Very shortly after the assassination of Julián Huamaní Yauli, on March 23, another of the Front’s candidates for a seat in the Chamber of Representatives, the populist José Gálvez Fernández, was murdered as he left the school that he was the head of, in Comas, one of the popular districts in Lima. Unaffected, simple and straightforward, likable, he was one of the local leaders of Popular Action who had worked the hardest for the close collaboration between the allied parties of the Front. When I went to the headquarters of Popular Action that night, where they were holding a wake for him, I found Belaunde and his wife Violeta badly shaken by the assassination of their colleague.
But amid bloody events such as these, in the final days of the campaign there was also a stimulating contrast: the Freedom Revolution meeting. For many months, we had been planning to bring together in Lima intellectuals of various countries whose ideas had contributed to the extraordinary political and cultural changes in the world, in order to show that what we wanted to do in Peru was part of a process of the reappraisal of democracy, in which more and more peoples around the globe were participating, and in order to show our compatriots that the most modern thought was liberal.
The meeting lasted for three days, in El Pueblo, on the outskirts of Lima, where conferences, round-table discussions, debates took place, and at night, serenades and fiestas to which the presence en masse of young people who belonged to Libertad lent a great deal of color. We had hopes that Lech Walesa would attend. The leader of Solidarity had promised Miguel Vega, who went to see him in Gdansk, that he would do his best to come, but at the last minute the internal problems of his country kept him from attending, and he sent us a message, through two leaders of the Polish labor movement, Stefan Jurczak and Jacek Chwedoruk, whose presence on the speakers’ platform, the night that they read the message aloud, gave rise to a great outburst of enthusiasm. (I remember Álvaro, more excited than usual, shouting Walesa’s name at the top of his lungs, in chorus with everyone else, with his arms upraised.)
Cultural meetings are usually boring, but this one wasn’t, not to me at any rate, nor, it seems to me, to the young people we brought from all over the country so that they could hear about the liberal offensive that was traversing the world. Many of them heard for the first time the things that were said there. Perhaps because of my total immersion in the stereotyped language of the electoral campaign, in those three days it seemed to me that I was tasting an exquisite forbidden fruit by hearing words without political cunning behind them or servitude to the immediate situation, used in a personal way, to explain the great changes that were taking place or that could suddenly occur in countries willing to reform themselves by staking everything on political and economic freedom — that was the subject dealt with by Javier Tusell — or simply to describe in the abstract, as Israel Kirzner did, the nature of the market. I remember the splendid explanatory speeches by Jean-François Revel and Sir Alan Walters as the high points of the meeting, and the explanation given by José Piñera of the economic reforms that brought Chile development and democratization. It was very stimulating, above all, thanks to the speeches by the Colombian Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the Mexicans Enrique Krause and Gabriel Zaid, the Guatemalan Armando de la Torre, and others, to realize that all over Latin America there were intellectuals attuned to our ideas, who looked on our campaign with the hope that, if it was carried through successfully in Peru, the liberal revolution would spread to their countries.
Among those who attended were two front-line Cuban freedom fighters: Carlos Franqui and Carlos Alberto Montaner. In the name of unequivocal democratic convictions, both of them had been fighting against Castro’s dictatorship for many years now, ever since they first felt that the revolution for which they had fought had been betrayed. It seemed to me that, as the meeting came to an end, I ought to make a public declaration of my solidarity with their cause, to say that the freedom of Cuba was also a flag we rallied round, and that, if we won the election, free Cubans would have in Peru an ally in their fight against one of the last vestiges of totalitarianism in the world. I did so, before reading my speech,* provoking the predictable wrath of the Cuban dictator who, two or three days later, answered from Havana with his usual vituperations.
Octavio Paz, who was unable to come, sent a videotape with a recorded message, explaining why he now supported the candidacy which, two years before in London, he had tried to talk me out of, and Miguel Vega Alvear had trouble rounding up enough television sets so that everyone in the audience could hear the message. But he managed, and so Octavio Paz was there with us, through his image and his voice, during those days of the congress. His encouragement came at an opportune moment for me, for to tell the truth, every so often I could hear, still pounding in my ears, the reasons he’d given me, two years before, in a conversation in his London hotel on Sloane Street, as we were having the orthodox tea and scones, for not going into politics: incompatibility with intellectual work, loss of independence, being manipulated by professional politicians, and, in the long run, frustration and the feeling of years of one’s life wasted. In his message, Octavio, with that subtlety in developing a line of reasoning which, along with the elegance of his prose, is his best intellectual attribute, retracted those arguments and replaced them with other, more up-to-date ones, justifying my determination and connecting it with the great liberal and democratic mobilization in Eastern Europe. At that moment, it was invigorating for me to hear, from the lips of someone whom I had admired since my youth, the arguments in favor of my going into politics which I had put to myself sometime before. Not long afterward, however, I would have a chance to see how right his first reaction had been and how Peruvian reality hastened to prove this second one wrong.
But still more than for intellectual reasons, the three days of the congress were a real vacation for me, since I could hobnob with friends I hadn’t seen for some time and meet wonderful people who came to the meeting bringing ideas and testimony that were like a breath of fresh air to this country with a marginal culture at a dead end that poverty and violence had turned Peru into. Except for the heavy security surrounding the meeting place, the foreign participants had no indication of the violence amid which the country was living, and they could even enjoy a spectacle of Peruvian music and folk dances to which, on the spur of the moment, Ana and Pedro Schwartz contributed several lively Sevillian dances. (I record this fact for history, for every time I have told people about it, nobody has believed me that the eminent Spanish economist was capable of such a feat.)