As I had done with Mrs. Thatcher and with Felipe González, prime ministers of countries with problems of the same sort, I asked government leaders in Taiwan for advice concerning antiterrorist activities. Like the others, they too promised to advise me. And they immediately made me an offer to set up two scholarships, for a short eight-week course in antisubversive strategy. The Freedom Movement sent Henry Bullard, a jurist who was a member of the Democratic Front’s committee on civil peace and human rights, and another person, as enigmatic as he was efficient, about whom I never managed to find out very much, except that he was a karate black belt and a Nisei: Professor Oshiro. He was the trainer and technical director of the security personnel of Prosegur, and the person who replaced Óscar Balbi — or reinforced him — following me around like a shadow at rallies and on my trips around the country. Of an indefinable age — between forty and forty-five, perhaps — and slender and strong as a rock, invariably wearing a light sport shirt, his serene and peaceable air made me trust him. Professor Oshiro never opened his mouth, except to utter a few incomprehensible murmurs, and nothing appeared to irritate him or bring him out of his meditative mood: neither the attacks of the Aprista “buffaloes” at demonstrations nor the storms that, all of a sudden, would make the small plane in which we were flying shudder violently. But if need be, his reactions were extraordinarily fast. Like the time, in Puno, during the festivities to celebrate Candlemas. We had entered the stadium, where a performance of folk dances was being given, and were greeted by a hail of stones, thrown from one of the boxes. Before the thought of raising my arms to protect myself had even crossed my mind, Professor Oshiro had already spread out his big leather coat, like an umbrella — one against showers of stones — over me and stopped, or at least deadened, their impact. The antisubversive course in Taiwan did not greatly impress him, but he took the trouble to present me with a report on everything he had heard and learned in it.
Since the trip through Asia was political, and with an overloaded agenda, I had hardly any time in those weeks for cultural activities or for seeing writers. With two exceptions. In Taipei I had lunch with the leaders of the local PEN club and was able to have a brief conversation with the magnificent Nancy Ying, of whom I had become a very good friend when I was the international president of that organization. And, in Seoul, the Korean PEN center gave a reception for me, to which it invited those who had accompanied me on the tour. It was presided over by an imposing figure, dressed in a very beautiful silk kimono with a flower print and carrying painted paper fans. The banker and industrialist Gonzalo de la Puente, making a bow worthy of a Renaissance courtier, leaned over to kiss the figure’s hand: “Chère madame…” We discreetly informed him that the person was a cher monsieur, a venerable poet, and apparently a very popular one.
Just after my return to Lima I gave a press conference reporting on my trip and the good prospects for the development of Peru’s economic relations with the countries of the Pacific Rim. The tour received good reviews from the media. There seemed to be a unanimous feeling in favor of Peru’s improving its interchanges with countries possessing enormous excess financial funds available for industrial investment. Wasn’t it absurd not to have taken advantage of this opportunity which our neighbor, Chile, was already making such good use of?
Worried by the polls’ prediction of a crushing victory for the Democratic Front, on November 27, 1989, Alan García broke what, by a provision of the Constitution and by custom, should be the president’s attitude during the electoral process: a genuine or a feigned neutrality. And at a press conference, he appeared on the TV screens to say that if nobody “stands up to him” (by “him” meaning me), he would do so. By refuting, for example, the figures that I had given regarding the number of public employees in Peru. According to him, there were only 507,000 people on the state payrolls. This was a subject of capital importance for us, and we had investigated it as thoroughly as was possible. Several times I had attended meetings of our committee on a national system of budget control, and the person who headed it, Dr. María Reynafarje, had given us a very interesting description of the underhanded tricks and crooked dealings which successive administrations had used to swell the number of employees in public enterprises. Alan García had exaggerated this practice to the point of perversion. The Peruvian Institute of Social Security, for instance, had a system of contracts with supposed firms employing security guards, and funds whose existence was kept as closely guarded as though they were a sort of military secret — a dodge that allowed the government to pay the salaries of hundreds of thugs and gunmen who belonged to its paramilitary groups. It was not hard for me, then, to argue with García and demonstrate the very next day, with figures in hand, that the number of Peruvians who received pay and salaries from the state (officially or through the subterfuge of temporary contracts) was over a million. The opinion surveys made after this polemical exchange showed that out of every three Peruvians, two believed me and only one believed him.
After that, and as a reprisal against my well-publicized trip through Asia, Alan García announced that Peru was granting recognition to Kim Il Sung’s regime and establishing diplomatic relations with North Korea. He hoped in this way to prevent or, at the least, put difficulties in the way of Peru’s economic interchanges with South Korea, and, indirectly, with the other countries of the Pacific Rim, for which Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship for life — under which North Korea was contending with Libya for the title of the state most actively promoting terrorism on a global scale — was an outcast regime.
But this was not the only reason. Through that gesture, Alan García was also repaying favors received by him and his party from that regime which, besides having been quarantined by the community of civilized countries, represented a survival of the most despotic form of Stalinist megalomania. During the 1985 presidential campaign, the communications media in Peru had pointed out with amazement the continual trips by Aprista leaders and by Alan García himself to Pyongyang, where, for instance, Representative Carlos Roca, dressed in a proletarian uniform, was in the habit of being photographed with North Korean officials. That the government of Kim Il Sung had given financial aid to Alan García’s campaign was something that went without saying, and there had even been a vitriolic denunciation in which a photographer from the periodical Oiga* had chanced upon a secret reunion of Aprista leaders and the semiofficial delegation of North Korea in Peru, at which, supposedly, one of the deliveries of campaign funds had been made in a shoe box!
During Alan García’s term in office the contacts had continued, in a more worrisome way. There was a strange purchase by the Ministry of the Interior of North Korean submachine guns and rifles to update the weaponry of the police and the Civil Guard. Nonetheless, only a part of that weaponry in fact reached those forces, and there were many reports concerning the final destination of the remainder — ten thousand firearms, apparently. It was another affair about which the government had never offered a convincing explanation. The alarm about the weapons imported from North Korea came not only from the press, but from the armed forces as well. The officers of the navy and the army with whom I talked in unbelievable meetings — in which it was necessary to change vehicles and places several times — had all referred to this subject. What had happened to those rifles? According to the most alarmist among them, they had ended up in the hands of the shock forces of the Aprista party and their paramilitary commando units, while according to others, they had been resold to drug traffickers, terrorists, or on the international market, to the profit of the few high-ranking officers and civilian bureaucrats closest to the president.