(Ever since the demonstration in the Plaza San Martín — and perhaps even before that — Francisco Belaunde Terry had been a persistent advocate of the idea of the Front and of my candidacy. And he had said very clearly that he disagreed with the populists who insisted, violently at times, not hiding their hostility toward the Freedom Movement and toward me, that his brother Fernando be a candidate once again. This, as is only natural, had earned him the animosity of many of his fellow party members, in particular those nobodies whose only credential for occupying leadership posts in Popular Action and being its candidates for Congress was their adulation of its leader, and hence they had hindered, by every possible means, the creation of the alliance. This situation was made worse for Francisco Belaunde Terry when, on the night of my withdrawal in June 1989, he appeared at my house, in the very middle of a demonstration by members of the Freedom Movement, and immediately after went to the headquarters of Libertad to express his support for the movement. Moreover, his wife, Isabelita, was a devoted activist in Acción Solidaria — the Solidarity program — and worked for months with Patricia to promote social aid programs in the shantytowns of San Juan de Lurigancho.
(Those mediocrities who, as happens in every party and particularly in those most ridden with bossism, are the ones who usually take over the leadership posts, plotted together to keep Francisco Belaunde Terry — without the shadow of a doubt the most mainstream populist member of Congress — from being the candidate of his party on the lists of the Democratic Front. Libertad then proposed that he be one of our candidates for the congressman’s seat for Lima and he accepted, honoring our quota with his name. But, to the misfortune of the Peruvian Congress, he was not elected.)
When I told Belaunde Terry of my conversation with Orrego, he resigned himself to finding a replacement for him. He asked me what I thought of Juan Incháustegui and I hastened to tell him that he seemed to me to be a magnificent choice. An engineer and a man from the provinces, he had been a good minister of energy and mines and had signed up as a member of AP not before but after having been minister, in the last days of Belaunde’s second term in office. Although I knew him only by sight, I was very much aware of the laudatory terms in which Belaunde had referred to him in our conversations in the Presidential Palace, at the midpoint of his presidency.
After certain hesitations — he was a man of modest financial resources and the income for the mayor of Lima was minimal — Incháustegui agreed to represent the Front. The PPC, for its part, chose Lourdes Flores Nano as its candidate for representative mayor. A young attorney, Lourdes had become very popular because of her likable nature and her fine oratory during the mobilization against the nationalization of the banks.
The pair of them were magnificent and I breathed a sigh of relief, certain that we would win the municipal election in Lima. The affable presence of Incháustegui, his flashes of wit, his lack of cutting polemic, won the sympathies of voters. His status as a man from the provinces was another good credential. Although he had been born in Arequipa, he had studied and lived in Cuzco and considered himself a native of that city, so that this ought to win many people over in the city of provincials that the capital of Peru had become. And, there alongside him, the warmth, youth, and intelligence of Lourdes Flores Nano — a new face in Peruvian politics — was an excellent complement.
However, from September on the opinion polls began to predict that the most votes would go not to Incháustegui but to a newcomer, Ricardo Belmont Cassinelli. The owner of a radio station and of a small-scale television channel, on which for several years he had been the emcee of a very popular talk show—“Habla el Pueblo” (“The People Speak”) — Belmont had never entered politics before, nor did he seem interested in doing so. His name was associated, rather, with sports, which he engaged in and promoted — he had been a boxing impresario — and in TV marathons to raise funds for the San Juan de Dios Clinic, which he had organized for several years. His image was that of a likable emcee and a favorite of the masses — because of his manner of speaking filled with “in” words, such as manito, for “pal,” patita, for “getting the bounce,” chelita, for “blondie,” and all the picturesque expressions of the latest slang popular with teenagers — associated with the world of show business, of popular singers, comedians, and vedettes, and not with public affairs. However, in the preceding municipal election certain publications, among them Caretas, had mentioned his name as a possible independent candidate for the mayoralty of Lima.
In mid-June of 1989, Belmont suddenly sent out the call for a rally in the Plaza Grau, in the district of La Victoria, in which, backed by Augusto Polo Campos, the composer of traditional Peruvian music, he announced the creation of the civic movement Obras and his candidacy for mayor.
In the interviews on TV that he took part in during the weeks that followed, Belmont put forth very simple ideas, which he was to repeat all through his campaign. He was an independent disillusioned by political parties and by politicians, since they had never fulfilled their promises. It was time for professional experts and technicians to take over the solution of problems. He always added that his ideology could be expressed in just one formula: he was for private enterprise. He also said that he was going to vote for me in the presidential election, “because my ideas are the same as Vargas Llosa’s,” but that he didn’t trust my allies: hadn’t AP and the PPC already been in power? And what had they done?
(These are the things that Mark Malloch Brown would have liked for me to say; or better put, those that, according to his opinion polls, Peruvian voters wanted to hear. Among those who heeded this message, ranting against politics and parties, was someone who was as much of a novice in such contests as Belmont, an obscure former rector of a technical university named Alberto Fujimori, who must have pricked up his ears and picked up a goodly number of hints.)
Since the day Belmont announced his candidacy, I was sure that this call to independent voters and his attacks on the political establishment would make an impression on our electorate. But the one who foresaw events most accurately was Miguel Cruchaga. I recall a conversation with him in which he regretted that Belmont was not our candidate: a new face and yet a well-known one, which, beneath the apparent superficiality and tastelessness of his statements, represented the sort of candidate that we were eager to promote: a self-made young entrepreneur, in favor of private initiative and a market economy, without the stigma of a political past.
On July 27, I had a long meeting with Ricardo Belmont, at my house in Barranco, at which Miguel Vega Alvear was also present. Because of the agreements within the Front, I was not able to propose to him what, no doubt, he would have accepted — being our candidate for the mayoralty — but instead limited myself to making him see the danger that his candidacy, by dividing the independent and the democratic vote, would end up handing over, once again, the municipality of Lima to the APRA (its candidate was Mercedes Cabanillas) or to the United Left (whose internal crisis, which had long been brewing, exploded at that point and brought about its division).
Belmont was very confident. My alliance with the other parties struck him as a mistake, because in the most impoverished sector, whose sentiments he sounded out every day on his programs, there was a widespread rejection of them and above all of Popular Action. He shared this opinion. He was aggrieved, moreover, because Belaunde’s administration had discriminated against him, refusing to give him back the channel that the military dictatorship had expropriated from him, as it had done in the case of the other TV channels.