^* I include among them Carlos Delgado, the civilian of greatest influence during the Velasco years and the one who wrote the majority of the speeches that the dictator delivered. A former Aprista and the ex-secretary of Haya de la Torre, the sociologist and political scientist Carlos Delgado resigned from the APRA when this party made a pact with the followers of Odría during Belaunde Terry’s first term as president. He backed the military revolution and contributed greatly to giving it an ideological cover, at the same time that he was the driving force behind a large part of the economic reforms—industrial co-ownership, the agrarian reform, controls and subsidies, et cetera—many of which were modeled on what had been the program for governing of the Aprista party. Carlos Delgado believed in that “third position” and his support for the dictatorship was inspired by the illusion that the army could be the instrument for instituting in Peru the democratic socialism that he defended. In Sinamos (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social: National System of Support for Social Mobilization), Carlos Delgado gathered around himself a group of intellectuals—Carlos Franco, Héctor Béjar, Helan Jaworski, Jaime Llosa, and others—who shared his position and the majority of whom, with intentions as good as his own, actively collaborated with the regime in its nationalizations and the extension of state intervention in the economy and in social life. But the criticisms that they deserve for this must be, especially in the case of Carlos Delgado, accompanied by a clarification: his good faith could not be doubted nor the consistency and openness with which he acted. He therefore always seemed “respectable” to me and I could disagree with him—and argue a great deal—without our friendship’s being broken. Moreover, it is obvious to me that Carlos Delgado did as much as he could to prevent, with all the influence he had, the co-opting by the Communists and those closest to them of the institutions of the regime and that he also used that influence to mitigate insofar as possible the abuses of the dictatorship. When the magazine Caretas was closed down and its editor-in-chief, Enrique Zileri, was persecuted, he secured me an interview with General Velasco (the only one I ever asked the dictator for) and supported me when I protested against this closing down and the persecution of Zileri and urged him to end them.