With the passage of time, I would often remember something that Collor said to me during the luncheon, at a moment when Kuczynski allowed him to get a word in edgewise: “I hope you win in the first round and don’t have to go through what I did.” And he explained that the second round of balloting in Brazil had been unbearably tense, so much so that for the first time in his life he had had doubts about his vocation for politics.
I was very grateful to Collor de Mello — as I was to President Sanguinetti of Uruguay — for inviting me in the thick of the election campaign, knowing that that would greatly displease President Alan García, and might displease the future Peruvian head of state, if I were not the winner. And I am sorry that this young and energetic president, who seemed so well prepared to carry out a liberal revolution in his country, failed to do so, except in a very partial and contradictory way, and, worst of all, did nothing to prevent corruption, with the consequent disastrous result.
On my return to Lima I found an invitation from the CGTP (Central General de Trabajadores del Perú: General Confederation of Workers of Peru), the Communist labor union, to set forth my Plan for Governing to the Fourth National Conference of Workers, which was being held in the Lima Centro Cívico. The debate had been organized to give the CGTP’s blessing to the candidacy of Henry Pease García, of the United Left, as “the workers’ candidate” and as a counterweight to the CADE conference. Only the four candidates who appeared to have any possibility of being elected were invited to this conference, as to the one held by CADE, but Alfonso Barrantes had invented an excuse for not attending, fearing that he would be humiliated by those who looked on him as having turned into a bourgeois and a revisionist. The APRA candidate, Alva Castro, on the other hand, turned up and ignored the jeers and catcalls. It seemed to me that I ought to attend too, precisely because the leaders of the Communist union were certain that I wouldn’t have the courage to put my head in the lion’s mouth. Moreover, I was curious to know the reaction to my proposals of those union delegates, steeped in Marxism-Leninism.
I hastily called together the leaders of the committees on labor and privatization — the obligatory subjects at the CGTP conference were the labor reform and popular capitalism — and, accompanied by Álvaro, we presented ourselves at the Civic Center on the afternoon of February 22. The place was packed with hundreds of delegates, and a group of extremists from Sendero Luminoso, barricading themselves in one corner, greeted me with cries of “Uchuraccay! Uchuraccay!” But it was the CGTP’s own service in charge of keeping order that shut them up and I could explain my program, for more than an hour, without interruptions and I was listened to with the attention that an audience of seminarians would pay to the devil. I hope that some of them discovered that Satan wasn’t as ugly as they made him out to be.
I told them that labor unions were indispensable in a democracy and that only in a democracy did they function as genuine defenders of workers, since in totalitarian countries unions were nothing but political bureaucracies and transmission belts for the watchwords of those in power. And that, for that reason, in Poland a labor union, Solidarity, in defense of which I had organized a march in the streets in Lima in 1981, headed the struggles for the democratization of the country.
As for Peru, I assured them that, even though it was against their firmest beliefs, our country was much closer to their ideal of state control and collectivization, with its swarm of public enterprises and generalized interventionism, than it was to the capitalist system, which it was acquainted with only in its most ignoble version: mercantilism. The reform that I was proposing had as its objective the removal of all the agencies of discrimination and exploitation of the poor by a handful of privileged individuals, thus assuring that justice would be accompanied by prosperity. The latter did not come about through the redistribution of existing wealth — which meant merely more widespread poverty — but with the establishment of a system in which everyone could have access to the market, to owning and running a business, and to private property. In order to bring this about, we had drawn up, in broad outline, the plans for large-scale “structural” reforms, such as property deeds for the parceleros, the removal of the barriers that restricted so many small businessmen and craftsmen to the informal economy, and, finally, the privatization of public enterprises. In this way there would come into being in Peru the popular capitalism whose principal beneficiaries would be those workers whose incomes populist policies had reduced so dramatically in the last five years.
With the help of Javier Silva Ruete, who had come with me, we explained that the privatization of public enterprises would be brought about in such a way that workers and employees could become stockholders — providing concrete examples by citing the cases of companies such as PetroPerú, the big banks, or Minero Perú—and also explained that defending, in the name of social justice, state-controlled enterprises such as SiderPerú, which was being kept alive artificially at enormous expense to the country, was an illogical argument, since the sums wasted in this way, from which only a handful of bureaucrats and politicians benefited, could be used to build the schools and hospitals that the poor were so badly in need of.
I was also very explicit with regard to job security. The first obligation of a government in Peru was to put an end to the poverty of so many millions of Peruvians, and to do so it was necessary to attract investment and stimulate the creation of new businesses and the growth of the ones that already existed, removing the obstacles that prevented this. “Job security” was one of them. The workers who benefited from it were a tiny minority, while it was the majority of Peruvians who needed jobs. It was not a happenstance that the countries with the best job opportunities in the world, such as Switzerland or Hong Kong or Taiwan, had the most flexible labor laws. And Víctor Ferro, of the committee on labor, explained why doing away with job security could not serve as an alibi for abuses.
I don’t know if we convinced anyone, but I for one found satisfaction in speaking of these subjects before an audience such as that. I had few possibilities to win them over to our cause, naturally, but I trust that some of them at least understood that our program for governing was proposing an unprecedented reform of Peruvian society and that the situation of workers, of jobholders in the informal economy, of those on the margins of society, and in general, of those strata with the lowest incomes, constituted the main focus of my efforts. When the meeting was over, there was polite applause, and an exchange with the secretary general of the CGTP and a member of the central committee of the Communist Party, Valentín Pacho, that Álvaro has recorded in El diablo en campaña: “You see, Doctor Vargas Llosa, there was no reason to fear workers.” “You see, Señor Pacho, workers have nothing to fear from freedom.” In the communications media, news of my presence at the CGTP conference was passed over in silence by the organs controlled by the state, but friendly media made much of it and even Caretas and Sí conceded that I had been courageous.