As for the commercial fishing industry, what had happened was even more self-destructive. In the 1950s, thanks to the vision of a handful of entrepreneurs — of one from Tacna in particular, Luis Banchero Rossi — a pioneer industry sprang up on the Peruvian coast: the manufacture of fish meal. In a few years Peru became the number-one producer in the world. This created thousands of jobs, dozens of factories, turned the little port of Chimbote into a large commercial and industrial center, and developed commercial fishing to the point that Peru, in the 1970s, became a country with a larger fishing industry than Japan.
In 1972 Velasco’s military dictatorship nationalized all the fisheries and made of them a gigantic conglomerate, Pesca Perú, which he put into the hands of a bureaucracy. The result: the ruin of the industry. When I began my travels around the country in 1987, the situation of that mammoth, Pesca Perú, was critical. Many fish meal factories had been closed — in La Libertad, in Chimbote, in Lima, in Ica, in Arequipa — and innumerable boats belonging to the conglomerate were rotting in the harbors, without the spare parts or replacements that would enable them to go out to sea to fish. This was one of the public sectors that drained off the most state subsidies, and was therefore one of the major causes of the nation’s impoverishment. (A moving episode of my campaign was the surprising decision, in October 1988, of the inhabitants of a little town on the coast of Arequipa, Atico, to gather in a body, with their mayor at the head, to plead for the privatization of the fish meal factory which, in days gone by, had been the principal source of employment in the town. It had now been closed. The moment I heard the news, I flew there in a very small plane that made a bumpy landing on the beach at Atico, so as to show the townspeople that my sympathies lay with them and to explain to them why we proposed to return to private ownership not only “their” factory but all the public enterprises in the country.)
The fishing and fish meal manufacturing disaster had hit Piura hard. I was really taken aback when I saw the coast of Sechura overcome by inertia. I remembered the harbor bustling with fishing smacks and small seagoing boats and the streets jammed with camareros—refrigerator trucks — that had crossed the vast desert to go all the way up there to buy little anchovies and other fish needed to keep the factories of Chimbote and other ports in Peru working.
And as for the oil in the marine deposit off Piura and the phosphates of Sechura, there they were, with people hoping that someday the capital and the technology needed to exploit them might come to Peru. During his first year in office, Alan García had nationalized the Belco Oil Company, an American concern that operated offshore on the northern coast. Since then the country had been involved in international litigation with the company. This, on top of the declaration of war of the Aprista government against the International Monetary Fund and the entire world financial system, its hostile policy toward foreign investments, and the growing insecurity in Peru because of terrorist activities, had made the country a plague-ridden nation: nobody extended credit to it, nobody invested in it. After being an exporter of petroleum, Peru in these years became an importer. That was why the Piura region had that heartbreaking look of desolation. And it was a symbol of what had been happening all over Peru for the past thirty years.
But compared with other regions, impoverished Piura was enviable — prosperous, almost. In the central Andes, in Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Junín, Cerro de Pasco, Apurímac, as well as in the Altiplano bordering on Bolivia — the departamento of Puno — that zone referred to as one of critical poverty, which was also the one to which terrorism and counterterrorism had brought the most bloodshed, the situation was even worse. The few roads had been disappearing little by little because of lack of maintenance and in many places Sendero Luminoso had dynamited the bridges and blocked the trails with boulders. It had also destroyed experimental crops and livestock, wrecked the buildings and killed off hundreds of vicuñas in the Pampa Galeras Reserve, pillaged agricultural cooperatives — principally those of the Valle de Mantaro, the most dynamic ones in all the high country — assassinated local agents from the Ministry of Agriculture and foreign experts in rural development who had come to Peru on international cooperation projects, murdered small-scale farmers and miners or caused them to flee for their lives, blown up tractors, power plants, hydroelectric installations, and in many places killed the cattle and rubbed out the members of cooperatives and communes who tried to oppose their razed earth policy, whereby they intended to throttle the cities to death, Lima above all, by allowing no food to reach them.
Words do not offer a precise account of what expressions such as “subsistence economy” or “critical poverty” mean in terms of human suffering, of the bestialization of life through lack of jobs and any hope of change for the better, through the impoverishment of the environment. This was the state of affairs in the mountain country in the center of Peru. Life there had always been poor, but now, with the closing of so many mines, the abandonment of crop-bearing lands, the isolation, the lack of investment, the nearly total disappearance of interchange with other regions, and the sabotage of centers of production and public services, it had been reduced to horrifying levels.
Seeing those Andean villages, daubed with the hammer and sickle and the slogans of Sendero Luminoso, from which entire families were fleeing, abandoning everything, driven half mad with desperation because of the violence and the wretched poverty, to go off to swell the armies of unemployed in the cities — villages in which those who stayed appeared to be the survivors of some biblical catastrophe — I often thought: “A country can always be worse off. Underdevelopment is bottomless.” And for the last thirty years Peru had done everything possible to ensure that there would be more and more poor people and that its poor would each day be more impoverished still. In the face of those millions of Peruvians who were literally dying of hunger, in that Andean Cordillera that has the richest mining potential on the continent — that Cordillera from which there came the gold and the silver that made the name of Peru ring out all over the world with a music of precious metals and become a synonym of munificence — wasn’t it obvious that politics ought to be oriented toward attracting investments, starting up industries, stimulating trade, restoring land values, developing mining, agriculture, and cattle raising?
The principle of the redistribution of wealth has an unquestionable moral force, but it often blinds its advocates and keeps them from seeing that it does not promote social justice if the policies that it gives rise to paralyze production, discourage initiative, drive away investments: that is to say, if they result in an increase in poverty. And redistributing poverty, or in the case of the Andes, the severest privation, as Alan García was doing, does not feed those who confront the problem as a matter of life or death.
Ever since my disillusionment with Marxism and socialism — in theory on the one hand, but above all in reality, the kind I had become acquainted with in Cuba, in the Soviet Union, and in the so-called popular democracies — I suspected that the fascination of intellectuals with state control had to do not only with their vocation for seeking handouts or a regular income, a vocation nurtured by the patronage system that had caused them to live under the sheltering shadow of the Church and of princes and had been continued by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, in which intellectuals, on condition that they proved docile, automatically formed part of the privileged elite, but also with their lack of economic knowledge. From that time on, I tried — in a very undisciplined way, unfortunately — to remedy in one way or another my ignorance in this field. After 1980, thanks to a year’s fellowship at the Wilson Center, in Washington, I did so in a more orderly way and with growing interest, on discovering that despite appearances economics, far from being an exact science, was as open to creativity as the arts. When I entered the political arena, in 1987, two economists, Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos and Raúl Salazar, who was to become the head of the economic team of the Democratic Front, began to give me weekly lessons on the Peruvian economy. We met in a little room overlooking Freddy Cooper’s garden, at night, for a couple of hours, and I learned many things there. I also learned to respect the talent and the decency of Raúl Salazar, the key figure in the detailed development of the program of the Front, the person who, had we won, would have been our minister of finance. I once asked Raúl and Felipe to figure out for me how much each Peruvian would get if an egalitarian-minded administration redistributed all the wealth that existed in the country at that time. The answer: approximately fifty dollars per capita.* In other words, Peru would go on being the same country of poor people that it was, with the aggravating circumstance that after even such a measure it would never cease to be just that.