A Fish in the Water: A Memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Not all of the other episodes of the “dirty war” were as amusing as this one. Aside from the daily news of assassinations of activists of the Front in various places throughout the country, which sent the campaign into a state of shock, the government, in order to counteract the campaign of accusations concerning Fujimori’s real estate holdings and his business dealings, had relaunched its own campaign regarding my supposed income tax evasions, through the director of the Tax Office at the time, the diligent Major General Jorge Torres Aciego (whom Fujimori was later to reward for his services by appointing him minister of defense and later on ambassador to Israel), who kept sending his bureaucrats to the Tax Office daily with fantastic marginal annotations questioning my sworn tax declarations from previous years, amid stupendous publicity. Leaflets with the most absurd denunciations proliferated beyond measure throughout the streets of Lima and the provinces, and Álvaro found it impossible to take the time to deny all the lies or even read those dozens or hundreds of leaflets and pamphlets distributed to intoxicate public opinion, a campaign tactic employed by Hugo Otero, Guillermo Thorndike, and other of Alan García’s public relations amanuenses, who, in those final weeks, beat all previous records in the fabrication of printed shit. Álvaro selected a few pearls from that proliferating dung heap for our meetings together early each morning, and sometimes we exchanged ironic comments about my angelical intention of waging a campaign of ideas. One of the tracts dealt with my drug addiction; another showed me surrounded with naked women, along with a doctored version of an interview of me that had appeared in Playboy, and mused: “Could this be why he’s an atheist?” another invented a declaration by a National Committee of Women Catholics exhorting believers to “close ranks against the atheist” and another reproduced a news item from La República, with the dateline “La Paz, Bolivia,” in which “Aunt Julia,” my first wife, urged Peruvians not to vote for me but for Fujimori, something that she too promised to do (Lucho Llosa telephoned her to ask her if that statement was true, and she sent back a letter full of indignation at such slander). Another of the leaflets was a supposed letter from me to the militants of Libertad, in which, making a show of that brutal frankness I boasted of, I told them that, yes, we had to take jobs away from a million employees for the shock (the economic reform) to be a success, and that, without doubt, many thousands of Peruvians would die of hunger during the early days of the reforms, but after that there would be prosperous times, and that if, with the reform of education, hundreds of thousands of poor never learned how to read and write, things would be better for their children or their grandchildren, and that it was also true that I’d married one of my aunts and then a first cousin of mine and later on I might possibly marry a niece, and that I wasn’t ashamed of it because that was what freedom was for. That campaign ended with a masterstroke, two days before the election, a date when, according to the law, no more electoral propaganda was allowed, with an invention of the state-controlled TV channel, which announced that in Huancayo children had begun to die, “infected by food from the PAS, which is headed by Señora Patricia.”

  Naturally, there were also a goodly number of fliers that attacked my adversary, some of them in such a base way that I wondered whether they’d come from us or whether they’d been conceived by the APRA to justify through such barefaced lies their accusations that we were racists. They almost invariably mentioned Fujimori’s Japanese origin, supposed brothels that he owned from which his father-in-law had made a fortune, accusations that he raped minors, and other such outrageous nonsense. Álvaro and Freddy Cooper assured me that those fliers had not come from our press office or from the campaign commando team, but I am certain that more than a few of them originated in one or another of the numerous—and at this juncture frenetic—authorities or offices of the Front.

  The high point of the second campaign stage was to be my public debate with Fujimori. It was something we had been looking forward to and methodically preparing for. I had announced from the start of the campaign that I would not participate in a debate during the first round—a pointless waste of time for someone who was many points ahead in the polls—but that, if there were a second round, I would. Ever since I resumed campaigning, in mid-April, we had carefully placed a share of our hopes in that public debate in which I would strive to demonstrate conclusively the superiority of the Front’s proposal, with its Plan for Governing, its model of development, and its team of technicians, over Fujimori’s. The latter, aware of the weakness of his position in a public debate in which it would be impossible for him to avoid discussing concrete plans, tried to diminish that risk by challenging me not to one, but to several debates—four at first, and then six—on various subjects, and in different places around the country, while at the same time he thought up all sorts of subterfuges to get out of what had been his own proposal. But, in this regard, we were helped along by stories on the subject in the press and the impatience of public opinion, which demanded that the spectacle be shown on the TV screen. I said I would agree to no more than a single, thoroughgoing debate, on all the subjects of the program, and named a committee, made up of Álvaro, Luis Bustamante, and Alberto Borea, the aggressive leader of the Christian Popular Party, to negotiate the details. Álvaro has amusingly recounted the details of the negotiation,* in which Fujimori’s representatives went to unimaginable lengths to put obstacles in the way of the debate, and since they were given a great deal of daily coverage in the media, they contributed to creating what we were seeking: an enormous audience. The atmosphere of intensive preparation was such that almost all the television channels and radio networks in the country broadcast the debate live.

  It was held under the auspices of the University of the Pacific, and the Jesuit Juan Julio Wicht performed veritable epic feats so as to make the whole thing come off impeccably. It took place on the night of June 3, in the Civic Center of Lima, filled to overflowing with three hundred journalists who had to be accredited beforehand, and twenty invited guests per candidate. It was directed by the journalist Guido Lombardi, who had very little to do, since, practically speaking, the debate never even got off the ground. Aware of the vulnerability of his situation once he would be obliged to refer specifically to a program for governing which he lacked entirely, Fujimori had brought along with him, written out, his speeches (each of them six minutes long) on all the subjects agreed on—Civil Peace, the Economic Program, Agricultural Development, Education, Work and the Informal Economy, and the Role of the State—and unbelievable as it may seem, he also had, all written out, the three-minute replies and one-minute rebuttals to which each of us had a right. As a result, during the so-called debate I felt, I imagine, like one of those chess players who match skills with robots or computers. I would speak and then Fujimori would read, although not even then did he fail to make mistakes in gender and number in Spanish now and again. Whoever had written those cards for him had tried to make up for the vacuousness of Cambio 90’s proposal by repeating ad nauseam all the clichés of the “dirty war”: the terrible economic shock, the million Peruvians who would lose their jobs (the average figure of half a million in the first round had become twice as many in the second), the disappearance of education for the poor, and the usual personal attacks (pornography, drug addiction, Uchuraccay). The spectacle of that tense man, frowning in concentration, reading in a monotone, without daring to depart from the libretto that he had brought with him on the little white cards, written out in large letters, despite my efforts to get him to answer concrete questions or specific charges having to do with his proposal for governing, had something about it that was half comic and half pathetic, and at times he made me feel ashamed, for him and for me as well. (He used up the five minutes allotted each one of us to say a few last words to the Peruvian people to wave a copy of the latest edition of the daily paper Ojo around and denounce the fact that it was already claiming that I had won the debate.)

  What was owed to a people readying itself to exercise the most
important right in a democracy—electing its leaders—was, surely, not this caricature of a debate. Or was it? Was it perhaps inevitable in a country with the characteristics of Peru? Nevertheless the practice of democracy in other poor countries with great economic and cultural inequalities does not descend to the depths it did in Peru, where every effort to elevate the campaign to a certain level of intellectual decorum was swept away by an uncontainable wave of demagoguery, lack of culture, shoddiness, and baseness. I learned many things in this election campaign, and the worst one of all was the discovery that the Peruvian crisis should not be measured only in terms of impoverishment, the decrease in standards of living, the aggravation of contrasts, the collapse of institutions, the acceleration of the rate of violence, but that all of that together had created conditions in which the functioning of democracy became a sort of parody, in which the most cynical and crafty always came up with the winning hand.

  This said, if I must choose one episode of all the three years that the campaign lasted that leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction, it is my performance in that debate. For even though I went to it with no illusions as to the result of the election, I was then able, despite my adversary, or rather, thanks to him, to show to the Peruvian people, in those two and a half hours, the seriousness of our program of reforms and the preponderant role played in it by the fight against poverty, the gigantic effort that we had made to remove all those privileges that Peru had seen accumulating to ensure the prosperity of a privileged elite while the majority fell farther and farther behind.

  The preparations were meticulous and amusing. During several days’ retreat, in Chosica, I had a number of training sessions with journalists who were friends of mine, such as Alfonso Baella, Fernando Viaña, and César Hildebrandt, who (the latter in particular) turned out to be better grounded and more incisive than the combatant I was preparing myself to confront. Moreover, taking time I really didn’t have, I had prepared a number of syntheses, as didactic as possible, of what we wanted to do in the domain of agriculture, in education, in the economy, in employment, and to restore civil peace. I kept to these subjects, despite the fact that, from time to time, I was obliged to allow myself to be distracted for a few moments so as to respond to the personal attacks, as when I asked him, since he boasted of his superiority as a technocrat, what had been done to the cows at the Agrarian University to make their production mysteriously decrease from 2,400 liters of milk per day to a mere 400 during the time that he was rector, or when, confronted with his concern because I had had an experience with drugs when I was fourteen years old, I advised him that he should worry, instead, about something more contemporary that concerned him more directly—like Madame Carmelí, the astrologist and candidate for a representative’s seat in the list of Cambio 90, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for trafficking in drugs.

  That night a great many people from the Front gathered at my house—there were members of the PPC, populists, members of SODE, mingling with the members of Libertad in an atmosphere that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks before—to watch with me the result of the opinion polls on the debate. Since all of them reported that I was the winner, and some of them gave me fifteen or twenty points’ advantage, many of the people gathered together there thought that thanks to the debate we had ensured our victory on June 10.

  Even though, as I have already pointed out, almost all my efforts in the campaign for the second round of voting were concentrated on making tours around the periphery of Lima—the shantytowns and marginal districts that had crept across the deserts and the mountains until they had turned into a gigantic belt of poverty and misery that squeezed the old part of Lima more and more tightly—I also made two trips to the interior, to the two departamentos which I visited most often in those three years and to which I felt the closest ties: Arequipa and Piura. The results of the first round, in both cities, had saddened me, since, because of the affection that I had always felt for both and because of the dedication that I bestowed on both during the campaign, I took it for granted that there would be a sort of reciprocity and that the vote of the people of Piura and Arequipa would favor me. But we won only in Arequipa with 32.53 percent against a very high 31.68 percent for Cambio 90; in Piura the APRA won the first round with 26.09 percent compared to 25.91 for us. Considering the high demographic density of both regions, the Front decided that I should make one last tour of them, above all to explain to Piurans and Arequipans the range of activities of the PAS, which had begun work in both places. During my trip to Arequipa I was present at the signing of an accord between the Municipality of Cayma and the PAS of Arequipa for the installation of medical dispensaries and first-aid centers, thanks to the financing and professional support received by that program. (In April and May close to five hundred dispensaries were installed by the PAS in marginal sectors of Lima and the interior.)

  Both were very different trips from the ones I had made in the first campaign; instead of the multicolor rallies in the town squares and the dinners and receptions at night, there were only visits to markets, cooperatives, associations of informales, itinerant peddlers, and dialogues and meetings with labor unions, members of communes, leaders of neighborhoods, and communities and associations of all sorts, which began at dawn and ended after the stars had come out—held usually out of doors, by candlelight, and during which dozens of times, hundreds of times, I lost my voice and even my sense of discernment, as I tried to disprove the lies concerning the economic shock, education, and the million unemployed. I was so exhausted that, in order to preserve the little energy I had left, I remained silent as we moved about from place to place, and even when the trips lasted only a few minutes, I usually fell fast asleep. Despite such efforts to overcome my fatigue, I was unable, amid an endless interchange of questions and answers, in the Central Market of Arequipa, to keep myself from losing consciousness for a few minutes. The amusing thing is that when I came to, in a daze, the same leader was still perorating, not realizing what had happened to me.

  I noticed the tension and the paroxysm reached by the electoral confrontation within Piura, in particular—a part of the country considered relatively peaceful—where I was obliged to tour the towns and villages that separate Sullana from San Lorenzo Colony amid great violence, and where my speeches frequently had as their audio background the jeers and catcalls of counterdemonstrators or the insults and punches my supporters and my adversaries were exchanging round about me. My grimmest memory of those days is that of my arrival, one torrid morning, in a little settlement between Ignacio Escudero and Cruceta, in the valley of Chira. Armed with sticks and stones and all sorts of weapons to bruise and batter, an infuriated horde of men and women came to meet me, their faces distorted by hatred, who appeared to have emerged from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings and animals were indistinguishable, since for both life was a blind struggle for survival. Half naked, with very long hair and fingernails never touched by a pair of scissors, surrounded by emaciated children with huge swollen bellies, bellowing and shouting to keep their courage up, they hurled themselves on the caravan of vehicles as though fighting to save their lives or seeking to immolate themselves, with a rashness and a savagery that said everything about the almost inconceivable levels of deterioration to which life for millions of Peruvians had sunk. What were they attacking? What were they defending themselves from? What phantoms were behind those threatening clubs and knives? In the wretched village there was no water, no light, no work, no medical post, and the little school hadn’t been open for years because it had no teacher. What harm could I have done them, when they no longer had anything to lose, even if the famous “shock” had proved to be as apocalyptic as propaganda made it out to be? Of what free education could those poor creatures have been deprived, when their only school had already long since been closed by national poverty? With their tremendous defenselessness, they were the best possible living proof that Peru could not continue to exist any
longer in the populist delirium, in the demagogic lie of the redistribution of a wealth decreasing by the day, providing instead dramatic evidence of the need for changing direction, for creating work and wealth through forced marches, for rectifying policies that were each day driving more new masses of Peruvians into a state of precariousness and primitivism that (with the exception of Haiti) no longer had any equivalent in Latin America. There was no way even to try to explain this to them. Despite the shower of stones, which Professor Oshiro and his colleagues tried to ward off with their coats spread out like an awning over my head, I made several attempts to talk to them over a loudspeaker, from the flatbed of a truck, but the outcries and the contention made such a din that I was forced to give up. That night, in the Hotel de Turistas in Piura, those faces and fists of exacerbated Piurans, who would have given anything to lynch me, made me reflect for a good while, before falling into my usual troubled sleep, on the incongruousness of my political adventure, and wish even more impatiently than on other days for June 10, liberation day, to arrive.

  On May 29, 1990, shortly after 9 p.m., an earthquake shook the northeastern area of the country, causing large-scale damage in the Amazon departamentos of San Martín and Amazonas. One hundred fifty people were killed and at least a thousand were injured in localities in the departamento of San Martín: Moyobamba, Rioja, Soritor, and Nueva Cajamarca, as well as in Rodríguez de Mendoza in Amazonas, where more than half the dwellings had collapsed or were damaged. This tragedy allowed me to confirm the good work that had been done by Ramón Barúa and Jaime Crosby with the PAS, which, the moment the news of the earthquake reached us, we put to work mobilizing all possible aid. On the morning after the catastrophe, Patricia and former president Fernando Belaunde left for the devastated areas on a plane loaded with fifteen tons of medicine, clothing, and food supplies. It was the first help to arrive there, and I believe the only help, for a week later, when I visited the region on June 6, on another plane loaded with field tents, boxes of serum and medicine kits, the few doctors, nurses, and medical assistants who were doing their best to aid the survivors and the injured had only the resources of the PAS to count on. This program, organized with the limited resources of an opposition party, which the government harassed, was capable under those circumstances of accomplishing all by itself something that the Peruvian government was unable to do. The images in Soritor, Rioja, and Rodríguez de Mendoza were monstrous: hundreds of families were sleeping in the open, under the trees, after having lost everything, and men and women were continuing to dig in the rubble, in search of people who were still missing. In Soritor there was practically not a single habitable dwelling left, for the ones that had not entirely collapsed had lost their roofs and walls and risked tumbling down from one moment to the next. As though terrorism and political raving had not been enough, nature too was venting its fury on the Peruvian people.