But, at the same time, he conspired with members of the APRA, which was springing up again, and with the new opposition groups that were organizing in Lima and in Arequipa. Of these groups, four would take definite shape in the following months, one of them with only an ephemeral existence — the National Coalition, guided by remote control by the daily La Prensa and Don Pedro Beltrán (who had gone over to the side in opposition to Odría), whose leader, Pedro Roselló, was also the organizer of an equally ephemeral group, the Owners’ Association — and three others that turned out to be political organizations with a more prolonged future: Democracia Cristiana (Christian Democracy), the Movimiento Social Progresista (the Social Progressivist Movement), and the Frente Nacional de Juventudes (National Youth Front), the seed of what was to become Popular Action, with Eduardo Orrego, at the time an architecture student, as one of the organizers.
By those years, 1954 and 1955, Odría’s dictatorship had grown weak. The repressive laws remained intact — above all, the Law of Domestic Security, a juridical aberration under cover of which hundreds of Apristas, Communists, and democrats had been sent to prison or into exile since 1948—but the regime had lost its basis of support in broad sectors of the middle class and the traditional right which (primarily because of its opposition to the APRA) had supported Odría since his defeat of Bustamante y Rivero. Among these sectors, the principal one, and the one that after its break with Odría was to turn into the most battle-hardened opposition to the regime, was La Prensa. Its owner and editor-in-chief, Pedro Beltrán Espantoso (1897–1979), as I have already said, was the bête noire of the left in Peru. His was a case very much like that of José de la Riva Agüero. Like the latter, he belonged to a tradition-conscious, very prosperous family, and had received an excellent education, at the London School of Economics. There he imbibed the principles of classic economic liberalism, a cause he had supported in Peru since his youth. And like Riva Agüero, Beltrán tried to organize and to lead a political movement — the former conservative, the latter liberal — in the face of the indifference, not to say the contempt, of his own social class, the so-called ruling elite, too selfish and ignorant to see beyond their very petty interests. The intentions of both, in the years of their youth, to organize political parties that would take an active part in public life, ended in resounding failures. And the furious rage of Riva Agüero in his mature years — documented in his Opúsculos por la verdad, la tradición y la Patria (Pamphlets in Favor of Truth, Tradition and the Fatherland)—which poisoned his intellectual work and impelled him to defend fascism and withdraw into a ridiculous caste pride, doubtless had a great deal to do with the disappointment he felt because of his powerlessness to mobilize that national elite which, as such, possessed in all truth nothing except money that almost always had been inherited or ill-gotten.
Unlike Riva Agüero, Pedro Beltrán continued to be active in politics, but in a more or less indirect way, through La Prensa, which, in the 1950s, became, thanks to him, a modern newspaper, each of its editorial pages written by a very well-integrated and brilliant group of journalists, perhaps the best that any modern Peruvian publication has had (I shall cite the names of the best ones: Juan Zegarra Russo, Enrique Chirinos Soto, Luis Rey de Castro, Arturo Salazar Larraín, Patricio Ricketts, José María de Romaña, Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and Mario Miglio). With this team and perhaps thanks to it, Don Pedro Beltrán discovered in those years the virtues of political democracy, of which he had not previously been a convinced supporter. On the contrary, La Prensa—like the oldest Peruvian daily, El Comercio—had attacked Bustamante y Rivero’s administration with great severity, conspired against it, and supported General Odría’s barracks coup in 1948 and the electoral farce of 1950 in which the latter proclaimed himself president.
But beginning in the mid-1950s, Pedro Beltrán came to the defense not only of the market and private enterprise but also of political freedom and the democratization of Peru.* And he attacked censorship, for which he had lost respect, allowing himself more and more harsh criticisms of the regime’s measures and its principal figures.
Esparza Zañartu, who was neither slow-witted nor dilatory, closed the paper, on which he mounted an assault with his informers and police, and Pedro Beltrán and his principal contributors ended up in the Frontón, the island prison just off Callao. He left it three weeks later — there had been strong international pressure for his release — as a hero of the freedom of the press (as he was proclaimed to be by the SIP (Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa: Inter-American Press Association) and with brand-new credentials as a democrat, which for the rest of his days would prove to be valid ones.
The climate changed as quickly as possible and Peruvians could once again engage in politics. Exiles from Chile, Argentina, Mexico returned, semiclandestine weeklies or biweeklies of just a few pages and of every ideological line began to appear, many of which disappeared after a few issues. One of the most picturesque of them was the mouthpiece of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (T), the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (T) — T for Trotskyite, whose leader and perhaps only affiliate, Ismael Frías, recently back from exile, glided his sinuous humanity every noon all through San Marcos, predicting the imminent establishment of soviets of workers and soldiers throughout the length and breadth of Peru. Another, more serious publication, whose title changed each year — calling itself 1956, 1957, 1958—was put out by Genaro Carnero Checa, who, although expelled from the Communist Party for having supported Odría’s coup d’état before being exiled by him, always maintained his ties with the U.S.S.R. and the socialist countries. In the Congress then in existence — a product of the fraudulent elections of 1950—a number of previously well-disciplined representatives and senators, sensing that the boat was shipping water, changed their old servility into independence and even, in the case of several of them, into open hostility toward the master. And in streets and public squares there circulated a hodgepodge of names and possibilities for the presidential election that, on paper at least, was scheduled to be held in 1956.
Of the new political groups that were emerging from the catacombs, the one that seemed to me to be the most interesting was the one that later coalesced into the movement that came to be known as Democracia Cristiana (the Christian Democrats). Many of its leaders in Arequipa, such as Mario Polar, Héctor Cornejo Chávez, Jaime Rey de Castro, and Roberto Ramírez del Villar — or their friends in Lima, Luis Bedoya Reyes, Ismael Bielich, and Ernesto Alayza Grundy — had worked with Bustamante y Rivero’s administration, and because of this a number of them had been the victims of persecution and exile. They were young professionals still, without ties to the great upper-class economic interests, uncontaminated by political filth, present or past, who appeared to be bringing to Peruvian politics a democratic conviction and an unequivocal decency, what Bustamante y Rivero had so pristinely embodied during the three years of his administration. Like many others, as soon as that movement made its appearance, I thought it was being organized in such a way that Bustamante y Rivero would be its leader and guiding light and, perhaps, its candidate in the coming elections. This made it even more attractive to me, since my admiration for Bustamante — because of his honesty and his well-nigh religious worship of the rule of law, on which Aprismo heaped such ridicule, calling him the “limping legalist”—had remained intact during my militancy in Cahuide. That admiration, as I now see more clearly, had to do with the precise fact that the general public had fallen into the habit of commenting sympathetically on his failure with the cliché: “He was a president for Switzerland, not for Peru.” In fact, during those “three years of struggle for democracy in Peru”—as the book of personal witness that he wrote in exile is entitled — Bustamante y Rivero governed as if the country that had elected him were not barbarous and violent, but a civilized nation of responsible citizens, respectful of the institutions and the norms that make social coexistence possible. From the fact that he had taken the trouble to write his speeches himself, in a clear and elegant prose with a turn-of-the-century cast, always addressing his compatriots without permitting himself the slightest demagoguery or shoddiness, as if taking as his point of departure the supposition that all of them formed an intellectually demanding audience, I saw in Bustamante y Rivero an exemplary man, a head of government that if Peru ever came to be that country which his governance aimed to make of it — a genuine democracy of free and cultivated individuals — Peruvians would remember with gratitude.