Despite the discretion they requested of us, news of that meeting leaked out and had serious consequences, since President García asked that punitive measures be taken against those responsible for its having been held. From then on, I met with officers on active duty all by myself, after journeys straight out of a movie, in which both the place we were to meet and the car I was to use were changed several times, as though the persons with whom I was going to converse were criminals with a price on their head and not highly respectable superior officers in the armed forces. The most absurd thing about these meetings, in almost every instance, was that they were useless, since nothing of any importance was discussed in them, and all we did was exchange political gossip or talk about vague schemes that Alan García might have up his sleeve to keep me from winning the election. I believe that, in many cases, these exaggeratedly complicated meetings were organized by military officers curious to see me in person and get an idea of the sort of man they would have to deal with if I were to become president of Peru.
The impressions I received from these meetings were rather disappointing. Because of the economic crisis and the general national decline, military careers had ceased to attract young men of talent and standards had been lowered to a dangerous degree. Some of the officers with whom I talked were arrogantly uncultured and looked on me as though I were an odd specimen when I explained to them what, in my opinion, the function of the army ought to be in a modern democratic society. Some of them were likable and congenial — the artillery colonel, for instance, who asked me point-blank, almost the moment we were introduced: “How good are you at drinking?” I told him that I was very bad at it. “Well then, you’re screwed,” he assured me. According to him, Alan García had won the affection and the respect of his colleagues by winning the “obstacle courses” that he organized in the Presidential Palace for high-ranking officers after the military parade on the national holiday. What kind of obstacle race was it? Rows of glasses and goblets alternately filled with beer, whisky, pisco, wine, champagne, and every sort of alcoholic drink imaginable. The president designated the contenders and took part in the competition himself. The one who cleared the most “obstacles” without toppling over onto the floor dead drunk was the winner. I assured the colonel that, since I drink very little and am allergic to drunkards, the celebration of the national holiday held at the Presidential Palace would be somewhat more sober during my term in office.
Of all those meetings the one that left me with a better impression was a conversation I had with General Jaime Salinas Sedó, at that time the head of the Second Sector whose armored division has almost always been the source of military coups in Peru. With him in that post democracy seemed assured. Cultivated, well-spoken, with elegant manners, he appeared to be very concerned about the traditional lack of communication between civil society and the military sphere in Peru, which, he said, was a continual danger for the rule of law. He spoke to me of the necessity of modernizing the armed forces and bringing them up to date technically, of eradicating politics from them, and of severely punishing cases of corruption, frequent in recent years, so that the military institutions in our country would have the prestige that they had in France or Great Britain.* Both he and Admiral Panizo, at the time chairman of the Joint Command, with whom I had a couple of private meetings, assured me emphatically that the armed forces would not permit any electoral fraud.
The speech I gave at the CAEM was one of three that I wrote and published during the campaign.† It seemed important to me to speak in depth, before the cream of the crop from the various military branches, about subjects which were central to the liberal reform of Peru and which involved the armed forces.
Unlike the situation that obtains in modern democracies, in Peru there has never been a deep solidarity between the armed forces and civil society, because of the military coups and the almost total lack of communication between civilians and the military. In order to achieve that solidarity and professionalism, the total independence and impartiality of the armed forces in the face of political factionalism and contention were necessary. And it was necessary that military officers be aware of the fact that, in the economic situation in which Peru found itself, military expenditures would be nonexistent in the immediate future, except for giving the armed forces adequate equipment for the battle against terrorism. This battle would be won only if civilians and military personnel fought shoulder to shoulder against those who had already caused damages amounting to ten billion dollars. As president, I would assume the leadership of this fight, to wage which peasants and workers would be called upon to join together in armed patrols, advised by the military. And I would not tolerate abuses of human rights, for such tactics were incompatible with a state under the rule of law and counterproductive if the aim was to win the support of the people.
It is an error to confuse nationalism and patriotism. The latter is a legitimate feeling of love for the land where one was born; the former, a nineteenth-century doctrine, restrictive and antiquated, which in Latin America had brought on fratricidal wars between countries and ruined our economies. Following the example of Europe, we had to put an end to that nationalistic tradition and work toward integration with our neighbors, the disappearance of borders, and continental disarmament. My government would make every effort, from the very first day, to remove all economic and political barriers that hindered close collaboration and friendship with other Latin American countries, and with our neighbors in particular. I ended my speech with an anecdote that went back to the days when I was teaching at King’s College at London University. I discovered there one day that two of my most diligent students were young officers in the British Army, which had awarded them scholarships so that they could earn a master’s degree in Latin American studies: “I learned from them that in Great Britain entering Sandhurst or the Naval Academy or the Air Corps was a privilege reserved for the most capable and hardworking young men — neither more nor less so than entering the most prestigious universities — and that the training that they received there prepared them not only for the din of battle (though naturally it also prepared them for that), but also for peace: that is to say, for serving their country effectively as scientists, as researchers, as technical experts, as humanists.” The reorganization of the armed forces in Peru would be oriented toward that goal.
Two or three days after the CAEM meeting, the Sawyer/Miller Group had the results of a new national opinion poll, the most important one that had been taken up until then because of the number of people interviewed and the places included in the sample. I was first overall, with 41 or 42 percent of those in the sample intending to vote for me. Alva Castro had managed to climb to 20 percent, while Barrantes was at a standstill with 15 percent and Henry Pease at 8 percent. The results didn’t seem bad to me, since I was expecting a sharp drop because of the excessive propaganda put out for the preferential vote. But I didn’t accept Mark Malloch Brown’s proposal that I cancel the tours of the interior and concentrate on a media campaign and on visits to the marginal districts of Lima. My person and my program were well known in the capital, whereas in many places in the interior they still were not.
That same week, as, in the short breaks between meetings that I had in planes or minivans, I was scribbling the speech that I would deliver in a meeting with liberal intellectuals of different countries that Libertad had organized for March 7 to 9, the news of the assassination of our leader in Ayacucho, Julián Huamaní Yauli, reached me. I immediately flew to Ayacucho to attend his funeral and arrived as they were enshrouding his remains, in a little mortuary chapel that had been set up on the second floor of an ancient, dark building that had once been a private dwelling and was now the School of Public Accounting. I had a strange feeling as I stood there contemplating the head of this modest Ayacuchan, shattered to bits by Sendero bullets, remembering how, on each one of my trips to his homeland, he had accompanied me in my travels, formal and reserved, as the people in that part of the country usually are. His murder was a good example of the irrationality and stupid cruelty of the terrorist strategy, since it was not intended to punish any violence, exploitation, or abuse committed by the extremely modest and previously apolitical Julián Huamaní, but simply to terrify through the crime those who believed that elections could change things in Peru. He was the first leader of Libertad who had been killed. How many others would there be, I asked myself as we were taking his remains to the church, through the streets of Ayacucho, experiencing for the first time that feeling of guilt that, especially during the runoff vote, would overcome me every time I learned that the lives of militants or candidates of ours had been cut short by the terrorists.