A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (24 page)

Of all the speeches I gave, I remember as the best ones, or in any event the least bad ones, two that I was able to prepare in the hospitable garden of my friends Maggie and Carlos Ferreyros—with no bodyguards, reporters, or telephones—for the launching of my candidacy, in the Plaza de Armas, the main square of Arequipa, on June 4, 1989, and the one closing the campaign, on the Paseo de la República, in Lima, on April 14, 1990, the most personal one of all. And also, perhaps, the brief address, on June 10, before the grief-stricken crowd that rushed to the doors of the headquarters of Libertad as soon as it became known that we had lost.

At the congress of the Movement there were speeches, but there was also an ideological debate which quite possibly did not interest all the delegates as much as it did me. Was the Freedom Movement going to promote a market economy or a
social
market economy? Enrique Ghersi defended the first thesis and Luis Bustamante Belaunde the second, in an intelligent interchange that caused a number of those attending to speak up in favor of one formula or the other. The discussion was more than a semantic itch. By way of the sympathy or the antipathy provoked by the adjective
social
, the heterogeneous composition of the Movement became clearly evident. Not only liberals had signed up as members of it, but also conservatives, Christian Socialists, Social Democrats, and a goodly number—the majority perhaps—without any ideological position, with an abstract loyalty to democracy or with no more than a negative definition: they were not Apristas or Communists and saw in us an alternative to whatever it was they detested or feared.

The most closely knit group and the one most closely identified with liberalism—or so it appeared at the time; things would change later—was one made up of young people between the ages of twenty and thirty, who had had their first passage at arms as journalists working together at
La Prensa
when that daily was released from state control by Belaunde in 1980, under the tutelage of two journalists who, for quite some time, had been defending the free market and combating government interventionism: Arturo Salazar Larraín and Enrique Chirinos Soto (both had joined Libertad). But these young people, among whom was my son Álvaro, had gone quite a bit further than their teachers. They were enthusiastic followers of Milton Friedman, of Ludwig von Mises, or of Friedrich Hayek, and the radicalism of one of them—Federico Salazar—bordered on anarchism. Several of them had worked or were still working at Hernando de Soto’s Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Freedom and Democracy Institute) and two of them, Ghersi and Mario Ghibellini, were co-authors with him of
El otro sendero (The Other Path)
, for which I had written the foreword,
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and in which it was shown, supported by exhaustive research, how the informal economy, set up just outside the law, was a creative response of the poor to the discriminatory barriers imposed by that mercantilist version of capitalism which was the only variety with which Peru was acquainted.

That investigation, made by a team directed by Hernando de Soto, was of great importance to the furthering of liberal ideas in Peru, and marked off a sort of borderline. De Soto had organized, in Lima, in 1979 and 1982, two international symposia to which he brought a roster of economists and thinkers—Hayek, Friedman, Jean-François Revel, and Hugh Thomas among others—whose ideas were a strong breath of modernizing fresh air in that Peru that was just emerging from so many years of populist demagoguery and military dictatorship. I had collaborated with Hernando in staging these events, speaking at both, helped him set up the Instituto Libertad y Democracia, closely followed his studies on the informal economy, and continued to be enthusiastic about his conclusions. I urged him to put them together in a book and when he did so, besides writing the foreword for it, I promoted
El otro sendero
in Peru and in the outside world as I have never done for a book of my own. (I even went so far as to insist, to the point of brazenness, that
The New York Times Magazine
accept an article that I had written about it, which finally appeared on February 22, 1987, and later was widely reprinted in many countries.) I did so because I thought that Hernando would be a good president of Peru. He too believed that and thus our relationship seemed to be an excellent one. Hernando was as vain and touchy as a prima donna, and when I first met him in 1979, just after his arrival from Europe, where he had lived for a good part of his life, he struck me as a slightly pompous and ridiculous figure, with his Spanish studded with Anglicisms and Gallicisms and his aristocratic, affected snobbishness (he had added a coquettish “de” to his father’s name, and for that reason Belaunde sometimes referred to him as “that economist with the name of a conquistador”). But I soon had the impression that I had discovered, beneath his picturesque outward appearance, a more intelligent, more modern person than the ordinary run of our politicians, someone who could lead a liberal reform in Peru and who, despite his mania for publicity, was therefore worth all the support I could give him, both inside and outside the country. Support him I did, with great success and also, I confess, no little embarrassment, once I discovered that I was forging for him an image of an intellectual which, as my countrymen have it, wept when it was superimposed on the original.

At the time of the mobilization against nationalization, Hernando was on holiday, in the Dominican Republic. But I phoned him and he returned to Peru earlier than he had planned to. Although in the beginning he expressed reservations as to the rally in the Plaza San Martín—as an alternative, he proposed a symposium on the informal economy in the Amauta Coliseum, an indoor stadium, but then later he and all the people from the Instituto Libertad y Democracia collaborated with enthusiasm in organizing the Plaza San Martín demonstration. His right-hand man in those days, Enrique Ghersi, was one of the organizers and de Soto one of the three speakers who preceded me. His presence on that platform had given rise to much covert pressure, which I resisted, convinced that those of my friends who were opposed to his speaking, maintaining that his odd words in English would make people burst out laughing, were behaving as they did out of jealousy and not, as they kept assuring me, because he seemed to them a man with more ambitions than principles and one whose loyalty was dubious.

His later conduct proved that my friends had been absolutely right. On the very eve of the rally on August 21, in which in theory he was to play an active part, de Soto had a discreet interview with Alan García at the Presidential Palace, which established the foundations of a close and advantageous collaboration between the administration and the Instituto Libertad y Democracia and which was to launch de Soto on a headlong career as an opportunist (one that was to reach new heights later under the administration and the dictatorship of Fujimori, the new president). That collaboration was cleverly contrived by Alan García in order to publicize himself, all of a sudden, after 1988, in one of those somersaults of which demagogues are capable, as a promoter of private property among Peruvians of scant means, a president who was fulfilling one of the fundamental aspirations of the Democratic Front: to make of Peru “a country of proprietors.” To this end, he had himself photographed right and left, arm in arm with de Soto, Peru’s “liberal,” and sponsored sensational and above all inordinately expensive projects—because of the publicity costing millions that surrounded them—in the young towns, which Hernando and his Institute carried out for him, in what he maintained was open competition with the Front. The maneuver had no major political effect, though as far as I was personally concerned, it admittedly was of great help to me to learn of the unsuspected abilities of the star performer involved, whom, with my characteristic naïveté, I had at one time believed capable of cleaning up Peruvian politics and saving the country.

While—impelled by the spite toward which he was so easily inclined or for more practical reasons—de Soto turned out in Peru to be a sly and sneaky enemy of my candidacy, in the United States he showed, wherever and whenever he got the chance, the video of the rally in the Plaza San Martín as proof of his popularity.
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But the person who in this barefaced way doubtless attracted more sympathy and support from liberal institutions and foundations in the United States for his Instituto Libertad y Democracia contrived, at the same time, to let slip out insinuations against the Democratic Front at the Department of State and various international agencies in the presence of individuals who sometimes came to me, all upset, to ask me what these Machiavellianisms meant. They simply meant that the person who had described the mercantilist system in Peru with such preciseness had ended up being its prototype. Those of us who aided and abetted him—and, in a manner of speaking, invented him—must admit frankly, without mincing words: we had not contributed to the cause of freedom or to that of Peru, but, rather, whetted the appetites of a homegrown Rastignac.

But his swift passage through the world of ideas and liberal values left behind a good book. And also, to a certain extent, that group of young radicals who, at the first congress of Libertad, so heatedly defended the deletion of an adjective.

The radicalism and the excitement of the young Turks headed by Ghersi—above all of the Jacobin Federico Salazar, always prompt to denounce any symptom of mercantilism or deviation tending toward state control—rather frightened Lucho Bustamante, a prudent man and, as the person responsible for the Plan for Governing, someone who was determined that our program should be realistic as well as radical (since liberal utopias also exist). Hence his insistence, with the backing of a number of the economists and professionals on his team, that the Movement should adopt as its own the formula that Ludwig Erhard (or rather, his adviser Alfred Müller-Armack) had used to label the economic policy which, after 1948, launched Germany’s amazing economic takeoff: the social market economy.

My own inclination was to drop the adjective “social.” Not because I believe a market economy incompatible with any form of redistribution of wealth—a thesis to which no liberal would subscribe, although there are varying points of view on the scope that a policy of the redistribution of wealth should have in an open society—but because in Peru it is more closely associated with socialism than with the equality of opportunity that is a feature of liberal philosophy. My objection also had to do with conceptual clarity. The military dictatorship had applied the label “social” to everything that it collectivized and brought under state control and Alan García martyrized Peruvians by repeating it in every one of his speeches, explaining that he was nationalizing banking so that it would fulfill a “social function.” The word used in that odd sense cropped up so often in political discourse that it had become more of a populist catchword than a concept. (I have always felt affection toward those young extremists, even though every so often one of them accused me of heterodoxy as well and, with the passage of time, two of them—Ghibellini and Salazar—turned out to be rather contemptible. But during the period to which I am referring, they appeared to be generous and idealistic. And their incorruptibility and their intransigence, I told myself, would be useful when the day came to undertake the arduous task of making the country moral.)

The congress did not come to any decision with regard to the adjective “social” and the debate remained an open-ended one, but the interchange marked the best intellectual moment of the meeting and served to set many members to thinking. The real conclusion came with the practical efforts of the two following months, in which Lucho Bustamante’s team drew up the most advanced liberal project thus far proposed in Peru, and none of the “young Turks” found anything in it to object to.

To what point did we manage to make
ideas
put down roots among members of Libertad? To what degree did Peruvians who voted for me vote for liberal ideas? I don’t know. This is a doubt that I would like very much to clear up. In any event, the effort we made to give ideas a primordial role in the life of the Freedom Movement was a many-sided one. The national committee on basic principles and culture was established, which the congress chose Enrique Ghersi to head, together with a school for party leaders that was Miguel Cruchaga’s idea and enthusiastically conducted by Fernando Iwasaki and Carlos Zuzunaga.

Shortly after the congress Raúl Ferrero Costa, who had been dean of the Bar Association, and a group of professionals and students associated with him joined Libertad. His handling of affairs as dean had been magnificent, and had been the occasion for his traveling extensively throughout Peru. When Víctor Guevara gave up his position as head of the national committee for organization, I asked Raúl to take his place, and despite the fact that he knew how difficult a post it was, he agreed. At that time, the secretary general, Miguel Cruchaga, aided by his wife Cecilia, had taken on an almost overwhelming task: recruiting and training the sixty thousand election supervisors we needed in order to have a representative at every single one of the tables for registering voters in the entire country. (The election supervisor is the sole guarantee against fraud when voters register or cast their ballots.) All the work of organizing was thus left in Ferrero’s hands.

Raúl made a tremendous effort to improve the status of Libertad in the provinces. Aided by some twenty co-workers, he traveled tirelessly throughout the interior, setting up committees where none existed as yet and reorganizing the ones that did. The infrastructure of Libertad was expanding. On my travels I was impressed to see that in remote provinces in Cajamarca, Ancash, San Martín, or Apurímac I was received by organized groups of members of Libertad on the front of whose headquarters there could be made out, from a long way away, that red and black emblem of Libertad whose calligraphy bore a family resemblance to Poland’s Solidarno$$$$$$$$$$. (In 1981, when the repressive laws against the labor movement headed by Lech Walesa were made public, I had led, along with the journalist Luis Pásara, a protest demonstration, and I suppose that because of this precedent, many people believed that the similarity of the two symbols had been my idea. But in all truth, although the close resemblance struck me as a happy coincidence, I didn’t plan it, nor do I know to this day whether it was devised by Jorge Salmón, who was responsible for publicity for Libertad, or Miguel Cruchaga or Fernando de Szyszlo, who, in order to help us raise funds, had designed a splendid lithograph with the Libertad insignia.)