Meanwhile, my trips throughout Peru followed one after the other without a letup, at a rate of visits to four, six, and sometimes more places a day, trying to cover for one last time the twenty-four departamentos, and in each one of them the greatest possible number of provinces and districts. The schedule set up by Freddy Cooper and his team — the efficient Pier Fontanot from the campaign’s command headquarters was in charge — was met perfectly, and I must say that the logistics of the rallies, transportation from place to place, connections, food and lodging, rarely broke down, which, in view of the state of the country and the national idiosyncrasy, was a real feat. The planes, helicopters, motorboats, minivans, or horses were there, and in all the villages or hamlets there was always a little platform and two or three young people from Mobilization who had arrived there beforehand to make sure that the microphones and loudspeakers were working, and that a minimum of security measures were in place. Freddy had several aides whose time was devoted exclusively to giving him a hand at this task, and one of them, Carlos Lozada, whom we called Woody Allen because he looked like him, and also like Groucho Marx, intrigued me by his gift for being everywhere at once. He looked as though he were disguised as something or other, though we couldn’t figure out what, with a strange headpiece, at once a cap and a helmet equipped with earflaps that reminded me of Charles Bovary’s headgear, and a loose jacket with a big backpack from which he took out sandwiches when it was time to eat, portable radios for communications, soft drinks to allay people’s thirst, revolvers for the bodyguards, batteries for the minivans, and even that day’s papers so we wouldn’t lose touch with the latest news. He was always on the run, and continually talking into a little microphone hanging from around his neck, with which he was constantly in communication with some mysterious control center to which he reported what was going on or from which he received instructions. I had the sensation that that eternal monologue of Woody Allen’s was organizing my destiny, that he was deciding where I would speak, sleep, travel, and whom I would see or fail to see in the course of my junkets. But I never managed to exchange a single word with him. Later on I learned that he was a public relations man who, having begun to work for the campaign in a professional capacity, discovered his real vocation and secret genius: that of a political organizer. In all truth, he did a magnificent job, solved any and every problem and never created a one. Glimpsing, wherever I arrived, whether in the midst of the underbrush of the jungle or amid the crags of the Andes or in the little towns along the sandy coast, his bizarre outfit — the thick glasses of someone very nearsighted, a colored shirt, and that sort of article of furniture with slipcovers that he carried around on his back, that Pandora’s box from which he took out unimaginable things — gave me a feeling of relief, the reassuring presentiment that, in that particular place, everything would come off as planned. One morning, in Ilo, immediately after we arrived, and before going to the rally in the main square where people were waiting for me, I decided to go down to the port, where a boat was being unloaded. I went up to it to speak with the stevedores, who, leaning on the gangplank of the vessel, were supervising the loading and unloading being done by the puntos (workers to whom they hire out their work), and all of a sudden, as though he were simply one more of those in the group, hidden underneath his combination cap and helmet and portable trunk of a backpack, talking into his microphone, I spied Woody Allen…
Amid these whirlwind tours all over Peru, I still arranged things so as to go to Brazil for a day, in answer to an invitation from the recently elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello. His triumph seemed to represent the victory of a radical liberal program, similar to mine, over Lula da Silva’s ideas in favor of mercantilism, state control, and interventionism, and for this reason, as well as because of the importance of Brazil to Peru — its neighbor with more than three thousand kilometers of common borders — it was decided by the directorate of the Democratic Front that I should make the trip. I took Lucho Bustamante, the head of the Plan for Governing, with me so that he could meet with Collor’s already appointed minister of finance — the instantly famous Zelia Cardoso — and Miguel Vega Alvear, whose Pro-Desarrollo (Association for Development) had drawn up a series of projects of economic cooperation with Brazil. One of these projects had aroused a great deal of enthusiasm on my part when it was described to me, and since that time I had encouraged its being worked out in detail. It had to do with linking the Pacific and Atlantic coasts through joining the highway systems of the two countries, following the Río Branco-Asís-Ipanaro-Ilo-Matarani axis, which, at the same time that it satisfied a long-cherished Brazilian ambition — having a commercial outlet to the Pacific and its emerging Asian economies — would act as a powerful economic stimulus for the development of all the southern region of Peru, particularly Moquegua, Puno, and Arequipa. The likable Collor — who could have imagined in those days that he would be impeached, having been accused of misappropriating state funds? — received me in Brasília, in a house surrounded with gardens straight out of a Hollywood movie (herons and swans strolled about all around us as we lunched together), with an encouraging sentence: “Eu estou torcendo por vocé, Mario” (“I’m pulling for you, Mario”) and the surprise of meeting an old friend, whom I had not expected to see there: José Guillermo Melquior, at that time the ambassador of Brazil to UNESCO. Melquior, an essayist and a liberal philosopher, a disciple of Raymond Aron and of Isaiah Berlin, with whom he had studied at the Sorbonne and at Oxford, was one of the thinkers who had defended with the greatest rigor and consistency the theses of a market economy and of the sovereignty of the individual in Latin America at a time when the collectivist and nationalist tide seemed to be monopolizing the culture of the continent. His presence at Collor’s side struck me as a magnificent sign of what the administration of the latter gave promise of being (an assumption not confirmed by reality, unfortunately). Melquior was already seriously ill, with the disease that would take his life a short time later, but he didn’t tell me so. On the contrary, I found him in an optimistic mood, joking with me about how times had changed since the days when, ten years before, in London, our countries seemed to us to be irredeemably immunized against the culture of freedom.
The meeting with Collor de Mello was extremely cordial but not very productive, because a large part of the conversation during the luncheon was monopolized by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, one of my economic advisers, with jokes and pieces of advice that at times gave the impression of being orders to the brand-new president of Brazil as to what he should and shouldn’t do. Pedro Pablo, the former minister of energy and mines in Belaunde’s second term in office — the best minister the latter had — had been persecuted by Velasco’s military dictatorship, to his good fortune. For living in exile allowed him to go from being a modest bureaucrat in the Central Reserve Bank of Peru to an executive of First Boston, in New York, where, after his experience as a minister of Belaunde’s, he was promoted to the office of president. In recent years he had traveled all over the world — he always specified a private jet, and if that couldn’t possibly be arranged, the Concorde — privatizing state-owned companies and advising governments of every ideology and geographical location that wanted to know what a market economy was and what steps to take to attain one. Pedro Pablo’s talent at handling economic matters was enormous (as was his talent for jogging and playing the piano, the flute, and the lute and telling jokes); but his vanity was even greater, and at that luncheon he displayed the latter above all, talking even with his elbows, giving us a professorial lecture and offering his services if there was need of them. At dessert, Collor de Mello took me by the arm and led me to an adjoining room where we could talk to each other alone for a moment. To my surprise, he told me that the project of integrating the Atlantic and Pacific coasts was bound to be confronted by the resistance and perhaps the open opposition of the United States, for that country feared that if the project were carried out, its commercial exchanges with the Asian countries of the Pacific Rim would suffer.