A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (22 page)

That Libertad relied in certain places on such unsuitable leaders has an explanation (although it does not constitute a justification). Support in the provinces came to us from groups or individuals who offered to help lay the foundations of the Movement; in our impatience to cover the entire country, we accepted those offers without screening them, sometimes making precisely the right choice and at others making monumental errors. That should have been corrected by having the national leaders make regular swings around the interior so as to perform on the spot that basic, unsung, often boring missionary work of the activist, indispensable if the goal is to build a solid political organization. We didn’t do this, at least not in the first year of our existence, and it was owing to this that in many places Libertad was born crooked, and later on it proved to be difficult to twist it back into the proper shape. I was aware of what was going to happen but could do nothing about it. My admonitions, whether plaintive or enraged, in the executive and political committees, that the leaders must go out into the provinces had little effect. They traveled with me to appear at rallies, but lightning visits of that sort did not further the work of organization. The reason they resisted was not so much the fear of terrorist attack as it was the endless hardships which, owing to the near collapse of the country, they would be forced to endure wherever they went. I told my friends that their propensity for the sedentary life would have regrettable consequences. And that was how it turned out. With a few exceptions the organization of Libertad in the interior proved to be far from representative. And in our committees as well there reigned and handed down decisions in thundering tones that immortal figure: the cacique.

I met many of these political bosses in those three years, and whether they were from the coastal regions, the mountains, or the jungle, they all seemed to be cut from the same cloth by the same tailor. They were, or had been, or inevitably would become senators, representatives, mayors, prefects, subprefects. Their energy, their abilities, their Machiavellian machinations, and their imaginations were concentrated on just one goal: to attain, to hang on to, or to recover a modicum of power through every means, licit or illicit, at their disposal. They were all ardent followers of the moral philosophy summed up in the precept: “To live without money from the state is to live in error.” All of them had a little court or retinue of relatives, friends, and protégés whom they made out to be popular leaders—of teachers, of peasants, of workers, of technicians—and placed on the committees they presided over. They had all changed ideologies and parties the way one changes one’s shirt, and they had all been, or at some point would become, Apristas, populists, and Communists (the three principal sources of sinecures in the history of Peru). They were always there, waiting for me, on the roads, in the stations, at the airports, with bouquets of flowers, bands, and bags of herbs to throw for good luck, and theirs were the first arms to reach out and hug me wherever I arrived, with the same affection with which they had embraced General Velasco, Belaunde, Barrantes, Alan García, and they always managed things in such a way as to be at my side on the speakers’ platform, microphone in hand, introducing me to the audience and offering to organize rallies and doing everything possible to be seen with me in photographs in the newspapers and on television. They were always the ones who, when a rally was over, tried to carry me about in triumph on their shoulders—a ridiculous custom of Peruvian politicians in imitation of bullfighters, and one that I always refused to allow, even if I occasionally had to defend myself with a good swift kick—and they were the ones who sponsored the inevitable receptions, banquets, dinners, lunches, barbecues, which they made into even grander occasions by delivering flowery speeches. Usually they were attorneys, but among them there were also owners of garages or transportation companies, or former policemen or ex-members of the military, and I would even go so far as to swear that they all looked alike, with their tight-fitting suits, their ridiculous little hairline mustaches of present, past, or future members of Congress, and their thunderous, saccharine, high-flown eloquence, ready to rain down in torrents at the slightest opportunity.

I remember one of them, a perfect specimen of the species, in Tumbes. Going a bit bald, in his fifties, with a cheerful smile, a gold tooth, he was introduced to me on the first political junket I made to that department, in December 1987. He climbed out of a car that was belching smoke, with an entourage of half a dozen people, whom he defined in these words: “The pioneers of the Freedom Movement in Tumbes, Doctor. And I, sir, am the helmsman, at your service.” I found out later that at one time he had been a “helmsman” of the APRA, and after that of Popular Action, a party he deserted in order to serve the military dictatorship. And after going through our ranks, he contrived to become a leader of Francisco Diez Canseco’s UCI (Unión Cívica Independiente: Independent Civic Unión) and, finally, of our ally SODE, which put him up as a regional candidate of the Democratic Front.

Battling with political bosses, tolerating political bosses, using political bosses was something I never learned how to do. They doubtless read on my face the disgust and the impatience they aroused in me, representing as they did, at the provincial level, everything that I would have liked politics in Peru
not
to be. But this did not prevent the committees of Libertad in many provinces from falling into the hands of local bosses. How to change something that was so visceral a part of our political idiosyncrasy?

The organization of Libertad in Lima worked better. The first departmental secretary, Víctor Guevara, and his team whose guiding light was a brilliant young man who had just received his degree in architecture, Pedro Guevara, worked with all their might, bringing together the members of the Movement in each district of the city, using the best people to constitute the first nuclei and making plans for the elections. When Rafael Rey took Víctor Guevara’s place, we had more than fifty thousand members in the capital, from almost every district in the city. The Movement had much deeper roots in the neighborhoods with high and middle incomes than in the poorer districts, but over the months that followed we managed to make rather impressive inroads in the latter as well.

I still have a very vivid image of our first attempt to organize in the young towns. A group of residents of Huáscar, one of the poorest shantytowns in San Juan de Lurigancho, wrote a letter to Miguel Cruchaga asking for information about the Movement, and we suggested to them that we organize a Freedom Day there where they lived. We went out one Saturday in March 1988. When we arrived at the soup kitchen, on the edge of a stretch of stony ground, there was no one there. Little by little, some hundred people showed up: barefoot women, suckling babes, curious onlookers, a rather tipsy man who kept cheering for the APRA, dogs that ran in and out between the legs of the people who were giving explanatory talks. And there too were María Prisca, Octavio Mendoza, and Juvencio Rojas, who a few weeks later would make up the first Libertad committee in Peru. Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos explained how, by debureaucratizing the state and by simplifying the burdensome legal system, tradesmen and craftsmen of the informal economy could work legally, with proper permits accessible to everyone, and spoke of the stimulus that this would be for people’s welfare. We had also brought along a prosperous businessman, who had begun by doing his buying and selling in the informal economy, like many of those present, so that they, who knew everything there was to know about frustration and failure, would see that success too was possible.

A group of women who, from the days of the campaign against state ownership, had been working with tireless enthusiasm for Libertad, went out with us to San Juan de Lurigancho. These women had painted slogans and made banners, transported people to and from public squares, collected signatures, and in those days swept floors, scrubbed down walls, and nailed doors and windows in place so that the house that we had just rented on the Avenida Javier Prado would be in fit shape for the opening, on March 15. This building, the headquarters of the Movement, would fulfill its function thanks especially to women like them, all volunteers—Cecilia, María Rosa, Anita, Teche…—who stayed on there morning, noon, and night, signing up members, working the computer, writing letters, taking care of the secretarial work, the purchasing of supplies, the cleaning, the complex machinery of a political headquarters.

Six of them, headed by María Teresa Belaunde, decided, in those last days of the summer of 1988, to work in the new slum settlements and shantytowns on the outskirts of Lima. In that immense urban belt where émigrés from the Andes end up—peasants fleeing from drought, hunger, terror—a person can read, from the building material of the hovels—bricks, wood, sheets of tin, and straw mats—as though they were geological strata, the age of the migrations that are the best barometer of the great shift of the nation’s population toward the capital and of the country’s economic failure. It is in these
pueblos jóvenes
, the young towns, that the poor and the wretched who make up two-thirds of the population of Lima are to be found. And it is there that the problems faced by Peru are experienced in their starkest reality: the lack of housing, of potable water and proper sewage disposal, of work, of medical facilities, of food, of transportation, of education, of public order, of safety. But that world, so full of suffering and violence, is also ablaze with energy, with ingenuity and the will to survive: it was there in those shantytowns that the new popular capitalism, which came to be called the “informal,” or “parallel,” economy, had sprung up—a phenomenon that could be transformed, if one became politically aware of what it represented, into the driving force of a liberal revolution.

And so Acción Solidaria—the Solidarity program—was born, with my wife Patricia as president of it all through the campaign. At the beginning there were only six women who were members and two and a half years later there were three hundred of them, and in the whole of Peru some five hundred, since the example of the women members of Libertad spread to Arequipa, Trujillo, Cajamarca, Piura, and other cities. Theirs was not charity work but political militancy that translated into concrete facts the philosophy according to which the poor had to be given the means to emerge from their poverty by themselves. Acción Solidaria helped organize workshops, businesses, companies, gave technical training courses and instruction in arts and crafts, arranged for credit for public works projects chosen by popular vote of the people who lived in the neighborhood, and offered technical and administrative advice as these projects were under way. Thanks to its efforts, dozens of stores, artisans’ workshops, and small industries appeared in the neediest districts of Lima, along with countless mothers’ clubs and day-care centers. And schools and medical dispensaries were built, streets and avenues were opened up, water wells were put in, and an irrigation system was even installed in the peasant community of Jicamarca. All with no official support whatsoever but, rather, with the undisguised hostility of that state which Alan García’s administration had turned into a subsidiary of the APRA.

Just as in my meetings with the government planning committees, my visits to the workshops in cooking, mechanics, sewing, weaving, leather working, and so on, to the classes in reading and writing, nursing, running a business, or family planning, and to the construction projects sponsored by Acción Solidaria were a tonic to me that revived my enthusiasm. Such visits reassured me that I had done the right thing by entering politics.

I have been speaking of the
women
of Acción Solidaria, because for the most part it was women who took charge of that branch of the Movement, although many men worked hand in hand with them: Dr. José Draxl, for instance, who coordinated the basic courses on health, the engineer Carlos Hara, responsible for the community development projects, and tireless Pedro Guevara, who took over the work in the most remote and depressed areas as though they were a religious apostolate. The Solidarity program changed the life of many of the women members of Libertad, since before joining the Movement very few of them had had the same vocation for social service and the same practical experience in the field that the main leader of this part of the Movement, María Teresa Belaunde, did. The great majority of them were housewives, from families with moderate or high incomes, who up until then had lived a rather empty and even frivolous life, blind and deaf to the seething volcano that is the Peru of underdevelopment and wretched poverty. Beginning to rub elbows every day with people who lived amid ignorance, sickness, and unemployment, people who were the victims of multiple abuses—taking on a commitment that was ethical as well as political and social—transformed them in a short time into individuals who were clearheaded about the Peruvian drama and aroused in many of them the determination to do something concrete. I include my own wife among them. I saw Patricia transformed by working in Acción Solidaria and in what would be its best fruit, the PAS (Programa de Apoyo Social: Program for Social Aid), an ambitious project intended to counterbalance the sacrifices that the stabilization of the economy would call for among the poorest segments of society. Even though she so thoroughly detested politics, she became passionately devoted to work in the young towns, in which she spent many hours during those years, readying herself to help me in the task of governing our country.

The women of the Solidarity program lacked a political vocation, but I was hoping that at least some of them would assume public responsibilities later on. With individuals like that, the whole nature of Peruvian politics could be changed. Seeing what they were doing, discovering how quickly they became thoroughly familiar with the entire range of problems of marginality and transformed themselves into excellent social promoters of social change—without them the Movement would never have put down roots in the young towns—was a refreshing contrast to the shady dealings of provincial political bosses or the petty intrigues within the Democratic Front. When, at the beginning of 1990, we drew up the lists of congressional candidates, I did my best, using the authority granted me by the first Libertad Congress, to convince two of the most dedicated leaders of Acción Solidaria, Diana de Belmont and Nany Bonazzi, to be our candidates for seats representing Lima. But both refused to abandon their work in the southern districts of the city for a seat in Congress.