In this way, the racial theme assumed a central place in the campaign. That racist tactic managed to make my own partisans feel out of place and cause them to experience some very uncomfortable moments. I remember having seen an interview on TV with one of the leaders of Popular Action, Jaime de Althaus, who was working on the committee for the Plan for Governing and was minister of agriculture in the cabinet proposed by Lucho Bustamante and Raúl Salazar, defending himself from the charge of a Channel 5 journalist that my candidacy was that of the whites, and pointing out that various leaders of ours were mestizos, of very humble origins, and with skin as dark as that of any Fujimorista. Jaime seemed to be trying to apologize for his having fair hair and blue eyes.
If we followed that route, we were lost. It goes without saying that, if it was a question of that, we could have shown that not only were there whites in the Front but hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned Peruvians, of every racial background imaginable. But it was not a question of that, and to me prejudices against a Japanese or an Indian Peruvian were as repugnant as those against a white Peruvian, and I said as much every time that I found myself forced to mention the subject. It could not be brushed to one side of the campaign now and an undetermined number — though I think it was a high percentage — of voters were sensitive to it, feeling that, by voting for a yellow man against a white one (that is what it appears that I am, in the mosaic of Peruvian races), they were engaging in an act of ethnic solidarity and retaliation.
If the electoral campaign had been a dirty one in the first round, it was now an obscene one. Thanks to spontaneous reports that reached us from different sources, and to verifications made by the people of the Democratic Front themselves or by reporters and media that backed my candidacy, such as the daily papers Expreso, El Comercio, and Ojo, Channel 4, the magazine Oiga, and above all César Hildebrandt’s television program “En Persona” (“In Person”), the mystery surrounding the person of agricultural engineer Fujimori Fujimori began to fade. A reality quite different from the mythological one with which he had been invested by the communications media controlled by the APRA and the left began to emerge. For one thing, the “candidate of the poor” was not at all poor and enjoyed an estate considerably more substantial than mine, judging from the dozens of houses and buildings he owned, had bought, sold, and resold in the last few years, in different districts of Lima, understating their worth in the Property Registry so as to lower his income tax payments, as had been proved by the independent congressman Fernando Olivera, who had made the fight for morality in politics the warhorse of his entire term in office and who for that reason instituted criminal proceedings against the candidate of Cambio 90 before the 32nd District Tax Court for “tax fraud and betraying public faith,” which, naturally, didn’t get anywhere.*
Moreover, it was discovered that Fujimori was the owner of a farm of some thirty-five acres — Pampa Bonita — that had been given to him gratis by the Aprista government, on extremely rich land, in Sayán, not too far north of Lima, using, in order to justify that land grant, a provision of the Agrarian Reform Law that provided for the free distribution of land — to poor peasants! Nor was this his only tie to the Aprista administration. For a year Fujimori had had a weekly program on the state television channel, given to him by order of President García; he had been the head of a governmental committee on ecology; he had been the adviser on agriculture of the Aprista candidate in the 1985 campaign; and the APRA had frequently made use of him in various capacities in the course of their five-year administration. (President García had sent him, for instance, as the government delegate to a regional convention in the departamento of San Martín.) If not an Aprista militant, agricultural engineer Fujimori had been assigned missions and been granted privileges by the Aprista government that were conceivable only if he were someone who enjoyed the administration’s confidence. His allegations against “traditional parties” and his persistence in presenting himself as someone undefiled by political service rendered was an electoral pose.
All this appeared in the press as information coming from us, but the one who beat the record for revelations was César Hildebrandt, in his Sunday TV program “En Persona.” A splendid journalist because of his qualities as a tenacious bloodhound, a diligent and tireless investigator, quite a bit more cultivated than the general run of his colleagues, and courageous to the point of rashness, Hildebrandt is also a man with a touchy, surly disposition that makes him very hard to get along with, one whose independence has made him many an enemy and involved him in all sorts of quarrels with the owners or editorial directors of the magazines, newspapers, and TV channels on which he has chanced to work, with all of whom he broke off relations (although very often he made up with them later, only to invariably break off with them once again) whenever he felt that his freedom had been limited or was endangered. This sort of behavior had made him many enemies, of course, to the point that in the end he was even obliged to leave Peru. But it also earned him a prestige and a guarantee of independence and a moral reliability that enabled him to pass judgment and to criticize that no TV journalist had had before (nor, I fear, will have again for a long time to come) in Peru. Though a friend of several sectors of the left and rather close to them, always giving them a platform from which to speak on his programs, Hildebrandt gave clear evidence of a sympathy for my candidacy throughout the primary campaign, without that stopping him, naturally, from criticizing me and my collaborators whenever he thought it necessary.
But in the runoff election campaign Hildebrandt took it upon himself as a moral duty to do whatever was in his power to prevent what he called “the leap into the dark,” for it seemed to him that a victory at the polls by someone who combined improvisation with cunning, plus a lack of scruples, could be like the final, fatal kick for a country which the politics of the last few years had left in ruins and more divided and violent than ever before in its history. Each Sunday “En Persona” presented both more and more attestations and the most severe denunciations concerning Fujimori’s personal business deals — whether open and aboveboard or suspect — together with his hidden ties to Alan García and his authoritarian and manipulative character, of which he had shown signs during his term in office as rector of the National Agrarian University of La Molina. Many of Fujimori’s colleagues in this research center campaigned actively as well, out of fear that he would be elected. Two delegations of professors and employees of the Agrarian University came to see me (on May 19 and June 4) in a public act of support, headed by the new rector, Alfonso Flores Mere (at that time I had a chance to see once again a friend of my early years, Baldomero Cáceres, now a professor at that research center and a stubborn defender of the growing of coca leaves as a crop, for historical and ethnic reasons), and in those meetings the professors from La Molina put forth any number of arguments, which some of them made public on Hildebrandt’s program, concerning the risks that the country could incur by electing as president someone who, as rector of that university, had given obvious signs of an authoritarian personality.