A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (51 page)

With a small team, in a separate office, and with funds from the campaign budget, he worked for an entire year making a survey of the nearly two hundred public enterprises and setting up a system and a sequence for privatization, which was to begin on a precise date, July 28, 1990. Javier sought advice in all the countries with experience of privatization, such as Great Britain, Chile, Spain, and a number of others, and began negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Bank for Development. Every so often, he and his team gave me progress reports on their work, and when it was finished, I invited foreign economists—the Spaniard Pedro Schwartz and the Chilean José Piñera, for instance—to give us their opinion. The result was a solid and thoroughgoing program that combined technical rigor and the will to change on the one hand and creative boldness on the other. It gave me genuine satisfaction when I was able to read the thick volumes and verify that the plan was a marvelous instrument to break the back of one of the principal sources of corruption and injustice in Peru.

Javier, who had agreed to be the head of the committee on privatization, also agreed not to be a candidate for Congress, so as to devote himself full time to this reform.

The reaction of the media and of public opinion to my speech at CADE was one of consternation at the magnitude of the reforms and the frankness with which they were put forth, and widespread recognition that, among the four speakers, I had been the only one to present a complete plan for governing (the magazine
Caretas
spoke of the “Vargas Coup”).
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On December 5, I had a working breakfast at the Hotel Sheraton with some hundred foreign journalists and correspondents, to whom I gave further details concerning the program.

My speech at the CADE conference was to be preceded and continued by a publicity campaign, in newspapers, on radio and on television, to disclose the reforms in the C and D sectors. This campaign, which began very well, in the first months of 1989, was then interrupted for various reasons, one of them being the quarrels and tensions within the Front, and another, an unfortunate spot on TV that showed a little monkey urinating.

José Salmón was responsible for the media campaign, and collaborated very well with Lucho Llosa, my brother-in-law, whom I had asked, because of his experience as a filmmaker and a television producer, to advise me in this field. During the campaign against nationalization and in the early days of Libertad, the two of them were in charge of all advertising and publicity. Then, when the Democratic Front was set up, the campaign manager, Freddy Cooper, who didn’t get along well either with Salmón or with Lucho, began to call more and more for publicity on the company owned by the brothers Ricardo and Daniel Winitsky, who also prepared TV spots on their own. (I shall be more specific and add that, like Jorge Salmón, the Winitskys did so in order to lend the Front their support and without charging us any fees for their services.) From that time on, in this touchy field, there was a bifurcation or parallelism that, at one moment, led to chaos and caused serious harm to the “campaign of ideas” that we ought to have waged.

At the beginning of 1989 Daniel Winitsky planned a series of TV ads using animals to promote the ideas of Libertad. The first one, with a tortoise, was amusing and everybody liked it. The second one, with a fish, in which Patricia, my children, and I were to participate, never got filmed: the fish died of asphyxiation, clouds hid the sun, sudden sandstorms thwarted the takes on the deserted beach at Villa where we tried to film it one morning. With the third ad, disaster overtook us, all because of a little monkey. Daniel had had an idea for a very brief spot, showing the damage wrought by the ever-increasing number of bureaucrats. In it a public employee, transformed into a monkey, was shown in his office, where, instead of working, he was reading the newspaper, yawning, loafing about, and even pissing on his desk. Freddy showed me the spot on a hectic afternoon packed tight with interviews and meetings, and I didn’t see anything shocking about it, except for a certain vulgarity that, perhaps, wouldn’t upset the audience it was aimed at, so I gave it my okay. This tactlessness would no doubt have been caught and corrected if the spot in question had been analyzed by the person responsible for media advertising, Jorge Salmón, or by Lucho Llosa, but because of his personal antipathies toward them which, at times, interfered with his work, Freddy went over both their heads, seeking only my approval for the spot ads. In this case, we paid the price for our indiscretion.

The little micturating monkey caused a major scandal, with both supporters and adversaries of Libertad finding it distasteful, and the Apristas made good use of the uproar. Upstanding ladies who were offended sent letters to newspapers and magazines or appeared on television protesting against the “vulgarity” of the ad, and government leaders appeared on the little screen, upset because self-sacrificing public employees were being ridiculed in that way, comparing them to animals. So that was how Vargas Llosa was going to treat them when he became president, like monkeys or dogs or rats or something even worse…There were editorials, apologies to government functionaries, and my house and the Freedom Movement received many calls from supporters urging us to take the spot in question off the TV channels. We had already done so, of course, once we realized how counterproductive it had turned out to be, but the administration saw to it that it continued to be shown on television for several days longer. And, up until the eve of the elections, the state-run channel kept bringing it back to the screen.

Criticisms of the little monkey were forthcoming from our allies as well, and even Lourdes Flores, the young attorney who had been our candidate for representative major of Lima, admonished us in a public speech for our lack of tact. The affair reached its peak when, in
Caretas
, Jorge Salmón was criticized for an ad that he hadn’t even been consulted about. But Jorge, in this and in other unpleasant incidents of which he was the victim during the campaign, showed a gentlemanliness that equaled his loyalty to me.

A while later, when the time came to begin the “campaign of ideas,” in order to prepare public opinion for our launching of the program, both Jorge Salmón and the Winitskys, with Daniel now recovered from the setback of the peeing monkey, presented me—each team on its own—with a plan. Jorge’s was politic and prudent; it avoided polemics and confrontation, and avoided giving precise details about the reforms, emphasizing, above all, the “positive” aspects: the need for peace, work, modernization. I appeared as the restorer of collaboration and fraternity among Peruvians. The Winitskys’ plan, on the other hand, was for a sequence in which each spot, in a very lively but also a very blatant way, focused on the evils that we were trying to face up to—inflation, state control, bureaucracy, international isolation, terrorism, discrimination against the poor, an ineffective educational system—and the remedies for them: fiscal discipline, restructuring of the state, privatization, reform of education, mobilization of the peasantry. I liked the Winitskys’ project a lot and approved of it, something that Salmón accepted, with a fine sense of fair play. And Lucho Llosa directed the filming of the first two “educational” spots.

Both of them were excellent and the opinion polls we took to check on their impact on the C and D sectors were encouraging. The first one showed the damage caused by inflation suffered by those who lived on a fixed income and the only way to put an end to it—by drastically reducing the printing of money without backing—and the second one, the paralyzing effects that government intervention had on production, stifling private enterprises and preventing the emergence of other new ones, and how, with a free market, there would be incentives for the creation of jobs.

Why was this sequence interrupted, after my speech at CADE, when it was so necessary to publicize the reforms? I can give only a tentative explanation of something that, obviously, was a grave error.

I believe that, at first, we didn’t go on filming the new spots planned by Winitsky because of the approach of the year-end holidays. We had special ads made for Christmas, and Patricia and I each recorded separate holiday greetings. Then, in January of 1990, when we should have gone on with the “campaign of ideas,” we found ourselves confronted by the tremendous amount of publicity put out to discredit us, in which every effort was made to present our proposal in a false light by attacking me personally, by making me out to be an atheist, a pornographer, a practicer of incest, an accomplice of the murderers of Uchuraccay, a tax evader, and a number of other horrors.

It was a mistake to try to refute the lies of this campaign through ads on television, instead of sticking to publicizing our proposed reforms. In allowing ourselves to be dragged into an area of controversy in which we had everything to lose, all we accomplished was to see my image cheapened by petty political maneuvering. Mark Malloch Brown was right when he insisted that we shouldn’t pay any attention to the mudslinging campaign. I thought so too, but after the first days in January, my hectic activities were such that I no longer had sense enough to mend the error. At that point, moreover, it was too late to do so, since something had begun that inflicted another grave blow on the Front: the chaotic and wasteful television campaign of our congressional candidates.

The directorate of the Movement had given me the authority to decide on the order in which our candidates would be listed, and also to designate a small number of the candidates for seats as representatives and senators. As for their place on the list, I put Miguel Cruchaga, the secretary general and jack-of-all-trades of Libertad from the very start, at the head of the candidates for senator, and at the head of the list of candidates for representative, Rafael Rey, who had been departmental secretary of Lima. They all accepted their position on the lists, which I had decided on, with few exceptions, by following the percentage of votes won by each of the congressional candidates in elections within Libertad. The only one who had his feelings hurt, because he had been put in fourth place—after Cruchaga, Miguel Vega, and Lucho Bustamante—was Raúl Ferrero, who, after I had read off the list of candidates, announced to the political committee that he was resigning as a candidate. But a few days later he reconsidered.

Among the individuals whom I invited to be candidates of ours were, as a representative, Francisco Belaunde Terry, and as a senator, the entrepreneur Ricardo Vega Llona, who had supported us since the days of the campaign against nationalization. Vega Llona represented that modern and liberal spirit in the businessman that we wanted to see spread among entrepreneurs in Peru—someone sick and tired of mercantilism, a determined supporter of a market economy, and without the social prejudices or the pseudoaristocratic, snobbish airs of many Peruvian businessmen. I also invited, as candidates for senator, Jorge Torres Vallejo, who had been forced out of the APRA because of his criticisms of Alan García and who, as the former mayor of Trujillo, we thought would be able to attract votes for the Front in that Aprista bastion, and a journalist who defended our ideas in his column in the daily
Expreso
: Patricio Ricketts Rey de Castro. And among our own militants, I gave in to the pleas of my friend Mario Roggero, who wanted to be a candidate for congressman despite his not having participated in the elections within the Freedom Movement. I included him on our list because of the good work that he had done as the Movement’s national secretary for unions, organizing various sectors of professionals, technicians, and craftsmen, never imagining that, once elected, he would turn out to be disloyal to those who had been responsible for his winning his seat in the Chamber of Representatives, first of all by helping Alan García out by taking a trip abroad so as not to cast his vote in Congress when the possibility came up of trying García for responsibility for the slaughter of prisoners that took place in June 1986, and then, after that, playing footsie with the regime that his party and his colleagues opposed.
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But we are still in the last weeks of 1989 and on one of those days—December 15—I had a brief literary parenthesis in the endless political hustle and bustle: the presentation, at the Alliance Française, of a translation of Rimbaud’s “Un Coeur sous une soutane” (“A Heart beneath a Cassock”) that I had done thirty years before and that had remained unpublished until Guillermo Niño de Guzmán and the enthusiastic cultural attaché of the French embassy, Daniel Lefort, finally took it upon themselves to bring it out. I could scarcely believe it when, for a couple of hours, I heard talk of poetry and literature, and of a poet whose works had been part of my bedside reading when I was young, and talked of them myself.

In the last days of December I went on tour once again, to take part in the distribution of gifts and toys throughout Peru that had been organized by a committee headed by Gladys Urbina and Cecilia Castro, the wife of the secretary general of Libertad in Cajamarca, and by the young people of Libertad’s Mobilization section. Hundreds of people participated in this operation, the object of which, besides bringing a little gift to several thousand poor children—a drop of water in the desert—was to test our ability to conduct mobilizations of this sort. We were thinking of the future: it would be imperative, in the hardest days of the fight against inflation, to make great efforts to bring aid to every corner of Peru in the form of food and medicine that would make the tremendous ordeal less of a hardship. Were we capable of organizing civil operations of major importance in cases of emergency such as natural catastrophes or for campaigns such as those for self-defense, literacy, and hygiene among the masses?

The results, from this point of view, were all that we could have asked for, thanks to the excellent work of Patricia, Gladys, Cecilia, Charo, and many other women members of Libertad. With the exception of Huancavelica, in all the other capitals of
departamentos
and in a great number of provinces, the boxes, bags, and packages full of the gifts we had gathered together thanks to factories, businesses, and private individuals, all arrived. Everything got done within the time limits we’d set: storing, packing, transporting, distributing. Shipments of them went out by truck, bus, plane, accompanied by young people from Mobilization, and in each city they were received by a committee of Libertad, which had also collected donations and gifts in the region. Everything was ready for starting the distribution of the gifts on December 21. During the final days, I went by the headquarters of the Solidarity program, on the Calle Bolívar, several times, and it was a swarm of activity, a hive of busy bees, with charts and time schedules on the walls, and vans and trucks filled to overflowing arriving and departing. On the morning we left for Ayacucho to start the distribution there, I said to Patricia, whom I scarcely saw during that time, since she devoted eighteen hours a day to that operation, that if all went that well for the Front, we already had victory in our pockets.