And so it was a surprise to find, among my colleagues, a number of writers, professors, journalists, or artists who, knowing that they were exposing themselves to satanization in the milieu in which they worked, nonetheless made common cause with the Freedom Movement and helped me all through the campaign. I am not referring to friends like Luis Miró Quesada Garland or Fernando de Szyszlo, with whom I had waged political battles side by side for a long time now, but to persons such as the anthropologist Juan Ossio, the historian and publisher José Bonilla, the essayists Carlos Zuzunaga and Jorge Guillermo Llosa, the novelist Carlos Thorne, and a fair number of others who, like them, worked diligently for the victory of the Front, and to the several dozen university professors who joined our committees for government planning. Or to those who, though not members of Libertad, lent me invaluable aid with their writings and their pronouncements, such as the journalists Luis Rey de Castro, Francisco Igartua, César Hildebrandt, Mario Miglio, Jaime Bayly, Patricio Ricketts, and Manuel d’Ornellas,* or the actor and stage director Ricardo Blume, whom I shall never be able to thank enough for the courage and generosity with which he staked everything, whenever necessary, in defense of what we both believed in. Or to intellectuals such as Fernando Rospigliosi and Luis Pásara and young writers such as Alfredo Pita, Alonso Cueto, and Guillermo Niño de Guzmán, who, from positions that were independent of and sometimes hostile to my own, made, amid the din of the electoral battle, the noblest of gestures toward me personally or toward what I was doing.
But among the adversaries too there were a number of intellectuals whose conduct attracted my attention, because, for the reasons that I have already mentioned, I didn’t expect from them the propriety with which they acted, even in the most heated moments of the political debate. That was the case with Henry Pease García. A university professor, a sociologist, the director for a time of a well-known institute of social investigation, DESCO — financed by the German Social Democratic Party — Henry Pease was, with Alfonso Barrantes, representative mayor of Lima, and a close collaborator of the latter before the break that brought them both face to face as leaders of the two factions of the left in the battle for the presidency. Pease’s conduct, as head of the most radical sector, in which, in point of fact, cut-rate intellectuals abounded, was exemplary. He made every effort to wage a campaign of ideas, promoting his program without ever having recourse to personal attacks or underhanded maneuvers, and acted at all times with a logical consistency and sobriety that was in sharp contrast to that of some of his followers. His personal life, moreover, had always likewise struck me as being consistent with what he wrote and defended as a public figure. This was a decisive reason for my accompanying him on the Peace March.
After this march, all of the public’s attention and my own activity were focused on the municipal campaign. At the end of the week that followed the Peace March — on November 4 and 5—with Juan Incháustegui and Lourdes Flores I made the rounds of the shantytowns of Canto Chico, María Auxiliadora, San Hilarión, Huáscar, as well as many others in Chosica and Chaclacayo. And the following week I toured various departamentos of the interior — Arequipa, Moquegua, Tacna, and Piura — participating in dozens of rallies, motorcades, interviews, marches, in favor of the candidates of the Democratic Front. In those final days of the municipal campaign, the internal tensions between the forces of the alliance seemed to disappear and we managed to present an image of understanding and union, which paved the way for a favorable result for our first ordeal by electoral fire, on November 12.
However, the municipal elections were not the overwhelming victory for us that the opinion polls had predicted. The Front won more than half the districts of the country, but this majority was clouded by the defeats suffered in key cities, such as Arequipa, where Luis Cáceres Velázquez, of the Frenatraca (Frente Nacional de Trabajadores y Campesinos: National Front of Workers and Peasants) was reelected; Cuzco, where the former leftist mayor, Daniel Estrada, won by a wide margin; Tacna, where Tito Chocano, a former member of the Christian Popular Party, came in first; and above all Lima, where Ricardo Belmont managed to win more than 45 percent of the vote, against the 27 percent for Incháustegui.*
Once the results were known, on the same night as the balloting, I went with Incháustegui to the Hotel Riviera, on the Avenida Wilson, which had been turned into the general headquarters of the OBRAS movement, to congratulate Belmont, and posed in front of the battery of photographers and television cameramen who filled the place to overflowing, between Belmont and Incháustegui, lifting up the arms of both of them to suggest subliminally that, in some way, the victory of the independent was also mine and that the defeat of Incháustegui had done me no harm. Álvaro did what he could to see that this image was widely publicized in the press and on television.
In my statements, I made prodigious efforts to emphasize the “overwhelming victory” of the Democratic Front, which had won thirty district mayoralties of greater Lima (against seven for the United Left, two from lists of independents, one for the Socialist Alliance and not a single one for the APRA).
But in private, the results of the municipal elections left us very worried: there was a coolness, bordering on antipathy, on the part of large popular sectors toward the established political forces, whether of the left or of the right, and a proclivity toward placing their trust and hopes in anyone representing something different from the establishment. There was no other explanation for the unusually heavy vote for Belmont, someone whose principal merit — aside from his popularity as a radio and television emcee — appeared to be that he was not a politician, that he came from outside politics. More serious still, the final opinion poll indicated that, although on a national scale those intending to vote for me were still hovering around 45 percent, there was a growing tendency, in the least privileged sectors, to see me as belonging to the unpopular political class.
I was aware of the need to do something to correct that image. But I still thought that the best way to do so would be by presenting my program for governing the country to the Peruvian people. This program would demonstrate that my candidacy represented a radical break with traditional politics. The campaign was almost over and we would very soon have a chance to explain what this program was: at the meeting of CADE (the Annual Conference of Executives).
Getting a little ahead of myself, I should like to note that Ricardo Belmont Cassinelli’s winning of the office of mayor of Lima refuted those who, after June 10, interpreted my defeat in exclusively racial terms. If it were true, as any number of commentators have said, including Mark Malloch Brown,* that it was hatred of the whites and a sort of racial solidarity that led large popular sectors to vote for the “little Chinaman,” since they were under the impression — as Fujimori persistently suggested in the course of his campaign during the second round — that the “yellow man” was closer to the Indian, the mestizo, and the black than to the “white man” (traditionally associated with the man enjoying privileges and the exploiter), then how were you to explain the resounding victory of that ginger-haired gringo with light green eyes, “Red” Belmont, whom, as he himself had predicted, the voters of sectors C and D, which included the immense majority of the mestizos, Indians, and blacks of Lima, voted into office by a landslide?