Two days later, on April 20, the bishops of Peru issued a statement declaring that “it is not honest to employ religion to serve partisan political ends,” along with the assurance that, as an institution, the Church was not supporting any candidacy. This pastoral letter from Peru’s bishops was an attempt to calm the storm of criticisms that had been caused, in media with close ties to the government — where there were a large number of progressive-minded Catholics — by an interview granted to the program “Panorama,” on Channel 5, on Easter Sunday (April 15, 1990) by the archbishop of Lima. When the interviewer confronted the prelate with a question concerning my agnosticism, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, in a polemical theological interpretation, expatiated on the question to demonstrate that an agnostic was not a man without God, but, rather, someone seeking God, and a man who does not believe but would like to believe, a being in prey to an agonizing search not unlike Unamuno’s, at the end of which lay a return to religious faith. The Aprista media and those on the left, already embarked on a battle-hardened campaign for Fujimori, reproached the archbishop for his bare-faced backing of the “agnostic” candidate, and a “leftist intellectual,” Carlos Iván Degregori, stated in an article that with that definition of an agnostic, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora “wouldn’t pass a theology exam.”
On April 19, early in the afternoon, who should arrive at my house but the archbishop of Arequipa, he too hidden in a car that entered directly into the garage, for the reporters’ siege of the place didn’t let up until June 10. A short little man with a great booming voice, brimming over with congeniality and homespun charm, Monsignor Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio had such good humor that we spent a very entertaining brief interlude — one of the few, if not the only one, in all those two months — as he told me that it was best for me to forget about “all that nonsense about having declared me an agnostic,” because as the son of Catholic parents, baptized and married in the Church and the father of children who had also been baptized, I was Catholic for all practical purposes, whether I admitted it or not. And that, if I wanted to win the election, I shouldn’t insist on continuing to tell the whole truth about the necessary economic adjustment, since that was tantamount to working for the adversary, especially since the latter said only the things that would win him votes. Not lying was a very good thing, of course; but revealing everything in an election campaign was to commit hara-kiri.
Joking aside, the archbishop of Arequipa was greatly alarmed by the offensive mounted by the evangelical sects in the young towns and marginal districts of Arequipa in favor of Fujimori, a campaign that had an obvious religious and sometimes anti-Catholic slant, because of the sectarianism of certain pastors who didn’t spare their criticisms of the Church and even attacked the Pope, the saints, and the Virgin Mary in their harangues. Like Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, he too was of the opinion that this religious war could contribute to the social disintegration of Peru. Although the Catholic Church could not explicitly come out in my favor, he told me that, in his own diocese, he had encouraged those faithful who, in answer to the challenge from the evangelical sects, had decided to campaign for me.
From that time on, the electoral battle little by little came to resemble a religious war, in which naïve fears, prejudices, and clean weapons clashed with the dirty ones and the low blows and most treacherous maneuvers on both sides, to extremes that bordered on farce and surrealism. Very early in the campaign, three years previously, an activist of Solidaridad, Regina de Palacios, who worked in the young town of San Pedro de Choque, had shut me up in a room at the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, with some twenty men and women of that shantytown, without telling me who they were. Once we were alone, one of them began to speak as though inspired and to quote from the Bible from memory, and all of a sudden the others, getting to their feet and raising their hands on high, began to accompany that sermon with exclamations of “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” At the same time, they urged me to do likewise, since the Holy Spirit had just made its appearance in the room, and to get down on my knees as a sign of humble submission to the newcomer. Completely taken aback and not knowing how I ought to react to this unexpected “happening”—some of those present had burst into tears, others were on their knees praying, with their eyes closed and their arms upraised — I could foresee the impression that would be made on those committees that constantly wandered about the corridors of the Libertad headquarters looking for a place to hold a meeting, if they chanced to open the door and come across such a spectacle. The evangelicals finally calmed down, composed themselves, and left, assuring me that I was the Anointed One and that I would win the election.
I believe that this was my first personal experience of the way in which evangelical sects had penetrated the marginalized sectors of the country. But even though I had many other such experiences later on, a number of them as surprising as that one, and I became accustomed to seeing, on all my visits to outlying urban districts, in the doorways of flimsy shacks and huts the ever-present emblem of Pentecostalists, Baptists, the Christian Missionary Alliance, the People of God, or dozens of other churches with names sometimes possessed of a picturesque syncretism, it was only during the campaign for the second round that I realized the magnitude of the phenomenon. It was true: in many poor parts of Perú where Catholic parishes were no longer served by the Church, either because the campaign of terrorist violence against parish priests (many had been assassinated by Sendero Luminoso) had led to the departure of those who remained or because there were no new priests to be assigned, the vacuum had been filled by Protestant preachers. These latter, men and women almost always of very humble origin, armed with the tireless and fervent zeal of pioneers, lived there on the spot, amid the same primitive conditions as the settlers of these towns, and had succeeded in making converts to those churches that required total surrender and permanent apostleship — so different from the lax and sometimes merely social commitment required by Catholicism — which proved, paradoxically, to attract those who, because of the precariousness of their lives, found in the sects an order and a feeling of security to which to cling. With Catholicism, by tradition and custom, the official — the formal — religion of Peru, the evangelical churches came to represent the informal religion, a phenomenon perhaps as widespread as, in the economic sphere, that of the tradesmen and “informal” businessmen of the parallel economy — whom Fujimori had been clever enough to enroll as allies of his candidacy, by proposing as his first vice president Máximo San Román, a humble “informal” businessman from Cuzco, the president of Fenapi Perú (Federación de Asociaciones de Pequeñas Empresas Industrials del Perú: Federated Associations of Small Industrial Enterprises in Peru), which since 1988 had brought together the principal provincial organizations of the parallel economy, and the APEMEPE (Asociación de Pequeños y Medianos Empresarios del Perú: Association of the Owners of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses in Peru).