A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (36 page)

His presence was going to be something wonderful, I thought. The truth was that we needed him. The family had begun to collapse. Grandpa suffered from bad health and had difficulty remembering things. The most alarming case was that of Uncle Juan. Since his arrival from Bolivia he had found a good job, in an industrial company, for he was content and, moreover, a family man, devoted to his wife and children. He had always been fond of drinking more than he should have, but this seemed to be something that he was able to control at will, just a few excesses on weekends, at parties, and at family reunions. However, ever since the death of his mother, a year and a half before, his drinking had been increasing. Uncle Juan’s mother had come from Arequipa to live with him when it was discovered that she had cancer. She played the piano wonderfully well, and when I went to my cousins Nancy and Gladys’s house, I always asked Señora Laura to play the “Melgar” waltz by Luis Duncker Lavalle and other compositions that reminded us of Arequipa. She was a very pious woman, who knew how to die with composure. Her death was Uncle Juan’s downfall. He stayed shut up in the living room of his house, refusing to open the door, drinking until he passed out. From that time on, he used to go on drinking like that, hour after hour, day after day, until the kindly, good-natured person he was when he was sober turned into a violent being who sowed fear and destruction all around him. I suffered as much as Aunt Lala and my cousins because of his downfall, those crises during which he little by little destroyed all his furniture, and kept entering and leaving sanatoriums—cures that he tried over and over and that were always useless—and filling with bitterness and financial hardships a family that he nonetheless adored.

Uncle Pedro had married a very pretty girl, the daughter of the overseer of the San Jacinto hacienda, and after having spent a year in the United States, he and Aunt Rosi were now living on the Paramonga hacienda, whose hospital he was the head of. That family was getting along very well. But Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby were fighting like cats and dogs, and their marriage seemed to be on the rocks. Uncle Jorge had kept on getting better and better jobs. With prosperity, he had acquired an insatiable appetite for entertainment and women, and his dissipations were a source of continual marital quarrels.

The family’s problems affected me deeply. I experienced them as though each one of those dramas in the different households of the Llosas concerned me in the most intimate way. And with more than my share of naïveté, I believed that with Uncle Lucho’s arrival everything was going to be all right again, that thanks to the great righter of wrongs the family would once again be that serene, indestructible tribe, sitting around the big table in Cochabamba for another boisterous Sunday dinner.

Between the end of September and the middle of October of 1989, after registering my candidacy at the national election board, I made a lightning-quick trip through four countries which, ever since the beginning of the campaign, I had been referring to as an example of the development that any country on the periphery that chooses economic freedom and joins the world’s markets can achieve: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.

They lacked natural resources, they were overpopulated and had started from zero, because of their colonial status or backwardness or because of a war that left them devastated. And the four of them, opting for development outward, had succeeded in becoming countries that exported and, by promoting private enterprise, brought about industrialization and a very rapid modernization, which ended mass unemployment and noticeably raised their standard of living. The four of them—but Japan in particular—were now competing in world markets with the most advanced countries. Were they not an example for Peru?

The object of the trip was to show Peruvians that we were already getting under way something we were proposing, the opening up of our economy toward the Pacific—negotiating with authorities, companies, and financial institutions of those countries. And that I was well enough known on the international scene to be received in those milieus.
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Álvaro managed to get Peruvian television to broadcast, each night of my tour through these four Asiatic countries, between September 27 and October 14, 1989, the images that the mustachioed cameraman who accompanied us, Paco Velázquez, sent to it via satellite.

Velázquez traveled with us thanks to Genaro Delgado Parker, one of the owners of TV Channel 5, who paid his expenses. At the time, Genaro, an old acquaintance of mine and a friend, was said to be an enthusiast of my candidacy. On the night that it was launched, in Arequipa, on June 4, 1989, he gave us a million dollars’ worth of ad time for nothing, after a discussion with Lucho Llosa, in which the latter accused him of being ambiguous and opportunistic when it came to his political tactics. Genaro visited me every so often to make suggestions and pass on political gossip to me, and in order to explain that if I was attacked on Channel 5’s news broadcasts and programs, it was the fault of his brother Héctor, an Aprista and an intimate friend and adviser to President Alan García during the latter’s first year in office.

According to Genaro, Héctor had won over his younger brother, Manuel, to his cause, and between the two of them they had placed him in the minority in the running of the channel, so that he had found himself obliged to give up any sort of executive post and the directorship of the company. Genaro always made me feel that I had been the original cause of his breaking off with Héctor—which had even gone as far as a fistfight—but that he had preferred to go through this family crisis rather than renounce a view of economics and politics that coincided with my own. Ever since I had worked with him as a reporter when I was still an adolescent, at Radio Panamericana, I had felt an irresistible warmth of feeling toward Genaro, but I always took his declarations of political love with a grain of salt. For I think I know him well enough to be certain that his great success as an impresario has been due not only to his energy and to his talent (of which he has more than enough), but also to his gift as a chameleon, his skill as a sharp businessman with a talent for swimming in both water and oil and for persuading both God and the Devil, at one and the same time, that he is their man.

His conduct, during the campaign against nationalization, was erratic. In the beginning, he placed himself in a position of headlong opposition to the measure, and Channel 5, which at the time he headed, opened its doors to us and was little short of being the spokesman for our mobilization. On the eve of the rally in the Plaza San Martín, he came to see me with suggestions, some of them very amusing, for my speech, which Channel 5 broadcast live. But in the days that followed, his position gradually changed from solidarity to neutrality, and then to hostility, with the rate of speed of an astronaut. The reason was a summons, at the most heated moment of the campaign, that he received from Alan García, who invited him to breakfast at the Presidential Palace. Once this interview was over, Genaro hurried out to my house, to tell me all about it. He recounted to me a version of his chat with the president, in which the latter, in addition to railing against me, had made veiled threats against him, which he did not tell me about in detail. I noted that he was quite upset by that meeting: half panic-stricken and half euphoric. The fact is that immediately thereafter Genaro left for Miami, where he disappeared into thin air. It was impossible to locate him. Manuel—the manager as well of a chain of radio stations—who took over the business, eliminated us from the news bulletins and placed many obstacles and difficulties in our way, even when it was a matter of getting our paid advertisements on the air.

After a few months, Genaro came back to Lima and, as though nothing had happened, renewed his contacts with me. He often visited me at my house in Barranco, offering me aid and counsel, while at the same time he pointed out to me that his influence with regard to the channel was limited now, since Héctor and Manuel had ganged up on him. Despite this, his offer of a million dollars’ worth of free publicity was honored by the company even after Genaro was no longer the director of the channel. Through almost the whole of the campaign, Genaro posed as a man on our side. He was present at the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, and in order to promote it brought together a small group of journalists who, working with Álvaro, distributed materials to the press that could be of help to us. That was how it happened that Paco Velázquez traveled through Asia with me.

Less intelligent and clever than Genaro, his brother Héctor chose to become involved with the APRA, assuming ticklish responsibilities in Alan García’s administration. He was commissioned by the latter to negotiate with the French government a smaller-sized purchase than the twenty-six Mirage planes that the Belaunde administration had ordered, part of which Alan García had decided to send back. The long-drawn negotiation, whereby in the end Peru kept twelve and returned fourteen, led to an accord that was never completely clear. This was one of the matters in which, according to persistent rumors, there had been shady dealings and commissions amounting to millions.
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I was repeatedly counseled by advisers and allies of the Front to avoid all mention of the Mirages, because of the risk that Channel 5 would turn into a merciless enemy of my candidacy. I disregarded the advice for the reason already mentioned: so that nobody in Peru would have the wrong idea as to what I was intending to do if I were elected. I am not definitely accusing Alan García and Héctor Delgado Parker in connection with this affair. For, even though I made every effort to acquire detailed information concerning the negotiations having to do with the Mirages, I never managed to arrive at a definite opinion about it. But, for that very reason, it was necessary to determine if the accord had been an open and aboveboard negotiation or not.

In the middle of my trip through Asia, a fax from Álvaro arrived for me one night in the hotel in Seoul: Héctor Delgado Parker had been kidnapped, on October 4, 1989, in the vicinity of Panamericana Television, by a commando unit of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which, in the course of the operation, had killed his chauffeur and wounded Héctor. He remained a captive for 199 days, until April 20, 1990, when his kidnappers let him loose in the streets of Miraflores. During this time, the executive director of Channel 5 was the youngest of the brothers, Manuel, but Genaro again came to have a certain hand in running the company. At a press conference during the Economics and Agriculture Forum 1990–1995, organized by the Universidad Nacional Agraria, on January 30, 1990 (at which, let it be said in passing, exasperated by the ferocity of the slander of me by officialdom, which was becoming even worse at that time, I went too far, calling Alan García’s administration “a government of shitheads and thieves”), I mentioned, among the affairs that would be the object of an investigation, the matter of the Mirages. Days later, in one of the most mysterious episodes of the campaign, Héctor’s captors allowed him to answer me and proclaim his innocence, from the “people’s prison,” by means of a videotape that was broadcast on César Hildebrandt’s program on Channel 4, on Sunday, February 11, 1990. The evening before, Manuel Delgado Parker had sought Álvaro out, so as to inform him of the existence of this videotape and assure him that the family would not authorize its being broadcast. The Aprista press accused me of putting Héctor’s life in danger by mentioning the Mirages while he was being held captive by his kidnappers. After that episode, Channel 5 was to turn into a key element of the campaign orchestrated by the government against us.

But all that took place a few months later, and during the trip to the Orient, at the beginning of October 1989, thanks to the good offices of Genaro and his cameraman, Álvaro was able to inundate the TV channels and the daily papers with pictures in which I appeared as little less than a head of state, conversing with the president of the Republic of China, Lee Tenghui, in Taiwan, or with the prime minister of Japan, Toshiki Kaifu. The latter proved to be very cordial toward me. On October 13, 1989, he postponed a meeting with Carla Hills, the United States trade representative, in order to receive me, and in our brief talk together he assured me that if I was elected Japan would support my administration in its efforts to bring Peru back into the financial community. He told me that he looked with favor on our effort to attract Japanese investments. Prime Minister Kaifu had been chairman of a Peruvian-Japanese friendship committee of the Diet and was aware of the fact that I had frequently used the example of Japan as proof that a country could rise from its ruins and that as a presidential candidate I stood in favor of the economic opening of Peru toward the Pacific. (In the second round of the election, Fujimori made good use of my harangues on the subject, telling the voters: “I agree with what Doctor Vargas Llosa says about Japan. But don’t all of you think that the son of Japanese parents can be more successful than he in pursuing that policy?”)

The Keidanren, a federation of private companies in Japan, organized a meeting in Tokyo between representatives of Japanese industries and banks and the entrepreneurs who accompanied me on the tour: Juan Francisco Raffo, Patricio Barclay, Gonzalo de la Puente, Fernando Arias, Raymundo Morales, and Felipe Thorndike. I asked them to travel with me because in their respective branches—finance, exports, mining, fishing, textiles, metallurgy—they represented modern businesses, and because I considered them to be efficient entrepreneurs, eager to progress and capable of learning from the companies that we visited in the “four dragons.” It was a good thing to show Asian governments and investors that our project for opening up trade could count on the support of the Peruvian private sector.

This was one of the few cases which involved a coordinated effort between groups of entrepreneurs and my campaign for the presidency. The positive feelings that, in the society we wanted to build, the private entrepreneur would be the driving force behind development, thanks to whose vision the jobs that we needed would be created, the foreign currency that was in such short supply would reach Peru, the standards of living of the populace would continually rise—someone recognized and approved of by a society without complexes, conscious of the fact that, in a country with a market economy, the success of businesses favors the entire community.

I never hid from entrepreneurs the fact that, during a first stage, they would be the ones who would have to make great sacrifices. Today I am less certain, but at the time it seemed to me that many, the majority perhaps, came around to admitting that they would have to pay that price if they wanted someday to be the peers of those entrepreneurs who, in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or Singapore, showed us their factories and made our heads swim with their figures on rates of growth and their worldwide sales. I managed to communicate to at least some of them my conviction that it depended solely on us whether, on a day in the not too distant future, that filthy and violent metropolis that the City of Kings (as Lima was called in the colonial period) had become would look in the eyes of tourists like the impeccable and wholly modern city-state of Singapore.

“When I arrived here thirty years ago, there, where you now see those skyscrapers, that avenue with boutiques that need not envy those in Zurich, New York, or Paris, and those five-star hotels, were swamps infested with crocodiles and mosquitoes.” I can still see that figure, pointing, from his window at the Singapore Chamber of Commerce, of which he was the head, at the center of that city, of that tiny country, that left me with an unforgettable impression.

Like Peru, Singapore was a multiracial society—whites, Chinese, Malayans, Hindus—with different languages, traditions, customs, and religions. But they had as well a very small area of land, with barely room for the country’s population, and suffered from an extreme tropical climate, with suffocating heat and torrential rains. Except for a good geographical situation, they lacked natural resources. That is to say, they were the victims of all those factors regarded as the worst obstacles to development. And yet they had become one of the most modern and most advanced societies in Asia, with a very high standard of living, the largest and most efficient port in the world—whose perfect, spanking-white cleanliness made it look like a sort of clinic, and where a ship unloaded and loaded again in barely eight hours—and high-technology industries.
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(The growth rate of its gross domestic product between 1981 and 1990 had averaged 6.3 percent per year and the growth rate of its exports between 1981 and 1989 7.3 percent, according to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.) Its different races, religions, and customs coexisted in that financial mecca, with one of the most active stock exchanges on the globe and a banking system that had interlocking networks throughout the planet. All of this had been brought about in less than thirty years, thanks to economic freedom, the market, and internationalization. It is true that Lee Kuan Yew had been authoritarian and repressive (only recently had he begun to tolerate opposition and criticism), something that I was not going to imitate. But why couldn’t Peru attain a similar development, within a democratic system? It was possible, if a majority of Peruvians so chose. And at that point in the campaign, the signs were favorable: the polls always placed me very far ahead, with those intending to vote for me wavering between 40 and 45 percent.