The possibility of a terrorist attack on my life or my family was something that Patricia, my children, and I looked on from the start as a reality that we must be aware of. We agreed not to do things that were imprudent, but not to allow the danger to take our freedom of movement away from us. Gonzalo and Morgana were studying in London, so that the risk to them was confined to the months when they were on vacation from school. But Álvaro was in Peru; he was a journalist and the communications director of the Front and did not mince words when he attacked extremism and the government day and night; moreover, he kept giving the security service the slip, so that Patricia lived in constant fear that someone would come to announce to us that he had been murdered or kidnapped.
It was obvious that, as long as no one attempted to put an end to the insecurity that political violence was causing to reign in the country, the possibilities of an economic recovery were nil, even if inflation were brought under control. Who was going to come to open mines or drill oil wells or set up factories if he ran the risk of being kidnapped, assassinated, obliged to make regular payoffs to revolutionaries, and having his installations blown up? (The very next week after I had visited, in Huacho, in March 1990, the cannery for the export company Industrias Alimentarias, SA, whose owner, a courageous young entrepreneur, Julio Fabre Carranza, told us how he had escaped an attempt on his life, Sendero Luminoso reduced the cannery to rubble, leaving a thousand workers out of jobs.)
Bringing peace to the country was one of the first priorities, along with the fight against inflation. This was not a task for police and soldiers alone, but for civil society as a whole, since everyone would suffer the consequences if Sendero Luminoso turned Peru into the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge or the Túpac Amaru revolutionaries turned it into another Cuba. Leaving the fight against terrorism in the hands of police and military forces had not produced positive results. On the contrary. The abuses of human rights, the disappearances, the extrajudicial executions had embittered the populace, which offered the forces of law and order no cooperation whatsoever. And without the aid of its citizens a democratic government cannot put down a subversive movement. The Aprista administration had aggravated the situation with its counterterrorist groups, such as the so-called Rodrigo Franco Commando Unit. These groups, as was common knowledge, were armed and directed from the Ministry of the Interior; they had assassinated attorneys and union leaders on close terms with Sendero Luminoso, placed bombs in print shops and institutions suspected of complicity with terrorism, and in addition hounded the president’s most belligerent adversaries, such as Representative Fernando Olivera, who, in view of the fact that he persisted in denouncing in Congress the unlawful acquisition of property by Alan García, had been the target of terrorist threats.
My thesis was that terror should not be combated in an underhanded way, but openly and resolutely, mobilizing peasants, workers, students, and personally headed by the civil authorities. I had said that if I were elected, I would assume the leadership of the fight against terrorism in person, that I would replace the politico-military heads of the emergency area by civil authorities and arm the patrols formed by the peasants to confront the Sendero Luminoso detachments.
In Peru, in the departamento of Cajamarca, peasant patrols had shown how effective they could be. Working together with the authorities, they had cleared the countryside of cattle rustlers, and constituted an effective brake on terrorism, since thus far Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA (the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) had been unable to get a foothold in the countryside in Cajamarca. In all the indigenous communities, cooperatives, and villages of the Andes that I visited, I encountered an immense frustration on the part of the peasants, because they were unable to defend themselves against the terrorist detachments. They were obliged to feed, clothe, and lend logistical aid to the terrorists, and obey their sometimes absurd orders, such as to produce only enough for their own needs, not engage in commercial dealings, and not attend market fairs. Aid lent the cause of subversion exposed these people to often merciless reprisals on the part of the forces of order. Many communities had formed patrols that confronted the tommy guns and automatic rifles of the Sendero Luminoso and Túpac Amaru movements with clubs, knives, and hunting rifles.
I therefore asked Peruvians for a mandate to provide these patrols with arms that would allow them to defend themselves effectively against those who were killing them wholesale.* This proposal was severely criticized, especially outside Peru, where it was said that by arming the peasants I would open the gates to civil war (as though one didn’t already exist) and that, in a democracy, it is the police and the military that are the institutions responsible for reestablishing public order. This criticism doesn’t take into account the actual political conditions in underdeveloped countries. In a democracy that is taking its first steps, the introduction of free elections, independent political parties, and a free press does not mean that all of its institutions have become democratic. The democratization of the whole of society is a much slower process, and it is a long time before labor unions, political parties, the government, and business begin to act as they are expected to in a state ruled by law. And the institutions that are perhaps the slowest at learning how to function democratically, within the law and with respect for civil authority, are those which, in dictatorial systems, semidictatorial ones, and sometimes even apparently democratic ones, have long been accustomed to the authoritarian exercise of power: the police and the military.
The ineffectiveness demonstrated by the forces of order in the fight against the terror campaign in Peru had several causes. One of them: their inability to win over the civilian population and obtain active support from it, especially when it came to providing information, which is indispensable in fighting an enemy that doesn’t show its face, whose action is based on its successfully mingling with civil society, from which it emerges in order to make its attacks and to which it returns to conceal itself. And this inability was a result of the methods employed in the fight against subversion by institutions which had not been prepared for this sort of war, so different from a conventional one, and which often limited themselves to following the strategy of showing the villagers that they could be as cruel as the terrorists. The result was that, in many places, the forces of order aroused as much fear and hostility among the peasants as the guerrilla bands of Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA.
I remember a conversation with a bishop in one of the cities of the emergency area. He was a young man, with the look of someone who went in for sports, and very intelligent. He belonged to the so-called conservative sector of the Church, an adversary of liberation theology and hence above all suspicious of having been taken in, as have certain members of religious orders who are supporters of this tendency, by extremist propaganda. I asked him, a man who had traveled all over this martyrized land and spoken with so many people, to tell me how much truth there was in the stories of abuses of which the forces of order were accused. His testimony was overwhelming, above all with respect to the behavior of the PIPs: rapes, thefts, murders, horrendous assaults against the peasants, all committed with total impunity. I remember his words: “I feel safer traveling by myself through the backlands of Ayacucho than I do if protected by them.” An incipient democracy cannot progress if it entrusts the defense of law and order to people who engage in such savagery.