Chamber of Representatives. He was one of the most enthusiastic and dedicated people in the Front, sparing no effort to help get things organized, solving problems, raising the morale of those who were losing heart, and infecting everyone with his own enthusiasm and his conviction with regard to the possibilities of winning which, whether they were genuine or feigned, were a tonic to ward off the defeatism and exhaustion that surrounded all of us. He came out to my house each morning, very early, with a detailed list of the public squares, corners, markets, schools, cooperatives, projects of the PAS under way which we would be visiting, and during the many hours of the day’s tour he was never without a smile on his lips, making kindly remarks, and sticking very close to me in case I was attacked.

  In order to demolish that image of a “haughty man,” someone “aloof” from the people, which, according to Mark Malloch Brown’s surveys, I had acquired in the eyes of humble voters, it was decided that, in this second stage, I would not tour the streets with my bodyguards. They would accompany me at a distance, melting into the crowd, which would be able to approach me, shake hands with me, touch me and embrace me, and also, at times, tear off bits of my clothes or push me to the ground and mangle me if they felt like it. I went along with these arrangements, but I readily admit that it cost me a heroic effort. I didn’t have—I don’t have—any appetite for mingling with crowds and I had to accomplish miracles to conceal my dislike for that sort of semihysterical pushing and pulling, kissing, pinching and pawing, and smile even when I felt that those demonstrations of affection were crushing my bones or tearing a muscle. Since, moreover, there was always the danger of an attack—on many occasions we were forced to confront groups of Fujimoristas, and I have already recounted how the good head of my friend Enrique Ghersi, who also was in the habit of accompanying me, stopped a stone hurled straight at my face on one of these tours—Raúl Diez Canseco always arranged things so that, if Ghersi wasn’t on hand, he himself would be close by to confront the aggressor. As darkness was falling, I would go back home, exhausted and aching all over, to bathe and change clothes, for at night I had meetings with those in charge of the Plan for Governing or the campaign commando team, and sometimes I had so many bruises that I had to rub myself all over with arnica as well before meeting with them. Every once in a while I recalled those terrific pages of Konrad Lorenz’s study On Aggression, where he recounts how wild ducks, in their impassioned amorous flights, suddenly become infuriated and kill each other. For, engulfed in a multitude of overexcited people who were tugging at me and embracing me, I often felt that I was only one step away from immolation.

  When I officially opened the runoff contest, on April 28, with a TV message entitled “De nuevo en campaña”—“On the Campaign Trail Again”—I already had two weeks of arduous work touring the marginal districts of Lima behind me. In that message I promised that I would do “everything in my power to get through not only to the intelligence but also to the heart of Peruvians.”

  In line with the new strategy, I was to inform the public of the work being accomplished by Solidaridad and, in particular, by the PAS, which by that time had dozens of work projects under construction in the districts on the periphery of Lima. Shown viewing the classrooms, playgrounds, day-care centers, soup kitchens, wells, irrigation ditches large and small, or roads built by the organization headed by Patricia, I explained that my plan for government included a vast, concerted aid program so that those Peruvians with the lowest incomes would be the least affected by the sacrifice required to get out of the trap set by state controls and inflation. The PAS was not a move to garner publicity. I didn’t wish to talk about it before its basic infrastructure was in place and I had the ironclad guarantee of the two men responsible for getting it started—Jaime Crosby and Ramón Barúa—that the sum of $1.6 billion needed in order to keep the twenty thousand small-scale public works projects in the marginal towns and villages in Peru going over a period of three years would be definitely forthcoming, thanks to international organizations, friendly countries, and the Peruvian business class. The PAS was a reality already taking shape in April and May of 1990, and despite the fact that aid still reached us in minuscule amounts, as though doled out with an eyedropper—it was dependent on the implementation of our program by the administration in power, especially with regard to funds from the World Bank—it was impressive to see so many technicians and engineers and hundreds of workers turning these projects, chosen by local residents themselves as those most urgently needed for their community, into concrete realities. In all my speeches I devoted half the time allotted me to demonstrating that what we were doing gave the lie to those who accused me of lacking a sensitivity to social problems. That sensitivity ought to be measured in terms of accomplishments, not rhetorical promises.

  To many leaders of the Front and friends of Libertad, the new strategy, more modest and popular, less ideological and polemical, seemed a timely rectification, and they thought
that in this way we would win back the voters we had lost, the ones who had voted for Fujimori. For no one had any illusions about the Aprista vote or that of its Socialist and Communist variations. We were also encouraged by the increasingly resolute support of the Church. Wasn’t Peru a Catholic country to its very marrow?

  The last thing I had imagined was finding myself converted, overnight, into a defender of the Catholic Church in an electoral battle. But that is what began to happen, once the campaign was renewed, when it was evident that among the senators and representatives elected from the Cambio 90 list, there were at least fifteen evangelical pastors (among them Fujimori’s second vice president, Carlos García y García, who had been president of the National Evangelical Council of Peru). The nervousness of the Catholic hierarchy over this sudden political rise of organizations that had previously been marginal was exacerbated by imprudent statements by several of the pastors who had been elected, Guillermo Yoshikawa for instance (the congressman for Arequipa), who had had a letter circulated among his faithful urging them to vote for Fujimori, with the argument that, when the latter became president, evangelical schools and churches would receive the same recognition and the same state subsidies as Catholic ones. The archbishop of Arequipa, Monsignor Fernando Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio, appeared on TV on April 18 and reproached Señor Yoshikawa for using religious arguments in the campaign and for his defiant attitude toward the religion practiced by the majority of the Peruvian people.

  Two days later, on April 20, the bishops of Peru issued a statement declaring that “it is not honest to employ religion to serve partisan political ends,” along with the assurance that, as an institution, the Church was not supporting any candidacy. This pastoral letter from Peru’s bishops was an attempt to calm the storm of criticisms that had been caused, in media with close ties to the government—where there were a large number of progressive-minded Catholics—by an interview granted to the program “Panorama,” on Channel 5, on Easter Sunday (April 15, 1990) by the archbishop of Lima. When the interviewer confronted the prelate with a question concerning my agnosticism, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, in a polemical theological interpretation, expatiated on the question to demonstrate that an agnostic was not a man without God, but, rather, someone seeking God, and a man who does not believe but would like to believe, a being in prey to an agonizing search not unlike Unamuno’s, at the end of which lay a return to religious faith. The Aprista media and those on the left, already embarked on a battle-hardened campaign for Fujimori, reproached the archbishop for his bare-faced backing of the “agnostic” candidate, and a “leftist intellectual,” Carlos Iván Degregori, stated in an article that with that definition of an agnostic, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora “wouldn’t pass a theology exam.”

  On April 19, early in the afternoon, who should arrive at my house but the archbishop of Arequipa, he too hidden in a car that entered directly into the garage, for the reporters’ siege of the place didn’t let up until June 10. A short little man with a great booming voice, brimming over with congeniality and homespun charm, Monsignor Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio had such good humor that we spent a very entertaining brief interlude—one of the few, if not the only one, in all those two months—as he told me that it was best for me to forget about “all that nonsense about having declared me an agnostic,” because as the son of Catholic parents, baptized and married in the Church and the father of children who had also been baptized, I was Catholic for all practical purposes, whether I admitted it or not. And that, if I wanted to win the election, I shouldn’t insist on continuing to tell the whole truth about the necessary economic adjustment, since that was tantamount to working for the adversary, especially since the latter said only the things that would win him votes. Not lying was a very good thing, of course; but revealing everything in an election campaign was to commit hara-kiri.

  Joking aside, the archbishop of Arequipa was greatly alarmed by the offensive mounted by the evangelical sects in the young towns and marginal districts of Arequipa in favor of Fujimori, a campaign that had an obvious religious and sometimes anti-Catholic slant, because of the sectarianism of certain pastors who didn’t spare their criticisms of the Church and even attacked the Pope, the saints, and the Virgin Mary in their harangues. Like Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, he too was of the opinion that this religious war could contribute to the social disintegration of Peru. Although the Catholic Church could not explicitly come out in my favor, he told me that, in his own diocese, he had encouraged those faithful who, in answer to the challenge from the evangelical sects, had decided to campaign for me.

  From that time on, the electoral battle little by little came to resemble a religious war, in which naïve fears, prejudices, and clean weapons clashed with the dirty ones and the low blows and most treacherous maneuvers on both sides, to extremes that bordered on farce and surrealism. Very early in the campaign, three years previously, an activist of Solidaridad, Regina de Palacios, who worked in the young town of San Pedro de Choque, had shut me up in a room at the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, with some twenty men and women of that shantytown, without telling me who they were. Once we were alone, one of them began to speak as though inspired and to quote from the Bible from memory, and all of a sudden the others, getting to their feet and raising their hands on high, began to accompany that sermon with exclamations of “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” At the same time, they urged me to do likewise, since the Holy Spirit had just made its appearance in the room, and to get down on my knees as a sign of humble submission to the newcomer. Completely taken aback and not knowing how I ought to react to this unexpected “happening”—some of those present had burst into tears, others were on their knees praying, with their eyes closed and their arms upraised—I could foresee the impression that would be made on those committees that constantly wandered about the corridors of the Libertad headquarters looking for a place to hold a meeting, if they chanced to open the door and come across such a spectacle. The evangelicals finally calmed down, composed themselves, and left, assuring me that I was the Anointed One and that I would win the election.

  I believe that this was my first personal experience of the way in which evangelical sects had penetrated the marginalized sectors of the country. But even though I had many other such experiences later on, a number of them as surprising as that one, and I became accustomed to seeing, on all my visits to outlying urban districts, in the doorways of flimsy shacks and huts the ever-present emblem of Pentecostalists, Baptists, the Christian Missionary Alliance, the People of God, or dozens of other churches with names sometimes possessed of a picturesque syncretism, it was only during the campaign for the second round that I realized the magnitude of the phenomenon. It was true: in many poor parts of Perú where Catholic parishes were no longer served by the Church, either because the campaign of terrorist violence against parish priests (many had been assassinated by Sendero Luminoso) had led to the departure of those who remained or because there were no new priests to be assigned, the vacuum had been filled by Protestant preachers. These latter, men and women almost always of very humble origin, armed with the tireless and fervent zeal of pioneers, lived there on the spot, amid the same primitive conditions as the settlers of these towns, and had succeeded in making converts to those churches that required total surrender and permanent apostleship—so different from the lax and sometimes merely social commitment required by Catholicism—which proved, paradoxically, to attract those who, because of the precariousness of their lives, found in the sects an order and a feeling of security to which to cling. With Catholicism, by tradition and custom, the official—the formal—religion of Peru, the evangelical churches came to represent the informal religion, a phenomenon perhaps as widespread as, in the economic sphere, that of the tradesmen and “informal” businessmen of the parallel economy—whom Fujimori had been clever enough to enroll as allies of his candidacy, by proposing as his first vice president Máximo San Román, a humble “informal” businessman from Cuzco, the pre
sident of Fenapi Perú (Federación de Asociaciones de Pequeñas Empresas Industrials del Perú: Federated Associations of Small Industrial Enterprises in Peru), which since 1988 had brought together the principal provincial organizations of the parallel economy, and the APEMEPE (Asociación de Pequeños y Medianos Empresarios del Perú: Association of the Owners of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in Peru).

  I had no antipathy whatsoever against the evangelicals, and on the contrary, a great deal of sympathy for the way in which its sects’ pastors had risked their lives in the highlands and in city shantytowns (where they were victims both of terrorists and of military repression) and for the way in which throughout the world the evangelical position had been, almost always, in favor of liberal democracy and a market economy. But the fanaticism and the intolerance with which some of them assumed their apostleship annoyed me as much as when such attitudes appeared among Catholics or politicians. Throughout the campaign, I held a number of meetings with pastors and leaders of Protestant churches, but I never wanted to establish any sort of organic relationship between them and my candidacy nor did I make them any promise other than that, during my administration, the freedom of religious worship in Perú would be respected to the letter. Precisely because I had declared myself to be an agnostic, I was careful to keep the religious question from rearing its head during the three years of the campaign, although I never refused to receive men of the cloth, whatever their religion, who wanted to see me. I received dozens of them, from the most diverse denominations, confirming to my own satisfaction yet again in those interviews that nothing attracts madness as surely (or exacerbates it as much) as does religion. One afternoon, my son Gonzalo came into the room, in a panic, to get me to leave a meeting: “What’s happening to my mother? I’ve just opened a door and seen her, with her eyes closed and her hands joined, with a fellow leaping all around her like a redskin and giving her little blows on the head.” It was a sorcerer, pastor, and layer-on of hands, Jesús Linares, a protégé of Senator Roger Cáceres, of the Frenatraca, who had urged me to receive him, assuring me that Linares was a man with spiritual powers and a seer, who had always been of help to him in his electoral battles. I didn’t have time to see him and he was received in my place by Patricia, whom the pastor convinced that she should submit to that strange rite which, he said, would assure our spiritual welfare and victory at the polls.* This was one of the most eccentric, though not the only person with “occult powers” who tried to work in favor of my candidacy. Another one was a female soothsayer who, shortly before the second election, sent me a card proposing to me that, in order to win, she, Patricia, and I should take an “astral bath” together (without specifying what this consisted of).