“Don’t you know what kind of thugs you’re picking as enemies? I’ve noticed you don’t answer the phone anymore.”
Because, ever since the day our manifesto came out, the anonymous calls had started. They came in the daytime or at night. In order to be able to get some sleep we had to disconnect the phone. The voices sounded like different ones each time, so that I came to think that every Aprista’s idea of fun, once he had a drink under his belt, was to call my house to threaten us. These calls went on for almost the entire three years this account covers. They finally became a part of the family routine. When the calls stopped, a sort of vacuum, a nostalgia even, lingered on in the house.
The demonstration — we called it A Meeting for Freedom — was set for August 21 in the classic place for rallies in Lima: the Plaza San Martín. The organizing of it was in the hands of independents who had never been political militants or had any experience in this sort of contention, people like the university professor Luis Bustamante Belaunde or the business leader Miguel Vega Alvear, with whom we were to become fast friends. Among the political novices that all of us were, the exception perhaps was Miguel Cruchaga, Belaunde Terry’s nephew, who as a young man had been a member of the AP (Acción Popular: Popular Action) party. But he had kept his distance from active militancy for some time. My friendship with the tall, gentlemanly, grave Miguel was of long standing, but it had become a very intimate one after my return to Peru, after nearly sixteen years in Europe, in 1974, on the eve of the capture of the news media by the dictatorship. We always used to talk politics whenever we were together, and each time, somewhat cast over with sickly melancholy, we wondered why everything in Peru always tended to get worse, why we were wasting opportunities and persisting so perversely toward working for our ruin and our downfall. And each time, too, in a very vague way, we outlined projects to do something, at some time or other. That intellectual game took on, all of a sudden, in the fever and boiling fury of those August days, a disconcerting reality. Because of this background and because of his enthusiasm, Miguel took on the job of coordinating the arrangements for the protest rally. These were intense and exhausting days which, from a distance, seem to me to be the most generously motivated and the most exciting ones of those years. I had asked the shareholders of the threatened companies and the opposition parties — Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party — to remain on the sidelines, so as to make the event clearly a matter of principle, of Peruvians who were not taking to the streets to defend personal or political interests but to defend values that seemed to us to be endangered by nationalization.
So many people mobilized to help us — collecting money, printing pamphlets and placards, preparing pennants, lending their homes for meetings, offering transportation for the demonstrators, and going out to paint slogans and drive through the streets in vehicles with loudspeakers — that from the very beginning I had the premonition that the Meeting for Freedom would be a success. Since my place was a madhouse, on the evening of August 21 I hid out for a few hours at the home of Carlos and Maggie Ferreyros, two friends, to prepare the first political speech of my life. (Carlos was kidnapped shortly thereafter, by the MRTA [Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru: Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement] and held in captivity for six months, in a tiny cellar without ventilation.)
But, despite the favorable signs, not even the most optimistic person among us could have predicted the extraordinary number of people who packed the Plaza San Martin elbow to elbow that night and overflowed the neighboring streets. When I went up onto the speakers’ platform I felt a mixture of boundless joy and terror: tens of thousands of people—130,000, according to the review Sí*—were waving flags and singing out in chorus at the top of their lungs the “Hymn to Freedom,” the words and music of which had been written for the occasion by Augusto Polo Campos, a very popular composer. Something must have changed in Peru when a crowd like that fervently applauded on hearing me say that economic freedom was inseparable from political freedom, that private property and a market economy were the only guarantee of development, and that we Peruvians would not allow our democratic system to be “Mexicanized” or the APRA to be turned into the Trojan Horse of Communism in Peru.
The story has it that that night, on seeing on the little TV screen the magnitude of the Meeting for Freedom, Alan García, in a fit of rage, smashed the set to smithereens. What is certain is that the immense demonstration had enormous consequences. It was a decisive factor in making it evident that the nationalization law, though already passed in Congress, could never be put into effect, and the law was later annulled. It was a death blow to Alan García’s ambition to stay in office for an unlimited time. It opened the doors of Peruvian political life to liberal thought that up until then had lacked a public presence, since all of our modern history had been, practically speaking, a monopoly of the ideological populism of conservatives and socialists of various tendencies. It gave the initiative back to the opposition parties, Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party, which, following their defeat in 1985, had appeared to be invisible, and laid the foundations for what would become the Frente Democrático (Democratic Front)* and, as Patricia feared, for my candidacy for the presidency.
Buoyed up by our success in the Plaza San Martín, we immediately organized two other meetings, in Arequipa, on August 26, and in Piura, on September 2. Both of them were also attended by thousands. In Arequipa there was violence; we were attacked by Aprista counterdemonstrators — the famous buffaloes or bullies and armed hoodlums of the party — and by a Maoist faction of the United Left, the Patria Roja (Red Fatherland). They set off explosives and, armed with clubs, stones, and stink bombs, attacked just as I was beginning to speak, so as to start a stampede. The young people in charge of maintaining order on the outer edge of the Plaza, organized by Fernando Cháves Belaunde, resisted the attack, but several of them were injured. “You see? You see?” Patricia grumbled; she and María Amelia, Freddy Cooper’s wife, had been obliged to dive underneath a policeman’s riot shield that night in order to escape a hail of bottles. “What I predicted has already started happening.” But the truth of the matter was that, despite her opposition in principle, she too worked morning and night organizing the meetings and was in the front row at all three of them.
It was the country’s middle classes who filled those three plazas. Not the rich, since in the indescribably wretched country that bad governments have turned Peru into there would not be enough of them to fill a theater and perhaps not even a living room. And not the poor, the peasants or the inhabitants of the shantytowns that were euphemistically called “young towns,” who listened to the debate pitting state ownership against a market economy, collectivism against free enterprise, from afar, as if it were no concern of theirs. These middle classes — office workers, professionals, technicians, tradesmen, state employees, housewives, students — had seen their lot worsen by the day. For three decades they had watched their standard of living decline and their hopes come to nothing under each succeeding government. Under the first administration of Belaunde Terry (1963–68), whose reformism had aroused great expectations. Under the military dictatorship and its repressive socialist policy, which had impoverished, ravished, and corrupted Peruvian society as no other previous government ever had. Under the second administration of Belaunde Terry, who had won by an overwhelming majority, and who did not remedy a single one of the disasters of the previous regime and left behind him an overt inflationary process. And under Alan García, who — in those days this was barely beginning to be perceived — would beat all records in the history of Peru for inefficient administration, bequeathing to his successor, in 1990, a country in ruins, in which real salaries had been reduced by half, paychecks by a third, and in which national production had fallen to the levels of thirty years before. Stunned, lurching in bewilderment from the political right to the left, overcome by fear and at times by desperation, these middle classes had rarely mobilized in Peru outside of election campaign periods. But they had done so this time, nonetheless, with an instinctive certainty that if the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, and financial firms came about, the situation would be worse still and Peru would be even farther away from being that decent, reliable country, with jobs and opportunities, that they longed for.