When racial prejudice is mentioned, one immediately thinks of the sort harbored by the person who is in a privileged position against the person who finds himself or herself discriminated against and exploited, that is to say, in the case of Peru, the prejudice of the white against the Indian, the black, and the different types of mestizos (all the possible combinations of Spanish, Indian, black, or Chinese blood, et cetera), since, to simplify — and, as far as the last few decades are concerned, to simplify a great deal — it is true that economic power has ordinarily been concentrated in the small minority with European ancestors, and poverty and wretchedness (this without exception) in aboriginal Peruvians or those of African origin. That minuscule minority which is white or can pass for white, thanks to money or their climb up the social ladder, has never concealed its scorn for Peruvians of another color and another culture, to the point that expressions such as cholo, mulato, zambo, chinocholo have in the mouth of this minority a pejorative connotation. Although nowhere written down, nor favored by any piece of legislation, there has always been among this small white elite a tacit discriminatory attitude against other Peruvians, which at times caused fleeting scandals, such as a famous one in the 1950s, for instance, when the Club Nacional blackballed a distinguished agriculturalist and entrepreneur from Ica, Emilio Guimoye, because of his Asian origin, or when in the puppet Congress of Odría’s dictatorship, a legislator by the name of Faura tried to get a law passed whereby highlanders (meaning Indians) would have to ask for a safe-conduct pass in order to come to Lima. (In my own family, when I was a child, Aunt Eliana was discreetly ostracized for having married an Oriental.)
Furthermore, parallel and reciprocal to these sentiments and complexes, there exist the prejudices and rancors of other ethnic or social groups against whites and among each other, with disparaging attitudes inspired by geographic and local loyalties superimposing themselves on them and commingling with them. (Since the time that, following the Conquest, the axis of Peruvian economic and political life shifted from the highlands to the coast, the people from the coast have come to despise the highlander and to look on him as an inferior.) It is not an exaggeration to say that, if one took a penetrating X-ray of Peruvian society, setting aside those “proper forms” that cover them over and that are so deeply rooted in almost all the inhabitants of this “ancient realm” of ours — being “ancient” always involves formality and ritual, that is to say pretense and fiction — what appears is a veritable cauldron of hatreds, resentments, and prejudices, in which the white despises the black and the Indian, the Indian the black and the white, and in which each Peruvian, from his little social, ethnic, racial, and economic segment of the whole, asserts himself by holding in contempt the person he believes to be beneath him and by turning his envious resentment against the person he feels is above him. This phenomenon, which occurs to a greater or lesser degree in all the countries of Latin America with different races and cultures, is aggravated in Perú because, unlike in Mexico or Paraguay, for instance, racial crossbreeding among us has been slow, and social and economic differences have been maintained to a degree that is above the average in Latin America. That great social leveler, the middle class, which up until the mid-1950s had gradually been growing, began to come to a standstill in the 1960s and since then has been gradually decreasing. By 1990 it was very small, fragile, and incapable of slackening and lessening the tremendous tension between the few who were at the top economically — the immense majority of whom were white — and the millions of dark-skinned, poor, poverty-stricken, and wretched Peruvians.
Those subterranean tensions and divisions were aggravated in Perú with the advent of Velasco’s dictatorship, which used racial prejudice and ethnic resentment in a quite explicit way in its propaganda campaigns to put a good face on the Velasco rule: his regime was that of mestizo and Indian Peruvians. He never managed to bring this off, since it never reached the point of taking root among the most underprivileged sectors, not even at the times when he carried out those populist reforms that aroused expectations in this part of the population — the nationalization of haciendas and businesses and state control of the oil industry — but some of that contentiousness, until then more or less repressed, surfaced and began to make its weight felt in public life in a more visible way than in days gone by, and to become tenser and more oppressive as, in large part because of those mistaken reforms, Perú became more impoverished still and fell even farther behind, and the economic imbalances between Peruvians increased. In the months of April and May 1990, all that suddenly overflowed, like a stream of mud, into the electoral contest.
Certain of my supporters, as I have already said, were the first to commit the error of openly giving proof of racist attitudes, and therefore I had been obliged, on the night of April 9, to remind those who shouted racist slogans in chorus at the doors to my house that Fujimori was as Peruvian as I was. When Fujimori, during his unexpected visit on the following morning, thanked me for having done so, I told him that we ought to try to make the subject of race disappear from the campaign, inasmuch as it was an explosive one in a country as violent as Peru. He assured me that he shared that belief. But in the weeks to come he resorted to the subject of race, to his benefit.
Since, on reopening the campaign, there were still reports of incidents in which Asians were the object of mistreatment or insults, in the second half of April I engaged in many gestures meant to demonstrate my rapprochement and solidarity with the Nisei community. I met with leaders of it, within the Freedom Movement, on April 20 and 25, and summoned the press on both occasions in order to condemn every sort of discrimination in a country that was lucky enough to be a crossroads of races and cultures. On that same April 20, I spoke with all the reporters and correspondents hastily sent from Tokyo to cover the second runoff election, in which, for the first time in history, a Nisei might become the head of state of a country outside Japan.
The Japanese colony published a communiqué on May 16, protesting against the racist incidents and emphatically stating that it had not sided as a group with either of the two candidates, and the Japanese ambassador, Masaki Seo — who had proved to be extremely cordial to me and to the Democratic Front — also made a statement denying that his country had made promises to any candidate. (Fujimori had been hinting that if he were elected gifts and credits from Japan would rain down on Peru.)
I believed that, in the light of all this, the subject of race would gradually fade away and that the electoral debate could focus on the two subjects in which I held an advantage: the Plan for Governing and the Program for Social Aid.
But the racial subject had poked only its head out. Soon its whole body would take part in the wrestling match, now pushed into the arena through the main entry by my adversary. On the pretext of protesting against racial discrimination, beginning with his first public rally, Fujimori began to repeat what would be the leitmotif of his campaign from that time on: that of “el chinito y los quatro cholitos,” the little Oriental and the four little mestizos. That is what the Vargasllosistas thought his candidacy represented; but they were not ashamed of being the same thing as millions and millions of Peruvians: chinitos, cholitos, indiecitos, negritos. Was it fair that Peru should belong only to blanquitos? Peru belonged to chinitos like him and to cholitos like the first vice president on his ticket. And then he introduced the likable Máximo San Román, who with his arms upraised showed the audience his strong Indian face of a cholo from Cuzco. When I was shown the video of a rally in Villa El Salvador on May 9, in which Fujimori used the racial subject in this undisguised way — he had already done the same thing before, in Tacna — defining the electoral contest before a crowd of impoverished Indians and cholos from the city’s squatter slums as a confrontation between whites and coloreds, I greatly regretted it, for stirring up racial prejudice in that way meant playing with fire, but I thought that it was going to bring him good results at the polls. Rancor, resentment, frustration of people exploited and marginalized for centuries, who saw the white man as someone who was powerful and an exploiter, could be wondrously well manipulated by a demagogue, if he continually repeated something that, moreover, had an apparent basis in fact: my candidacy had seemed to enjoy the support of the “whites” of Peru en bloc.