Augusto Ferrando came to see me one night, shortly after that visit to the prison, to tell me that he was prepared, on his program, which had millions of TV viewers in the young towns, to announce that he would leave television and Peru if I didn’t win the election. He was certain that, with a threat like that, countless humble Peruvians, for whom “Trampolín a la fama” was manna from heaven each Saturday, would make me the winner. I gave him my heartfelt thanks, of course, but I remained silent when, in a very vague way, he led me to understand that, by doing a thing like that, he would find himself in a very vulnerable position in the future. When Augusto left, I earnestly entreated Pipo Thorndike not to come to any agreement, for any reason, with the famous TV emcee that might involve any sort of economic reward. And I hope he paid attention to me. The fact is that, on the next Saturday, or the one after that, Ferrando announced, as a matter of fact, that he would end his weekly program and leave Peru if I lost the election. (After June 10, he was as good as his word and moved to Miami. But with his audience clamoring for him, he came back and resumed “Trampolín a la fama,” a turn of events that made me happy: I would not have liked to be the cause of the disappearance of such a popular program.)
The declarations of popular support that most impressed me were the ones of two persons unknown to the general public, who had both suffered a personal tragedy and who, by publicly lending me their support, placed their peace of mind and even their lives in danger: Cecilia Martínez de Franco, the widow of the Aprista martyr Rodrigo Franco, and Alicia de Sedano, the widow of Jorge Sedano, one of the journalists murdered in Uchuraccay.
When my secretaries told me that the widow of Rodrigo Franco had asked for a meeting with me in order to offer me her support, I was dumbfounded. Her husband, a young Aprista leader on very intimate terms with Alan García, had occupied highly important posts within the administration, and when he was murdered by a terrorist commando unit, on August 29, 1987, he was president of ENCI (Empresa Nacional de Comercialización de Insumos: National Enterprise for the Commercialization of Raw Materials), one of the large state corporations. His murder greatly upset the country, because of the cruelty with which it was carried out — his wife and a little son of his very nearly died in the fierce hail of bullets that raked his little house in Naña — and because of the personal qualities of the victim, who, despite being a party politician, was universally respected. I didn’t know him, but I knew about him, through a leader of Libertad, Rafael Rey, a friend and companion of his in Opus Dei. As though his tragic death had not been enough, after his death Rodrigo Franco was subjected to the ignominy of having his name adopted by a paramilitary force of the Aprista administration, which committed numerous murders and attacks against persons and local headquarters of the extreme left, claiming responsibility in the name of the Rodrigo Franco Commando Unit.
On the morning of June 5, Cecilia Martínez de Franco came to see me. I had not met her before either, and I needed only to see her to be aware of the tremendous pressures that she must have had to overcome in order to take that step. Her own family had tried to dissuade her, warning her of what she was exposing herself to. But, making great efforts to control her emotion, she told me that she believed it to be her duty to make such a public statement, since she was certain that, in the present circumstances, that was what her husband would have done. She asked me to summon the press. With great composure, she made her declaration of support for me to the horde of reporters and cameramen who filled the living room; it predictably brought her threats of death, calumny in the press under government control, and even personal insults from President García, who called her a “dealer in corpses.” Despite all this, two days later, on one of César Hildebrandt’s programs, with a dignity that, for a few moments, seemed suddenly to ennoble the regrettable farce that the campaign had turned into, she explained her gesture once again, and again asked the Peruvian people to vote for me.
Alicia Sedano’s public declaration of support for me took place on June 8, two days before the election, without prior announcement. Her unexpected arrival at my house, with two of her children, took both the journalists and me by surprise, inasmuch as since the tragedy of January 1983, when her husband, the photographer for La República, Jorge Sedano, was murdered with seven other of his colleagues by a mob of communal landholders in Ica, in the highlands of Huanta, in a place called Uchuraccay, like all the widows or parents of the victims she had frequently been exploited by the leftist press to attack me, accusing me of having deliberately falsified the facts, in the report of the investigating commission of which I was a part, so as to exonerate the armed forces from being in any way responsible for the crime. The indescribable levels of fraud and filth reached by that long campaign, in the writings of Mirko Lauer, Guillermo Thorndike, and other professional purveyors of intellectual trash, were what had convinced Patricia of how useless political commitment was, in a country like ours, and the reason why she had tried to dissuade me from mounting the speakers’ platform on the night of August 21, 1987, in the Plaza San Martín. The “widows of the martyrs of Uchuraccay” had signed public letters against me, had appeared, always dressed from head to foot in black, at all the demonstrations of the United Left, had been unmercifully exploited by the Communist press, and, during the campaign for the second round, had been made the most of to further his campaign by Fujimori, who seated them in the first row at the Civic Center on the night of our “debate.”
What had caused Sedano’s widow to change her mind and back my candidacy? The fact that she suddenly felt revolted by the way she had been used by the real dealers in corpses. That was what she told me, in front of Patricia and her children, weeping, her voice trembling with indignation. The night of the debate at the Civic Center had been the last straw, for, in addition to demanding that they be present, they had obliged her and the other widows and relatives of the eight journalists to dress all in black so that the press would find their appearance more striking. I didn’t ask her about the names or the faces of the “they” to whom she had referred, but I could well imagine who they were. I thanked her for her gesture and her support and took advantage of the occasion to tell her that, if I had reached the situation in which I now found myself, fighting to be elected to the presidency of Peru, something that had never before been an ambition of mine, it had been, in large part, because of the tremendous experience represented in my life by that tragedy of which Jorge Sedano (one of the two journalists killed in Uchuraccay whom I had known personally) had been a victim. While investigating it, so that the truth would come out, amid all the deception and lying that surrounded what had happened in those mountain fastnesses of Ayacucho, I had been able to see from close up — to hear and touch, literally — the depths of violence and injustice in Peru, the savagery amid which so many Peruvians lived their lives, and that had convinced me of the need to do something concrete and urgent so that our unfortunate country would change direction at last.
I passed the eve of election day at home, packing suitcases, since we had tickets to fly to France on Wednesday. I had promised Bernard Pivot to appear on his program “Apostrophes”—the next to the last in a series that had appeared on French TV for fifteen years — and was determined to keep that promise whether I won or lost the election. I was quite certain that the latter would be the case and that, therefore, this trip abroad would be a long one, so I spent several hours selecting the papers and file cards I needed in order to work in the future, a long way away from Peru. I felt completely exhausted, but at the same time happy that everything was nearly over. That afternoon, Freddy, Mark Malloch Brown, and Álvaro brought me the last-minute opinion surveys, from various agencies, and they all agreed that Fujimori and I were so evenly matched that either of the two of us could win. That evening Patricia, Lucho and Roxana, and Álvaro and his girlfriend and I went out to eat at a Miraflores restaurant, and the people at the other tables were uncommonly discreet all evening long, forbearing to engage in the usual demonstrations. It was as if they too had been overcome with fatigue and were anxious for the seemingly endless campaign to be over and done with.