When I thought I had found the explanation of what Sartre would call the situation of the writer in Peru in periods of dictatorship, I wrote a series of articles in the magazine Caretas, under the overall title of “El intelectual barato” (“The Cut-Rate Intellectual”),* which — this time for good reason — exacerbated the long-standing phobia against me on the part of those who knew very well that they had sold out. Alan García, with his infallible intuition for this sort of move, recruited several of them to be his mastiffs and let them loose on me, armed with the weapons that they wield so well. They played an important role during the campaign and spared no effort to bring it down to the level of mere mudslinging.
The first one hired was — a striking paradox — a journalist on the take who had faithfully served Velasco from his post as editor-in-chief of La Crónica, a figure of whom it can be said, without fear of being mistaken, that he is the most exquisite product that dung-collecting journalism in Peru has yet created and the one whose talent has contributed the most to beating even our recent records for pestilence: Guillermo Thorndike. From the pages of that daily, with a little band of collaborators recruited in the local literary pigsties (the exception was Abelardo Oquendo, one of the best friends of my youth, whose reasons for being there, surrounded by such resentful and scheming pen pushers as Mirko Lauer, Raúl Vargas, Tomás Escajadillo, and other even worse muckrakers, I was never able to understand), there poured forth adulation of the dictator and a stubborn defense of his actions, alternating with infamous campaigns against their adversaries which censorship of the communications media prevented us from answering. One of the worst victims of these diatribes was the Aprista party, from which, at the same time that it stole from it a large part of its program for governing, the Velasco dictatorship attempted, through Sinamos (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Sociaclass="underline" National System of Support for Social Mobilization), to steal away the backing of the masses. At the time of the events of February 5, 1975, when a police strike degenerated into popular uprisings against the regime and in the burning down of the Círculo Militar and the daily Correo,* the newspaper, under Thorndike’s editorship, blamed the Aprista party for the disorders and intoxicated public opinion with an anti-Aprista campaign compared to which the witch-hunts against Haya de la Torre’s party by the ultraconservative press of the 1930s was mere child’s play.
A few years later, however, from his position as editor-in-chief of the daily La República—another famous manifestation of a sewer metamorphosed into a paper — Thorndike would turn to serving the APRA and Alan García with the same enthusiasm and the identical vile means as when he was a toady of Velasco’s. As a reward, following Alan García’s victory in the election, he was sent to Washington at the taxpayers’ expense (his likable wife, about whom nobody had ever known that she had even a casual relationship to culture, was named cultural attaché of Peru to the Organization of American States). Guillermo Thorndike was quickly summoned home from there by President Alan García in the days of the nationalization of the banks, so that he could apply his techniques of poisoning public opinion and wage one of his mudslinging campaigns against those of us who were opposed to the measure. A “hate office” was set up in a suite at the Hotel Crillón. From there, under Thorndike’s direction and prepared by him, there came pouring forth, to daily papers, radio stations, and government-controlled TV channels, accusations, insinuations, and the most despicable attacks against my person and my family. (Among the lies — along the lines of the age-old ruse of committing a robbery and then coming out into the street shouting “Thief!”—was that of my having been a Velasco supporter!) Thanks to unexpected allies, who, from the ranks of the Aprista administration itself, told us in secret how the “hate office” functioned, the daily Expreso revealed its existence and photographed Thorndike coming out of the Crillón, whereupon his operations diminished somewhat. Later, ever the diligent servant of the master of the day, Thorndike would publish a hagiographic biography of Alan García, and during the electoral campaign, García would once again bring him back to Peru to be editor-in-chief of a scandal sheet, Página Libre, which, in the final months before the elections, played a role that can easily be imagined. (A few days before the first round of balloting, a woman telephoned my house, many times, insisting on speaking to me or to Patricia, explaining that she would reveal her identity only to us. Patricia finally came to the phone to talk to her. The woman, Argentine by birth but Peruvian by marriage, was Guillermo Thorndike’s mother. We had never met her. She was calling to say that she was so ashamed of what her son was up to in the pages of the newspaper of which he was the editor-in-chief that she had decided, for the first time in her life, to vote in the coming elections: she would vote for me, as a way of making amends, and we could make that fact public. We didn’t do so at the time, but I am doing so now, with my thanks for an initiative which, in all truth, still amazes me.*
These are not mere anecdotes. They represent a general phenomenon, a state of affairs that affects the entire cultural life of Peru and that has repercussions on its political life. One of the contemporary myths concerning the Third World is that, in those countries frequently subjugated by despotic and corrupt dictatorships, intellectuals represent a moral reserve, which, although powerless in the face of the dominant brute force, constitutes a hope, a source from which, when things begin to change, the country will be able to draw ideas, values, and persons that will allow it to promote freedom and justice. In reality, this is not how things are. Peru is a demonstration, rather, of how fragile the intellectual class is in the Third World — of the ease with which the lack of opportunities, the insecurity, the scarcity of means to carry out one’s work, the absence of any accepted status in society, and the inability to exert any sort of effective influence make intellectuals vulnerable to corruption, to abandonment of their ideals, to cynicism and careerism.
When I first began to take an active part in Peruvian politics I was prepared for confrontations with my colleagues, whose techniques I was familiar with from the days when, at the end of the 1960s, I came into conflict with them by starting to criticize the Cuban revolution. From then on, I had been the target of their wrath, apparently for reasons having to do with ideological differences, although in truth, very often the real reason was rivalry and envy, which is also inevitable when someone has, or is perceived as having, recognition, of enjoying what goes by the name of success, by those who must confront all sorts of difficulties in order to practice their calling. I was, therefore, prepared to contend with those Peruvian intellectuals whom for some time I had promised myself only to read, and never again to keep company with.