A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (70 page)

I had given explicit instructions to the campaign commando team and to the leaders of Libertad not to employ such tricks, and forbade our militants to engage in the tactics of a dirty campaign, because in the first place they were immoral and also because unleashing a religious war could turn out to be counterproductive. But there was no way to avoid it. I learned later that members of the Libertad section for young people, passing themselves off as evangelicals who were for Fujimori, had gone through towns and markets slandering Catholics, and they were no doubt responsible for defacing some of the walls, but not all of them. For, incredible as it may seem—though nothing is incredible when it comes to fanaticism—some of the evangelical organizations, above all the most bizarre of them, believed, following the success attained by their candidates for seats in Congress, that the time had come to declare open war on the “papists.” In Ancash, for instance, the Sons of Jehovah (not to be confused with Jehovah’s Witnesses, also active pro-Fujimori militants) circulated a leaflet which, to the outrage of the local bishop, Monsignor Ramón Gurruchaga, they even distributed to nuns in a convent, saying that the moment had come for the Peruvian people to free themselves from servitude to a “pagan and fetishistic Church,” and to emancipate children from the Church-run schools that “teach them to adore idols.” Leaflets of a similar or even more aggressive tenor circulated in Huayanco, Tacna, Huancavelica, Huánuco, and above all in Chimbote, where the implantation of evangelical churches in neighborhoods inhabited by fishermen and workers in the fish-meal factories went back many years.
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The evangelical mobilization in Chimbote had such sharp-honed anti-Catholic connotations that the bishop, Monsignor Luis Bambarén—a distinguished “progressivist” of the Peruvian Church—intervened in the polemic with forceful denunciations against sects that “hurl epithets at the Catholic faith” and with expressions of firm support for the archbishop.
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Religion was the main subject of the electoral debate. Ill-will, chicanery, spectacular moves, or comic misunderstandings entered into it, in a way that had no precedent in the history of Peru, where, unlike Colombia or Venezuela, countries in which there had been religious wars, the nineteenth-century rivalries between the Church and liberalism had never led to bloodshed. In the third week in May, the archbishop and primate of the Church in Peru, Monsignor Vargas Alzamora, published a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Lima, stating that “charity moves us to be silent no longer” and that he felt obliged to condemn “the insidious campaign against our faith” initiated by the evangelical sects “because of the political power they attained in the last legislative elections.”

Without allowing himself to be scared off by the storm of criticism that this letter brought on in Aprista and leftist publications, which accused him of “having adopted the headband” (the militants of Libertad wore headbands at rallies), Monsignor Vargas Alzamora gave a press conference on May 23, declaring that he could not remain silent—“because silence means admission”—when confronted with publications that offended the Virgin Mary and the Pope and called the Church “pagan, iniquitous and fetishistic.” He said that he did not hold all evangelical groups responsible for those attacks, only those few whose insults “ought to have a limit.” And he announced that on May 31 the effigy of the Lord of Miracles, Lima’s most popular object of devotion, would leave its shrine and be carried in procession through the downtown section of the city, in order to accompany the image of the Virgin Mary, in amends for the insults heaped upon her and as a demonstration that the Peruvian people were Catholic. A short time before, in Arequipa, Archbishop Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio had called upon the faithful, for the same reasons, to hold a procession on May 26 with the most highly venerated image of the southern region: that of the Virgin of Chapi.

In one of those early-morning balance sheets that I was in the habit of drawing up with Álvaro, in my study, I remember having said to him, around that time, as I began to put more stock in the whole business of “magic realism” because of the hallucinatory proportions that the religious quarrel was taking on, that my supporters who, without my either wanting or seeking it, were creating an image of me as the “defender of Catholicism against the evangelical sects” were mistaken if they believed that that was going to bring me victory at the polls. The Catholic Church in Perú had been deeply divided since the years of liberation theology, and I was well acquainted with enough progressive middle-class Catholics to know that they were much more progressive than they were Catholic. Irritated by the attitude of the hierarchy favoring my candidacy, they would resolutely turn, with holy zeal and in the name of their status as believers, which they were not at all embarrassed about turning into political capital, to exhorting the faithful not to allow themselves to be manipulated by the “reactionary hierarchy” and to vote for Fujimori in the name of “the popular Church.” In this way, I would not only lose the election in any event, but would lose it in the worst possible way, in ideological confusion, religious misunderstanding, and political absurdity.

That is what happened. The bishop of Cajamarca, Monsignor José Dammert, a progressive in the Church, turned up on May 28 in
La República
, the daily paper capable of any imaginable calumny, to criticize the archbishop of Lima, who, according to him, “had fallen into the trap” and allowed himself to be used as a tool by the Front, and to condemn him for seeking to revive “the Catholicism of the Crusades, the Catholicism of the Conquest—what used to be called in Spain national Catholicism.” That was how this prelate interpreted the archbishop’s decision to bring out for the procession, along with the Lord of Miracles, an image brought to Perú by the conquistadors: the Virgin of Evangelization. (Other “progressives” would wonder whether this meant that Monsignor Vargas Alzamora wanted to bring the Inquisition back to life.) While many personalities and institutions of the sector of the Church regarded as being “conservative,” such as Catholic Action, the CCEC (Consorcio de Centros Educativos Católicos: Association of Catholic Educational Centers), Opus Dei, Sodalitium, the Legion of Mary, closed ranks around the primate of the Peruvian Church, in the media controlled by the government and those of the left criticisms of the hierarchy by well-known “progressive” Catholics proliferated, such as the one by Senator Rolando Ames (in
La República
, May 30, 1990), protesting against the political pressure the episcopate was trying to bring to bear in my favor and against the conspiracy on the part of “certain bishops who are opposed to one of the presidential candidacies.” In
Página Libre
there appeared daily lists of “progressive Catholics” urging voters to cast their ballots for Fujimori, and announcements that thousands of humble women who were members of clubs for mothers, “belonging to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church,” had sent to the Pope a protest—with 120 pages of signatures!—against those Church authorities who were inducing the faithful to vote against Fujimori, “the candidate of the people” (June 1, 1990).

Going himself one better in this clown act, President García announced that he would attend the procession to amend the insult to the Virgin Mary, because for ten years he had been a member of the “Ninth Company of the Brotherhood of the Christ Clad in Purple,” and that “those who believe that it is an act in bad taste and proclaim themselves to be agnostics” did not have the right to attend. Comparable to the unwitting humor of these declarations was a proposal, put forward in all seriousness, which I received at a meeting of the Democratic Front’s campaign command, for me to give my permission for a miracle to take place in the course of that procession. Through clever electronic devices, the mouth of the Lord of Miracles could be made to open at a peak moment of the procession and utter my name. “If the Christ Clad in Purple speaks we win,” Pipo Thorndike stammered excitedly.

Naturally, neither Patricia nor Álvaro nor I had planned to attend the procession (though my mother went to join it, sincerely alarmed that evangelical demons were about to take over Peru), but neither did the most militant of the Catholics among the leaders of the Freedom Movement attend, heeding Monsignor Vargas Alzamora’s request that political leaders refrain from “altering the nature” of the ceremony. A great multitude covered the Plaza de Armas that day, just as the crowd that escorted the Virgin of Chapi, in Arequipa, had been huge.

Ever since the beginning of this campaign, Fujimori handled the religious question deftly, thanking the archbishop and the bishops for their good offices, proclaiming himself a convinced and avowed Catholic—his children were studying with the Augustinian Fathers—and promising that during his administration the relations between the Catholic Church and the state would not be modified one iota and expressing his pleasure at the appearance of “our highly venerated Lord of Miracles…something that an agnostic would not be able to say,”
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on the streets out of season—for this procession is traditionally held in October. From then on, he never missed an opportunity to be photographed and filmed in churches or proudly showing the photograph of his son Kenji on the occasion of his first communion. He did not appear to have the slightest memory of the efforts made in his behalf by his allies, the evangelicals, whom, moreover, he hastened to dump the moment he assumed office.
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In the midst of this religious imbroglio, in which I felt completely lost, not knowing how to act so as not to make a faux pas, not to appear to be an opportunist and a cynic, and not to retract what I had said I believed and did not believe, I received a discreet request from the apostolic nuncio for us to have a talk together. We met in Alfredo Barnechea’s apartment, and there the purple-clad prelate (as my longago staff writer Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui would have put it), a refined Italian diplomat, informed me, without spelling it out word by word, of the concern on the part of the Church because of the rise to political power of evangelical sects in a traditionally Catholic country such as Peru. Couldn’t something be done? I told him jokingly that I was doing everything possible to prevent it, but that winning the second round did not depend on me alone. A few days later, Freddy Cooper came out to my house to announce to me that Pope John Paul II would receive me at a special private audience in Rome in three days’ time. I could go, meet with the Pope, and be back in just over forty-eight hours, so that the timetable of the campaign wouldn’t be affected. Such an interview would banish the last scruples that certain Peruvian Catholics of the old school might still have, despite what was happening, about voting for an agnostic. This opinion was also shared by several members of the campaign commando team and of the “kitchen cabinet.” But even though there was a moment when I was tempted—more out of curiosity about the person of the Pope than because I placed any confidence in the beneficial effect of the meeting on the election—I decided not to make the trip. It would have been a move so obviously opportunistic that it would have made us all feel ashamed.

And along with religion, another equally unexpected, and more sinister, subject suddenly made its appearance: racism, ethnic prejudice, social resentment. All that has existed in Perú since before the arrival of Europeans, when the civilized Quechuas of the mountain regions had had the most profound contempt for the small and primitive cultures of the Yungas on the coast, and it has been a factor making for violence and an important obstacle to the integration of Peruvian society throughout the entire history of the Republic. But in no previous election campaign has it appeared as openly as in the second round of voting, placing in full public view one of the worst of our national flaws.

When racial prejudice is mentioned, one immediately thinks of the sort harbored by the person who is in a privileged position against the person who finds himself or herself discriminated against and exploited, that is to say, in the case of Peru, the prejudice of the white against the Indian, the black, and the different types of mestizos (all the possible combinations of Spanish, Indian, black, or Chinese blood, et cetera), since, to simplify—and, as far as the last few decades are concerned, to simplify a great deal—it is true that economic power has ordinarily been concentrated in the small minority with European ancestors, and poverty and wretchedness (this without exception) in aboriginal Peruvians or those of African origin. That minuscule minority which is white or can pass for white, thanks to money or their climb up the social ladder, has never concealed its scorn for Peruvians of another color and another culture, to the point that expressions such as
cholo, mulato, zambo, chinocholo
have in the mouth of this minority a pejorative connotation. Although nowhere written down, nor favored by any piece of legislation, there has always been among this small white elite a tacit discriminatory attitude against other Peruvians, which at times caused fleeting scandals, such as a famous one in the 1950s, for instance, when the Club Nacional blackballed a distinguished agriculturalist and entrepreneur from Ica, Emilio Guimoye, because of his Asian origin, or when in the puppet Congress of Odría’s dictatorship, a legislator by the name of Faura tried to get a law passed whereby highlanders (meaning Indians) would have to ask for a safe-conduct pass in order to come to Lima. (In my own family, when I was a child, Aunt Eliana was discreetly ostracized for having married an Oriental.)

Furthermore, parallel and reciprocal to these sentiments and complexes, there exist the prejudices and rancors of other ethnic or social groups against whites and among each other, with disparaging attitudes inspired by geographic and local loyalties superimposing themselves on them and commingling with them. (Since the time that, following the Conquest, the axis of Peruvian economic and political life shifted from the highlands to the coast, the people from the coast have come to despise the highlander and to look on him as an inferior.) It is not an exaggeration to say that, if one took a penetrating X-ray of Peruvian society, setting aside those “proper forms” that cover them over and that are so deeply rooted in almost all the inhabitants of this “ancient realm” of ours—being “ancient” always involves formality and ritual, that is to say pretense and fiction—what appears is a veritable cauldron of hatreds, resentments, and prejudices, in which the white despises the black and the Indian, the Indian the black and the white, and in which each Peruvian, from his little social, ethnic, racial, and economic segment of the whole, asserts himself by holding in contempt the person he believes to be beneath him and by turning his envious resentment against the person he feels is above him. This phenomenon, which occurs to a greater or lesser degree in all the countries of Latin America with different races and cultures, is aggravated in Perú because, unlike in Mexico or Paraguay, for instance, racial crossbreeding among us has been slow, and social and economic differences have been maintained to a degree that is above the average in Latin America. That great social leveler, the middle class, which up until the mid-1950s had gradually been growing, began to come to a standstill in the 1960s and since then has been gradually decreasing. By 1990 it was very small, fragile, and incapable of slackening and lessening the tremendous tension between the few who were at the top economically—the immense majority of whom were white—and the millions of dark-skinned, poor, poverty-stricken, and wretched Peruvians.