I made a conscious decision not to find out who had given donations and contributions to Libertad and to the Democratic Front, nor how much the sums donated amounted to, so as not to find myself, later on, if I were president, unconsciously predisposed in favor of the donors. And I made it a rule that only one person would be authorized to receive financial contributions to the campaign: Felipe Thorndike Beltrán. Pipo Thorndike, a petroleum engineer, an entrepreneur, and an agricultural expert, had been one of the victims of General Velasco’s dictatorship, which had expropriated all his holdings. He had been obliged to go into exile. While he was abroad he built his businesses and his fortune back up, and in 1980, with a stubbornness as great as his love for his native land, he returned to Peru with his money and his determination to work with a will. I had confidence in his honesty, which I knew to be as great as his generosity — he was another of those who, ever since the days of the Plaza San Martín, had devoted himself to working full time alongside me — and that was why I entrusted such a thankless and time-consuming task to him. And I set up a committee of people of unquestionable probity to supervise the expenditures of the campaign: Freddy Cooper, Miguel Cruchaga, Fernando de Szyszlo, Miguel Vega Alvear, who were sometimes given a helping hand by the administrative secretary of the Freedom Movement, Rocío Cillóniz.* I forbade all of them to give me any information whatsoever about what was received and what was spent, and laid down only the following rule: accept no money from foreign governments or from companies (all donations were to be made on a personal basis). These conditions of mine were fulfilled to the letter. I was very seldom consulted or informed about the subject. (One of the rare exceptions was the day that Pipo, deeply moved, could not keep himself from commenting to me that the head of government planning for the Front, Luis Bustamante Belaunde, had turned over to him the $40,000 that a group of businessmen had made certain he received so as to give him a helping hand in his campaign for a seat in the Senate.) The few times that, during an interview, someone mentioned the possibility of monetary aid being offered me, I interrupted him and explained that the financial circuits of Libertad and of the Democratic Front did not run through my house.
Between the first and second round of voting, one of the schemes thought up by the government to slander us consisted in having the Aprista and Communist majority in Congress appoint a committee that would summon the candidates before it to reveal how much their campaign expenditures amounted to and the sources of their financial funds. I remember the skeptical looks on the faces of the senators on that committee when I explained to them that I couldn’t tell them how much we had spent on the campaign because I didn’t know and gave them the reasons why I hadn’t wanted to know. Once the second round was over, and despite the fact that no law existed that required us to do so, through Felipe Thorndike and the head of the campaign of the Front, Freddy Cooper, we informed that committee of the amount that we had spent. And that was how I too learned that in those three years we had received and spent the equivalent of some four and a half million dollars (three-quarters of which went for TV ads).
This figure, modest by comparison with other Latin American campaigns — if one thinks, for instance, of Venezuela or Brazil — is, of course, a high one for Peru. But it is far from the astronomical sums that, according to our adversaries, we squandered in our efforts to win. (One United Left congressman, reputed to be an honest man, Agustín Haya de la Torre, stated, without one hair of his mustache trembling: “The Front has already spent more than forty million dollars.”)
We held the first congress of Libertad in the Colegio San Agustín in Lima, between April 14 and 16, 1989. It was organized by a committee headed by one of my most faithful friends, Luis Miró Quesada Garland, who, despite his formidable repugnance for politics, worked with me day and night for three years in a spirit of self-sacrifice. We elected him honorary president of the congress, to which delegates came from all over Peru. In the weeks before, there had been elections within the Movement to choose the members of the congress, and the Lima districts and neighborhoods participated enthusiastically. At the opening ceremonies, on the night of the 14th, the district committees arrived with orchestras and musical groups, and the gaiety of the young people turned the ceremony into a party. Instead of delivering my speech extemporaneously, it seemed to me that the occasion — in addition to the opening of this first congress, with Belaunde and Bedoya we had formally set up the Democratic Front, at Popular Action’s Asociación Perú, and SODE had joined the alliance — demanded that I write it beforehand and read it aloud.
Aside from this speech, I wrote only three others beforehand, though I improvised and delivered hundreds of others. During tours of the interior and the various districts of Lima I spoke several times each day, in the morning and at night, and in the last weeks there were rallies that took place at the rate of three or four a day. In order to keep my throat in good condition, Bedoya advised me to chew whole cloves between one speech and the next, and the physician who accompanied me — there were two or three of them, who took turns on duty, along with a small emergency team in case there was an attempt on my life — kept stuffing lozenges down my gullet or handing me the throat spray. I tried not to talk between rallies, so as to give my throat irritation time to go away. But even so it was sometimes impossible to keep my voice from turning hoarse or getting clogged up with phlegm. (In the jungle, late one afternoon, I arrived at the town of La Rioja with almost no voice left. And the moment I began speaking a stiff breeze came up that finished the job of ruining my vocal cords. In order to finish my speech, I had to beat myself on the chest, like Tarzan.)
Speaking in public squares was something I had never done before the Plaza San Martín. And it is something for which having given classes and lectures is of no help, and may even be a hindrance. For in Peru political oratory has remained at the romantic stage. The politician goes up onto the platform to charm, to seduce, to lull, to bill and coo. His musical phrasing is more important than his ideas, his gestures more important than his concepts. Form is everything: it can either make or destroy the content of what he says. The good orator may say absolutely nothing, but he says it with style. What matters to his audience is for him to sound good and look good. The logic, the rational order, the consistency, the critical acumen of what he is saying generally get in the way of his achieving that effect, which is attained above all through impressionistic images and metaphors, ham acting, fancy turns of phrase, and defiant remarks. The good Latin American political orator bears a much closer resemblance to a bullfighter or a rock singer than to a lecturer or a professor: his communication with the audience is achieved by way of instinct, emotion, sentiment, rather than by way of intelligence.