The fact that I speak of him in those terms today, in view of his repulsive activities later as the adviser of Velasco’s military dictatorship, the author of the monstrous law confiscating all the communications media, and the first editor-in-chief of El Comercio after the state had taken it over, will make many people smile. But the fact is that, in the middle of the 1950s, when he came to Lima from his native Arequipa, this young attorney appeared to be a model of a politician with clean hands, a man driven by his burning democratic zeal and an indignation that flared up on the slightest provocation against any and every form of injustice. He had been Bustamante y Rivero’s secretary, and I was only too eager to see in him a rejuvenated and radicalized version of the former president, with the same moral integrity and the same unbreakable commitment to democracy and the rule of law.
Dr. Cornejo Chávez spoke of agrarian reform, of a reform of business enterprises based on profit sharing and a voice in their management by their workers, and he condemned oligarchy, large landowners, the “forty families,” with Jacobin rhetoric. He was admittedly not a likable man, but, rather, cold and distant, with that ceremonious and rather pompous manner of speaking so frequent in Arequipans (especially those who had had experience before the bar), but his modest and almost frugal way of life made many of us think that, with him at the head, the Christian Democratic Party could accomplish the transformation of Peru.
Things turned out very differently. Cornejo Chávez eventually became the leader of the party — he was not its head in 1955 or 1956, when I was a militant in it — and was its candidate for the presidency in the election of 1962, in which he won an insignificant percentage of the vote. His authoritarianism and his personality little by little created tensions and factional quarrels within his own party, which culminated, in 1965, in the breakup of the Christian Democrats: a majority of the leaders and militants were to leave, with Luis Bedoya Reyes at their head, to form the Christian Popular Party, whereas Cornejo Chávez’s party, reduced to its nadir, was barely to survive General Velasco’s military coup in 1968. He then saw that his hour had come. What he was unable to secure by way of the ballot box, Dr. Cornejo Chávez obtained through the dictatorship: reaching power by virtue of the fact that the military entrusted him with tasks as undemocratic as gagging the communications media and gutting the power of the judiciary (since he was also to be responsible for the creation of the National Council of Justice, an institution through which the dictatorship placed judges in its service).
When Velasco fell from power — when he was replaced, after a palace coup led by General Morales Bermúdez, in 1975—Cornejo Chávez, after taking part in the Constituent Assembly (1978–1979), retired from politics, in which, surely, he had left behind him nothing but bad memories.
The nonexistent Christian Democratic Party — a handful of social climbers — figured, nonetheless, in the political life of Peru, allied to Alan García, who, in order to maintain the fiction of a liberalizing regime, always had a Christian Democrat in his administration. After Alan García Christian Democracy died out, or rather, its governing board went into hibernation to wait until circumstances would allow it to recover a few crumbs of power once it had become the parasite of another of the revolving heads of state.
But we are in 1955 and all that is still far in the future. After that summer, as I began classes in my third year at the university and discussed literature with Luis Loayza, was a militant in the Christian Democratic movement, wrote short stories, and made index cards from history books at Porras Barrenechea’s, there arrived in Lima someone who would represent another earth tremor of my existence: “Aunt” Julia.
Fourteen. Cut-Rate Intellectuals
On October 26, 1989, El Diario, the mouthpiece of Sendero Luminoso, published a communiqué in the name of a front organization, the MRDP (Movimiento Revolucionario en Defensa del Pueblo: Revolutionary Movement in Defense of the People), calling for a “class-based armed work stoppage” for November 3, “in support of the war of the people.”
The following morning, the United Left candidate for the mayoralty of Lima and the presidency, Henry Pease García, announced that on the day chosen by the Sendero Luminoso movement for the work stoppage he would take to the streets with his supporters with the aim of proving “that democracy [is] stronger than subversion.” I was with Álvaro, in my study — early each morning, before the meeting of the “kitchen cabinet,” we went over the program for the day — when I heard the news on the radio. The idea instantly occurred to me to join the demonstration and take to the streets too with my supporters on November 3 in answer to the challenge of Sendero Luminoso. Álvaro liked the idea, and to avoid its bogging down in complicated consultations with the allies, I wasted no time and made my decision public, in a telephone interview with “Radioprogramas.” In it, I congratulated Henry Pease and proposed to him that we march together.
It caused a sensation that someone who for years had been a target of native progressivist intellectuals, a group that included Pease, should lend his support to an initiative of the Marxist left, and it struck some of my friends as a political error. They feared that my gesture would give Pease’s candidacy a sort of backing (the opinion polls showed him as having the support of less than 10 percent of those intending to vote). But this was a typical case in which ethical considerations ought to prevail over political ones. Sendero Luminoso was behaving more and more daringly and extending its area of activity; its attacks took place daily, as did its murders. In Lima, its presence had greatly increased in factories, schools, and the young towns, where its schools and indoctrination centers functioned in plain sight of everyone. Wasn’t it a good idea for civil society to take to the streets to demonstrate in favor of peace on the same day that terrorism threatened to stage an armed work stoppage? The Peace March received a tidal wave of support, from political parties, unions, cultural and social institutions, and well-known figures. And it attracted a huge number of demonstrators, eager to show their repudiation of the horror into which Peru was gradually sinking through the messianic fanaticism of a minority.
Pressured by the prevailing mood, the candidates of the APRA (Alva Castro) and of the Socialist Alliance (Barrantes Lingán) joined the march too, although their lack of enthusiasm was evident. Both of them made a point of being present at the monument to Miguel Grau, on the Paseo de la República, and withdrew with their small delegations before the other contingents, the United Left column and that of the Democratic Front, which had begun the march, the former from the Plaza Dos de Mayo and ours from the monument to Jorge Chávez, had joined up together on the Avenida 28 de Julio.
After a slow, enthusiastic, and orderly march, the columns converged in front of the monument to Grau and there Henry Pease and I gave each other a friendly embrace. We laid bouquets of flowers at the foot of the monument and the national anthem was sung. The enormous crowd was made up not only of political militants but also of people who belonged to no party and had no interest in politics, who felt the need to express their condemnation of the murders, the kidnappings, the bombs, the disappearances, and other acts of violence that in recent years had so debased the value of life itself in Peru. There were many religious all round the monument to Grau — bishops, priests, nuns, lay Christians — who, amid the chorused slogans and locomotive cheers of the parties, let their own slogan be heard: “Se siente, se siente, Cristo está presente” (“We can feel it, we can feel it, Christ is here with us”).