It had been with Popular Action that the leaders and activists of the Freedom Movement had had the most difficulties coordinating the campaign in the first stage. Now, however, it was from Popular Action that I received the strongest backing, especially from its young and diligent secretary for the departamento of Lima, Raúl Diez Canseco, who, from mid-April on, devoted himself day and night until election day to working side by side with me, organizing daily trips around the shantytowns and slum settlements on the outskirts of Lima. I scarcely knew Raúl, and the only thing I had heard about him concerned the squabbles that he inevitably became involved in with the Libertad activists at rallies — he was the man Belaunde relied on for mobilizing members of Popular Action — but in those two months I really came to appreciate him for the way in which he committed himself to the second-round campaign when in all truth he no longer had any personal reason for doing so, since he was already assured of his seat in the Chamber of Representatives. He was one of the most enthusiastic and dedicated people in the Front, sparing no effort to help get things organized, solving problems, raising the morale of those who were losing heart, and infecting everyone with his own enthusiasm and his conviction with regard to the possibilities of winning which, whether they were genuine or feigned, were a tonic to ward off the defeatism and exhaustion that surrounded all of us. He came out to my house each morning, very early, with a detailed list of the public squares, corners, markets, schools, cooperatives, projects of the PAS under way which we would be visiting, and during the many hours of the day’s tour he was never without a smile on his lips, making kindly remarks, and sticking very close to me in case I was attacked.
In order to demolish that image of a “haughty man,” someone “aloof” from the people, which, according to Mark Malloch Brown’s surveys, I had acquired in the eyes of humble voters, it was decided that, in this second stage, I would not tour the streets with my bodyguards. They would accompany me at a distance, melting into the crowd, which would be able to approach me, shake hands with me, touch me and embrace me, and also, at times, tear off bits of my clothes or push me to the ground and mangle me if they felt like it. I went along with these arrangements, but I readily admit that it cost me a heroic effort. I didn’t have — I don’t have — any appetite for mingling with crowds and I had to accomplish miracles to conceal my dislike for that sort of semihysterical pushing and pulling, kissing, pinching and pawing, and smile even when I felt that those demonstrations of affection were crushing my bones or tearing a muscle. Since, moreover, there was always the danger of an attack — on many occasions we were forced to confront groups of Fujimoristas, and I have already recounted how the good head of my friend Enrique Ghersi, who also was in the habit of accompanying me, stopped a stone hurled straight at my face on one of these tours — Raúl Diez Canseco always arranged things so that, if Ghersi wasn’t on hand, he himself would be close by to confront the aggressor. As darkness was falling, I would go back home, exhausted and aching all over, to bathe and change clothes, for at night I had meetings with those in charge of the Plan for Governing or the campaign commando team, and sometimes I had so many bruises that I had to rub myself all over with arnica as well before meeting with them. Every once in a while I recalled those terrific pages of Konrad Lorenz’s study On Aggression, where he recounts how wild ducks, in their impassioned amorous flights, suddenly become infuriated and kill each other. For, engulfed in a multitude of overexcited people who were tugging at me and embracing me, I often felt that I was only one step away from immolation.
When I officially opened the runoff contest, on April 28, with a TV message entitled “De nuevo en campaña”—“On the Campaign Trail Again”—I already had two weeks of arduous work touring the marginal districts of Lima behind me. In that message I promised that I would do “everything in my power to get through not only to the intelligence but also to the heart of Peruvians.”
In line with the new strategy, I was to inform the public of the work being accomplished by Solidaridad and, in particular, by the PAS, which by that time had dozens of work projects under construction in the districts on the periphery of Lima. Shown viewing the classrooms, playgrounds, day-care centers, soup kitchens, wells, irrigation ditches large and small, or roads built by the organization headed by Patricia, I explained that my plan for government included a vast, concerted aid program so that those Peruvians with the lowest incomes would be the least affected by the sacrifice required to get out of the trap set by state controls and inflation. The PAS was not a move to garner publicity. I didn’t wish to talk about it before its basic infrastructure was in place and I had the ironclad guarantee of the two men responsible for getting it started — Jaime Crosby and Ramón Barúa — that the sum of $1.6 billion needed in order to keep the twenty thousand small-scale public works projects in the marginal towns and villages in Peru going over a period of three years would be definitely forthcoming, thanks to international organizations, friendly countries, and the Peruvian business class. The PAS was a reality already taking shape in April and May of 1990, and despite the fact that aid still reached us in minuscule amounts, as though doled out with an eyedropper — it was dependent on the implementation of our program by the administration in power, especially with regard to funds from the World Bank — it was impressive to see so many technicians and engineers and hundreds of workers turning these projects, chosen by local residents themselves as those most urgently needed for their community, into concrete realities. In all my speeches I devoted half the time allotted me to demonstrating that what we were doing gave the lie to those who accused me of lacking a sensitivity to social problems. That sensitivity ought to be measured in terms of accomplishments, not rhetorical promises.
To many leaders of the Front and friends of Libertad, the new strategy, more modest and popular, less ideological and polemical, seemed a timely rectification, and they thought that in this way we would win back the voters we had lost, the ones who had voted for Fujimori. For no one had any illusions about the Aprista vote or that of its Socialist and Communist variations. We were also encouraged by the increasingly resolute support of the Church. Wasn’t Peru a Catholic country to its very marrow?
The last thing I had imagined was finding myself converted, overnight, into a defender of the Catholic Church in an electoral battle. But that is what began to happen, once the campaign was renewed, when it was evident that among the senators and representatives elected from the Cambio 90 list, there were at least fifteen evangelical pastors (among them Fujimori’s second vice president, Carlos García y García, who had been president of the National Evangelical Council of Peru). The nervousness of the Catholic hierarchy over this sudden political rise of organizations that had previously been marginal was exacerbated by imprudent statements by several of the pastors who had been elected, Guillermo Yoshikawa for instance (the congressman for Arequipa), who had had a letter circulated among his faithful urging them to vote for Fujimori, with the argument that, when the latter became president, evangelical schools and churches would receive the same recognition and the same state subsidies as Catholic ones. The archbishop of Arequipa, Monsignor Fernando Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio, appeared on TV on April 18 and reproached Señor Yoshikawa for using religious arguments in the campaign and for his defiant attitude toward the religion practiced by the majority of the Peruvian people.