What was owed to a people readying itself to exercise the most important right in a democracy — electing its leaders — was, surely, not this caricature of a debate. Or was it? Was it perhaps inevitable in a country with the characteristics of Peru? Nevertheless the practice of democracy in other poor countries with great economic and cultural inequalities does not descend to the depths it did in Peru, where every effort to elevate the campaign to a certain level of intellectual decorum was swept away by an uncontainable wave of demagoguery, lack of culture, shoddiness, and baseness. I learned many things in this election campaign, and the worst one of all was the discovery that the Peruvian crisis should not be measured only in terms of impoverishment, the decrease in standards of living, the aggravation of contrasts, the collapse of institutions, the acceleration of the rate of violence, but that all of that together had created conditions in which the functioning of democracy became a sort of parody, in which the most cynical and crafty always came up with the winning hand.
This said, if I must choose one episode of all the three years that the campaign lasted that leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction, it is my performance in that debate. For even though I went to it with no illusions as to the result of the election, I was then able, despite my adversary, or rather, thanks to him, to show to the Peruvian people, in those two and a half hours, the seriousness of our program of reforms and the preponderant role played in it by the fight against poverty, the gigantic effort that we had made to remove all those privileges that Peru had seen accumulating to ensure the prosperity of a privileged elite while the majority fell farther and farther behind.
The preparations were meticulous and amusing. During several days’ retreat, in Chosica, I had a number of training sessions with journalists who were friends of mine, such as Alfonso Baella, Fernando Viaña, and César Hildebrandt, who (the latter in particular) turned out to be better grounded and more incisive than the combatant I was preparing myself to confront. Moreover, taking time I really didn’t have, I had prepared a number of syntheses, as didactic as possible, of what we wanted to do in the domain of agriculture, in education, in the economy, in employment, and to restore civil peace. I kept to these subjects, despite the fact that, from time to time, I was obliged to allow myself to be distracted for a few moments so as to respond to the personal attacks, as when I asked him, since he boasted of his superiority as a technocrat, what had been done to the cows at the Agrarian University to make their production mysteriously decrease from 2,400 liters of milk per day to a mere 400 during the time that he was rector, or when, confronted with his concern because I had had an experience with drugs when I was fourteen years old, I advised him that he should worry, instead, about something more contemporary that concerned him more directly — like Madame Carmelí, the astrologist and candidate for a representative’s seat in the list of Cambio 90, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for trafficking in drugs.
That night a great many people from the Front gathered at my house — there were members of the PPC, populists, members of SODE, mingling with the members of Libertad in an atmosphere that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks before — to watch with me the result of the opinion polls on the debate. Since all of them reported that I was the winner, and some of them gave me fifteen or twenty points’ advantage, many of the people gathered together there thought that thanks to the debate we had ensured our victory on June 10.
Even though, as I have already pointed out, almost all my efforts in the campaign for the second round of voting were concentrated on making tours around the periphery of Lima — the shantytowns and marginal districts that had crept across the deserts and the mountains until they had turned into a gigantic belt of poverty and misery that squeezed the old part of Lima more and more tightly — I also made two trips to the interior, to the two departamentos which I visited most often in those three years and to which I felt the closest ties: Arequipa and Piura. The results of the first round, in both cities, had saddened me, since, because of the affection that I had always felt for both and because of the dedication that I bestowed on both during the campaign, I took it for granted that there would be a sort of reciprocity and that the vote of the people of Piura and Arequipa would favor me. But we won only in Arequipa with 32.53 percent against a very high 31.68 percent for Cambio 90; in Piura the APRA won the first round with 26.09 percent compared to 25.91 for us. Considering the high demographic density of both regions, the Front decided that I should make one last tour of them, above all to explain to Piurans and Arequipans the range of activities of the PAS, which had begun work in both places. During my trip to Arequipa I was present at the signing of an accord between the Municipality of Cayma and the PAS of Arequipa for the installation of medical dispensaries and first-aid centers, thanks to the financing and professional support received by that program. (In April and May close to five hundred dispensaries were installed by the PAS in marginal sectors of Lima and the interior.)
Both were very different trips from the ones I had made in the first campaign; instead of the multicolor rallies in the town squares and the dinners and receptions at night, there were only visits to markets, cooperatives, associations of informales, itinerant peddlers, and dialogues and meetings with labor unions, members of communes, leaders of neighborhoods, and communities and associations of all sorts, which began at dawn and ended after the stars had come out — held usually out of doors, by candlelight, and during which dozens of times, hundreds of times, I lost my voice and even my sense of discernment, as I tried to disprove the lies concerning the economic shock, education, and the million unemployed. I was so exhausted that, in order to preserve the little energy I had left, I remained silent as we moved about from place to place, and even when the trips lasted only a few minutes, I usually fell fast asleep. Despite such efforts to overcome my fatigue, I was unable, amid an endless interchange of questions and answers, in the Central Market of Arequipa, to keep myself from losing consciousness for a few minutes. The amusing thing is that when I came to, in a daze, the same leader was still perorating, not realizing what had happened to me.
I noticed the tension and the paroxysm reached by the electoral confrontation within Piura, in particular — a part of the country considered relatively peaceful — where I was obliged to tour the towns and villages that separate Sullana from San Lorenzo Colony amid great violence, and where my speeches frequently had as their audio background the jeers and catcalls of counterdemonstrators or the insults and punches my supporters and my adversaries were exchanging round about me. My grimmest memory of those days is that of my arrival, one torrid morning, in a little settlement between Ignacio Escudero and Cruceta, in the valley of Chira. Armed with sticks and stones and all sorts of weapons to bruise and batter, an infuriated horde of men and women came to meet me, their faces distorted by hatred, who appeared to have emerged from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings and animals were indistinguishable, since for both life was a blind struggle for survival. Half naked, with very long hair and fingernails never touched by a pair of scissors, surrounded by emaciated children with huge swollen bellies, bellowing and shouting to keep their courage up, they hurled themselves on the caravan of vehicles as though fighting to save their lives or seeking to immolate themselves, with a rashness and a savagery that said everything about the almost inconceivable levels of deterioration to which life for millions of Peruvians had sunk. What were they attacking? What were they defending themselves from? What phantoms were behind those threatening clubs and knives? In the wretched village there was no water, no light, no work, no medical post, and the little school hadn’t been open for years because it had no teacher. What harm could I have done them, when they no longer had anything to lose, even if the famous “shock” had proved to be as apocalyptic as propaganda made it out to be? Of what free education could those poor creatures have been deprived, when their only school had already long since been closed by national poverty? With their tremendous defenselessness, they were the best possible living proof that Peru could not continue to exist any longer in the populist delirium, in the demagogic lie of the redistribution of a wealth decreasing by the day, providing instead dramatic evidence of the need for changing direction, for creating work and wealth through forced marches, for rectifying policies that were each day driving more new masses of Peruvians into a state of precariousness and primitivism that (with the exception of Haiti) no longer had any equivalent in Latin America. There was no way even to try to explain this to them. Despite the shower of stones, which Professor Oshiro and his colleagues tried to ward off with their coats spread out like an awning over my head, I made several attempts to talk to them over a loudspeaker, from the flatbed of a truck, but the outcries and the contention made such a din that I was forced to give up. That night, in the Hotel de Turistas in Piura, those faces and fists of exacerbated Piurans, who would have given anything to lynch me, made me reflect for a good while, before falling into my usual troubled sleep, on the incongruousness of my political adventure, and wish even more impatiently than on other days for June 10, liberation day, to arrive.