In order for a country to emerge from poverty, redistributive policies don’t work. Others do work, the ones which, since they take into account an inevitable inequality between those who produce more and those who produce less, lack the intellectual and ethical fascination that has always surrounded socialism, and have been condemned because they encourage the profit motive. But egalitarian-oriented economies based on solidarity have never raised a country out of poverty; they have impoverished it even further. And they have frequently limited freedoms or caused them to disappear altogether, since egalitarianism requires strict planning, which starts out by being economic and gradually spreads to the rest of life. From this there results inefficiency, corruption, and privileges for those in power that are a negation of the very concept of egalitarianism. The rare cases of the economic takeoff of countries of the Third World have all, without exception, followed the plan of a market economy.
In each of my trips to the central mountain region between 1987 and 1990, and I made many of them, I felt a tremendous sadness on seeing what life there had become for at least a third of Peruvians. And I returned from each of these trips more convinced than ever of what had to be done. Reopen the mines that had been closed for lack of incentives to export, since the artificially low value of the dollar had caused small and medium-sized mining operations to come close to disappearing altogether, so that only large-scale mining had survived, in extremely precarious conditions. Attract capital and technology in order to open new companies. Put an end to the price controls on agricultural products whereby the Aprista administration condemned peasants to subsidize the cities, the pretext being to lower the price of food for the masses. Give title deeds to the hundreds of thousands of peasants whose land had been divided up by the cooperatives and do away with the regulations forbidding corporations to invest in rural holdings.
But in order to accomplish all this, it was imperative to put an end to the terror that had taken hold in the Andes, allowing the revolutionaries to do as they pleased.
Traveling in the Andes was arduous. In order to avoid ambushes, it had to be done suddenly and unexpectedly, with a small party, sending Mobilization activists ahead to alert the most reliable people no more than one or two days in advance. It was impossible to go overland to many provinces of the central mountain region — Junín, after Ayacucho, had been victimized by the most attacks. The journey had to be made in small planes that landed in unbelievable places — cemeteries, soccer fields, riverbeds — or in light helicopters which, if a storm suddenly overtook us, had to set down wherever they could — on top of a mountain sometimes — until the weather cleared. These acrobatics completely unnerved some of the friends of Libertad. Beatriz Merino took out crosses, rosaries, and holy medals she wore over her heart, and invoked the protection of the saints without self-consciousness. Pedro Cateriano intimidated the pilots into giving him reassuring explanations about the flight instruments, and kept pointing out to them the threatening thunderheads, the sharp peaks that suddenly loomed up, or the snaky rays of lightning that zigzagged all about us. The two of them were more afraid of flying than of terrorists, but never refused to go with me when I asked them to.
I remember the very young little soldier, practically a child, whom they brought to me at the abandoned airport of Jauja on September 8, 1989, so that we could take him back to Lima with us. He had survived an attack that noon in which two of his buddies had died — we had heard the bombs and the shots from the speakers’ platform in the main square in Huancayo, where we were holding our rally — and he was losing a lot of blood. We made room for him in the very small craft by having one of the bodyguards stay behind. The boy was surely under the army’s legal age limit of eighteen. He was holding a container of plasma above his head, but his strength gave out. We took turns holding it up. He didn’t complain once during the flight. He stared blankly into space, with an astonished, wordless desperation, as though trying to understand what had happened to him.
I remember how, on February 14, 1990, as we were leaving the Milpo mine, in Cerro de Pasco, the triple glass of a side window of our light van shattered, turning into a spider web, as we were driving past a hostile group. “This was supposed to be an armored van,” I said. “It is,” Óscar Balbi assured me. “Against bullets. But that was a stone.” It wasn’t armored against cudgels either, because at a sugar mill in the North, a handful of Apristas had smashed all its windowpanes to smithereens a few weeks before. The theoretical armor, moreover, turned the vehicle into an oven (the air conditioning never worked), so that, as a general rule, we jolted over the roads with a door held open by my security guard Professor Oshiro’s foot.
I remember the members of the Libertad committee of Cerro de Pasco, who turned up at a regional meeting, some of them battered and bruised and others injured, since that morning a terrorist commando unit had attacked their headquarters. And I remember the members of the committee in Ayacucho, the capital of the Sendero Luminoso insurrection, where human life was worth less than anywhere else in Peru. Every time I went to Ayacucho in those three years to meet with our committee, I had the feeling that I was with men and women who could die at any moment and was assailed by a sense of guilt. When the lists of candidates for national and regional legislative posts were agreed on, we knew that the risk for the men and women of Ayacucho whose names were on them would be even greater than before, and like other political organizations, we offered to get the candidates out of Ayacucho and hide them until after the election. They didn’t take us up on the offer. They asked me, rather, to see if I could arrange with the politico-military head of the region to allow them to go about armed. But Brigadier General Howard Rodríguez Málaga refused me permission for them to do so.
Shortly before that meeting, Julián Huamaní Yauli, a Freedom Movement candidate for a seat in the regional legislature, had heard people climbing up onto the roof of his house and ran out into the street for safety’s sake. The second time, on March 4, 1990, he didn’t have time to get out of the house. They surprised him at the front door, in broad daylight, and after gunning him down, the killers calmly walked off through a crowd which ten years of terror had taught not to see anything, hear anything, or lift a finger in such cases. I remember the badly mangled body of Julián Huamaní Yauli in his coffin, on that sunny morning in Ayacucho, and the weeping of his wife and his mother, a peasant woman who, with her arms around me, sobbed out words in Quechua that I was unable to understand.