A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (50 page)

In agriculture too we proposed to introduce a market economy, by privatizing it, so that the transference from enterprises under complete or partial state control to civil society would serve to create a large number of independent owners and entrepreneurs. Much of this reform was already under way, through the efforts of the peasants themselves, who, as I have said, had gradually been parceling out the cooperatives—dividing them up into individual private plots of land—despite the fact that this was forbidden by law. Their action had affected two-thirds of the rural areas of the country, but it had no legal validity. The movement of the
parceleros
, born independently, in opposition to the parties and the unions of the left, had for years represented a hopeful sign to me—like that of the
informales
, those earning their living from the parallel economy. The fact that the poorest of the poor had opted for private enterprise, for emancipation from state tutelage, was, even though they themselves didn’t know it, a resounding demonstration that the doctrines of collectivism and state ownership had been repudiated by the Peruvian people and that, through this trying experience, they were discovering the advantages of liberal democracy. And so, on June 4, 1989, in the Plaza de Armas of Arequipa, on declaring my candidacy, the
parceleros
and the
informales
were the heroes of my speech; I referred to them by calling them the spearhead of the transformation for which I was seeking the vote of Peruvians.

(My campaign strategy was based, in large part, on the supposition that
parceleros
and
informales
would be the principal support for my candidacy. That is to say, I foresaw a campaign in which I would manage to persuade these sectors that what they were doing, in the cities and in the countryside, corresponded to the reforms that I wanted to carry out. I failed without question: the immense majority of
parceleros
and
informales
voted against me—rather than in favor of my adversary—having been frightened off by my antipopulist preaching; in other words, they voted in defense of the populism against which they had been the first to rebel.)

The reform of the agrarian reform was to be accomplished by giving title deeds to the members of cooperatives that had decided on the privatization of the collectivized landholdings and by creating legal procedures so that other cooperatives could imitate them. Privatization would not be obligatory. Those cooperatives that wanted to continue as such could do so, but without state subsidies. As for the large sugar refineries on the coast—Casagrande, Huando, Cayaltí, for instance—the government would offer them technical advice as to how to turn themselves into private companies, and their members into stockholders.

The run-down condition of these refineries—at one time the principal exporters and drawers of foreign capital to Peru—was the product of the inefficiency and the corruption that the system of government control had introduced into them. Under private and competitive management they could recover and serve to create jobs and foster rural development, since they owned the richest landed properties with the best intercommunications in the entire country.

The reform of the system of land ownership would create hundreds of thousands of new owners and entrepreneurs in the country, who could get ahead, thanks to an open system, without the obstacles and discrimination of which agricultural areas had always been a victim by comparison with the cities. There would no longer be the price controls on agricultural produce that had doomed entire regions to ruin, or impelled them to produce coca—regions where the peasants were obliged to sell their produce below cost, with the consequence that Peru now imported a large part of its food. (I repeat that this system permitted memorable chicanery: the privileged who had been granted import licenses, who received undervalued dollars, could, in just one of these operations, leave accounts abroad amounting to millions of dollars. As I write these lines, in fact, the magazine
Oiga
^*
has just revealed that one of Alan García’s ministers of agriculture, a member of his circle of intimates, Remigio Morales Bermúdez—the son of the ex-dictator—deposited in the Atlantic Security Bank, in Miami, more than twenty million dollars during his term in office!) With a market economy, farmers would receive fair prices for their produce, determined by supply and demand, and would have the necessary incentives to invest in agriculture, to modernize their techniques of cultivating crops, and pay taxes on their incomes sufficient to permit the state to improve the infrastructure of roads and highways that had deteriorated and nearly disappeared in certain regions. The familiar spectacle in the last years of the Aprista regime of tons of rice produced by the impoverished growers of the
departamento
of San Martín rotting in warehouses while Peru wasted tens of millions of dollars importing rice—and on the side, enriching a handful of bigwigs with political pull—would not be repeated. This was another constant subject of my speeches, especially to audiences of peasants: the reforms would immediately benefit millions of Peruvians who were barely scratching out a living; liberalization would bring rapid growth to agriculture, livestock raising, and agroindustry and a social restructuring that favored those who were poorest. But in my innumerable trips to the highlands and the mountains, I always noted the resistance of country people, above all the most primitive of them, to allowing themselves to be convinced. Because of centuries of mistrust and frustration, doubtless, and because of my own inability to formulate this message in a convincing way. Even in the periods of my candidacy’s greatest popularity, the places where I noted the strongest rejection were the rural regions. Puno in particular, one of the most miserably poor
departamentos
(and one of those richest in history and in natural beauty) of the country. All my tours of Puno were the object of violent counterdemonstrations. On March 18, 1989, in the city of Puno, Beatriz Merino, after delivering her speech without letting herself be intimidated by a crowd that booed her and shouted “Get out of here, Aunt Julia!” at her (the scant applause we received came from a handful of members of the PPC, since AP had boycotted the rally), fainted from the shock and from the 12,000-foot altitude and had to be given oxygen right there on the spot, in one corner of the speakers’ platform. On the following day, March 19, in Juliaca, Miguel Cruchaga and I were almost unable to give our speeches, because of the catcalls and the racist shouts (“Get out of here, you Spanish!”). On another tour, on February 10 and 11, 1990, our leaders had me suddenly appear in the stadium, during the celebration of Candlemas, and I have already recounted how we were greeted by a shower of stones thrown at us, which thanks to the reflexes of Professor Oshiro didn’t harm me, but made me fall ignominiously to the ground. The rally to mark the close of the campaign, on March 26, 1990, in the main square, was very well attended, and the efforts by groups of troublemakers to break it up did not succeed. But our hopes because of the large crowd were sheer illusion, since in both the first and the second round my lowest percentage of votes in Peru was in that
departamento
.

At CADE I also put forward the plans to privatize the postal and customs services and to reform the tax system, but only mentioned in passing many other subjects because of the time limit. Among these subjects, the one that mattered most to me was privatization. I had been working for some time on it with Javier Silva Ruete.

Javier, whom the readers of my books are more or less acquainted with, since—with due regard for the distances that separate fiction and reality—he had served me as the model for the Javier of my first short stories and of
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
, had had an outstanding career as an economist and had occupied important political posts. After graduating from San Marcos, he had honed his skills in Italy, and worked in the Central Reserve Bank. He was Belaunde Terry’s youngest minister during his first term in office—at the time Javier was a member of the Christian Democratic Party—and, after that, secretary general of the Andean Pact. When General Velasco was overthrown by the coup hatched in the Presidential Palace, his successor, General Morales Bermúdez, named Silva Ruete minister of finance, and his direction of the ministry put an end to certain upheavals of the Velasco regime, such as inflation and the exclusion from international organizations. The group that, with Javier, managed the economy during that period had formed the nucleus of the small political association of technical experts and professionals, SODE, that formed part of the Democratic Front (Manuel Moreyra had been the president of the Central Bank at the same time that Silva Ruete was minister of finance). The people of SODE, such as Moreyra, Alonso Polar, Guillermo van Ordt, Raúl Salazar himself, and several others, had had a prime role in the drawing up of our Plan for Governing and I invariably found in them support for the reforms we proposed and allies against the resistances to the reforms on the part of AP or the PPC.

In order to get Popular Action to accept the incorporation of SODE as part of the Democratic Front I had had to perform miracles, since Belaunde Terry and the populists had strong prejudices against it because of SODE’s collaboration with the military dictatorship and because of the extremely tough stand that SODE, particularly Manolo Moreyra and Javier Silva, had taken against Belaunde Terry’s second term. There was the further fact that SODE had collaborated with Alan García during his electoral campaign, having been his ally for a time, and from whose congressional lists two members of SODE had been elected, Javier to the Senate and Aurelio Loret de Mola to the Chamber of Representatives. Silva Ruete, moreover, had been an adviser to Alan García in the latter’s first year in office. But I made a point of emphasizing to Belaunde how SODE had broken with the APRA since the days of the nationalization of the banks, supporting our campaign very actively, and how indispensable it was to have in our administration a team of high-level technical experts. Belaunde and Bedoya finally reluctantly gave in, but never felt very happy with this ally.

It made both of them uneasy, moreover, that Javier Silva Ruete was one of the owners of
La República
, that loathsome monster of a daily paper. Born under the editorship of Guillermo Thorndike, that specialist in sleaze, as a yellow scandal sheet, tireless in the exploitation or fabrication of sensationalism—crimes, gossip, denunciations, gruesome stories, human smut frenetically exhibited
—La República
, without ceasing to exploit this sort of filth, at the same time immediately turned into the mouthpiece of the APRA and of the United Left, in a case of political schizophrenia improbable in any country but Peru. The explanation of this hybrid was, apparently, the fact that among the owners of
La República
there was a perfect balance between the power of Senator Gustavo Mohme (a Communist) and that of Carlos Maraví (a fervent nouveau-riche Aprista), who had arrived at the opera buffa formula of placing the news stories and editorials of the daily in the service of these two masters who were each other’s enemies. Javier’s role in this complicated situation and amid people of that sort—his name appeared on the masthead as chairman of the board of directors of the company that published
La República—
was always a mystery to me. I never asked him why he had done as he did nor did we speak of the subject, since both he and I wanted to maintain a friendship that had meant a great deal to both of us since we were youngsters and we tried not to put it to the test by subjecting it to the treacherous pressures of politics.

We had seen very little of each other when he was a minister during the military dictatorship and while he was an adviser to Alan García. But when we did occasionally run into each other, at some social get-together, our mutual affection was always there, stronger than anything else. At the time of the events at Uchuraccay, after the report of the commission which I wrote and defended publicly,
La República
carried out a campaign against me that lasted for many weeks, in which false testimony and lies were followed by insults, by extremes of monomania. The substance of the attack pained me less than the fact that all these insults appeared in a newspaper owned by one of my oldest friends. But our friendship survived even this experience. This was another argument that I used with Belaunde and Bedoya to win their approval for including SODE in the Democratic Front:
La República
had vented its fury on few people as mercilessly as it had on me. It was necessary, then, to cast suspicion aside and trust that Javier and his group would behave decently toward the Front.

SODE’s change of attitude came about as a result of the campaign to nationalize banking. Manuel Moreyra was one of the first to condemn the step, from Arequipa, where he happened to be, and he devoted countless statements, lectures, and articles to the subject. His resolve caused all of his colleagues to follow his lead and precipitated the break between SODE and the APRA. SODE’s two members of Congress, Silva Ruete and Loret de Mola, fought the measure in the two legislative bodies. From that time on, there had been close collaboration between SODE and the Freedom Movement.

The reasons why I asked Javier confidentially to lead the committee on privatization were his competence and his capacity for work. In the first months of 1989 we talked, in his study, and I asked him if he was ready to assume that task, keeping in mind the following: the privatization was to include the whole of the public sector and be planned in such a way as to permit the creation of new owners among the workers and employees of the privatized enterprises and the consumers of their services. He agreed. The main objective of the transference to civil society of public enterprises would not be technical—to reduce the fiscal deficit, to provide the state with revenue—but social: to multiply the number of private shareholders in the country, to give millions of Peruvians with small incomes access to ownership. With his characteristic enthusiasm, Javier told me that from that moment on he would abandon all his other activities to devote himself body and soul to that program.