The next day Álvaro, very excited, interrupted a meeting at my house with Mark Malloch Brown to tell me the results of the elections in Nicaragua: against all predictions, Violeta Chamorro beat Daniel Ortega at the polls and put an end to ten years of rule by the Sandinistas. After what had happened in Brazil, Violeta’s victory confirmed the change in direction of the ideological winds in Latin America. I called her to congratulate her — I had known her since 1982, when she was resisting what seemed an unstoppable Sandinista mob which had covered the walls of her house with insults — and among the campaign leaders of the Democratic Front there were those who thought that I ought to make a lightning trip to Nicaragua, so as to have my photo taken with her as I had done with Collor de Mello. Miguel Vega Alvear even found a way to carry out the entire operation in twenty-four hours. But I refused, since in these last weeks it seemed imprudent to me, and since on February 26 I had a meeting scheduled with Peruvian military leaders at the CAEM (Centro de Altos Estudios Militares: Center for Advanced Military Studies).
An important weapon in the “dirty war” waged against me was my “antimilitarism” and “antinationalism.” The APRA, in particular, but also part of the left — which since the days of Velasco’s dictatorship had become militaristic — reminded voters that in a public ceremony, in 1963, the army had burned my novel La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero) because it was regarded as being an insult to the armed forces. The “hate office,” digging around in my bibliography, found many statements of mine and quotations I had cited in articles and interviews attacking nationalism as one of the “human aberrations that has caused the most bloodshed in history”—a sentence that, in fact, I still stand behind — whereupon it disseminated them far and wide, in huge quantities, in leaflets that were anonymous but had been printed on the presses of the state-run Editora Nacional. In one of them, voters were warned that the army would not allow “its enemy” to take office and that, consequently, if I won the elections there would be a military coup.
This was also something feared by the leaders of the Democratic Front, who advised me to make public gestures and hold private meetings with high-ranking officers in the military so as to reassure them with respect to the “antimilitarism” of my books and certain positions I had taken some twenty or thirty years back (in favor of the Cuban Revolution, for example, and of the MIR’s guerrilla attack, led by Luis de la Puente and Guillermo Lobatón, in 1965).
The armed forces were to play a decisive role in the elections, since, because they were in charge of guaranteeing the legality of the electoral process, it would depend on them whether Alan García got away with it if he attempted to falsify the results. Ensuring their impartiality was indispensable, as was holding an open dialogue with the military institutions along with which we would be governing the country on the morrow. But holding an interview with the highest echelons was no easy matter; they were afraid of reprisals by the president if he noted a tendency on their part toward supporting the candidate of the Democratic Front. And they had every reason to do so, inasmuch as, ever since assuming power, Alan García had caused tremendous upheavals within the armed forces, transferring, retiring, and promoting officers so as to make certain that adherents of his occupied the key posts. The navy had resisted these encroachments, holding to a certain institutional line with regard to promotions and the rotation of postings, but the air force, and above all the army, had been traumatized by the appointments that had been forthcoming from the Presidential Palace.
We had a committee of defense and internal order in the Front, headed by Johnny Jochamovitch, made up of half a dozen generals and admirals, which worked more or less secretly so as to protect the lives of its members from terrorist attacks and reprisals by the president’s office. Every time I met with them I had the feeling of having gone underground because of the precautions that had to be taken — changing cars, drivers, houses we met in — but I must say that in every overall review of the situation they passed on to me — usually with General Sinesio Jarama, an expert in revolutionary warfare, as their spokesman — I noted that they were working very hard. From the first meeting I told them that the objective of our defense policy ought to be, at the institutional level, the depoliticization of the armed forces, their reconversion with an eye to the defense of civil society and democracy, and their modernization. The reform ought to guarantee that there would be no more political interference in the organization of the military and no more military interference in the political life of the country. There was friction at first between this committee and the one on human rights and civil peace, headed by Amalia Ortiz de Zevallos, with whom a number of military officers also collaborated, but they were finally able to coordinate their work, particularly with regard to the subject of subversion.
Through the members of these committees, or through friends, and at times at their own request, I had several interviews with military leaders on active duty concerning the operations of Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA. The most official meeting of all took place on September 18, 1989, at the Institute for Development, with the minister of the interior and Alan García’s factotum, Agustín Mantilla, who, accompanied by a handful of generals and colonels of the police under the command of the military, gave me and a little group from Libertad a very frank exposition on Sendero Luminoso, the way it had taken root in the countryside and in the cities, and the difficulties involved in infiltrating spies into it and in obtaining information about such a hermetic and pyramidal organization which used such relentless methods. Minister Mantilla, who, let me say in passing, seemed to me to be more intelligent and articulate than could be expected of a man who had spent his life giving orders to hoodlums and gunmen, gave us a detailed account of a very recent operation, in a village in the highlands of the departamento of Lima, where Sendero, following its usual pattern, had “executed” all the authorities and taken over control of the place, through political commissars, turning it into a base of support for its guerrillas. An antisubversive commando unit had reached the village, after a night march amid the crags of the Andes, and captured and “executed” the commissars in turn, but the military detachment of Sendero had managed to escape. Minister Mantilla didn’t beat about the bush and coldly told us that this was the only possible way to act in the war to the death that Sendero had unleashed and in which, he admitted, subversion was gaining ground. When he finished he took me aside, to tell me that the president sent me his greetings. (I asked him to give the president mine in return.)
Sometime before that, on June 7, 1989, the Naval Intelligence Service, which has the reputation of being the best-organized one of all the armed forces (institutional rivalries had prevented the integration of all the intelligence services), had given Belaunde, Bedoya, me, and a small group from the Democratic Front an explanatory talk several hours long on the same subject, in one of its buildings. The officers who presented the reports were very forthcoming and had a wealth of information at hand that appeared to be well-founded. They had photographs taken in Paris of the visitors to the center of operations set up there by Sendero Luminoso for their propaganda campaigns and the collecting of funds throughout Europe. Why, then, was the fight against subversion so ineffective? According to them, because of the lack of training and equipment for this type of war being fought by armed forces that continued to ready themselves and equip themselves for conventional warfare, and because of the meager support from the civilian population, which acted as though this were a fight between terrorists and the military that was no concern of theirs.