One day, when I came home at noon, I found Julia bathed in tears. The dogcatchers had taken Batuque to the pound. The men in the van had practically grabbed him out of her arms.
I rushed off to get him at the pound, which was near the Puente del Ejército. I managed to get there in time and rescue poor Batuque, who, the minute they took him out of the cage and I picked him up, pissed and shat all over me and lay trembling in my arms. The spectacle at the pound left me as terrified as he was: two zambos (men half Indian and half black) who worked there were beating to death, right in plain sight of the dogs in cages, the animals who had not been reclaimed by their owners after several days had gone by. Driven half out of my mind by what I had seen, I went off with Batuque and sat down in the first cheap little coffeehouse I came across. It was called La Catedral. And it was there that the idea crossed my mind to begin with a scene like that the novel that I would write someday, inspired by Esparza Zañartu and Odría’s dictatorship, which, then in 1956, was gasping its last.
Sixteen. The Great Change
It is a custom that at CADE, the Annual Conference of Executives, the presidential candidates present their plans for governing. The meetings arouse great interest and the explanatory speeches are delivered before audiences full of entrepreneurs, political leaders, government officials, and many journalists.
Of the ten candidates, CADE invited those four of us who, according to the opinion polls, were the only ones in December 1989 who might possibly be elected: the candidates of the Democratic Front, of the APRA, of the United Left, and of the Socialist Alliance. Four months away from the elections, Alberto Fujimori’s name did not turn up in the surveys, and when eventually it did, he was vying for last place with the Prophet Ezequiel Ataucusi Gamonal, the founder of the Israelite Church of the New Universal Pact.
I was impatiently awaiting the chance to present my program, showing the Peruvian people what was new about my candidacy and the drive for reform that inspired it. I was chosen to give the final speech ending the conference, on the afternoon of the second day, after the speeches by Alva Castro and Henry Pease, and the one by Barrantes, who set forth his ideas in the morning of the second day, Saturday, December 2. Speaking last seemed to me to be a good sign. Those chosen to be on the panel with me were a man who was for the Front, Salvador Majluf, the president of the National Association of Industries, and two dignified adversaries: the agrarian technician Manuel Lajo Lazo and the journalist César Lévano, one of the few judicious Marxists in Peru.
Although those in charge of our Plan for Governing had not finished drawing up the program, in the last week of November Lucho Bustamante handed me the draft of a speech setting forth its main features. Performing miracles as far as time was concerned, since those were the days of the public controversy with Alan García regarding the number of government employees, I managed to seclude myself for two whole mornings so as to write the text of my speech,* and on the eve of the CADE conference I met with the directorate of the Plan for Governing for a practice session in answering the predictable objections of the panel and the audience.
After describing the impoverishment of Peru in recent decades and the contribution of the Aprista government to the cataclysm (“Those who, taking Señor Alan García Pérez at his word, as set forth in his speech at this same forum in 1984, invested their entire savings, made a miserable deaclass="underline" today they have less than 2 percent of their savings left”), I explained our proposal for “saving Peru from mediocrity, from demagoguery, from hunger, from underemployment, and from terror.” From the very start, coming straight to the point, I made the aim of our reforms clear: “We already have political freedom. But Peru has never really tried to follow the path of economic freedom, without which any democracy is imperfect and condemned to poverty…All our efforts will be directed toward turning Peru from the country of proletarians, the unemployed, and the privileged elites that it is today into a country of entrepreneurs, property owners, and citizens equal before the law.”
I promised to take on the task of leading the fight against terrorism and mobilizing civil society, arming peasant patrols and making every effort to have this example of self-defense be imitated in urban and rural centers of production. Civil authorities and institutions would again take control of the emergency zones that had been entrusted to the military.
This step would be a strong one, but one within the law. There must be an end to the violations of human rights committed by the forces of order in their antisubversive campaign: the legitimacy of democracy depended on it. Peasants and humble Peruvians would never aid the government in confronting the terrorists as long as they felt that police and soldiers were riding roughshod over them. In order to demonstrate my administration’s resolve not to tolerate abuses of this sort, I had decided — as I outlined to Ian Martin, the secretary general of Amnesty International, who visited me on May 4, 1990—to appoint a commissioner of human rights, who would have an office in the Presidential Palace. In the following months, after shuffling through many names, I asked Lucho Bustamante to sound out Diego García Sayán, a young attorney who had founded the Andean Committee of Jurists and who, although he had ties to the United Left, seemed capable of carrying out the duties of this post impartially. This commissioner would not be appointed simply for show; he would have powers to follow up on complaints and accusations, to conduct investigations on his own, to initiate court proceedings, to draft projects for informing and educating public opinion, in schools, labor unions, agricultural communes, barracks, and police headquarters.
In addition to this commissioner, there would be another who would be responsible for the national program of privatization, a key reform of the program, that I too wanted to follow closely. Both commissioners would have ministerial rank. For this latter task I had designated Javier Silva Ruete, who at that time was the head of the program for privatization.
The first year would be the most difficult stage, owing to the inevitable recessionary nature of the anti-inflationary policy, the aim of which was to reduce the increase in prices to 10 percent per year. In the next two years — of liberalization and of major reforms — the increase in production, employment, and revenues would be moderate. But from the fourth year on, we would enter a very dynamic period, on a solid foundation, in which employment and revenues would increase. Peru would have begun the takeoff toward freedom accompanied by material well-being.
I explained all the reforms, beginning with the most controversial ones, from the privatization of public enterprises — it would begin with some seventy firms, among them the Banco Continental, the Society Paramonga, the Empresa Minera Tintaya, AeroPerú, Entel Perú, the Compañía de Teléfonos, the Banco Internacional, the Banco Popular, Entur Perú, Popular y Porvenir Compañía de Seguros, EPSEP, Laboratorios Unidos, and the Reaseguradora Peruana, and would continue until the whole of the public sector had been handed over to private hands — until the present number of ministries had been cut in half.