On my return to Lima, on the afternoon of March 30, I was confronted with a curious piece of news. Our security unit had gotten wind of an order given the evening before by President García to all the regional development corporations to the effect that, henceforth, they were to redirect their logistic support — transportation, communications, and advertising — withdrawing it from Alva Castro’s Aprista candidacy and giving it instead to Cambio 90. At the same time, from that day on, all the communications media dependent on the government and with ties to García — especially Channel 5, “Radioprogramas,” La República, Página Libre, and La Crónica—began to extol systematically a candidacy that, up until then, they had scarcely mentioned. The only person who didn’t appear to be surprised at the news was Fernando Belaunde, with whom I met on the night of my return to Lima. “Fujimori’s candidacy is a typical Aprista maneuver to take votes away from us,” the ex-president assured me. “They did the same thing to me, in 1963, inventing the candidacy of engineer Mario Samamé Boggio, who said the same things I did, was a professor at the same university as I was, and who, in the end, received even fewer votes than the number of signatures that got him on the official list of candidates.” Was the candidate in the cap with earflaps and the tractor an epiphenomenon invented by Alan García? In any event, Mark Malloch Brown was worried. The flash polls — we took one every day in Lima — confirmed that in the shantytowns the popularity of the “little Chinaman” was rapidly increasing.
Who was he? Where did he come from? He had been a professor of mathematics and rector of the Agrarian University, and in that capacity headed for a time the CONUP (Asamblea Nacional de Rectores: National Assembly of University Rectors). But his candidacy couldn’t be weaker. He hadn’t even been able to fill the quotas for senators and congressmen on his list. Among his candidates there were many pastors of evangelical churches, and all of them, without exception, were unknowns. We discovered later that he had included on his list of candidates his own gardener and a prophetess and palmist, implicated in a trial having to do with drugs, named Madame Carmelí. But the best proof of the lack of seriousness of his candidacy was that Fujimori himself was also a candidate for a Senate seat. The Peruvian Constitution allows this duplication, which is taken advantage of by many aspirants to seats in Congress who, in order to garner more publicity, register at the same time as presidential candidates. Nobody with a real possibility of being elected president runs for a senatorship at the same time, since according to the Constitution the two offices create a conflict of interest.
Although I did not cancel all the remainder of the tours scheduled for the last days before the election — Huancayo, Jauja, Trujillo, Huaraz, Chimbote, Cajamarca, Tumbes, Piura, and Callao — I made lightning visits, almost every morning before leaving for the provinces, to the young towns in Lima where Fujimori seemed to have the firmest support, and I also made a series of TV spots, talking with people from the C and D sectors who asked me questions about the points in my program under heaviest attack. With the brand-new support of planes and minivans belonging to the government, Fujimori began a series of junkets in the provinces, and news programs showed large audiences of humble Peruvians at all his meetings, people whom the “little Chinaman” with the poncho, the cap with earflaps, and the tractor who attacked all politicians in his speeches seemed to have bewitched overnight.
On Friday, March 30, the new mayor of Lima, Ricardo Belmont, endorsed my candidacy. He did so from my house in Barranco, after a conversation that proved to be very instructive to me. Fujimori’s takeoff had greatly disturbed him, because not only had he repeated everything that Belmont had said in his municipal campaign—“I am not a politician,” “All politicians have been failures,” “The time for independent candidates has come”—but in addition the committees of Belmont’s own organization, OBRAS, were being cannibalized by Cambio 90 in the marginal districts of Lima. His local offices were switching banners and the posters with his face were being replaced by others with the face of the “little Chinaman.” In Ricardo’s opinion, there wasn’t the slightest doubt about it: Fujimori was a creation of the APRA. And he told me that the former Aprista mayor of Lima, Jorge del Castillo, had tried to get him to include Fujimori on his list of city councilmen, something he hadn’t gone along with since Fujimori, though a university professor, was an absolute political unknown. Six months back, the presidential candidate of Cambio 90 had aspired to no higher office than that of municipal councilman.
As he had told Álvaro, with whom he had had several meetings prior to this one with me and with whom he had made friends, in the talk we had together Ricardo Belmont assured me: “I’m going to stop Fujimori.” And in those last eight days of the campaign he did everything in his power to back my candidacy, in a press conference, on a television program he planned with that very purpose in mind, and by coming up onto the speakers’ platform to offer me his support at the rally on April 4, on the Paseo de la República, with which we ended the campaign in Lima. None of this helped to hold back what reporters were soon to baptize as “the tsunami,” but it left me with an image of Belmont as a likable person, who, predictably, was made to pay dearly for that display of loyalty to me by the future Peruvian government, which asphyxiated the mayoralty of Lima by depriving it of financial resources and condemning Belmont to a city administration that could accomplish next to nothing.*