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).
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.