For the first time, I was overcome by the idea that I had been badly mistaken to embark upon this political adventure. Perhaps Patricia was right. Was it worthwhile to go on? The future looked at once dark and ludicrous. AP and the PPC would go on squabbling to see who would head the electoral lists and how many candidates for municipal councilman each party would get and what places the candidates of each party would have on the lists, until the Front had lost all the prestige it had. Was it in this spirit that we would achieve the great peaceful transformation? Was it possible with such an attitude to dismantle the macrocephalic state and transfer our immense public sector into the hands of the citizenry? The moment our own supporters were elected to office, wouldn’t all of them immediately make a move — exactly as the Apristas had done — to divide up the administration into smaller units and demand that still more divisions be created so that there would be more public posts to fill?
The worst of all this was how blind we had been to what was going on around us. In mid-1989 armed attacks were becoming more and more frequent from one end of the country to the other; according to the government, they had already caused some eighteen thousand deaths. Whole regions — such as the Huallaga area, in the jungle, and nearly the whole of the central Andes — were little short of being completely under the control of Sendero Luminoso and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. Alan García’s policy had caused the country’s hard currency reserves to vanish into thin air and the printing of paper money with no backing presaged an inflationary explosion. Companies were working at a half and in some instances a third of their proven capacity. Those Peruvians who were able to do so were taking their money out of the country and those who managed to find a job abroad left. Tax revenues had fallen to the point where we were suffering from a general collapse of public services. Every night the television screens showed heartbreaking scenes of hospitals without medicines or beds, of schools without desks, without blackboards, and sometimes without roofs or walls, of districts without water or light, of streets strewn with refuse, of production workers and office clerks on strike, in desperation over the dizzying fall in the standards of living of the population. And the Democratic Front was paralyzed — over which party would propose its list in each of the municipalities!
When dawn came, I drew up a stern letter* addressed to Belaunde and Bedoya, informing them that, in view of their inability to reach an agreement, I was withdrawing as a presidential candidate. I woke Patricia up to read her the text, and it surprised me that, instead of rejoicing, she had certain reservations regarding my resigning as a candidate. We made plans to go abroad immediately so as to avoid the predictable pressures. I had been invited to receive a literary prize in Italy — the Scanno, in the Abruzzi — so the next day we bought our tickets, in secret, for twenty-four hours later. That afternoon I sent the letter, via Álvaro, my older son, to Belaunde and to Bedoya, after informing the executive committee of Libertad of my decision. I saw some of my friends with sad faces — I remember Cruchaga’s, paper-white, and Freddy’s, as red as a prawn’s — but none of them attempted to dissuade me. The truth is that they too were tired of the absurd way in which the Front had bogged down. I gave instructions to the security guards not to allow anyone to enter the house and we unplugged the telephone. The news reached the communications media early that evening and had the effect of a bombshell. All the channels began their nightly news program with it. Dozens of reporters surrounded my house and immediately a parade of people from all the political camps of the Front began. But I received no one nor did I appear when, later on, a spontaneous demonstration of some hundreds of members of Libertad surrounded the house, with Enrique Chirinos Soto, Miguel Cruchaga, and Alfredo Barnechea as speakers.
Early in the morning on June 22, the security guards took us to the airport and managed to get us aboard the Air France flight immediately, thereby enabling us to dodge another demonstration of members of Libertad, headed by Miguel Cruchaga, Chino Urbina, and Pedro Guevara, whom I glimpsed in the distance from the little window of the plane.
When we arrived in Italy, two journalists were waiting there for me, both of whom, heaven only knows how, had discovered where I was headed: Juan Cruz, from El País in Madrid, and Paul Yule, from the BBC, who was making a documentary on my candidacy. My conversation with them surprised me, since both of them were convinced that my resignation was simply a tactic to force the intractable allies to give in.
In the end, that was what everyone would believe, and the practical result, when the episode was over, was that after all, contrary to what many people thought, I wasn’t as bad a politician as I seemed to be. The truth of the matter is that my resignation was not planned with the intention of marshaling public opinion so as to put pressure on AP and the PPC. It was genuine, stemming from my loathing for the political maneuvering in which the Front was submerged, the conviction that the alliance was not going to work, that we would disappoint the expectations of many people, and that my effort was going to be useless. But Patricia, who never lets me get away with anything, says that that, too, is a debatable truth. For if I had really believed that there was no hope, I would have used the word irrevocable in my letter of resignation, something I had not done. So that perhaps, as she believes, in some secret compartment I harbored the illusion — the desire — that my letter would settle our differences.
It did settle them, temporarily. From the day I left the country, the independent communications media severely criticized the PPC and AP, and criticisms rained down on the heads of Bedoya and Belaunde in the form of editorials, articles, and statements. The number of people who announced their intention to vote for me suddenly rose impressively all over the country and in every social sector. Up until then public opinion polls had always shown me to be the leading candidate against the candidates of the APRA (Alva Castro) and the United Left (Alfonso Barrantes), but with a potential vote that never went beyond 35 percent of the total. At this point the figure rose to 50 percent, the highest I had attained at any point in the campaign. Libertad enrolled thousands of new members, to the point that membership cards gave out and more had to be printed in a great hurry. Our various local headquarters were filled to overflowing, day and night, by a multitude of supporters and members who urged us to break with AP and the PPC and go before the voters by ourselves. And on my return to Lima, I found 4,890 letters (according to Rosi and Lucía, who counted them) from all over Peru, congratulating me for having broken with the other parties (with Popular Action in particular, which had aroused more antagonisms).
Some months before, we had hired the Sawyer/Miller Group as advisers, an international firm with extensive experience in election campaigns, since they had worked with Cory Aquino in the Philippines and with a number of presidential candidates in Latin America, among them the Bolivian Sánchez de Lozada, who was the one who recommended the firm to us. This matter of asking a foreign company for advice concerning an electoral battle in Peru seemed to arouse in Belaunde, who had twice won the presidency without the need for this sort of help, a hilarity that his inbred sense of politeness kept under control with only the greatest difficulty. But the fact is that Mark Malloch Brown and his collaborators at the Sawyer/Miller Group were a great help with their opinion polls, which allowed me to keep close track of the feelings, fears, hopes, and changing mood of that complicated mosaic that goes to make up Peru. Their predictions were usually right on the mark. A great deal of Mark’s advice was rejected because it clashed with certain matters of principle — I wanted the election to be won in a certain way and for a specific purpose — and frequently the consequences were precisely the ones that he had predicted. One of these pieces of advice, from the first opinion survey in depth taken at the beginning of 1988 down to the eve of the second electoral round — in June 1990—was to break with the allies and present myself as an independent candidate, with no ties to the political establishment, and to represent myself, rather, as coming to save Peru from the state into which the politicians had plunged it — all of them, regardless of their ideologies. His advice was based on a conclusion that all the surveys had shown from the beginning of the campaign to the end: that there was, in the heart of the country — the C and D sectors, those poor and extremely poor Peruvians who represented two-thirds of the electorate — a profound disillusionment with and great rancor toward political parties, particularly those that had already enjoyed power. The surveys also showed that the positive feelings I had been able to arouse in the heart of the country bore a direct relationship to my image as someone who came from outside the political milieu, of an independent with no ties to the established parties. The creation of the Democratic Front and my constant presence in the media alongside two such long-standing establishment figures as Bedoya and Belaunde were inevitably going to erode that image during the long campaign and support for me would shift toward one or another of my adversaries (Mark thought that it would be Barrantes, the leftist candidate).