Of all the social groups that we did our best to attract to the Freedom Movement, the one we had the most success with was the one which produced those engineers, architects, attorneys, physicians, entrepreneurs, economists who made up the committees of the Plan for Governing. Most of them had never been in politics before and had no intention of being politically active in the future. They loved their professions and wanted only to be able to practice them successfully, in a Peru different from the one that they could see falling apart before their eyes. Though they were hesitant at first, we eventually managed to persuade them that only with the cooperation of people like themselves could we make Peruvian politics more decent and more effective.
Between that meeting in Szyszlo’s studio and March 15, 1988, when we opened the headquarters of the Freedom Movement, in Magdalena del Mar, there intervened five months of exhausting efforts to attract supporters. We worked long and hard, but unsystematically, feeling our way. Nobody in the original group had any experience as an activist or a gift for organization. And I to an even lesser degree than my friends. Having spent my life in a study, making up stories, was not the best possible preparation for founding a political movement. And my right arm in this task, a faithful and beloved friend, Miguel Cruchaga, the first secretary general of Libertad, who had lived shut up in his architect’s studio and was most unsociable, was in no position to make up for my ineffectiveness. But not for lack of dedication: he was the first, in a gesture that deserves to be called heroic, to give up his profession in order to devote himself full time to the Movement. Later others would do the same, making out as best they could or living in near poverty, with only the small amount of financial help that Libertad managed to give them. From public squares, we moved on to private houses in those last months of 1987 and the early ones of 1988. Friends or sympathizers invited young people of their neighborhoods in and Miguel Cruchaga and I talked to them, answered their questions, and provoked discussions that went on till late at night. One of those meetings took place at the home of Gladys and Carlos Urbina, who would later be great guiding spirits of the mobilization campaign. And another one at the home of Bertha Vega Alvear, who, with a group of women, would found, shortly thereafter, Acción Solidaria, the Solidarity program sponsored by Libertad.
It was also one of our goals to recover — to bring back to life — those intellectuals, journalists, or politicians who, in the past, had defended liberal positions, arguing against socialists and populists and countering, by promoting the theory of the free market, the tide of paternalism and protectionism that had submerged Peru. In order to attain that goal we organized the Jornadas por la Libertad: Freedom Days. They lasted from nine in the morning till nine at night. There were talks whose purpose was to show, with statistics, how greatly the various nationalizations had impoverished the country and increased discrimination and injustice, and how the policy of government intervention, besides destroying industry, went against the interests of consumers and favored small-scale mafias which the system of quotas and preferential dollar exchange rates enriched without their having to compete or to serve the public. And there were talks devoted to explaining the “informal economy” as an answer on the part of the poor to the discrimination of which they were the object, since proper legal licensing for even the smallest enterprise or business activity was expensive and selective, available only to those who had money or political pull. And to defending those itinerant peddlers, artisans, tradesmen, and small-scale businessmen, of modest origins, working as informales, who in many fields — transportation and housing in particular — had proved to be more efficient than the state and sometimes even more so than the large-scale, full-time entrepreneurs who were legally licensed.
During the Freedom Days, the criticism of socialism and mercantilist capitalism endeavored to point out the deep-seated identity of two systems which, beneath their divergences, were related by virtue of the predominant role played in both by the state, the “planner” of economic activity and the dispenser of privileges. A recurrent theme was the necessity of reforming that state — by strengthening it, by streamlining and paring away its excesses, by opening it up to technology, and by making it moral — as a fundamental requirement for development.
There was always a talk too on those countries of the Third World to which market-oriented policies and the promotion of exports and of private enterprise had brought rapid growth, countries such as the four “Asian dragons”—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — or Chile. In all those countries, the more or less liberal economic reforms were in flagrant contradiction to the repressive and dictatorial activity of their governments, and in the course of the Freedom Days we did our best to show that this contradiction was neither acceptable nor necessary. Freedom had to be understood as something indivisible, politically and economically. The Freedom Movement must win an electoral mandate for these ideas that would allow us to concretize them in a democratic civilian regime. A great liberal reform was possible under democratic rule, provided that a clear majority voted for it. To achieve this, it was indispensable to be open and aboveboard, explaining in detail what we wanted to do and the price that it would exact.
We held the first Freedom Day in the Hotel Crillón, in Lima, on February 6, 1988; the second, devoted to agrarian subjects, at the San José hacienda in Chincha on February 18; on February 26, in Arequipa; a Young People’s Day, in Lima, on March 5; on March 12, a day in the young town of Huáscar, on the informal economy; and on March 14, a Women’s Day, in which there participated for the first time an economist who became yet another of the leaders of Libertad: Beatriz Merino.
During these Freedom Days we managed to line up hundreds of supporters, but their greatest importance lay in the field of ideas. For many of those who attended them it was unheard of for a political organization in Peru to speak out, in the most straightforward terms, in favor of a free market, to defend capitalism as more efficient and fairer than socialism and as the only system capable of safeguarding people’s freedoms, to see in private enterprise the driving force of development and call for a “culture based on success” instead of on resentment and the state handouts advocated by Marxists and conservatives alike, even though their rhetoric was different. The word capitalism had come to be taboo, except to denigrate it. (I received strong recommendations from leaders of AP and the PPC never to use it in speeches.)