hem.

When I asked Erasmo Reyna to define the APRA, he made no

mention at first of ideology or policies. “Aprismo is a feeling,” he told
me. “A brotherhood. It’s like you’re part of a big family.” I pointed out
that it sounded as if he were talking about a soccer team. He shook his
head. “We’re not a club. Not a fan base. We’re something bigger than
that.”

“Sorry for the delayed response. It’s been a crazy week!”


 

Alan García was born into the APRA. His mother was a schoolteacher,
his father an accountant; both were committed Party members. After
the APRA was declared illegal, García’s father spent years living
clandestinely, as did the APRA’s legendary founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de
la Torre. García’s father was being held in El Sexto, a notorious prison
in Lima (which was later torn down), when his son was born in 1949.
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García joined the Party as a teen-ager, and he was often in the front row
for Haya de la Torre’s classes on history and politics at the Casa del
Pueblo, the APRA’s cavernous headquarters, in central Lima. Even then,
he stood out, for his Party pedigree, his intellect, and his size. (As an
adult, he was six feet three, nearly a foot taller than the average
Peruvian, “which is like having free publicity in a country like ours,” his
diminutive secretary Ricardo Pinedo told me.) In the early seventies,
García was one of a small group of young men whom Haya de la Torre
selected to study with him personally. The students would gather on
Sunday afternoons at Haya’s home, on the outskirts of Lima, to talk
politics and revolution and history, and to sing. García was a precocious
public speaker, in the mold of his mentor, and a good singer, a talent he
later employed to great effect when he was busking as a student in Paris,
and, even later, when he campaigned with famous Peruvian musicians,
belting out Creole classics in his melodic baritone. He was a charismatic
but undisciplined student, well known at the Catholic University for his
eloquent speeches and for the orange leather coat he wore. Mirko Lauer,
a political analyst and an editor, befriended García when they were both
students. He describes him as on the surface full of confidence but, in
fact, dogged by uncertainty and obsessed with status. “There was
something missing, replaced, as it were, by ambition,” Lauer told me.
“García didn’t seem to be completely there. And those who
aren’t there tend to make stupendous candidates because people can
project onto them whatever they wish.”

García spent five years studying law and sociology in Europe. He

returned to Peru in 1977, from which point his rise within the Party was
seemingly unstoppable. He was elected as a delegate of the 1978
Constitutional Assembly, at twenty-nine, and won a seat in Congress
two years later. By thirty-three, he was the Party’s secretary-general,
and, having outmaneuvered all others for the role of Haya de la Torre’s
chosen successor, he was more or less guaranteed to be the Party’s
Presidential candidate in 1985. His election that year was historic, the
culmination of the APRA’s decades-old dream—he was the first (and, to
date, only) APRA President—and the first peaceful transition from one
democratically elected leader to another in nearly forty years. García
was thirty-six years old, South America’s youngest head of state at the
time, half the age of Peru’s outgoing President.

The story most often told about García is that he was predestined, the
most talented of Haya de la Torre’s disciples, the Chosen One. And
there was certainly something messianic about Alan García circa 1985;
he was a firebrand, a vocal anti-imperialist, a popular hero of the left.
Full of promise and brio, he was most at home in front of a crowd,
which he could whip up into a kind of ecstasy with his unabashedly lofty
language. “The task couldn’t be more dramatic and difficult,” García
declared in his inauguration speech. “Nor could the challenge be more
beautiful and transcendental.” His first address as President was full of
the kind of populist gestures that would become his specialty: he
proposed to cut his own salary and reduce Peru’s payment on its
international debt to ten per cent of its exports. He promised to double
the punishments for public servants who broke the law, and pledged his
allegiance to his fellow-Peruvians: “The future will be ours. That’s my
commitment, and here is the promise of my life and self in the face of
death.”

Amonth into his term, García’s approval rating was above ninety-five
per cent, and for a couple of years his policies appeared to be working:
he froze savings accounts in foreign currency, fixed prices, and even had
some success in controlling inflation. The economy expanded by nearly
ten per cent annually, an astonishing growth rate for any country. At the
same time, however, Peru began running large deficits, a problem that
García addressed by simply printing more money. By 1987, Peru’s
reserves of foreign currency had all but vanished, and García, without
the full support of his Cabinet, announced a plan to nationalize the
banks. The move was eventually defeated by public outcry, including
protests led by, most prominently, the novelist and future Nobel Prize
winner Mario Vargas Llosa.

Hyperinflation is what most Peruvians remember when they think of the

late nineteen-eighties. Prices could change several times daily, and
shopping bags full of cash were required to buy basic household
supplies. New denominations of bills were printed with a seemingly
endless string of zeros, and the lifetime savings of the middle class
became suddenly worthless. During the final three years of García’s first
term, the nation’s G.D.P. fell by a quarter, one of the most dramatic
recessions in Peru’s history. By 1990, some sixty per cent of Peruvians
were living in poverty.

If there’s a mitigating factor to this generalized Presidential

incompetence, it’s that García was at the time grappling with South
America’s most bloodthirsty terrorist group, the Shining Path, as well as
another, less violent but also destabilizing insurgency, the Túpac Amaru
Revolutionary Movement, or M.R.T.A., led by a former Aprista and
onetime friend of García’s, Víctor Polay. As if that weren’t enough, a
paramilitary group named for Rodrigo Franco, an APRA martyr who had
been killed by the Shining Path, was responsible, toward the end of
García’s term, for the assassinations of several suspected members of the
Shining Path and the M.R.T.A. Political violence like this would have
tested any head of state, but García’s response was particularly
calamitous. He presided over a campaign against the Shining Path that
cost thousands of lives. His armed forces responded to Shining Path
prison riots by killing hundreds of guerrillas, some even as they
surrendered. This did little to contain the terrorist threat, and the
economic chaos further emboldened the terrorists. By 1989, more than a
thousand electrical towers had been destroyed by the Shining Path, and
Lima had grown accustomed to blackouts. Bombs in the capital were
also a regular occurrence, and in the interior the situation was even
worse: by some estimates, more than half a million rural Peruvians were
displaced by political violence. Among political analysts, historians, and
ordinary Peruvians, there is a consensus that García’s first Presidency
was the worst in contemporary Peruvian history. His popularity
plummeted to six per cent, and, when he visited Congress for his
farewell address in 1990, opposition members pounded their desks and
chanted “Thief!” so loudly that for several minutes he was unable to
speak.

By the time García left the Presidential Palace, his reputation as the
bright young hope of the Latin-American left had been destroyed. He
was dogged by accusations of corruption and illicit enrichment through
dubious contracts,