Between the first and the second electoral round — between April 8 and June 10, 1990—I was unable to do my studious hour or hour and a half of reading in the mornings, even though I sat down in my study with a copy of Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations or Objective Knowledge in my hands. My head was too immersed in the problems, in the tremendous tension of each day, in the news of attempts on people’s lives and of murders — for over a hundred persons with ties to the Democratic Front, district leaders, candidates for national or regional offices, or sympathizers, were assassinated in those two months, humble people, beings no different from others who all over the world are the privileged victims of political terrorism (and also of counterterrorism) — and I had to give up. But not a single day, not even the day of the election, went by without my reading a sonnet of Góngora’s, or a strophe of his Polifemo or his Soledades or one or another of his ballads or rondelets, and through these verses to feel that, if only for a few minutes, my life became purer. May these present lines stand as evidence of my gratitude toward the great man of Córdoba.
I had thought I knew Peru well, since I had made any number of trips to the interior, beginning when I was still a small boy, yet my constant travels over those three years revealed to me a profound aspect of my country, or rather, the many aspects, the many faces that constitute it, its impressive geographical, social, and ethnic diversity, the complexity of its problems, its tremendous contrasts, and the shocking levels of poverty and helplessness in which the majority of Peruvians lived.
Peru is not one country, but several, living together in mutual mistrust and ignorance, in resentment and prejudice, and in a maelstrom of violences. Violences in the plural, that of political terror and that of the drug traffic; that of common crime, which, with the country’s impoverishment and the collapse of the (limited) rule of law was making daily life more and more barbarous; and then too, of course, the so-called structural violence: discrimination, the lack of opportunity, unemployment, and the starvation wages of vast sectors of the population.
I knew all this; I had heard it and read it and seen it, from a distance and in a few quick glances, the way we Peruvians who have the good fortune to belong to the tiny privileged segment that surveys call Sector A see the rest of our compatriots. But between 1987 and 1990 I came to know all that at close range, had it at my fingertips almost every day, and to a certain degree I can say that I lived it. The Peru of my childhood was a poor and backward country: in the last decades, mainly since the beginning of Velasco’s dictatorship and in particular during Alan García’s presidency, it had become poorer still and in many regions wretchedly poverty-stricken, a country that was going back to inhuman patterns of existence. The famous “lost decade” for Latin America — lost by the populist policies of domestic development, government control, and economic nationalism recommended by the Economic Commission for Latin America, imbued with the economic philosophy of its president, Raúl Prebisch — was particularly tragic for Peru, since our governments went much further than others when it came to “defending itself” against foreign investments and sacrificing the creation of wealth to its redistribution.*
An administrative district I knew well, in earlier days, was the departamento of Piura. And today I couldn’t believe my eyes. The little towns of the province of Sullana — San Jacinto, Marcavelica, Salitral — or of Paita — Amotape, Arenal, and Tamarindo — not to mention those in the mountain country of Huancabamba and Ayabaca, or those in the desert — Catacaos, La Unión, La Arena, Sechura — seemed to have died a living death, to be languishing in hopeless apathy. It is admittedly true that, in my memory, the dwellings were as crude as they are today, made of clay and wild cane, and that people went barefoot and groused about the lack of roads, of medical dispensaries, of schools, of water, of electricity. But in these poor small towns of my childhood in Piura there was a powerful vitality, a visible light-heartedness and a hope that now seemed to have died out altogether. They had grown a good deal — some of them had tripled in size, they were full to overflowing with kids and with people without jobs, and an air of decay and decrepitude, if not of total despair, appeared to be swallowing them up. In my meetings with local townspeople, the same chorus was repeated over and over: “We’re dying of starvation. There are no jobs.”
The case of Piura is a good illustration of that phrase by the naturalist Antonio Raimondi, who, in the nineteenth century, defined Peru as “a beggar sitting on a bench made of gold.” And also a good example of how a country chooses underdevelopment. The ocean off the coast of Piura has a wealth of fish that would suffice to give work to all the men in Piura. There is oil offshore, and in the desert the immense phosphate mines of Bayóvar that have not yet been worked. And the soil of Piura is very fertile and produces abundant crops, as shown in the past by its landed estates that grew cotton, rice, and fruit and were among the best-cultivated haciendas in Peru. Why should a departamento with resources such as that die of starvation and lack of jobs?
General Velasco confiscated those large landed estates from which, indeed, the workers received a very small percentage of the profits, and turned them into cooperatives and enterprises of so-called social property, in which, in theory, the peasants replaced the former owners. In practice, the new owners were the boards of directors of these socialized enterprises, who bent their every effort to exploiting the peasants, as much as or more than the peasants’ old bosses ever had. With an aggravating circumstance. The former owners knew how to work their lands, replaced worn-out machinery, reinvested. The heads of the cooperatives and social property enterprises devoted their efforts to administering them politically, and in many cases their one concern was to plunder them. The result was that soon there were no profits to share.*
When I began my campaign, all the farm cooperatives in Piura except one were technically bankrupt. But a social property enterprise never goes broke. The state releases it each year from the debts it has contracted with the Banco Agrario (in other words, it passes the losses on to the taxpayers), and President Alan García was in the habit of turning these releases from debt into public ceremonies, with glowing revolutionary rhetoric. This explained why rural Piura had grown poorer by the year ever since the agrarian reform that had been put into effect in order that, according to Velasco’s oft-repeated slogan, “the owner will no longer feed on the poverty of the peasants.” The owners had disappeared, but the peasants were eating less than they had before. The only beneficiaries had been the petty bureaucrats catapulted to the head of these enterprises through political power, boards of directors against whom, in our meetings, members of cooperatives continually came up with the same accusations.