I was repeatedly counseled by advisers and allies of the Front to avoid all mention of the Mirages, because of the risk that Channel 5 would turn into a merciless enemy of my candidacy. I disregarded the advice for the reason already mentioned: so that nobody in Peru would have the wrong idea as to what I was intending to do if I were elected. I am not definitely accusing Alan García and Héctor Delgado Parker in connection with this affair. For, even though I made every effort to acquire detailed information concerning the negotiations having to do with the Mirages, I never managed to arrive at a definite opinion about it. But, for that very reason, it was necessary to determine if the accord had been an open and aboveboard negotiation or not.
In the middle of my trip through Asia, a fax from Álvaro arrived for me one night in the hotel in Seouclass="underline" Héctor Delgado Parker had been kidnapped, on October 4, 1989, in the vicinity of Panamericana Television, by a commando unit of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which, in the course of the operation, had killed his chauffeur and wounded Héctor. He remained a captive for 199 days, until April 20, 1990, when his kidnappers let him loose in the streets of Miraflores. During this time, the executive director of Channel 5 was the youngest of the brothers, Manuel, but Genaro again came to have a certain hand in running the company. At a press conference during the Economics and Agriculture Forum 1990–1995, organized by the Universidad Nacional Agraria, on January 30, 1990 (at which, let it be said in passing, exasperated by the ferocity of the slander of me by officialdom, which was becoming even worse at that time, I went too far, calling Alan García’s administration “a government of shitheads and thieves”), I mentioned, among the affairs that would be the object of an investigation, the matter of the Mirages. Days later, in one of the most mysterious episodes of the campaign, Héctor’s captors allowed him to answer me and proclaim his innocence, from the “people’s prison,” by means of a videotape that was broadcast on César Hildebrandt’s program on Channel 4, on Sunday, February 11, 1990. The evening before, Manuel Delgado Parker had sought Álvaro out, so as to inform him of the existence of this videotape and assure him that the family would not authorize its being broadcast. The Aprista press accused me of putting Héctor’s life in danger by mentioning the Mirages while he was being held captive by his kidnappers. After that episode, Channel 5 was to turn into a key element of the campaign orchestrated by the government against us.
But all that took place a few months later, and during the trip to the Orient, at the beginning of October 1989, thanks to the good offices of Genaro and his cameraman, Álvaro was able to inundate the TV channels and the daily papers with pictures in which I appeared as little less than a head of state, conversing with the president of the Republic of China, Lee Tenghui, in Taiwan, or with the prime minister of Japan, Toshiki Kaifu. The latter proved to be very cordial toward me. On October 13, 1989, he postponed a meeting with Carla Hills, the United States trade representative, in order to receive me, and in our brief talk together he assured me that if I was elected Japan would support my administration in its efforts to bring Peru back into the financial community. He told me that he looked with favor on our effort to attract Japanese investments. Prime Minister Kaifu had been chairman of a Peruvian-Japanese friendship committee of the Diet and was aware of the fact that I had frequently used the example of Japan as proof that a country could rise from its ruins and that as a presidential candidate I stood in favor of the economic opening of Peru toward the Pacific. (In the second round of the election, Fujimori made good use of my harangues on the subject, telling the voters: “I agree with what Doctor Vargas Llosa says about Japan. But don’t all of you think that the son of Japanese parents can be more successful than he in pursuing that policy?”)
The Keidanren, a federation of private companies in Japan, organized a meeting in Tokyo between representatives of Japanese industries and banks and the entrepreneurs who accompanied me on the tour: Juan Francisco Raffo, Patricio Barclay, Gonzalo de la Puente, Fernando Arias, Raymundo Morales, and Felipe Thorndike. I asked them to travel with me because in their respective branches — finance, exports, mining, fishing, textiles, metallurgy — they represented modern businesses, and because I considered them to be efficient entrepreneurs, eager to progress and capable of learning from the companies that we visited in the “four dragons.” It was a good thing to show Asian governments and investors that our project for opening up trade could count on the support of the Peruvian private sector.
This was one of the few cases which involved a coordinated effort between groups of entrepreneurs and my campaign for the presidency. The positive feelings that, in the society we wanted to build, the private entrepreneur would be the driving force behind development, thanks to whose vision the jobs that we needed would be created, the foreign currency that was in such short supply would reach Peru, the standards of living of the populace would continually rise — someone recognized and approved of by a society without complexes, conscious of the fact that, in a country with a market economy, the success of businesses favors the entire community.
I never hid from entrepreneurs the fact that, during a first stage, they would be the ones who would have to make great sacrifices. Today I am less certain, but at the time it seemed to me that many, the majority perhaps, came around to admitting that they would have to pay that price if they wanted someday to be the peers of those entrepreneurs who, in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or Singapore, showed us their factories and made our heads swim with their figures on rates of growth and their worldwide sales. I managed to communicate to at least some of them my conviction that it depended solely on us whether, on a day in the not too distant future, that filthy and violent metropolis that the City of Kings (as Lima was called in the colonial period) had become would look in the eyes of tourists like the impeccable and wholly modern city-state of Singapore.
“When I arrived here thirty years ago, there, where you now see those skyscrapers, that avenue with boutiques that need not envy those in Zurich, New York, or Paris, and those five-star hotels, were swamps infested with crocodiles and mosquitoes.” I can still see that figure, pointing, from his window at the Singapore Chamber of Commerce, of which he was the head, at the center of that city, of that tiny country, that left me with an unforgettable impression.
Like Peru, Singapore was a multiracial society — whites, Chinese, Malayans, Hindus — with different languages, traditions, customs, and religions. But they had as well a very small area of land, with barely room for the country’s population, and suffered from an extreme tropical climate, with suffocating heat and torrential rains. Except for a good geographical situation, they lacked natural resources. That is to say, they were the victims of all those factors regarded as the worst obstacles to development. And yet they had become one of the most modern and most advanced societies in Asia, with a very high standard of living, the largest and most efficient port in the world — whose perfect, spanking-white cleanliness made it look like a sort of clinic, and where a ship unloaded and loaded again in barely eight hours — and high-technology industries.* (The growth rate of its gross domestic product between 1981 and 1990 had averaged 6.3 percent per year and the growth rate of its exports between 1981 and 1989 7.3 percent, according to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.) Its different races, religions, and customs coexisted in that financial mecca, with one of the most active stock exchanges on the globe and a banking system that had interlocking networks throughout the planet. All of this had been brought about in less than thirty years, thanks to economic freedom, the market, and internationalization. It is true that Lee Kuan Yew had been authoritarian and repressive (only recently had he begun to tolerate opposition and criticism), something that I was not going to imitate. But why couldn’t Peru attain a similar development, within a democratic system? It was possible, if a majority of Peruvians so chose. And at that point in the campaign, the signs were favorable: the polls always placed me very far ahead, with those intending to vote for me wavering between 40 and 45 percent.