But now that I was returning to Peru with far-reaching political intentions, it was best to confront the bull of Loreto from the very start and know what to expect. Miguel Cruchaga and Freddy Cooper went to the jungle to prepare for my arrival. I came by plane alone, via Miami, since Patricia, as a sign of protest against these first signs of proselytism, refused to come with me. A small but cordial crowd welcomed me at the Iquitos airport, and on the following day, December 13, in the auditorium of the Colegio San Agustín, filled to capacity, I spoke of my relationship to Amazonia and of how much my novels, in particular Pantaleón y las visitadoras, owed to that region. The women of Loreto, who constituted the great majority of my listeners, gave proof of better humor than my adversaries, laughing at my anecdotes concerning that fictitious work (and, two and a half years later, voting overwhelmingly for me in the general elections, since it was in Loreto that I won the most impressive plurality in the country).
The stop-off in Loreto took place without incident, in a warm and friendly atmosphere, and the only unforeseen event was Freddy Cooper’s fit of rage, on getting up at midnight in the Hotel de Turistas where we spent the night and discovering that the bodyguards responsible for our safety had all gone off to the brothel.
As soon as I arrived in Lima, on the 14th of December, I set to work creating that Frente Democrático (Democratic Front)* which the reporters rebaptized with the dreadful contraction Fredemo (which Belaunde and I always refused to use).
I went to visit, separately, the leaders of Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party, and both Fernando Belaunde and Luis Bedoya Reyes proved favorable to the idea of the Front. We held many meetings, full of circumlocutions and veiled tensions, in order to clear away the obstacles conspiring against the alliance. Bedoya was much more enthusiastic about the idea than Belaunde, for the latter had to confront the stubborn opposition of many of his friends and fellow party members, bent on his being, once again, the candidate for president and insistent that Popular Action alone should present the opposition candidate. With his superb tact, Belaunde evaded and discouraged these pressures, little by little, but it was a joyless exercise, for he doubtless feared that, with the realization that their leader was about to enter winter quarters — at the time he was, after all, in his middle seventies — his party, so closely linked to him personally, would fall to pieces.
Finally, after many months of negotiations in which, very often, I felt asphyxiated by his byzantine maneuvers, we agreed to set up a tripartite commission charged with the task of setting up the bases of the alliance. Three delegates represented AP on it, three the PPC, and three others the “independents,” whose representatives acknowledged me as their leader and for whom we chose a name that stood for something that as yet did not exist: the Movimiento Libertad (Freedom Movement). The three delegates whom I designated to represent the Freedom Movement — Miguel Cruchaga, Luis Bustamante, and Miguel Vega Alvear — would later constitute, with Freddy Cooper and me, the first executive committee of that movement, Libertad, that we were beginning to create, at top speed, in those final days of 1987 and the beginning ones of 1988, at the same time that we were organizing the Democratic Front.
I have been endlessly criticized for this alliance with two traditional parties that had already been in power (for a good part of Belaunde Terry’s two terms as president, Bedoya Reyes had been his ally). This alliance, critics maintain, took away the freshness and the newness of my candidacy and made it appear to be a machination of the old bosses of the Peruvian right — who had lost prestige after the negative balance sheet of Belaunde’s second term as president — with the aim of returning to power through a third person. “How could the Peruvian people believe in the ‘great change’ that you offered,” they’ve asked me, “if you went along arm in arm with those who governed the country between 1980 and 1985 without changing a single thing that was going badly in Peru? When you joined up with Belaunde and Bedoya, you committed suicide.”
I was aware from the beginning of the risks that such an alliance meant, but I decided to run them for two reasons. The first: because so many reforms were needed in Peru that, in order to see them through, a broad popular base was required. AP and the PPC had influence in significant sectors and both parties had impeccable democratic credentials in their favor. If we present ourselves to the voters as separate parties, at the polls, I told myself, the splitting of the votes for the center and the right will make either the United Left or APRA the winner. The negative image of “old pols” can be effaced with a plan for deep-seated reforms that would not have anything to do with the populism of AP or the conservatism of the PPC, but would be associated, rather, with a radical liberalism never before put forward in Peru. These are the ideas that will give freshness and newness to the Front.
Moreover, I was afraid that three years would not be enough, in a country with the complicated problems of Peru — vast zones affected by terrorism, roads in terrible condition or nonexistent, an almost total lack of means of communication — for a new organization of inexperienced people such as Libertad to set up branches in all the provinces and districts in order to compete with the APRA, which in addition to its good organization could also count this time on all the apparatus of the state as part of its electoral machine, and to put up a fight against a left that had been battle-hardened in a number of electoral contests. However discredited they might be, I calculated, AP and the PPC can count on a national infrastructure, indispensable for winning the election.
Both calculations were quite wrong. It is true that my friends and I, fighting with the allies at times like cats and dogs, with Popular Action especially, were able to see to it that the Front’s program for governing was reformist and radical. But when election day came, this carried less weight in the popular sectors than the presence among us of names and faces that had lost all credibility in view of their past political activities. And, what was more, it was ingenuous on my part to believe that Peruvians would vote for ideas. They voted the way people do in an underdeveloped democracy, and sometimes in the mature ones as well — on the basis of images, myths, heart throbs, or on account of obscure feelings and resentments with no particular connection to processes of reason.
The other supposition was even more erroneous. Neither Popular Action nor the Christian Popular Party had a solid national organization. The latter had never had one. A small party, largely middleclass, about all it could count on outside of Lima was a few committees in the capital cities of departamentos and provinces and very few followers. And Popular Action, despite having won two presidential elections and having been in its best periods a mass party, never reached the point of having the disciplined, efficient organization that the APRA had. It was always an alluvial party that sedimented around its leader during elections and then scattered. But following its reverse in 1985—its presidential candidate, Dr. Javier Alva Orlandini, obtained just over 6 percent of the vote — it had lost its impetus and begun to fall apart. Its committees, where such existed, were made up of former bureaucrats, held in bad repute sometimes because of abuses or poor management in their assigned jobs, many of whom appeared to want the Front to win so that they could go back to their old ways.