As soon as I returned to Lima, on the weekend of the 14th and 15th of April, I began making preparations for the second round. At the beach, I had reached the conclusion that there was no other alternative, since my withdrawal, besides creating a constitutional impasse that might serve as an alibi for a coup d’état, would be useless: all the forces of the Democratic Front were reluctant to make any agreement with Fujimori, whom they considered too involved with the APRA. It was necessary to put a good face on the bad times we were going through and try to raise the morale of my supporters, which, since April 8, had hit bottom, so that at least they would be good losers.
Criticisms and the search for those responsible for the results of the first round became more stubborn within our ranks; in the communications media accusations against various scapegoats proliferated. Opposing factions vented their fury on Freddy Cooper, as the campaign director, and also on Álvaro, Patricia — whom they accused of being the power behind the throne and of abusing her influence on me — and on Lucho Llosa and Jorge Salmón for the way in which they had managed the campaign publicity. There was no lack of criticism of me, for having permitted the extravagant advertising campaign by our candidates for seats in Congress, and for many other things, some of them quite justified and others motivated by downright racism in reverse: why had we brought to the fore so many white leaders and candidates in the Front, instead of balancing them with Indians, blacks, and mestizos? Why had it been a blond singer with blue eyes — Roxana Valdivieso — who got the rallies off to a lively start by singing the theme song of the Democratic Front, instead of a little mestiza from the coast or an Indian from the mountains with whom the darkskinned masses of the nation could have better identified themselves? Although they became milder later on, these attacks of paranoia and masochism continued to be heard in our ranks all during the two months of the campaign for the second round.
Freddy Cooper handed me his resignation but I did not accept it. I also persuaded Álvaro to stay on as communications director, even though he still thought I’d made a mistake by going on with my candidacy. To placate those who were touchy about it, Roxana didn’t sing at our meetings again and although Patricia went on working hard with Solidaridad and the Program for Social Aid (PAS), she did not give any more interviews or attend any more of the Front’s public ceremonies or accompany me on my travels throughout the interior (this was her decision, not mine).
That weekend I called a meeting of the “kitchen cabinet,” reduced now to those responsible for the campaign, for finances, for the media, and to the communications director, with the addition of a new member, Beatriz Merino, who had an excellent public image and had made a strong showing in the preferential voting, and we drew up a plan for the new strategy. Not the slightest modification would be made in the Plan for Governing, naturally. But we would talk less about sacrifices and more about the range of activities of the PAS and other social programs that we had begun to set up. My campaign would now be oriented toward demonstrating the activities to further solidarity and the social aspect of the reforms, and its efforts would be concentrated on the young towns and the marginal sectors of Lima and the principal urban centers of the country. Publicity would be reduced to a minimum and the amount of the campaign budget thus saved would be channeled toward the PAS. Since Mark Malloch Brown and his advisers insisted in no uncertain terms that it was indispensable to wage a negative campaign against Fujimori, whose image had to be exposed as a false one in the eyes of the general public, by demanding that he present his program for governing and thus reveal his weak points, I said that I would approve of such a strategy if it were based on the revelation of verifiable information. But after that meeting I could sense the scandalous levels of mudslinging in which both my supporters and my adversaries would indulge during the coming weeks. On Monday, April 16, on the Calle Tiziano, where it had its general headquarters, I met with the directors of the Plan for Governing and the heads of the principal committees. I urged them to go on working, as though in any event we were going to take over the presidency on July 28, and I asked Lucho Bustamante and Raúl Salazar to present me with a proposal for my ministerial cabinet. Lucho would be prime minister and Raúl would be in charge of the Ministry of Finance. It was indispensable for the teams of each branch of the administration to be ready for the changing of the guard. Moreover, it was advisable to evaluate the interrelationship between the forces in the Congress that had been elected on April 8 and to outline a policy for dealing with the legislative branch from July 28 on, so as to be able to carry out the most essential part of our program at least.
That same afternoon, at Pro-Desarrollo, I attended a meeting of the executive council of the Democratic Front, at which Bedoya and Belaunde Terry, as well as Orrego and Alayza, were present. It was a meeting marked by long faces, buried resentment, and visible apprehension. At that point not even the most experienced of those old pols could understand the Fujimori phenomenon. Like Chirinos Soto, Belaunde, with his deep-rooted idea of a mestizo, Indian-Hispanic Peru, was alarmed at the thought that someone with all his dead kin buried in Japan would get to be president. How could someone who was practically a foreigner have a profound commitment to the country? These arguments, which I heard from many of my supporters, among them a group of retired navy officers who visited me, made me feel that I was in the midst of a totally absurd situation, and left me wishing that Fujimori would win, just to see whether by his victory that ethnically biased vision of what was genuinely Peruvian had been expunged forever.
Yet something positive resulted from this meeting: a collaboration of the forces of the Democratic Front, in a fraternal spirit that had not existed before. From then on, until June 10, populists, members of the PPC, Libertad, and SODE worked together, without the quarrels, low blows, and pettiness of previous years, presenting a very different image from the one that they had previously offered. Because of the tremendous setback that the low number of votes they received signified for all of them, or because they sensed how risky it could be for Peru if there came to power someone who had come from nowhere and represented a leap in the dark or the continuation of García’s administration through a straw man, or because of an uneasy conscience resulting from the selfish factionalism that often characterized our coalition, or simply because there were no longer any seats in Congress at stake, the enmities, jealousies, envy, rancor disappeared during this second stage. On the part both of leaders and of militants of the various parties comprising the Front there was a will to collaborate, which, although it was almost too late to change the final result, allowed me to focus all my efforts on the adversary and not be distracted by the internal problems that had given me such headaches during the first round.
Freddy Cooper set up a small campaign commando team with leaders of Popular Action, the Christian Popular Party, the Freedom Movement, and SODE, and composite teams left for various areas to breathe life into mobilizing the forces of the Front. Almost none of those called on refused to travel and many leaders spent days or weeks at a time going back and forth throughout the provinces and districts of the interior, trying to win back the votes that had been lost. Eduardo Orrego stayed in Puno, Manolo Moreyra in Tacna, Alberto Borea of the PPC, Raúl Ferrero of Libertad, and Edmundo del Águila of Popular Action in the emergency zone, and I believe that there was not a single departamento or region where they failed to raise the spirits of our downcast political partners, all this in an atmosphere of increasing violence, for ever since the day after the elections, Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA had unleashed another terrorist offensive that left dozens of people injured and dead all over the country.