A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (49 page)

Two other reforms that I announced at the CADE were also the object of fierce attacks: that of the labor market and the new model for government employment. The former was made out by my adversaries to be a clever way of allowing entrepreneurs to fire their workers, and the latter to be a plan to turn out half a million public employees into the streets. (In a video against us that managed, in less than a minute, to pile up, one on top of the other, plagiarism [it repeated images from Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
], distortion, and slander, the government pictured me, disfigured by fangs à la Dracula, as bringing on an apocalyptic shock, in which factories were closed, prices shot into the stratosphere, children were thrown out of schools, and workers out of their jobs, and the entire country blew up in a nuclear explosion.)

Like free education, job security is a false social victory, which, instead of protecting the good worker against arbitrary dismissal, has turned into a mechanism for protecting the inefficient worker, and an obstacle to the creation of jobs for those who need work—in Peru, at the end of 1989, seven out of every ten adults. Job security favored 11 percent of the economically active population. It was, then, a small minority that had job security and an income that ensured that the number of unemployed would remain constant. The laws protecting the worker meant that, after a trial period of three months, a worker turned into the owner of his job, from which it was practically impossible to remove him, since the “just cause” for his dismissal referred to in the Constitution had been reduced, by the laws in force at that time, to a “grave dereliction of duty,” something almost impossible to prove. The result was that companies functioned with a minimum of personnel and hesitated before expanding for fear of finding themselves later on with the dead weight of a payroll that was too large. In a country where unemployment and underemployment affected two-thirds of the population and where creating work for the immense majority was an extremely urgent necessity, it was imperative to give the principle of job security a genuinely
social
meaning.

Explaining that I would respect rights already won—the reforms would affect only those newly hired—I enumerated at CADE the principal measures needed to mitigate the negative effects of job security: lack of productivity would be included among the just causes for dismissal, the trial period for evaluating the worker’s ability would be extended, commercial enterprises would be offered a vast range of possibilities for hiring temporary workers that would allow them to adjust their work force to market variations, and to combat unemployment among young people, contracts for training and apprenticeship, part-time work, and contracts for rotating workers and early retirement would be drawn up. In addition, the worker would be allowed to set himself up as a private and autonomous business and negotiate with the employer for providing his services on a contract basis. Within this package of measures, the democratization of the right to strike was also included, which up to that time had been the monopoly of the highest levels of the union hierarchy, and which, in many cases, forced the rest of the workers to go out on strike through a sort of blackmail. Strikes would be decided on by secret, direct, and universal vote; strikes that affected vital public services and strikes in support of other unions or associations would be prohibited; the practice of taking hostages and occupying work sites, as an adjunct to union work stoppages, would be penalized.

(In March 1990, during our congress on “La revolución de la libertad”—“The Revolution of Freedom”—Sir Alan Walters, who had been one of Margaret Thatcher’s advisers, assured me that these measures would have a favorable effect on the creation of jobs. He reproached me, I admit, for not having been as radical with regard to the minimum wage, which we were going to maintain. “It appears to be an act of justice,” he said to me. “But it is one only for
those who are working
. The minimum wage is an injustice for those who have lost their job or enter the labor market and find all the doors shut. To benefit these latter, those most in need of social justice, the minimum wage is an injustice, an obstacle that blocks their path to employment. The countries where there are the most jobs are those in which the market is freest.”)

I explained, particularly on visits to factories, that an efficient worker is too expensive for businesses to let him go, and that our reforms would not affect rights already won, but would apply only to
new
workers, those millions of Peruvians who were unemployed or who had miserable jobs, whom we had the duty to help by quickly creating work for them. I can see why workers alienated by populist preaching were bound to be hostile, because they didn’t understand these reforms, or because they understood them and feared them. But the fact that the majority of the unemployed, in whose favor these reforms were conceived, should vote massively against
these
changes in particular says a great deal about the formidable dead weight of populist culture, which leads those who are most discriminated against and exploited to vote in favor of the system that keeps them in that condition.

As for the half million public employees, it is worth telling the entire story, because this subject, like that of free education, had a devastating effect in my disfavor among the humble sectors and because it shows how effective dirty tricks can be in politics. The news that, once I took office, I would throw 500,000 bureaucrats out into the streets appeared in that great orchestrator of out-and-out lies,
La República
,
^*
as a statement that Enrique Ghersi, the “young Turk” of the Freedom Movement, had supposedly made in Chile, to a Chilean journalist.
^†
In fact, Ghersi hadn’t said any such thing and he hastened to deny this piece of information, once he returned to Peru, in the press
^§
and on television. A while later, the Chilean journalist himself, Fernando Villegas, came to Lima and denied this cock-and-bull story,
^*
in the daily papers and on TV. But by this point the concerted lies regarding the 500,000 employees, organized by a cabal consisting of
La República, Hoy, La Crónica
, and the state-run radio stations and TV channels, had become an incontrovertible truth. Even leaders of the Democratic Front, my allies, were convinced of it, since some of them, such as the PPC leader Ricardo Amiel and the populist Javier Alva Orlandini, confirmed the falsehood in their statements to the press instead of denying it—by criticizing Ghersi for the slanderous untruth they attributed to him!
^*

What is certain is that neither Ghersi nor anyone in the Front could have said any such thing, because there was no way of determining how many public employees were superfluous, since there was no way of even knowing how many of them there were. The Democratic Front had a committee, headed by Dr. María Reynafarje, trying to determine the number, and it had tracked down more than a million (excluding the members of the armed forces), but the evaluation was still going on. Naturally, this bureaucratic inflation had to be drastically reduced, so that the state would have only those functionaries it needed. But the transference from the public sector to the private of the tens or hundreds of thousands of excess bureaucrats was not going to be accomplished through untimely dismissals. We were aware of the problem, and my administration, not only for legal and ethical reasons, but also for practical ones, was not going to make the stupid mistake of beginning its term in office by making this problem many times worse. Our plan was to painlessly relocate unneeded bureaucrats. This process of decanting would go on gradually as, with the reforms, economic growth started, new business concerns came into being, and the ones that already existed began to work at full capacity. This process would be speeded up by the government, through incentives to bring about voluntary resignations or early retirements. Without trampling anyone’s rights underfoot, doing our best to encourage the market to carry out the relocation, a good part of the bureaucracy would pass over to the civil sector—a good part, although at this juncture the exact number could not be determined.

But fiction routed reality. In perfect synchronization, the moment the falsehood was printed in
La República
(with huge headlines on the front page), the government began its campaign, via the radio stations and the TV channels it controlled and via its fanatical followers, distributing millions of leaflets throughout the country, and repeating daily, in every possible form, through all its mouthpieces, from its leaders to its shadiest newsmongers, the rumor that I would begin my administration by firing half a million government employees. Declarations, denials, explanations, from me, from Ghersi, or from those in charge of the Plan for Governing, were of no use whatsoever.

From a very early age I have lived my life fascinated by fiction and the spell it casts, because my vocation has made me highly sensitive to that phenomenon. And I have long since realized how far the realm of fiction extends beyond the bounds of literature, cinema, and the arts, genres in which it is thought to be confined. Perhaps because it is an irresistible necessity that the human species tries to satisfy in one way or another, even by unimaginable ways of behaving, fiction makes its appearance everywhere, crops up in religion and in science and in activities more obviously vaccinated against it. Politics, particularly in countries where ignorance and passions play as important a role in it as they do in Peru, is one of those fields that has been well fertilized so that what is fictitious, what is imaginary, will take root. I had many chances to verify this during the campaign, above all with regard to the subject of the half a million bureaucrats threatened by my liberal ax.

The left immediately joined the campaign and there were union agreements, manifestoes in protest and repudiations, public demonstrations of government employees and workers at which they burned me in effigy or carried coffins about the streets with my name on them.

The apogee was a judicial proceeding against me, initiated by the CITE (Confederación Intersectorial de Trabajadores Estatales: Intersectorial Confederation of State Workers), a union group controlled by the left that had been seeking legal recognition for some time. Alan García hastened to grant it now, for that very purpose. The CITE initiated what, in legal jargon, is called “a proceeding preparatory to an admission of guilt” before the judiciary because of “the risk of losing their jobs confronted by its members.” I was summoned before the 26th Civil Court of Lima. Besides being grotesque, the matter was a legal absurdity, as even adversaries like the Socialist senator Enrique Bernales, for instance, and the Aprista representative Héctor Vargas Haya declared.

In the executive and political committees of Libertad we discussed whether I should appear before the judge, or whether this was tantamount to collaborating with Alan García’s Machiavellian tactics, permitting the hostile press to cause a great uproar over me, brought before the bar in the Palace of Justice by workers threatened with dismissal. We decided that only my attorney would appear. I entrusted this mission to Enrique Chirinos Soto, a member of the political committee of Libertad, which I had invited to advise me. Enrique, an independent senator, journalist, historian, and an authority on the Constitution, was one of those liberals of yesteryear, like Arturo Salazar Larraín, educated alongside Don Pedro Beltrán. A journalist whose opinion carried weight, a subtle political analyst, a conservative without complexes, and a staunch Catholic, Enrique is one of the intelligent politicians—despite being a little scatterbrained—that have appeared in Peru, and a native Arequipan who has been able to maintain the legal tradition of his home territory. He almost always attended the meetings of the political committee, during which he was in the habit of remaining completely silent and motionless, giving off an aroma of good Scotch whisky, in a sort of voluntary catatonia. Every so often, something would arouse him from his geologic torpor and impel him to speak: his contributions to the discussion were wondrously clearsighted and helped us to surmount complicated problems. Every once in a while, remembering his function as adviser, he sent me little notes that I read with delight: descriptions of the political situation at the moment, tactical advice, or simply comments on what was going on at the time, written with great wit and humor. (None of his many talents kept him, however, from making a monumental blunder between the first and the second round of voting.) Enrique was a brilliant polemicist and easily proved to the court the legal impertinence of the CITE’s accusation.

On January 2, the judge of the 26th Civil Court of Lima backed down on his decision to force me to appear, and declared the CITE’s request for a hearing null and void. CITE appealed and Chirinos Soto made an outstanding impression with his oral report before the bar of the Civil Superior Court of Lima, on January 16, 1990, which confirmed the lower court’s decision.
^*

As a colophon to this episode, I shall point out a curious coincidence. During Alan García’s administration, because of the inflation coupled with recession—so-called stagflation—analysts calculated that in Peru some half a million jobs were lost, the same figure that, according to his campaign, I was planning to eliminate from the government’s payroll. The subject would provide material for an essay on the Freudian theory of transference and, surely, for a politics-fiction novel.

Another radical measure that I announced at the CADE conference did not, however, cause any significant repercussions: the reform of General Velasco’s agrarian reform, which was still in force. Our adversaries’ failure to mount a big campaign against this issue was due, perhaps, to the fact that the present arrangements in rural Peru—above all, in the state-run cooperatives and SAIS (Sociedades Agrarias de Interés Social)—were so clearly repudiated by the peasants that our adversaries would have had a hard time attempting to defend the status quo. Or, perhaps, because the peasant vote—thanks to the mass migration to the cities in recent decades—today represents barely 35 percent of the national electorate (and absenteeism at the polls is higher in the country than in the city).