In the end, the results were precisely the opposite of what I had foreseen. The infrastructures of the allies never amalgamated during the campaign and, on the contrary, in many places in the interior the two parties devoted their energies to fighting each other, because of personal rivalries and petty greed, and sometimes, as in Piura, exchanging savage press releases via the radio and the newspapers that couldn’t have pleased their adversaries more. Despite our deficiencies as far as organization was concerned, and they were serious ones, Libertad may well have been, among the forces of the Front — in addition to AP and the PPC, it was joined by SODE (Solidaridad y Democracia: Solidarity and Democracy), a small group of executives and professionals — the one that managed to set up the most widespread network of committees in the country (though not for long).
The alliance with AP and the PPC was not the principal reason for my defeat in the elections. A number of factors brought it about, and doubtless a great deal of the responsibility for my failure was my own, for having focused the entire campaign on the defense of a program for government, for disregarding the exclusively political aspects of the situation, for giving signs of intransigence and maintaining, from beginning to end, an openness in my proposals that made me vulnerable to the attacks and the maneuvers to discredit me and that frightened off many of my initial supporters. But the alliance thanks to which the AP and the PPC had governed the country between 1980 and 1985 contributed to the fact that popular confidence in the Front — which lasted throughout nearly the entire campaign — was precarious and, at a certain juncture, vanished altogether.
All through this period of close to three years I met with Belaunde and Bedoya at intervals of two or three times a month, alternating in the beginning the places where we met so as to dodge the pack of reporters, and then later on at my house for the most part. Our meetings took place in the morning, around ten o’clock. Bedoya invariably arrived late, which irritated Belaunde, a most punctual man and always eager for the meetings to end promptly so that he could be off to the Club Regatas to swim and play badminton (he sometimes came with his slippers and racquet).
It is hard to imagine two people — two politicians — so completely different. Belaunde had been born in an aristocratic family, though not a wealthy one, and had reached the winter of his life heaped with honors: two presidential victories and an image as an upright, democratic statesman that not even his bitterest adversaries denied him. Bedoya, who was somewhat younger, born in Callao in 1919, and whose origins were much humbler — he came from a lower-middleclass family — had had a long way to go in order to carve out a career for himself, as an attorney. His political career had had a brief apogee — he had been a magnificent mayor of the capital, from 1964 to 1966, during Belaunde’s first term, and had been reelected from 1967 to 1969, but after that nothing had enabled him to shake off the labels of “reactionary,” “defender of the oligarchy,” and “man of the extreme right” that the left had pinned on him, and he was defeated both times he ran for president (in 1980 and 1985). Those labels, along with his not being a very good speaker and sometimes acting too hastily, contributed to the fact that Peruvians were never going to allow him to head the government of the country. It was an error for which we paid dearly, especially in the 1985 election, for his administration would surely have been less populist than Alan García’s, been more aggressive against terrorism and, without the slightest doubt, more honest.
Of the two of them, the one who was eloquent and brilliant, elegant and charming, was Belaunde. Bedoya, on the other hand, could be far off the mark and long-winded, with his long courtroom-style soliloquies that infuriated Belaunde, a man constitutionally allergic to anything abstract and totally uninterested in ideologies and doctrines. (The ideology of Popular Action consisted of an elementary form of populism — a great many public works projects — inspired by Roosevelt’s New Deal, that president being the model of a statesman for Belaunde; of nationalistic slogans like “the conquest of Peru by Peruvians” and of romantic allusions to the empire of the Incas and the cooperative and communal work of the pre-Hispanic people of the Andes.) But of the two, Bedoya proved to be more flexible and ready to make concessions for the sake of the alliance, and the one who, once we had arrived at an agreement, fulfilled it to the letter. Belaunde always acted — keeping up, I readily grant, the proper formalities at all times — as if the Democratic Front were Popular Action, and the Christian Popular Party and Libertad two mere bit players. Beneath his most elegant manners there was a certain vanity about him, not a little stubbornness, and a touch of the caudillo — the political boss accustomed to doing and undoing whatever he pleased in his party without anybody ever daring to contradict him. Very courageous, a public speaker with a splendid nineteenth-century rhetorical style, a man of melodramatic gestures — fighting a duel, for instance — he had been one of the moving forces of the Democratic Front in 1945, which won José Luis Bustamante y Rivero the presidency, and he had suddenly attracted attention in the last years of General Odría’s dictatorship (1948–56) as a reformist leader, determined to make social changes and modernize Peru. His winning of the presidency in 1963 stirred up enormous hope. But his administration did not accomplish very much, in large part because of the APRA and the faction supporting Odría (which, acting as allies in Congress, where they had a majority, blocked all of Belaunde’s projects, beginning with agrarian reform) and in part because of his indecision and his bad choices of collaborators. Velasco’s military coup sent him into exile in Argentina, from which he went to the United States, where he lived all during the days of the dictatorship, very modestly, teaching. In his second term, unlike the first, he was not overthrown by the military, but that was perhaps his one merit: surviving until the next election. For in every other respect — and above all in his economic policy — he was a failure. During his first two years he entrusted the premiership and the portfolio of minister of finance to Manuel Ulloa, an intelligent and likable man, extremely loyal to him but frivolous to the point of irresponsibility. He did not rectify any of the catastrophic measures taken by the dictatorship, such as the socialization of land and the nationalization of the most important companies in the country. He dangerously increased the national debt, failed to confront terrorism resolutely when it was still in its germinating stage, was unable to control the corruption that contaminated people in his own administration, and allowed inflation to rage unchecked.
I had voted for Belaunde every time he was a candidate, and even though I was aware of his shortcomings, I defended his second term as president, since it seemed to me that after twelve years of dictatorship, the reconstruction of democracy was the first priority and could best be attained if Popular Action remained in power. And also because those who attacked it — the APRA and the United Left — represented even worse choices. And, above all else, because there is, in the person of Belaunde, in addition to his wide reading of good books and his good manners, a profound decency, along with two qualities that I have always admired in him, inasmuch as they are not often found in Peruvian politicians: a genuine belief in democracy* and absolute honesty. He is one of the few presidents in our history who left the Presidential Palace poorer than when he entered it. But mine was qualified support, not exempt at times from criticism of his administration, of which, moreover, I was never a part. With just one exception, I refused all the posts he offered me: the embassies in London and in Washington, the Ministry of Education and that of Foreign Relations and, finally, the office of prime minister. The exception was the unremunerated, month-long appointment, the memory of which gave Patricia and me nightmares, as one of the members of the commission investigating the killing of eight journalists in a remote region of the Andes, Uchuraccay,† for which I had been mercilessly attacked and for which I was about to be taken to court.