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 sociaclass="underline" 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.
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”).* 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.