The recurrent theme of my three speeches had been that the way out of poverty does not lie in redistributing the little wealth that exists but in creating more. And in order to do that markets must be opened up, competition and individual initiative encouraged, private property not be fought against but extended to the greatest number, our economy and our psychology taken out of the grip of the state, and the handout mentality that expects everything from the state replaced by a modern outlook that entrusts the responsibility for economic life to civil society and the market.
“I see it but I don’t believe it,” my friend Felipe Thorndike said to me. “You talk about private property and popular capitalism, and instead of lynching you they applaud you. What’s happening in Peru?”
That is how the story of my candidacy began. From that time on, whenever I’ve been asked why I was ready to give up my vocation as a writer and enter politics I’ve answered: “For a moral reason. Because circumstances placed me in a position of leadership at a critical moment in the life of my country. Because it appeared that the opportunity was at hand to accomplish, with the support of a majority of Peruvians, the liberal reforms which, ever since the early 1970s, I had been defending in articles and polemical exchanges as being necessary in order to save Peru.”
But someone who knows me as well as I know myself, or perhaps even better, Patricia, doesn’t see it that way. “The moral obligation wasn’t the decisive factor,” she says. “It was the adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk. Of writing the great novel in real life.”
This may well hit the nail on the head. It is true that if the presidency of Peru had not been, as I said jokingly to a journalist, “the most dangerous job in the world,” I might never have been a candidate. If the decadence, the impoverishment, the terrorism, and the multiple crises of Peruvian society had not made it an almost impossible challenge to govern such a country, it would never have entered my head to accept such a task. I have always believed that writing novels has been, in my case, a way of living the many lives — the many adventures — that I would like to have had myself and therefore I can’t discard the possibility that, in those dark depths where the most secret motivations of our acts are plotted, it was the temptation of adventure, rather than some sort of altruism, that induced me to enter professional politics.
But if it is true that the temptation of adventure played a role, so did another one, either major or minor, which, in an attempt to be as far from grandiloquent as possible, I shall call a moral commitment.
I shall try to explain something that is not easy to put into words without lapsing into platitudes or into sentimental simplemindedness. Although I was born in Peru (“through an accident of geography,” as the head of the Peruvian Army, General Nicolás de Bari Hermoza, put it, thinking that he was insulting me),* my vocation is that of a cosmopolitan and an expatriate who has always detested nationalism, which strikes me as one of the human aberrations that has made the most blood flow, and I also know that patriotism, as Dr. Johnson said, can be the last refuge of a scoundrel. I have lived a good part of my life abroad and I have never felt like a total stranger anywhere. Despite this, the relations I have with the country where I was born are more intimate and long-lasting than those I have with any other, including the ones in which I have come to feel completely at home: England, France, or Spain. I don’t know why this is, but in any case it is not on account of a question of principle. But what happens in Peru affects me more — makes me happier or irritates me more — than what happens elsewhere, and in a way that I would be unable to justify rationally, I feel that between me and Peruvians of any race, language, and social status, for better or for worse — especially for worse — there is something that ties me to them in a seemingly invincible way. I don’t know whether this is related to the stormy past that is our heritage, to the violent and miserable present of our country, to its uncertain future, or to the crucial experiences of my adolescence in Piura and Lima, or, simply, to my childhood, there in Bolivia, where, as tends to happen to expatriates, in my grandparents’ and my mother’s household, we lived Peru, the fact of being Peruvian, as the most precious gift ever bestowed on our family.
Perhaps saying that I love my country is not true. I often loathe it, and hundreds of times since I was young I have promised myself to live a long way from Peru forever and not write anything more about it and forget its aberrations. But the fact is that it is continually on my mind, and whether I am living in it or residing abroad as an expatriate, to me it is a constant torment. I cannot free myself from it; when it doesn’t exasperate me, it saddens me, and often both at once. It has grieved me most of all ever since I have had ample evidence that it manages to interest the rest of the world only because of its natural cataclysms, its record rates of inflation, the activities of its drug traffickers, its terrorist massacres, or the villainies of those who govern it. And to know that it is spoken of, outside its borders, when it is spoken of at all, as a horrible, caricatural country that is dying by the inch because of the inability of Peruvians to govern themselves with a minimum of common sense. I remember having thought, when I read George Orwell’s essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” in which he says that England is a good country of good folk with “the wrong people in control,” how well that definition applied to Peru. For among us are decent people capable of accomplishing, for example, what the Spaniards have in Spain in the last ten years; but such people have rarely gone into politics, an area that in Peru has almost always been in dishonest and mediocre hands.
In June of 1912, the historian José de la Riva Agüero made a journey on muleback from Cuzco to Huancayo, following one of the highroads of the Inca empire, and left as testimony of the experience a beautiful book, Paisajes peruanos (Peruvian Landscapes), in which he evokes, in sculptural prose, the geography of the Andes and the historic epic deeds to which those brave territories, Cuzco, Apurímac, Ayacucho, and Junín, were witness. On reaching the great plain of Quinua, outside Ayacucho, the scene of the battle that put the final stamp on the emancipation of Peru, a somber reflection causes him to halt. A strange battle for liberation that one — in which the royalist band of the Viceroy La Serna was made up exclusively of Peruvian soldiers and the emancipating army was two-thirds Colombian and Argentine. This paradox sends him into an acid consideration concerning the failure as a republic of his country, which, ninety years after the battle that made it a sovereign nation, is a laughable shadow of what it was in its pre-Hispanic stage, and in the three colonial centuries, of the most prosperous viceroyalty of all the Spanish possessions. Who is responsible? The “poor colonial aristocracy,” the “poor stupid Lima nobility, incapable of any sort of idea and of any effort”? Or “the military leaders” with “vulgar appetites,” “greedy for gold and avid for command,” whose “befuddled intelligences” and “depraved hearts” were incapable of serving their country, and when someone managed to do so, “all his rivals plotted to destroy him”? Or, perhaps, those “Creole bourgeois” possessed of “sordid and Phoenician selfishness” who “were ashamed later on in Europe, with the basest instincts for social climbing, of their condition as Peruvians, to which they owed everything they were and had”?