A Fish in the Water

  I explained all the reforms, beginning with the most controversial ones, from the privatization of public enterprises—it would begin with some seventy firms, among them the Banco Continental, the Society Paramonga, the Empresa Minera Tintaya, AeroPerú, Entel Perú, the Compañía de Teléfonos, the Banco Internacional, the Banco Popular, Entur Perú, Popular y Porvenir Compañía de Seguros, EPSEP, Laboratorios Unidos, and the Reaseguradora Peruana, and would continue until the whole of the public sector had been handed over to private hands—until the present number of ministries had been cut in half.

  In education, I anticipated a thoroughgoing reform, so that equality of opportunity would at last be possible. Only if poor Peruvian children and young people received a high-level technical or professional education would they have equal status for getting ahead in life along with those children and young people from families with middle and high incomes who could attend private schools and universities. In order to raise the educational level of the poor, it was necessary to reform the programs of study so that they would take into account the cultural, regional, and linguistic heterogeneity of Peruvian society, modernize the training given teachers, pay them good salaries and give them well-equipped schools, with libraries, laboratories, and an adequate infrastructure. Did the impoverished Peruvian state have any way to finance this reform? Of course not. For that, we would have to put an end to the indiscriminate access to a free education. After the third year of secondary school, it would be replaced by a system of scholarships and grants, so that those who were in a position to do so would finance, in whole or in part, their own education. No student who lacked financial resources would be left without a secondary school or a university education; but middle and high income families would contribute to giving the poor the means to acquire an education that would prepare them to emerge from poverty. Parents would participate in the administration of the school centers and in determining the contributions made by each family.

  Almost immediately, this proposal was used against us and became one of the most fiery warhorses sent into battle against the Front. Apristas, Socialists, and Communists proclaimed that they would defend “free education” with their lives, maintaining that we wanted to do away with it so that not only having enough to eat and having a job, but also getting an education would be a privilege of the rich alone. And a few days after my speech at CADE, Fernando Belaunde came to my house with a memorandum, reminding me that a free education was a firm plank in the Popular Action campaign platform. They would not abandon it. Populist leaders began to make statements along the same lines. The criticisms of the allied parties assumed such proportions that I called a meeting of all the parties of the Democratic Front in the Freedom Movement in order to discuss this measure. The meeting was a stormy one. In it, León Trahtenberg, the chairman of the committee on education, was relentlessly questioned by the populists Andrés Cardó Franco, Gastón Acurio, and others.

  I myself intervened in the argument, on that and other occasions, as the defender of our proposal. It is demagoguery to uphold in principle universal free education, if the result of it is that three children out of four study in schools that lack libraries, laboratories, bathrooms, desks, and blackboards, and often even ceilings and walls, that teachers receive inadequate training and earn starvation wages, and that therefore only the young people of the middle and upper classes—who can afford to pay for good schools and good universities—receive an education that assures them of a successful professional career.

  In my conversation with Belaunde I made myself very clear: I would not yield on this or any other point of our program. I had given in when it came to the municipal elections and the congressional lists, allowing Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party a great many advantages, but when it came to the Plan for Governing I would make no concessions. The one reason why I wanted to be president was to carry out those reforms. The educational one was among the most important, since it was aimed at putting an end to one of the most unjust forms of cultural discrimination: that stemming from differences in income.

  Finally, although we were unable to keep dissident voices within the alliance from speaking out against this measure from time to time, we managed to get Popular Action, against their will, to put up with it. But our adversaries continued to attack us mercilessly on the subject, with advertising campaigns and pronunciamentos by teachers’ unions and associations in defense of “popular education.” The campaign was such that León Trahtenberg himself sent me his letter of resignation from the committee (I did not accept it) and came to me, at the beginning of January 1990, to propose that we retreat from our position, in view of the negative reactions. With the backing of Lucho Bustamante, I insisted that it was our duty, since the measure seemed to us to be necessary, to go on defending it. But despite my constant preaching about it—from that time on, in all my speeches I brought the subject up—this was one of the reforms that frightened the voters most and made a fair number of them decide to vote against me.

  I am writing these lines in August 1991, and I see, by clippings from newspapers in Lima, that the teachers in state schools—380,000 of them—have been on strike for five months, in despair over their living conditions. Pupils in public schools risk missing out on the entire year of studies. And even if they don’t, a person can easily imagine what, with the huge parenthesis of five months of no schooling, this year will mean for these students in academic terms. The bishop of Huaraz states in a magazine that it is a scandal that the average pay of a schoolteacher is scarcely more than a hundred dollars a month, which means that they and their families go hungry. For five months now, because of the strike, all the state schools have been closed, and since the new administration took office the state has not built a single classroom, because of a lack of funds. But education continues to be free and Peruvians should congratulate themselves that the great victory of the people was not cast aside!

  This controversy taught me a great deal about the power of ideological myth, which is able to completely replace reality. Because the free public education that my adversaries defended so zealously was nonexistent, a dead letter. For some time, the well-nigh total bankruptcy of the nation’s treasury kept the state from erecting schools, and the immense majority of classrooms that were constructed in marginal districts and young towns to meet the growing demand were built by the people of the neighborhood themselves. And the parents also took over the maintenance, the cleaning, and the repair of the national primary and secondary schools because of the inability of the state to cover these expenses.

  Every time I toured a poor neighborhood, in Lima or in the provinces, I visited a number of schools. “Did the government build these classrooms?” “No! We did!” Owing to the economic crisis, it had been some time since the Peruvian state had contributed anything except the teachers’ salaries. The parents had filled the vacuum by taking it upon themselves to build and maintain the schools in the poorest neighborhoods and districts in the country. In my speeches I always emphasized that, in just a couple of years, our Solidarity program had built, thanks to donations, volunteer work, and the collaboration of the local residents, more day-care centers and schoolrooms than the Peruvian state. Moreover, Enrique Ghersi discovered that that same Aprista government that harped day and night on the threat to free public education had passed measures that required parents who enrolled their children in state schools to pay “fees” to parents’ associations which would go to a national education fund. Like many other unrealistic measures, making education free, which had served only to do further harm to the poor by increasing discrimination, had gradually been modified in practice, owing to the force of circumstances.

  I placed great hopes in the reform of education. I was convinced that the most effective way to achieve justice in Peru was high-level public instruction. Sometimes I pointed out that I had studied in public schools, such as Leoncio Prado and San Miguel in Piura, and at the University of San Marcos, so that I knew
the defects of the system (although they had grown worse since my days as a student). But these efforts to persuade my compatriots of the sound principles underlying our proposed reform of education were useless, and those who accused me of wanting to keep the people ignorant prevailed.

  Two other reforms that I announced at the CADE were also the object of fierce attacks: that of the labor market and the new model for government employment. The former was made out by my adversaries to be a clever way of allowing entrepreneurs to fire their workers, and the latter to be a plan to turn out half a million public employees into the streets. (In a video against us that managed, in less than a minute, to pile up, one on top of the other, plagiarism [it repeated images from Pink Floyd’s The Wall], distortion, and slander, the government pictured me, disfigured by fangs à la Dracula, as bringing on an apocalyptic shock, in which factories were closed, prices shot into the stratosphere, children were thrown out of schools, and workers out of their jobs, and the entire country blew up in a nuclear explosion.)

  Like free education, job security is a false social victory, which, instead of protecting the good worker against arbitrary dismissal, has turned into a mechanism for protecting the inefficient worker, and an obstacle to the creation of jobs for those who need work—in Peru, at the end of 1989, seven out of every ten adults. Job security favored 11 percent of the economically active population. It was, then, a small minority that had job security and an income that ensured that the number of unemployed would remain constant. The laws protecting the worker meant that, after a trial period of three months, a worker turned into the owner of his job, from which it was practically impossible to remove him, since the “just cause” for his dismissal referred to in the Constitution had been reduced, by the laws in force at that time, to a “grave dereliction of duty,” something almost impossible to prove. The result was that companies functioned with a minimum of personnel and hesitated before expanding for fear of finding themselves later on with the dead weight of a payroll that was too large. In a country where unemployment and underemployment affected two-thirds of the population and where creating work for the immense majority was an extremely urgent necessity, it was imperative to give the principle of job security a genuinely social meaning.

  Explaining that I would respect rights already won—the reforms would affect only those newly hired—I enumerated at CADE the principal measures needed to mitigate the negative effects of job security: lack of productivity would be included among the just causes for dismissal, the trial period for evaluating the worker’s ability would be extended, commercial enterprises would be offered a vast range of possibilities for hiring temporary workers that would allow them to adjust their work force to market variations, and to combat unemployment among young people, contracts for training and apprenticeship, part-time work, and contracts for rotating workers and early retirement would be drawn up. In addition, the worker would be allowed to set himself up as a private and autonomous business and negotiate with the employer for providing his services on a contract basis. Within this package of measures, the democratization of the right to strike was also included, which up to that time had been the monopoly of the highest levels of the union hierarchy, and which, in many cases, forced the rest of the workers to go out on strike through a sort of blackmail. Strikes would be decided on by secret, direct, and universal vote; strikes that affected vital public services and strikes in support of other unions or associations would be prohibited; the practice of taking hostages and occupying work sites, as an adjunct to union work stoppages, would be penalized.

  (In March 1990, during our congress on “La revolución de la libertad”—“The Revolution of Freedom”—Sir Alan Walters, who had been one of Margaret Thatcher’s advisers, assured me that these measures would have a favorable effect on the creation of jobs. He reproached me, I admit, for not having been as radical with regard to the minimum wage, which we were going to maintain. “It appears to be an act of justice,” he said to me. “But it is one only for those who are working. The minimum wage is an injustice for those who have lost their job or enter the labor market and find all the doors shut. To benefit these latter, those most in need of social justice, the minimum wage is an injustice, an obstacle that blocks their path to employment. The countries where there are the most jobs are those in which the market is freest.”)

  I explained, particularly on visits to factories, that an efficient worker is too expensive for businesses to let him go, and that our reforms would not affect rights already won, but would apply only to new workers, those millions of Peruvians who were unemployed or who had miserable jobs, whom we had the duty to help by quickly creating work for them. I can see why workers alienated by populist preaching were bound to be hostile, because they didn’t understand these reforms, or because they understood them and feared them. But the fact that the majority of the unemployed, in whose favor these reforms were conceived, should vote massively against these changes in particular says a great deal about the formidable dead weight of populist culture, which leads those who are most discriminated against and exploited to vote in favor of the system that keeps them in that condition.

  As for the half million public employees, it is worth telling the entire story, because this subject, like that of free education, had a devastating effect in my disfavor among the humble sectors and because it shows how effective dirty tricks can be in politics. The news that, once I took office, I would throw 500,000 bureaucrats out into the streets appeared in that great orchestrator of out-and-out lies, La República,* as a statement that Enrique Ghersi, the “young Turk” of the Freedom Movement, had supposedly made in Chile, to a Chilean journalist.† In fact, Ghersi hadn’t said any such thing and he hastened to deny this piece of information, once he returned to Peru, in the press§ and on television. A while later, the Chilean journalist himself, Fernando Villegas, came to Lima and denied this cock-and-bull story,* in the daily papers and on TV. But by this point the concerted lies regarding the 500,000 employees, organized by a cabal consisting of La República, Hoy, La Crónica, and the state-run radio stations and TV channels, had become an incontrovertible truth. Even leaders of the Democratic Front, my allies, were convinced of it, since some of them, such as the PPC leader Ricardo Amiel and the populist Javier Alva Orlandini, confirmed the falsehood in their statements to the press instead of denying it—by criticizing Ghersi for the slanderous untruth they attributed to him!*

  What is certain is that neither Ghersi nor anyone in the Front could have said any such thing, because there was no way of determining how many public employees were superfluous, since there was no way of even knowing how many of them there were. The Democratic Front had a committee, headed by Dr. María Reynafarje, trying to determine the number, and it had tracked down more than a million (excluding the members of the armed forces), but the evaluation was still going on. Naturally, this bureaucratic inflation had to be drastically reduced, so that the state would have only those functionaries it needed. But the transference from the public sector to the private of the tens or hundreds of thousands of excess bureaucrats was not going to be accomplished through untimely dismissals. We were aware of the problem, and my administration, not only for legal and ethical reasons, but also for practical ones, was not going to make the stupid mistake of beginning its term in office by making this problem many times worse. Our plan was to painlessly relocate unneeded bureaucrats. This process of decanting would go on gradually as, with the reforms, economic growth started, new business concerns came into being, and the ones that already existed began to work at full capacity. This process would be speeded up by the government, through incentives to bring about voluntary resignations or early retirements. Without trampling anyone’s rights underfoot, doing our best to encourage the market to carry out the relocation, a good part of the bureaucracy would pass over to the civil sector—a good part, although at this juncture the exact number could not be determined.

  But fiction routed reality. In p
erfect synchronization, the moment the falsehood was printed in La República (with huge headlines on the front page), the government began its campaign, via the radio stations and the TV channels it controlled and via its fanatical followers, distributing millions of leaflets throughout the country, and repeating daily, in every possible form, through all its mouthpieces, from its leaders to its shadiest newsmongers, the rumor that I would begin my administration by firing half a million government employees. Declarations, denials, explanations, from me, from Ghersi, or from those in charge of the Plan for Governing, were of no use whatsoever.

  From a very early age I have lived my life fascinated by fiction and the spell it casts, because my vocation has made me highly sensitive to that phenomenon. And I have long since realized how far the realm of fiction extends beyond the bounds of literature, cinema, and the arts, genres in which it is thought to be confined. Perhaps because it is an irresistible necessity that the human species tries to satisfy in one way or another, even by unimaginable ways of behaving, fiction makes its appearance everywhere, crops up in religion and in science and in activities more obviously vaccinated against it. Politics, particularly in countries where ignorance and passions play as important a role in it as they do in Peru, is one of those fields that has been well fertilized so that what is fictitious, what is imaginary, will take root. I had many chances to verify this during the campaign, above all with regard to the subject of the half a million bureaucrats threatened by my liberal ax.