Democracia had only just come out when I was summoned by my father to his office. I found him livid, waving about the weekly on which my name appeared on the masthead as editor-in-chief. Had I forgotten that La Crónica belonged to the Prado family? That La Crónica had exclusive rights to material that came from the International News Service? That he was the director of the INS? Did I want La Crónica to cancel his contract and leave him without a job? He ordered me to take my name off the masthead. So as a result, after the second or third issue, my friend and comrade from San Marcos, Guillermo Carrillo Marchand, succeeded me as the supposed editor-in-chief — the real one was Luis Jaime. And since after a few issues Guillermo also had problems because of his being on the masthead in that capacity, Democracia then came out with a fictitious editor-in-chief, whose name we filched from one of Borges’s short stories.
The Christian Democrats played a major role in the downfall of Esparza Zañartu, which precipitated the death of the dictatorship. If he had continued to be in charge of the security forces of the dictatorship, the regime would perhaps have gone on beyond the elections of 1956, by faking the results, as it had done in 1950, in favor of Odría himself or of some figurehead (there were several individuals lining up to play that role). But the fall of the strongman of the regime weakened it and plunged it into a state of disorder in which the opposition seized the opportunity to take over the streets.
Throughout the dictatorship Esparza Zañartu had occupied a relatively unimportant post — administrative head of the Ministry of the Interior — which allowed him to remain in the background, for despite the fact that he made all the decisions with respect to security, the minister of the interior took public responsibility for them. The probable reason that led Odría to make Esparza Zañartu minister was that nobody wanted to occupy that puppet post. Legend has it that when General Odría summoned him to offer him the portfolio, Esparza answered that he would accept it, out of loyalty, but that this measure was the equivalent of suicide for the regime. And so it was. The moment that Esparza Zañartu became a visible target, all the weapons of the opposition were trained on him. The coup de grâce was the demonstration by Pedro Roselló’s National Coalition, in Arequipa, which Esparza tried to break up by sending hired gunmen and police in civvies as counterdemonstrators. The latter were routed by the Arequipans, and police began shooting at the dissidents, the result being a large number of casualties. The drama of 1950 seemed to be repeating itself, when, during the fraudulent elections, confronted with an attempted rebellion in the streets by the people of Arequipa, Odría had resorted to a wholesale slaughter. But this time the regime did not dare to bring tanks and soldiers out into the street to fire on the crowd, as rumor has it that Esparza Zañartu wanted to do. Arequipa declared a general strike, which the entire city took part in. At the same time, in accordance with the long-standing custom that had earned it the name of the caudillo city (since the majority of republican rebellions and revolutions began there), the Arequipans tore up the paving stones of the streets and set up barricades, where thousands upon thousands of men and women of every social sector waited on the alert for the regime’s response to their list of demands: Esparza Zañartu’s resignation, the abolition of the Law of Domestic Security, and a date set for free elections. After three days of tremendous tension, the regime sacrificed Esparza Zañartu, who, after resigning, hurriedly went abroad. And although the dictatorship named a military cabinet, it was evident to everyone, beginning with Odría himself, that the people of Arequipa — the home territory of Bustamante y Rivero — had dealt him a fatal blow.
In that Arequipan epic, which, in Lima, we students at San Marcos supported with lightning demonstrations at which Javier Silva and I were always in the first row, the leaders at various times were Mario Polar, Roberto Ramírez del Villar, Héctor Cornejo Chávez, Jaime Rey de Castro, and other Arequipans of the nascent Christian Democratic movement. They were attorneys who had great prestige, friends and even relatives of the Llosa family, and one of them, Mario Polar, had been a suitor, or as my Granny Carmen put it, a “beau” of my mother’s, to whom as a young man he had written some passionate poems that she kept hidden from my father, a man of retrospective fits of jealousy.
All these reasons finally aroused my wholehearted enthusiasm when the Christian Democratic movement organized itself as a party and I signed up as a member of it. I was immediately catapulted, I have no idea either how or by whom, to the departmental committee for Lima, of which Luis Jaime Cisneros, Guillermo Carrillo Marchand, and such respectable holders of academic chairs as the jurist Ismael Bielich and the psychiatrist Honorio Delgado were also members. The new party declared in its statutes that “it was not based on a creed,” so that it was not necessary to be a believer in order to be militant in it, but in all truth the headquarters of the party — an old house with walls made of cane reeds and clay, with balconies — on the Avenida Guzmán Blanco, very near the Plaza Bolognesi, seemed like a church, or at least a sacristy, since all the well-known ultrapious believers in Lima were there, from Don Ernesto Alayza Grundy to the leaders of Catholic Action and of UNEC (Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos: National Union of Catholic Students) and all the young people seemed to be students at the Catholic University. I wonder whether in those days there were any other students from San Marcos in the Christian Democratic Party except for myself and Guillermo Carrillo (Javier Silva was to sign up as a member sometime later).
What the devil was I doing there, among these people who were ultrarespectable, but light-years away from the Sartrean who ate priests alive, the leftist sympathizer not completely cured of the Marxist notions of the circle that I had belonged to, that I still felt myself to be? I wouldn’t be able to explain it. My political enthusiasm was quite a bit stronger than my ideological consistency. But I remember having experienced a certain uneasiness whenever I was obliged to explain intellectually my militancy in the Christian Democratic Party. And things got worse when, thanks to Antonino Espinoza, I was able to read material having to do with the social doctrine of the Church and Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, which the Christian Democrats always cited as proof of their commitment to social justice and their will to work for economic reform to favor the poor. The famous encyclical fell from my hands as I read it, because of its paternalistic rhetoric, its gassy sentiments and vague criticisms of the excesses of capital. I recall having commented on the subject to Luis Loayza — who, if I remember correctly, had also signed some Christian Democratic text or other or had enrolled as a member of the party — and having told him how ill at ease I felt after reading that celebrated encyclical that struck me as being extremely conservative. He too had tried to read it, and after a few pages had started retching.
Nonetheless, I did not part company with the Christian Democratic Party (I would abandon it only years later, from Europe, because of the lukewarmness of its defense of the Cuban revolution, when for me the latter became an impassioned cause), because its fight against dictatorship and for the democratization of Peru was impeccable and because I continued to believe that Bustamante y Rivero would end up being the leader of the party and perhaps its presidential candidate. But, above all, because I, along with other more or less radical young people, discovered among the leaders of the Christian Democratic Party an attorney from Arequipa, who, although as devout a believer as the others, seemed to us from the start to be a man of more advanced and more progressive ideas than his colleagues, someone determined not only to moralize and democratize Peruvian politics, but also to bring about a profound reform so as to put an end to the iniquities of which the poor were victims: Héctor Cornejo Chávez.