Very early on, I brought up the subject in a closed meeting of Libertad. The political committee agreed with me that, in conformity with the rule of sincerity that we had established for ourselves, I could not hide my status as an agnostic for the sake of an easier win at the polls. At the same time, it was imperative for us, no matter how great the provocations, to avoid controversy over the religious question. None of us suspected at the time — toward the end of 1987—the importance that the subject of religion would take on between the first and the second round of voting, as a result of the successful mobilization of the evangelical churches in favor of Fujimori.
Among the leaders of the Freedom Movement there were a fair number of Catholics cut from the same cloth as Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy: dedicated, consistent, and on very close terms with the hierarchy or with certain ecclesiastical orders or institutions, to the point that I once hinted that, surrounded by people like them, it was likely that the Holy Spirit would preside over the sessions of our political committee. In the 1960s, Miguel Cruchaga had been the organizer of the Catholic renewal movement in Peru. Lucho Bustamante kept up a very close friendship with the Jesuits, in whose school he had studied, and taught at the University of the Pacific, which had ties to the order. Our brand-new secretary of the departamento of Lima, Rafael Rey, was a member of Opus Dei, someone who had taken the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity (the latter of which, let me say in passing, he defended like a besieged fortress against the disrespectful assaults of many female members of Libertad). And on the political committee there were several dyed-in-the-wool Catholics—“catholic, apostolic, Roman, and holier than thou,” as one of them joked. (Among the best-known ones I shall mention Beatriz Merino, Pedro Cateriano, and Enrique Chirinos Soto.)
Even though, I am certain, my religious position perturbed all of them, I must thank them for never making me aware of it, not even in a veiled way, and not even at the times when the campaign against my “atheism” became more violent still. It is true that, in accordance with what we advocated with regard to privacy, we never discussed religion in the Freedom Movement. Nor did my Catholic friends come forth to make public use of their status to put a stop to the attacks: they were, as I have already said, believers who tried to live in accordance with their beliefs, for whom it was not conceivable to exploit their faith, either to attack the adversary or to promote themselves.
This was also how Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy comported himself. Throughout the entire campaign he maintained an absolute discretion regarding the subject of religion, which never turned up in our conversations, not even when thorny questions arose, such as birth control, which I explicitly defended and which he would have found it hard to approve of.
But apart from his being discreet and completely honest — I was happy with the image of moral purity that he brought with him to his candidacy for the office of second vice president — Don Ernesto was a marvelous fellow campaigner. He was tireless and invariably good-humored, and his physical resistance left all of us amazed, as did his tact and his spirit of solidarity: he never used his advanced age or his prestige to ask for or to accept the slightest privilege. I sometimes had to firmly demand that he not accompany me — when it was a question, for instance, of going to places such as Huancavelica or Cerro de Pasco, where it was necessary to go up to altitudes of more than twelve thousand feet — because he was always all set to climb steep slopes in the Andes, sweat bullets in the jungle, or shiver from the cold on high mountain plateaus in order to reach all the towns on the planned itinerary. His joyousness, his naturalness and straightforwardness, his ability to adapt to the rigors of the campaign, and his youthful enthusiasm for what we were doing helped to make the endless trips back and forth to towns, districts, and regions bearable. He was usually the first speaker at our rallies. He spoke slowly, his long arms stretched out and his ascetic silhouette towering over all of us on the speakers’ platform. And with his little piping, slightly falsetto voice and a roguish twinkle in his eyes he would end his brief speech with a metaphor: “I have leaned over to listen to the pulse of the depths of Peru. And what did I hear? What did that deep throbbing say? Fre-de-mo! Fre-de-mo! Fre-de-mo!”
I had heard, since before my trip to Europe, that Eduardo Orrego refused to accept the candidacy for the mayoralty of Lima that Popular Action offered him. He left for France with his wife, Carolina, almost at the same time as I returned, and in the press there were many speculations about this. Belaunde confirmed to me that Orrego was hesitant, but he told me that he was confident that he could make him change his mind before the final date for candidates to register — August 14—and asked me to help persuade him.
I phoned him in Paris. Eduardo seemed to me to have his mind firmly made up. The reason he put forward was a tactical one. The opinion polls for the mayoralty predicted that he would win 20 percent, half of what I would receive in the two rounds of voting for the presidency. If he won fewer votes or lost the municipal election, he told me, his failure would be a millstone around my neck for my campaign. We ought not to take the risk of his losing. When judged from the perspective of what occurred in the municipal elections, his refusal to run proved that his intuition was correct. Had he had a presentiment that he’d be beaten?
Perhaps there was another, more secret, reason. At the time of my withdrawal as a presidential candidate and the uproar that followed, Congressman Francisco Belaunde Terry — the brother of the former president, the founder of Popular Action, and one of the populists who had suffered from the most harassment by Velasco’s dictatorship — had held Orrego responsible for the intransigence of Popular Action concerning the lists of joint candidates, saying, if the newspapers weren’t lying, very harsh things about him. Although I never heard Orrego make the slightest allusion to the incident, this episode may have influenced his decision.
(Let me say, between parentheses, that Francisco Belaunde Terry had always been one of the populists whom I respected most, one of those rare politicians who lend dignity to politics. Because of his independence, which sometimes made him stand up to his own party when his conscience so dictated, and because of that maniacal uprightness of his that led him, despite his meager financial means, never to accept the raises in salaries, bonuses, and reimbursements that the members of Congress continually passed to increase their incomes, and to give back his paychecks or donate them to the doormen and congressional employees when the APRA forced though a measure that prohibited a congressman or a senator from refusing the increases. Because of his utter scorn for the conventions and the calculations that rule the life of the politician, Francisco Belaunde — tall and gaunt, a living historical encyclopedia, a voracious reader and an elegant speaker, yet one who gave the impression of having stepped out of literature and the past — always struck me as being a man from another time or from another country, a lamb set down in the middle of a pack of wolves. He was capable of saying what he thought and believed, although that trait put him in prison and sent him into exile, as happened to him during the dictatorships of Odría and Velasco, and yet he persisted, even though it made enemies of the members of his own party or of the institutions which every good politician fears and fawns over: the communications media. In the 1985 election campaign, on the occasion when I announced on television that I would not vote for Alan García but for Bedoya Reyes for president, I added that, on the lists of congressional candidates, I would cast my ballot for two candidates whom, for the welfare of Peru, I would like to see in Congress: Miguel Cruchaga and Francisco Belaunde Terry.