Yet leftist thought had an illustrious precursor in Peru: José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930). In his short lifetime, he produced an impressive number of essays and articles to further the spread of Marxism, of analyses of Peruvian reality, and works of literary criticism or political commentaries on current events notable for their intellectual acuity, and often for their originality. In them the reader can find a freshness of concept and an individual voice that were never to appear again among his avowed followers. Although they all call themselves Mariateguists, from the most moderate to the most extreme (Abimael Guzmán himself, the founder and leader of Sendero Luminoso, maintains that he is a disciple of Mariátegui’s), passing by way of the PUM (Partido Unificado Mariateguista: Unified Mariateguist Party), the truth of the matter is that after the brief apogee that Mariátegui represented for socialist thought, the latter entered a decline in Peru which touched bottom during the years of the military dictatorship (1968–1980), in which the opposing positions in intellectual debate appeared to be confined to two: the opportunism of the left or terrorism.
Intellectuals had as much responsibility as the military for what happened in Peru during those years, especially in the first seven—1968 to 1975, those of General Velasco’s regime — in which all the wrong solutions for the nation’s great problems were adopted, making them worse and plunging Peru into a state of ruin to which Alan García was to give the last turn of the screw. They applauded the destruction by force of the democratic system, which, however defective and inefficient it may have been, permitted political pluralism, criticism, active unions, and the exercise of freedom. And with the argument that “formal” freedoms were the mask of exploitation, they justified the fact that political parties were forbidden, that no elections were held, that landed estates were confiscated and collectivized, that hundreds of businesses were nationalized and turned over to state control, that the freedom of the press and the right to criticize were suppressed, that censorship was institutionalized, that all the TV channels, the daily papers, and a large number of radio stations were expropriated, that a law was passed to subjugate the judicial power and place it in the service of the executive power, that hundreds of Peruvians were imprisoned and deported and a number of them assassinated. In all these years, having seized all the important communications media that existed in the country, they devoted themselves to harping on those slogans against democratic values and liberal democracy and to defending, in the name of socialism and the revolution, the abuses and iniquities of the dictatorship. And, of course, to raining down insults on those of us who did not share their enthusiasm for what Velasco’s sycophants called “the socialist, participationist and libertarian revolution.” And we lacked any forum for answering them.
Some of them, the fewest in number, acted in this fashion out of naïveté, truly believing that the longed-for reforms to put an end to poverty, injustice, and backwardness could come about by way of a military dictatorship which, unlike those of yesteryear, did not speak of “Western Christian civilization” but of “socialism and revolution.”* These ingenuous supporters of the dictatorship, people like Alfredo Barnechea or César Hildebrandt, soon lost their illusions and joined those who opposed the regime. But the majority were not partisans of the dictatorship out of naïveté or out of conviction, but, as their later behavior proved, out of opportunism. They had been summoned. It was the first time that a government of Peru had called on intellectuals and offered them a few crumbs of power. Without hesitating, they threw themselves into the arms of the dictatorship, displaying a zeal and a diligence that frequently went beyond what had been asked of them. This was the reason, no doubt, why General Velasco himself, a man without subtlety, had spoken of the intellectuals of the regime as of mastiffs he kept so as to scare the bourgeoisie.
And, in fact, that was the role to which the regime reduced them: to bark and bite from the vantage point of the newspapers, radios, television channels, ministries, and official agencies whose excesses we opposed. What happened to so many Peruvian intellectuals constituted for me a genuine trauma. From the time of my break with the Cuban regime, at the end of the 1960s, I had come to be the object of the attacks of many of them, but even so I had the feeling that they were acting as they did — defending what they were defending — guided by a faith and certain ideas. After having seen that sort of moral abdication by a generation of Peruvian intellectuals, in the years of Velasco’s dictatorship, I discovered something that I still believe today: that for the great majority of them, those convictions were only a strategy to enable them to survive, build a career, get ahead. (In the days of the nationalization of the banks, the Aprista press published, with a great deal of ballyhoo, a number of irate statements by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, from Paris, accusing me of identifying myself “objectively with the conservative sectors of Peru” and of opposing “the irresistible incursion of the popular classes.” Ribeyro, a very courteous and respectful writer and up until then a friend of mine, had been given a diplomatic post at UNESCO by Velasco’s dictatorship and was retained in it by all the successive governments, whether dictatorships or democracies, which he served obediently, impartially, and discreetly. Shortly thereafter, José Rosas-Ribeyro, a Peruvian ultraleftist from France, described him, in an article in Cambio,* trotting all over Paris with other bureaucrats of the Aprista regime in search of signatures for a manifesto in favor of Alan García and the nationalization of the banks signed by a group of “Peruvian intellectuals” established there. What had turned the apolitical and skeptical Ribeyro into an untimely socialist militant? An ideological conversion? The instinct of diplomatic survival. That was what he himself informed me, in a message he sent me at the time — one that made a worse impression on me than his statements — via his publisher, who was also a friend of mine, Patricia Pinilla: “Tell Mario not to pay any attention to the things that I am declaring against him, because they represent only favorable opportunities for me.”)
I then understood one of the most dramatic expressions of underdevelopment. There was practically no way in which an intellectual of a country such as Peru was able to work, to earn his living, to publish, in a manner of speaking to live as an intellectual, without adopting revolutionary gestures, rendering homage to the socialist ideology, and demonstrating in his public acts — his writings and his civic activities — that he belonged to the left. To get to be editor-in-chief of a publication, to be promoted to higher academic rank, to obtain fellowships, travel grants, invitations with expenses paid, it was necessary for him to prove that he was identified with the myths and symbols of the revolutionary and socialist establishment. Anyone who failed to heed the invisible watchword was condemned to the wilderness: marginalization and professional frustration. That was the explanation. Hence the inauthenticity, that “moral hemiplegia”—in Jean-François Revel’s phrase — in which Peruvian intellectuals lived, repeating on the one hand, in public, an entire defensive logomachy — a sort of countersign in order to assure their posts within the establishment — which corresponded to no intimate conviction, a mere tactic of what the anglicism calls posición amiento, positioning oneself correctly. But when one lives in this way, the perversion of thought and language becomes inevitable. It was for that reason that a book such as the one brought out by Hernando de Soto and his team at the Freedom and Democracy Institute—El otro sendero—had aroused so much enthusiasm on my part: at last something was appearing in print in Peru that revealed an effort to think independently and originally on the underlying problems of Peru, breaking taboos and frozen ideological concepts. But, once more in the land of unfulfilled promises, that hope came to nothing almost the moment it was born.