Simplifications, however, must be avoided in this respect as well. The defense of human rights is one of the weapons that extremism makes most effective use of in order to paralyze governments that it wishes to overthrow, manipulating well-intentioned but ingenuous persons and institutions. In the course of the campaign I had several meetings with officers of the army and the navy, who informed me in detail about the state of the revolutionary war in Peru. And that was how I learned of the extremely difficult, not to say impossible, conditions in which soldiers and sailors are obliged to carry on that war, owing to the lack of adequate training and equipment, and owing to the demoralization that the economic crisis was causing in the ranks. I remember a conversation, in Andahuaylas, with a young army lieutenant who had just come back from a scouting expedition in the area of Cangallo and Vilcashuamán. His men, he explained to me, had enough ammunition for just one engagement. In a second skirmish with the insurgents, they no longer had the means to shoot back. As for provisions, they had none with them at all. They had to hustle up their own food as best they could. “You probably think we were obliged to pay the peasants for that grub, right, Doctor Vargas? What with? I haven’t received my pay for two months now. And what I earn [less than a hundred dollars a month] doesn’t even go far enough to support my mother back in Jaén. The extra money handed out to soldiers who do really tough jobs gives them enough to buy smokes. Kindly explain to me how we can get hold of enough cash to pay for what we eat when we go out on patrol.”
By 1989, the inflation of the past few years had reduced the real pay of the military, as well as of all the other employees of the state, to a third of what it had been in 1985. The detachments sent out to fight subversion suffered a similar decrease. The dejection and the frustration of officers and troops connected to the counterinsurgency campaign were enormous. In the barracks, at the bases, the lack of spare parts had put trucks, helicopters, jeeps, and armaments of every sort out of service. There was, furthermore, a tacit rivalry between the national police and the armed forces. The former considered themselves discriminated against by the latter, and soldiers and sailors accused the Civil Guard of selling their weapons to drug traffickers and terrorists, who were allies in the valley of the Huallaga. And both forces of order recognized that the terrible lack of resources had dramatically increased corruption in the military institutions, to neither a greater nor a lesser degree than in public administration.
Only a determined participation of civil society alongside the forces of order could reverse that tendency whereby, since the time it first made its dramatic appearance in 1979 up until the present, it is subversion that is winning points and the democratic system of government that is losing them. My idea was that, as in Israel, civilians should organize to protect work centers, cooperatives and communes, public services, and means of communication, and that all of this should be done in collaboration with the armed forces, though under the direction of the civil authorities. This close collaboration would serve — as had been the case in Israel, where there are doubtless many things to criticize but also others to imitate, among the latter the relationship that exists between their armed forces and civil society — not to militarize society but to “civilize” the police and the military, thereby closing the breach caused by their lack of acquaintance with each other, if not the outright antagonism, which in Peru, as in other countries of Latin America, characterizes the relationship between military and civilian life. In our program for civil peace, prepared by a committee headed by an attorney — Amalia Ortiz de Zevallos — and made up of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, jurists, and military officers, the activity of the patrols was regarded as part of a multiple process, aimed at the recovery by civil society of the emergency area placed under military control. At the same time that the exceptional emergency laws would be abrogated in the area and the patrols would begin to function, flying brigades of judges, doctors, social workers, organizers of agrarian programs, and teachers would go there, so that a peasant would have additional reasons to combat terrorism besides that of mere survival. I had decided, moreover, that in case I were elected, I would go to the emergency area to live, more or less permanently, in order to direct from there the civilian mobilization against terrorism.
At nightfall on January 19, 1989, a man who lived in Los Jazmines, a slum neighborhood adjoining the airport of the city of Pucallpa, saw two strangers come out of a patch of underbrush and run, carrying something, to the landing strip where the planes brake to a stop and make a turn to taxi to the disembarkation area. One of the two scheduled flights from Lima had just landed. The two strangers, seeing that the recent arrival was a commercial AeroPerú flight, went back to the thicket. The man who lived in Los Jazmines ran to alert the other people who lived in the area, whose residents had formed a patrol. A group of these civilian patrolmen, armed with clubs and machetes, went to check on what the two strangers were doing out there next to the runway. The patrol surrounded them, questioned them, and were about to take them to the police station when the two men drew revolvers and fired point-blank at the civilian patrolmen. They perforated Sergio Pasavi’s intestines in six places; they shattered José Vásquez Dávila’s femur; they fractured the collarbone of Humberto Jacobo the barber and wounded Víctor Ravello Cruz in the lumbar area. In the ensuing chaos, the strangers got away. But they left behind a bomb that weighed two kilos, a so-called Russian cheese, which contained dynamite, aluminum, nails, buckshot, bits of metal, and a short fuse. They were going to throw this bomb at the Faucett plane, which leaves Lima at the same time as the AeroPerú flight, but was two hours late that day. I was coming in on that plane, to set up the Libertad committee of Pucallpa, visit the Ucayali area, and preside over a political rally at the Teatro Rex in the city.
The civilian patrol brought their wounded to the regional hospital and made a deposition concerning the attempted bombing to the representative chief of police, a major in the Civil Guard (the chief of police had gone off to Lima), to whom they handed over the bomb. When they sought me out to tell me about what had happened, I rushed to the hospital to visit the wounded. What a horrible sight! Patients piled one atop the other, sharing beds, in rooms swarming with flies, and nurses and doctors working miracles to care for their patients, operate, heal, without medicine, without equipment, lacking the most basic sanitary conditions. After taking steps to see that the two civilian patrolmen in the most serious condition were transferred to Lima by Solidarity, I went to the police. One of the attackers, Hidalgo Soria, seventeen years old, had been captured, and according to the befuddled officer of the Civil Guard who took care of me, had confessed that he belonged to the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and admitted that the intended target of the bomb had been my plane. But like so many others, the suspect never got as far as the courts. Every time that the press tried to find out what had become of him, the authorities in Pucallpa put them off with evasive answers, and one day they announced that the judge had let him go free because he was a minor.
For Christmas 1989 the Solidarity program organized a show on December 23 in the Alianza Lima stadium, with the participation of film, radio, and TV artists, which was attended by some 35,000 people. Shortly after the performance had begun, it was announced over the radio that a bomb had been found in my house and that the bomb demolition squad of the Civil Guard had managed to defuse it and remove it, obliging my mother and my in-laws, the secretaries and the servants to leave the house. The fact that this bomb was found just as the show at the stadium began seemed suspect to us, a coincidence no doubt meant to spoil the celebration by forcing us to leave, and because we smelled a rat Patricia and my children and I deliberately remained on the platform until the Christmas festivities were over.* The suspicion that it was not a real attempted bombing but a psychological ploy was further confirmed that night, when we came back home to Barranco and the demolition squad of the Civil Guard assured us that the bomb — discovered by the watchman at a tourism school next door — wasn’t filled with dynamite but with sand.