It was not easy to obtain offers of aid and investments, since I was a mere candidate for president. However, we secured concrete promises for the Program for Social Aid of some four hundred million dollars (Taiwan, two hundred million, and South Korea and Japan, a hundred million each). On the tour, I could show the governments of those countries and many companies what we were going to do to change the self-destructive course that Peru had taken. The country’s image had fallen to lamentable extremes: an insecure and violent place, quarantined by the financial community, which, since the declaration of war by the Aprista administration against the International Monetary Fund, had removed Peru from its agenda, excluding it from all programs for credit or aid and with no interest in its continued existence.
To my arguments that Peru was endowed with resources that the Asian countries of the Pacific needed — beginning with petroleum and minerals — and that it was therefore possible to make both economies complementary by converting the Pacific into a bridge for exchanges, the answers always tended to be the same ones. Yes, but before that, Peru had to get out of its impasse with the International Monetary Fund, without whose endorsement no country, bank, or business enterprise would trust commitments made by the Peruvian government. The second condition was to bring a definite end to terrorism.
In the case of Japan, the matter was a particularly delicate one. Government officials and entrepreneurs told us, without beating about the bush, of their annoyance at the lack of compliance with the commitments made by Peru regarding the North Peru pipeline, financed by Japan. Many years ago, Peruvian administrations had stopped amortizing this debt that had been contracted in the days of the military dictatorship, but more serious still for a country where formality is everything, the present administration did not even offer any explanation. The officials in charge of the project answered neither letters nor telexes. And the special envoys that had been sent had been received neither by the president nor by government ministers but by second-level bureaucrats whose instructions appeared to be to answer with excuses and evasive promises (the famous Peruvian institution of the meceo: to keep shilly-shallying until one’s conversational partner gets tired of insisting). Was this any way to behave toward friendly countries?
I tirelessly repeated to bureaucrats and entrepreneurs that it was against this sort of procedure and political morality that I was fighting. And I explained to everyone that in our program renegotiation with the IMF and the fight against terrorism were absolute priorities. I don’t know whether they believed me or not. But I did obtain a number of things. Among them, an accord with the Keidanren to hold in Lima, immediately following the election, a meeting of Peruvian and Japanese entrepreneurs charged with laying the foundations of a collaboration that would include everything from the thorny subject of unpaid debts to the way in which Japan could aid Peru to reenter the financial world and the sectors in which Japanese businesses could invest in the country. Tireless Miguel Vega Alvear, who had organized the trip through the Orient, was placed in charge of making preparations for this meeting, at the end of April or the beginning of May (the elections were to be held on April 10 and we did not reject the idea that we might win in the first round of voting).
The most spectacular reception given me on the entire tour was in Taiwan. And I left there convinced that important investments would be forthcoming from that country as soon as we won the election. Officials from the Ministry of Foreign Relations were waiting for me as I got off the plane, two cars with sirens escorted me wherever I went, President Lee Teng-hui received me at an official audience, as did the minister of foreign relations, and we had a long working session with the leaders of the Kuomintang and with private entrepreneurs. And also something that I had insistently requested: a detailed account of the agrarian reform that had transformed the island of great semifeudal landholdings that Taiwan had been when Chiang Kai-shek arrived there into an archipelago of small and medium-sized farms in the hands of private owners. This reform was the driving force that led to the industrial takeoff that turned Taiwan into the economic power that it is today.
When I was a student, in the 1950s, Taiwan was a bad word in Latin America. The progressivist sectors considered that for a country to “Taiwanize itself” was the worst sort of opprobrium. For the ruling ideology — that confused mixture of socialism, nationalism, and populism that had ruined Latin America — the image of Taiwan was that of a semicolonial factory, a country that had sold its sovereignty for a mess of pottage: the U.S. investments that allowed the existence of manufacturing plants in which millions of miserably paid workers sewed trousers, shirts, and dresses for multinational corporations. In the middle of the 1950s, the Peruvian economy — whose export volume then amounted to as much as two billion dollars per year — was superior to Taiwan’s and the income per capita of both countries was under a thousand dollars. When I visited the island, income per capita in Peru had gone down to around half of what it was in the 1950s and Taiwan’s had increased more than 700 percent ($7,530 for 1990). And after having experienced an average annual growth rate of 8.5 percent between 1981 and 1989 (with its exports increasing at the rate of 12.1 percent over the same period),* Taiwan now had reserves of $75 billion, whereas when Alan García’s tenure in office ended, Peruvian reserves were negative and the country was bearing the crushing burden of an external debt of $20 billion.
Unlike South Korea, whose development, no less impressive than Taiwan’s, had had as a driving force seven enormous conglomerates, in Taiwan businesses of small and medium size, working at a very high technological level, had multiplied: in 1990 80 percent of its factories, the majority of them oriented toward exports and highly competitive, had less than twenty workers. This was a model that suited us. Officials and businessmen in Taiwan spared no effort to satisfy my curiosity and arranged a program of visits for me which, although it was a killing one, turned out to be very instructive. I remember in particular the impression of science fiction conveyed to me by the scientific industrial park of Hsin Chu, where the world’s large corporations were invited to experiment with products and technologies for the future. In Taiwan I received the firmest promises of aid should the Democratic Front assume power.
Naturally, there was a political interest behind this. Peru broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in order to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in the days of Velasco’s dictatorship. Since that time, succeeding Peruvian administrations had reduced the country’s commercial contacts and exchanges with Taiwan; under Alan García, they had dwindled to nothing. In order to maintain a presence in Peru, Taiwan still had a commercial office in Lima, the manager of which was the semiofficial representative of his government. But he was not even authorized to give out visas. Although in none of the interviews of me was I asked any concrete questions, I volunteered to government authorities the information that my administration would engage in consular and commercial relations, as other countries had done, without breaking off diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.