Uncle Pedro had married a very pretty girl, the daughter of the overseer of the San Jacinto hacienda, and after having spent a year in the United States, he and Aunt Rosi were now living on the Paramonga hacienda, whose hospital he was the head of. That family was getting along very well. But Uncle Jorge and Aunt Gaby were fighting like cats and dogs, and their marriage seemed to be on the rocks. Uncle Jorge had kept on getting better and better jobs. With prosperity, he had acquired an insatiable appetite for entertainment and women, and his dissipations were a source of continual marital quarrels.
The family’s problems affected me deeply. I experienced them as though each one of those dramas in the different households of the Llosas concerned me in the most intimate way. And with more than my share of naïveté, I believed that with Uncle Lucho’s arrival everything was going to be all right again, that thanks to the great righter of wrongs the family would once again be that serene, indestructible tribe, sitting around the big table in Cochabamba for another boisterous Sunday dinner.
Twelve. Schemers and Dragons
Between the end of September and the middle of October of 1989, after registering my candidacy at the national election board, I made a lightning-quick trip through four countries which, ever since the beginning of the campaign, I had been referring to as an example of the development that any country on the periphery that chooses economic freedom and joins the world’s markets can achieve: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.
They lacked natural resources, they were overpopulated and had started from zero, because of their colonial status or backwardness or because of a war that left them devastated. And the four of them, opting for development outward, had succeeded in becoming countries that exported and, by promoting private enterprise, brought about industrialization and a very rapid modernization, which ended mass unemployment and noticeably raised their standard of living. The four of them — but Japan in particular — were now competing in world markets with the most advanced countries. Were they not an example for Peru?
The object of the trip was to show Peruvians that we were already getting under way something we were proposing, the opening up of our economy toward the Pacific — negotiating with authorities, companies, and financial institutions of those countries. And that I was well enough known on the international scene to be received in those milieus.* Álvaro managed to get Peruvian television to broadcast, each night of my tour through these four Asiatic countries, between September 27 and October 14, 1989, the images that the mustachioed cameraman who accompanied us, Paco Velázquez, sent to it via satellite.
Velázquez traveled with us thanks to Genaro Delgado Parker, one of the owners of TV Channel 5, who paid his expenses. At the time, Genaro, an old acquaintance of mine and a friend, was said to be an enthusiast of my candidacy. On the night that it was launched, in Arequipa, on June 4, 1989, he gave us a million dollars’ worth of ad time for nothing, after a discussion with Lucho Llosa, in which the latter accused him of being ambiguous and opportunistic when it came to his political tactics. Genaro visited me every so often to make suggestions and pass on political gossip to me, and in order to explain that if I was attacked on Channel 5’s news broadcasts and programs, it was the fault of his brother Héctor, an Aprista and an intimate friend and adviser to President Alan García during the latter’s first year in office.
According to Genaro, Héctor had won over his younger brother, Manuel, to his cause, and between the two of them they had placed him in the minority in the running of the channel, so that he had found himself obliged to give up any sort of executive post and the directorship of the company. Genaro always made me feel that I had been the original cause of his breaking off with Héctor — which had even gone as far as a fistfight — but that he had preferred to go through this family crisis rather than renounce a view of economics and politics that coincided with my own. Ever since I had worked with him as a reporter when I was still an adolescent, at Radio Panamericana, I had felt an irresistible warmth of feeling toward Genaro, but I always took his declarations of political love with a grain of salt. For I think I know him well enough to be certain that his great success as an impresario has been due not only to his energy and to his talent (of which he has more than enough), but also to his gift as a chameleon, his skill as a sharp businessman with a talent for swimming in both water and oil and for persuading both God and the Devil, at one and the same time, that he is their man.
His conduct, during the campaign against nationalization, was erratic. In the beginning, he placed himself in a position of headlong opposition to the measure, and Channel 5, which at the time he headed, opened its doors to us and was little short of being the spokesman for our mobilization. On the eve of the rally in the Plaza San Martín, he came to see me with suggestions, some of them very amusing, for my speech, which Channel 5 broadcast live. But in the days that followed, his position gradually changed from solidarity to neutrality, and then to hostility, with the rate of speed of an astronaut. The reason was a summons, at the most heated moment of the campaign, that he received from Alan García, who invited him to breakfast at the Presidential Palace. Once this interview was over, Genaro hurried out to my house, to tell me all about it. He recounted to me a version of his chat with the president, in which the latter, in addition to railing against me, had made veiled threats against him, which he did not tell me about in detail. I noted that he was quite upset by that meeting: half panic-stricken and half euphoric. The fact is that immediately thereafter Genaro left for Miami, where he disappeared into thin air. It was impossible to locate him. Manuel — the manager as well of a chain of radio stations — who took over the business, eliminated us from the news bulletins and placed many obstacles and difficulties in our way, even when it was a matter of getting our paid advertisements on the air.
After a few months, Genaro came back to Lima and, as though nothing had happened, renewed his contacts with me. He often visited me at my house in Barranco, offering me aid and counsel, while at the same time he pointed out to me that his influence with regard to the channel was limited now, since Héctor and Manuel had ganged up on him. Despite this, his offer of a million dollars’ worth of free publicity was honored by the company even after Genaro was no longer the director of the channel. Through almost the whole of the campaign, Genaro posed as a man on our side. He was present at the launching of my candidacy in Arequipa, and in order to promote it brought together a small group of journalists who, working with Álvaro, distributed materials to the press that could be of help to us. That was how it happened that Paco Velázquez traveled through Asia with me.
Less intelligent and clever than Genaro, his brother Héctor chose to become involved with the APRA, assuming ticklish responsibilities in Alan García’s administration. He was commissioned by the latter to negotiate with the French government a smaller-sized purchase than the twenty-six Mirage planes that the Belaunde administration had ordered, part of which Alan García had decided to send back. The long-drawn negotiation, whereby in the end Peru kept twelve and returned fourteen, led to an accord that was never completely clear. This was one of the matters in which, according to persistent rumors, there had been shady dealings and commissions amounting to millions.*