for the demonstrators, and going out to paint slogans and drive through the streets in vehicles with loudspeakers—that from the very beginning I had the premonition that the Meeting for Freedom would be a success. Since my place was a madhouse, on the evening of August 21 I hid out for a few hours at the home of Carlos and Maggie Ferreyros, two friends, to prepare the first political speech of my life. (Carlos was kidnapped shortly thereafter, by the MRTA [Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru: Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement] and held in captivity for six months, in a tiny cellar without ventilation.)
But, despite the favorable signs, not even the most optimistic person among us could have predicted the extraordinary number of people who packed the Plaza San Martin elbow to elbow that night and overflowed the neighboring streets. When I went up onto the speakers’ platform I felt a mixture of boundless joy and terror: tens of thousands of people—130,000, according to the review Sí * —were waving flags and singing out in chorus at the top of their lungs the “Hymn to Freedom,” the words and music of which had been written for the occasion by Augusto Polo Campos, a very popular composer. Something must have changed in Peru when a crowd like that fervently applauded on hearing me say that economic freedom was inseparable from political freedom, that private property and a market economy were the only guarantee of development, and that we Peruvians would not allow our democratic system to be “Mexicanized” or the APRA to be turned into the Trojan Horse of Communism in Peru.
The story has it that that night, on seeing on the little TV screen the magnitude of the Meeting for Freedom, Alan García, in a fit of rage, smashed the set to smithereens. What is certain is that the immense demonstration had enormous consequences. It was a decisive factor in making it evident that the nationalization law, though already passed in Congress, could never be put into effect, and the law was later annulled. It was a death blow to Alan García’s ambition to stay in office for an unlimited time. It opened the doors of Peruvian political life to liberal thought that up until then had lacked a public presence, since all of our modern history had been, practically speaking, a monopoly of the ideological populism of conservatives and socialists of various tendencies. It gave the initiative back to the opposition parties, Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party, which, following their defeat in 1985, had appeared to be invisible, and laid the foundations for what would become the Frente Democrático (Democratic Front) * and, as Patricia feared, for my candidacy for the presidency.
Buoyed up by our success in the Plaza San Martín, we immediately organized two other meetings, in Arequipa, on August 26, and in Piura, on September 2. Both of them were also attended by thousands. In Arequipa there was violence; we were attacked by Aprista counterdemonstrators—the famous buffaloes or bullies and armed hoodlums of the party—and by a Maoist faction of the United Left, the Patria Roja (Red Fatherland). They set off explosives and, armed with clubs, stones, and stink bombs, attacked just as I was beginning to speak, so as to start a stampede. The young people in charge of maintaining order on the outer edge of the Plaza, organized by Fernando Cháves Belaunde, resisted the attack, but several of them were injured. “You see? You see?” Patricia grumbled; she and María Amelia, Freddy Cooper’s wife, had been obliged to dive underneath a policeman’s riot shield that night in order to escape a hail of bottles. “What I predicted has already started happening.” But the truth of the matter was that, despite her opposition in principle, she too worked morning and night organizing the meetings and was in the front row at all three of them.
It was the country’s middle classes who filled those three plazas. Not the rich,
But, despite the favorable signs, not even the most optimistic person among us could have predicted the extraordinary number of people who packed the Plaza San Martin elbow to elbow that night and overflowed the neighboring streets. When I went up onto the speakers’ platform I felt a mixture of boundless joy and terror: tens of thousands of people—130,000, according to the review Sí * —were waving flags and singing out in chorus at the top of their lungs the “Hymn to Freedom,” the words and music of which had been written for the occasion by Augusto Polo Campos, a very popular composer. Something must have changed in Peru when a crowd like that fervently applauded on hearing me say that economic freedom was inseparable from political freedom, that private property and a market economy were the only guarantee of development, and that we Peruvians would not allow our democratic system to be “Mexicanized” or the APRA to be turned into the Trojan Horse of Communism in Peru.
The story has it that that night, on seeing on the little TV screen the magnitude of the Meeting for Freedom, Alan García, in a fit of rage, smashed the set to smithereens. What is certain is that the immense demonstration had enormous consequences. It was a decisive factor in making it evident that the nationalization law, though already passed in Congress, could never be put into effect, and the law was later annulled. It was a death blow to Alan García’s ambition to stay in office for an unlimited time. It opened the doors of Peruvian political life to liberal thought that up until then had lacked a public presence, since all of our modern history had been, practically speaking, a monopoly of the ideological populism of conservatives and socialists of various tendencies. It gave the initiative back to the opposition parties, Popular Action and the Christian Popular Party, which, following their defeat in 1985, had appeared to be invisible, and laid the foundations for what would become the Frente Democrático (Democratic Front) * and, as Patricia feared, for my candidacy for the presidency.
Buoyed up by our success in the Plaza San Martín, we immediately organized two other meetings, in Arequipa, on August 26, and in Piura, on September 2. Both of them were also attended by thousands. In Arequipa there was violence; we were attacked by Aprista counterdemonstrators—the famous buffaloes or bullies and armed hoodlums of the party—and by a Maoist faction of the United Left, the Patria Roja (Red Fatherland). They set off explosives and, armed with clubs, stones, and stink bombs, attacked just as I was beginning to speak, so as to start a stampede. The young people in charge of maintaining order on the outer edge of the Plaza, organized by Fernando Cháves Belaunde, resisted the attack, but several of them were injured. “You see? You see?” Patricia grumbled; she and María Amelia, Freddy Cooper’s wife, had been obliged to dive underneath a policeman’s riot shield that night in order to escape a hail of bottles. “What I predicted has already started happening.” But the truth of the matter was that, despite her opposition in principle, she too worked morning and night organizing the meetings and was in the front row at all three of them.
It was the country’s middle classes who filled those three plazas. Not the rich,
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