The writer Abraham Valdelomar used to say: ‘In this barbarous country, they call the delicate dragonfly a “bloodsucker”.’ The surrealist César Moro penned this aphorism: ‘All over the world people make mistakes, but in Peru they only make mistakes.’ And the story goes that a crafty old mayor at the beginning of the century calmed the fears of the inhabitants of Lima at the spread of Spanish flu that was wreaking havoc throughout America and advancing on Peru, with these words: ‘Here, even flu goes soft in the head.’
One has to beware of the reverse chauvinism or masochistic patriotism that such jokes might disguise, but in fact, in the light of recent events, I have been wondering over the last few days if Peru has not now become what Idi Amin’s Uganda or ‘Emperor’ Jean Bédel Bokassa’s Central African Republic once were: one of the world’s picturesque eccentricities. When, throughout the entire globe, despotic regimes that seemed quite indestructible are beginning to crumble and where civilian and democratic governments are everywhere replacing dictatorships, in Peru a lawfully elected president is stifling democracy and becoming a dictator, without great difficulty and with the approval of ‘all the people and all the decent people of the country’, as a distinguished gentleman declared when he rang my house to accuse me of betraying the fatherland for having asked the international community to throttle the coup d’état with economic sanctions (a plea that I now reiterate).
The support of ‘the people’ for the dictatorship is not excusable, of course, but it is understandable: those millions of Peruvians who, for several decades, have been reduced to horrific extremes of poverty by the dreadful populist policies of military and civilian governments and who, besides hunger, cholera, unemployment and filth, have had to cope with terrorism and counter-terrorism and are exposed to the break-up of all forms of legality and security in their poor shanty towns, would find it difficult to have a very clear idea of the medium or long term effects of a coup d’état, or the meaning of deeply rooted democratic principles. They put their trust in General Odría in 1948
and in General Velasco in 1968 and went out to cheer them, just as they are now cheering the brand new ‘hard man’, whom, as happened with the others, they will come to detest as soon as they discover that those in power are not their saviours but a bunch of cynical operators (several of whom, furthermore, prospered in the shadow of the previous military regime).
It is more difficult to explain the support for the coup shown by the ‘decent people’, like those businessmen of CONFIEP, the Confederation of Peruvian Industry, who, after a hypocritical declaration, have become an organic part of the dictatorship, responsible for the Industry portfolio. Those gentlemen are displaying a monumental blindness because, by identifying with a regime which sooner or later will be rejected by the Peruvian people with the same contempt with which they have thrown off all dictatorships, they are putting at risk not just their own futures, but something much more important, that has cost enormous effort to introduce and develop in Peru: notions of property, private enterprise, the market economy and liberal capitalism.
We fought and won a formidable battle against the nationalization of the financial system by the previous government with an argument that a significant proportion of Peruvian society came to accept: that political freedom and representative democracy are inseparable from a respect for private property and private enterprise and that to defend the one was also a way of defending the other. These businessmen, who went back on all they said in favour of democracy when they were afraid of being expropriated, have rushed to become the geishas of the new dictator and to receive from him the commercial perks by which they have always lived. In so doing, they have provided a magnificent service to supporters of statism and collectivism who had seemed to have lost the argument. They can now go on to the offensive again with renewed energy and raise an accusing finger: ‘Isn’t it clear that the word capitalist is synonymous with coups d’état and militarism in Peru?’
Yes, now it is clear, and it also means having a faulty memory and very few brain cells. Because what these people represented — private enterprise — was threatened in a democracy in 1987 and yet it was possible, by using the institutions and rights guaranteed by this democracy, to mobilize, defend and try to save something that, if it had fallen into the jaws of the state, would have functioned much worse than under their control. On the other hand, when a dictatorship, the dictatorship
of General Velasco, decided to expropriate their estates, their newspapers, their fishing companies, their radio stations, their television channels etc., they had to accept the losses meekly, without being able to lift a finger to prevent them.
How, after such an experience, can they still believe that a military dictatorship — because that is what we now have in Peru, although the puppet that presides over it for the time being does not wear the stripes — is a firmer guarantee for private property and enterprise than a State of Law, with freedom of the press, and institutions, however defective, like an elected congress and an independent judiciary which can restrain the abuses and excesses of those in power? In truth, they do not believe it. They do not stop to think about it. They do not stop to think for one moment about the incalculable surprises in store for them and for every Peruvian once the Pandora’s box of a regime based on brute force is opened. They are drunk with the illusion that the military can now really ‘sort out’ the terrorists, killing as many as necessary without having those sinister human rights organizations coming to cause trouble, that their beloved Chichonet will know how to run the unions with a firm hand and that the Minister of the Economy with the curls and cupid face that they have cultivated so assiduously — little Pinochet Boloña — will now begin to protect them, or rather to protect ‘national industry’, against heartless outside competition. One cannot even hope that when, soon, they discover that the collapse of democracy has increased terrorism, and the disenchantment of the ‘people’ with the dictatorship which has not given them what they expected, and has increased social violence, then they will learn the lesson. Did they learn it under Velasco?
For me, the most extraordinary aspect of what is happening in Peru is the obsequiousness and the indulgence shown to the dictatorship by certain communications networks that were expropriated by the previous military regime and returned to their owners under democracy (this was the first measure of President Belaúnde Terry when he returned to office in 1980). From the pen of some journalists who are among the most competent in the country and, supposedly, the most committed to freedom, I have read the most lavishly ornate arguments to justify the coup or to whitewash it, presenting it as a ‘different coup’ which, given the mitigating circumstances surrounding it, should be given a chance. If one were to believe them, then the high popularity of the ‘coup’ in opinion polls in the first days bears more
weight than all those abstract arguments about democracy which, in practice, functioned very badly in Peru. Didn’t Parliament sometimes seem like a circus? Weren’t the judges corrupt? Didn’t the institutions need cleaning up and putting in order? This is what the ‘real country’ wants, not the ‘formal Peru’ of political parties, and this is what legitimates the actions of Fujimori and the army. It is regrettable that it had to happen like this. But it has happened and it is too late to turn back, to reopen Congress and re-establish the rule of the constitution. Because that could provoke a ‘popular uprising’.
If every dictatorial act approved by ‘the people’ and ‘the decent people’ according to opinion polls was irreversible, the director of the newspaper Expreso in Lima — which now acts almost as the official mouthpiece of the coup since 5 April — would still be in exile, stripped of Peruvian nationality, and the paper that he edits would still be in the hands of the state that confiscated it, because these outrages, according to the famous intellectual ‘mastiffs’ of the military regime that committed them, could not have been more popular. But, in fact, this is all a farce, mounted by sections of the media like those who now, instead of defending democracy against those who overthrew it, try to excuse them and find an accommodation with them.
I had (naively) considered that people like Manuel d’Ornellas and Patricio Ricketts — to name those who have been most servile to the coup — would be incapable of supporting a dictatorship in return for favours or personal gain. If journalists like these — who seemed to fight so tenaciously for Peru to stop being the barbarous and backward country that dictatorships, above all, had made it, and to embrace once and for all the culture of freedom — approve of what is happening and even try to benefit from it, then what can be expected of those that have neither their background nor their experience? How can the uncultured react lucidly if the cultured deceive themselves and deceive them with false reasons to defend the indefensible?
What makes many people like them in Peru act in this way is a sense of impotence that political democracy sometimes gives rise to in a country where the institutions and the parties are not, as yet, very democratic and where corruption and arbitrary acts often make a mockery of the law. And also the exasperation and moral indignation often felt when those who work within the democratic system seem to use this system in such a way as to prevent it from functioning. Yet history — and above all Peruvian history, which is so new — should
have taught them that a dictatorship is a much worse remedy than the ills that it purports to cure. Because the defects — corruption, inefficiency, lack of culture — are not those of democracy but of society and can always find in arbitrary and overbearing regimes a wonderfully fertile ground in which to develop and become worse. It has always been so. And for that reason, after every dictatorship, we have had to start out, further and further behind, on that difficult — but irreplaceable — road of learning about democracy from within democracy itself. Today’s setback plunges us back to the bottom of the well from which we emerged, so battered, twelve years ago.
‘How can you attack a government that is going to cut down APRA and the communists? Have you already forgotten that they were your enemies?’ This is a message I have been sent. Yes, APRA and the communists are my political enemies: I have fought a hard ideological and political battle against them. But as far as I am concerned, this battle can only be fought on equal ground that guarantees freedom and the judge of the contest can only be the people of Peru and not a crooked and thuggish judge who opposes reason with tanks. One of the few hopeful news items coming out of Peru is that the political parties have put aside their differences and disputes and have united in their opposition to the coup, in favour of the re-establishment of democracy – a democracy which is at once both definite and real, which allows coexistence within diversity and is capable, furthermore, of harmonizing within a viable system so many cultures, ethnic groups and different social interests as those which make up the explosive society of Peru. It is good that, from all parts of the political spectrum, the political parties have understood that it is now the first priority for every responsible Peruvian to defend this coexistence within the law, without being terrorized by opinion polls or by the farcical relationship between ‘the people’ and ‘the decent people’.
Berlin, 25 April 1992