Ten:
Urubamba, Peru
“Adiós amigos! Take care!”
Pablo and Campbell stand waving on the riverbank, growing smaller and smaller against the long, skinny curve of bridge and the stocky cement houses. Ivochote: the last town in Peru’s southeastern Amazon reachable by road, where last night we sat eating sopa de gallo as Arnold Schwarzenegger gunned down terrorists on a forty-inch TV and half the tiny town watched blank-eyed, squatting in front of the screen or hunched over the wall or reclining luxuriantly at tables over their pricey desserts. Across the street blared the competition: here the other half of the town sat, squatted, or hunched as Sylvester Stallone stalked his prey. “What do you think they did before TV?” asked Campbell. “Talked?”
Ivochote, being the jumping-off point into the remote lower Uru-bamba region, has made a modest mint since the Camisea Gas Project began. Or at least its two inns have.
Pablo and Campbell are still waving and hollering their good-byes. I will miss them. It astonishes me, traveling alone, how quickly strangers become family. Even after a few days shared, I miss new friends abjectly when we part. I wave until they are the size of my fingernail, then turn around, leaning into the wind, and settle onto my bench. I watch with satisfaction as the blade of our motorboat slices neat through the obliging glide of the Río Urubamba.
“Warm enough?” Rufo eyes me. It’s early enough in the morning, and high enough in the Andean foothills, for the Amazon to be cool.
“Sí, claro. You?”
“I could use a warm body, but I’m not complaining.” His eyes are amused, as usual, above the wide cheekbones, burly nose, plum lips. I chortle. Rufo is a strategic planning consultant for a couple of Peru’s indigenous organizations. I’ve known him going on four days now. But it’s been a full four days.
“Too bad you left your girlfriend in Lima. You’re just going to have to suffer, pajero.” We both laugh uproariously. The other passengers on the boat inspect us dubiously from behind their bundles and packages.
Pablo took it upon himself to enlighten Campbell and me in regard to a certain key Peruvian colloquialism. Pajero: from the paja leaves gathered on the high Andean plains, an epithet meaning both “redneck” and “masturbator.” The four of us devoted at least a half-hour of hysterics to that one on our lengthy road trip to Ivochote. Things tend to loosen up right quick when you’re bumping down an atrociously rutted, pothole-crammed, single-lane dirt road at forty miles an hour. “A little slower, perhaps?” I offered helpfully from the back, smiling solicitously in the rearview mirror at our just-kicked-puberty driver. “I like fast cars and loud music,” he retorted, grinning behind mirror sunglasses, gunning the engine. “This,” said Campbell, delicately dislocating himself from my chest, where he landed after one particularly enlivening jolt, “is when you truly feel the prayers of those who love you.”
It was just past dawn when we loaded our bags into the boat, the sun still tucked drowsing under the horizon. First light was slow, reaching pale across the listening distance. Then quickening like it remembered what it came to do, remembered with a jerk of panic all those seeds waiting to crack, flowers dreaming of fruit, all the children creaking sleep-faced from under scratchy blankets, the mothers with their tasks lined up patient as sheep. Now the sun is officially out. I raise my face and it beats red through my eyelids, pours into my throat, prickles down my spine.
Rufo bellows something incomprehensible from a couple of benches up. I open my eyes reluctantly. “Yes?”
“We’re getting close. Start paying attention.”
The land is rising around us now, swelling until it is broad-shouldered and brash. The river narrows, the current grows urgent. I hold fast to the sides of the boat, watching the green above us, green everywhere it can get a foothold, trees clinging to cliffs or, to hell with it, bungee jumping straight over, vines leapfrogging without a second glance, leaves the size of my thigh hurdling one over the other to come to rest coquettish inches above the current.
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“There it is,” says Rufo, making his way toward me, hanging on to the sides as the boat gets tossed around like cardboard. He settles next to me to watch my reaction, but I am looking behind us at the boy steering the boat, at his tight frightened face and his companion barking out commands. I am wondering whether I should be terrified or merely worried. Then Rufo is tugging at my shoulder and I turn and we are in it, of it, the Pongo de Mainique, the Gran Pongo, the grandest Pongo of them all—or so the Machiguenga thought when they named it, and I fully concur; as magnificent a sight as I’ve ever seen or will ever see; water everywhere, water bursting from the rock face, water trickling and spurting and cascading from skyscraper cliffs, heaving through cracks and crannies and over whole walls, torrents jostling on all sides. Rainbows a dime a dozen. Waterfalls by the fistful. Machiguenga legend holds that a river demon lurks here, but what I see are endless blooming blossoms of white taffeta, a line of brides perpetually awaiting their prince. I can barely breathe. I am inside the veil now.
I arrived in Lima, Peru, on March 29, after a thirty-five-hour bus ride from Quito, Ecuador. I discovered, too late, that there was a major soccer game taking place in the city at the same time as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) summit. By the time I looked into flights, they were all booked. But I had to get to Lima for the summit, because that’s where I was scheduled to meet up with Pablo —the president of the Federation of Indigenous Machiguenga and my contact for my second story on globalization and indigenous communities in the Amazon. Also, I’d been reading up on the IDB, and I knew that there would be activists from all over the continent demonstrating against it. I filed my articles on the Sarayacu, packed my bag, and got on the bus.
Two hours after reaching Lima, I arrived at the Museo de la Nación, where the summit was taking place. The area surrounding the museum in central Lima had been cordoned off for three blocks, and 2,500 armed militia were patrolling the blockades. It took me a while to locate the protesters. They were rallying in the permitted area, well beyond earshot of those attending the conference. “No al BID!” chanted indigenous leaders in feathered headdresses. Activists milled about, greeting friends, grumbling over the heat. Some crouched on the sidewalk, sharing soft drinks and talking shop. I roamed through the scattered crowd, exhausted but happy, spiked on adrenaline. There were representatives from Peru’s indigenous groups and from NGOs, and labor and environmental activists from across the hemisphere. All sorts of people with lengthy catalogs of grievances to present to the Bank.
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The IDB is financing the controversial Camisea Gas Project, and that’s what I came to write about. Deemed by Amazon Watch to be “the most damaging project in the Amazon basin,” the Camisea project is located smack in the middle of one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world: the Urubamba. Home to the Machiguenga, Nanti, Nahua, and Yine indigenous communities, the Urubamba also contains vast pools of natural gas. Up to 75 percent of gas extractions are to be operated within a state reserve set aside for indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation. A contractor for Pluspetrol, lead operator of extractions in the lower Urubamba, recently violated internationally recognized indigenous rights by contacting members of the Nahua tribe living in this reserve. In the 1980s, when Shell was conducting drilling in the area, up to half of the Nahua population was annihilated by diseases introduced by the workers. In addition to the gas extractions, the $1.6 billion project has a second consortium managing transport: the Transportadora de Gas del Perú, or TGP, is constructing two pipelines leading all the way to the Peruvian coast. A processing plant is being built within the buffer zone of a marine reserve.
The Camisea project proposal was so flawed that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the United States Export-Import Bank, and Citigroup all rejected requests for financing. But in September 2003, the IDB, notorious for its bare-bones environmental policy, approved a $75 million direct loan and a $60 million syndicated loan. The Camisea project is not the Bank’s only controversial investment: it is funding a laundry list of projects that have environmental and social justice activists up in arms across Latin America.
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The World Bank has such a high profile that it has been the target of extensive scrutiny. In contrast, the IDB has succeeded in remaining quietly beyond the spotlight of your average western activist. I’d never heard of it before researching this story. “Public pressure has modified the policies of the World Bank,” Juan Houghton, an organizer with the Indigenous Organization of Colombia, tells me. He is demonstrating outside the Museo. “So now the IDB does its dirty work. It makes loans in order to facilitate privatization and corporate investments.” Indeed, the IDB evinces a rather unsettling tendency to issue loans directly in line with structural adjustments imposed by the International Monetary Fund—such as, say, opening up energy resources to maintain debt payments. “The IDB is a tool of the IMF,” Houghton says. The IMF dictates the policies, and the IDB provides the financing—at a price, of course. Despite the “Inter-American” in its name, the IDB’s “nonregional members” include roughly a dozen European countries, Japan, Israel, and South Korea. And while the Bank is owned by its forty-seven member governments, voting power is proportional to capital contributions—and the U.S. holds 30 percent of the votes.
According to a study by the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, the IDB invested $6.27 billion in financing forty-nine fossil fuel pipeline, power, and sectoral reform projects between 1992 and 2004. These projects together will generate over double the emissions produced by all of Latin America in 2000. Of the top fifteen corporate beneficiaries, half are based in the U.S., and only one in Latin America. The TGP—the Camisea gas transport consortium—is but part of a vast transportation network in the making, an ambitious integration of infrastructure to steer the movement of energy and other resources northward.
Back in Camisea, a full half of the gas being extracted is destined for shipment to the west coast of the U.S. But as it happens, Peru has other things to worry about besides oversensitive ecosystems or the quality of life for a few thousand natives. The country is in debt to the tune of $30 billion, with the IMF hovering like Don Corleone at the door. Peru’s principal creditor is the IDB. If I were Peru, I’d keep my mouth shut, too.
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I locate Pablo inside the NGO room of the summit. He is loud, jovial, with bulldog jowls and an immense belly. He introduces me to Campbell, a biologist collecting data for Amazon Watch. Campbell is affable and bespectacled, a master of the grammatically flawless, twangily American variety of gringo Spanish. Along the way we pick up Rufo, and the next morning the four of us fly east to Cuzco. From Cuzco we take an eight-hour bus to Quillabamba. Then we hire a car and driver, drive six hours, and we’re in the Upper Urubamba region. The four of us will spend a couple of days meeting with Machiguenga, and then Rufo and I will continue on by boat into the far-flung wilds of the Lower Urubamba. I do not have a commitment from a publication for this story yet, but I feel it’s an important one, so I plan to write it anyway and then shop it around to some of the progressive magazines. After I’m back in the U.S., Earth Island Journal picks it up.
I’ve read Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller, and I am intensely curious about these people, the Machiguenga, who have been persecuted since the time of the Incas. They were enslaved during the rubber boom, decimated by malaria and smallpox, and wooed by a colonial God through the exploits of Jesuit, Franciscan, and Protestant missionaries. Many of the Machiguenga fled to the depths of the jungle, living in voluntary and complete isolation. In the 1940s evangelical missionaries entered the Urubamba with the goals of translating the New Testament into native languages, spreading Christianity, and generally “Peruvianizing” the indigenous peoples. These missionaries trained schoolteachers and health workers, started community stores, and introduced the Machiguenga to cash crops and commerce. While they ultimately succeeded in tethering the Machiguenga to the outside world, it took decades of devoted toil on the part of the missionaries to win some of these people over. How, I wonder, are the Machiguenga handling this new breed of zealots? Have the prizes of hydrocarbon exploitation proven as compelling as eternal salvation?
The first place we visit in the Upper Urubamba is Shimaa, a community of six hundred that lies directly in the path of the TGP pipelines. We are seated across from a semicircle of village representatives, who proceed to detail their grievances, one of them translating from Machiguenga into Spanish.
“There was a water tank that burst because of their construction,” says Laura, young and heart-faced, her voice cracking. “From the landslides. Now, whenever the river rises or it rains, we drink dirty water. And also my field of coffee and medicinal plants was ruined when they laid their lines.”
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“The TGP offered us their support,” says Angel, thirty-something and resentful. “So we signed the paper. But they haven’t followed through. The clinic has not a single pill. There is no teacher for the primary school. They made promises, but we have nothing to show for it.”
And then there was the gas spill in September 2003, offers another. There used to be a lot of animals and fish, but now there are none. And the diseases, adds a fourth. Malaria, dengue, diarrhea. Yes, and the house they built in compensation for one destroyed by a landslide: terribly constructed. And the noise from the machines. The bridge they promised.
I grow depressed listening to them. Fierce with empathy, but the brand of empathy that climbs walls in a windowless room. They believe they are defeated, these people. I remember Mario and Marcia in Sarayacu, and I look at the bleak faces before me, the hands leaden in their laps; I listen to the voices, barren as dry riverbeds, and I think, they are defeated already.
When they are done, Pablo lectures them. “Don’t sign anything until it’s properly arranged,” he scolds, and they hang their heads like penitent children. “You should know this already. Nothing good comes from these companies.” I look away, cringing, trying to make sense of my emotions. Pablo is right, yet his paternalism riles me. I feel pity and embarrassment for the villagers, but also disappointment at their submissiveness, at their aura of defeat. Then I am angry with myself: who am I to pity them, to be disappointed?
After the meeting, Damian Torres Esteban, the president of Shimaa, takes us to see the project. A 20-to 25-meter-wide path has been razed through the forest for the pipelines. The builders did not bother to cover the pipes with earth. They snake down the hill, across the river, and continue west in zigzagging lines until they fade into the horizon. They have been constructed along the ridgetop: the shortest, cheapest, and most environmentally destructive option. Consequent erosion has led to the heavy landslides that Laura mentioned.
The top of the hill is shaved clean. A generator buzzes insistently; behind barbed wire squats the shiny yellow jungle gym of a pump. “There’s one every eight to ten kilometers,” a guard tells me. He is young, sullen, reluctant to talk. “There are two of us stationed here at all times, to guard the pump.” I ask him if he has friends in Shimaa. “No,” he says. “We are prohibited from talking with the community.” I feel a wash of sympathy for these pariahs. “It’s the law,” he continues, eyes on the skyline above my shoulder. “We don’t bother them.”
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The final phase of the Camisea Gas Project is the construction of a plant to liquefy gas for export to the U.S. This will cost another $1 billion to $2 billion. The lead corporation is Texas-based Hunt Oil, which splits majority shareholder status in the Camisea consortia with Pluspetrol. Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive officer of Hunt Oil, is close to the Bush family: George W. appointed Hunt finance chairman of the Republican National Committee’s Victory 2000 committee, and Hunt secured the status of a Bush “Pioneer” by raising over $100,000 for his buddy. Hunt also sits on the board of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former clubhouse, and Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is in line to build the plant. The site is a scant five miles from the 830,000-acre Paracas National Park, Peru’s sole marine sanctuary for endangered birds and sea lions.
It’s simple geometry to connect the dots between the Bush administration’s approval of this project and the generosity showered upon him by the oil and gas industry in 2000. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bush’s campaign received $1.7 million from the oil and gas sectors, over three times the amount given to the industry’s next most-favored candidate.
After parting from Pablo and Campbell and crossing the Gran Pongo, our first stop in the Lower Urubamba is the community of Nuevo Mundo. Rufo and I gather our bags and clamber off the boat and up the riverbank. Before us lies a wide clearing lined with small tin-roofed wooden houses, loosely constructed, separated by patches of palm and hibiscus. Teenagers are playing volleyball. Peruvian pop blasts from somewhere. Rufo asks a passerby if he can direct us to the president of the community, telling him Pablo sent us.
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The man eyeballs me, then squints up at Rufo in a not especially friendly way. “It’s Sunday. He’s drinking beer with his friends. I’ll let him know you’re here.” He walks off.
Rufo turns to me. “Well then. What do you say we get something cold to drink?”
We are now officially in the Amazon basin, deep in the lowlands, and it feels like being sautéed. What’s more, my belly’s been acting rather odd lately. I generally take great pride in my cast-iron stomach: I only got sick once in India, and by month four I was drinking the tap water. But lately this mutinous organ has been sending me lurching off on frantic dashes to the bathroom at least five times a day. I’m definitely off-kilter, and I resolve to begin taking my antimalarials. At least I can try to fend off that evil.
We locate the closest thing to the village café—a family that cooks food and sells soft drinks—and collapse at the table. Three hours later, Ismael, the president of Nuevo Mundo, shows up, a mite toasted but with a lot on his mind.
“The problem here,” he begins pointedly, “is that we don’t have coordination between communities.” As it turns out, there are three Machiguenga organizations, constituted roughly along religious lines. The Federation of Indigenous Machiguenga is the Dominican branch. Nuevo Mundo belongs to the Organization of Indigenous Machiguenga of the Lower Urubamba, an Evangelical association.
Rufo and I are taken aback. Pablo had led us to believe that he was the elected president of the whole shebang. “Pablo didn’t tell you that we were coming?”
“Not a word.”
Once we get past that, pleasantries proceed, and the interview begins. I ask Ismael how the project has affected Nuevo Mundo.
“Well, we’ve seen a lot of change. As soon as money enters, there’s change. Now, for example, we have beer. Actually”—defensive, sucking in his gut—“I like beer. But now we also have alcoholism. That’s new.” Speaking more slowly. “And the workers, they came in and talked with our youth. Now the young are more interested in leaving.”
I ask him about the wildlife.
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“The animals are gone.” Sober now, his eyes on the dirt line where the bank veers down to the river. “There are no fish left in the Urubamba.” Ismael considers the empty beer can on the table between us. He lifts it, tilts it, and sends it spinning down the table, where it drops onto the ground. No one moves to pick it up.
“We wanted development. We wanted tin for our roofs.” He’s waxing maudlin, the pleats on his round face creasing deeper with the sinking dusk. “But we were mistaken.” He lifts his shoulders and straightens his spine, pulling himself together. “We have a different definition of development now: sustainable development, and it depends on us.”
Rufo asks him if the community has a vision of the future, of how to proceed.
“No. Not really.” He’s downcast again, his Sunday beer-glow completely evaporated. “I guess what we want is to improve our community with running water and electricity. Also, and this is very important, we don’t want to lose our biodiversity or our culture.”
I feel the same despondency I felt in Shimaa. Are these just platitudes, or is he taking refuge in denial? He wants it all, but surely he understands what has already been lost.
“Do you have any kind of plan? A scenario of some sort?” Rufo is hopeful.
“No.” Ismael’s face is barely visible now. His eyes gleam dully in the dark, reflecting the electric lights snapping on a few houses away. His voice is flat, weary. “The company hasn’t fulfilled their promises. I’m not sure exactly where things went wrong.” A hand in the air, fending off invisible accusers. “Maybe we negotiated badly. I don’t know.”
Ismael tells us there is no place for us to sleep at Nuevo Mundo, and waves us on to our second destination, Kirigueti, a community ten minutes upriver.
Our first sight in Kirigueti is a huge television, sitting on a raised platform in the middle of a clearing in the jungle. Behind it, what looks like a home. Commercial jingles prod and jostle at top volume. No one is watching. We walk past, into the village. The homes are spread out evenly among the palms and tropical plants: new, tin-roofed, some of them two stories. Gas bulbs are strung about like Christmas lights.
No one here has been informed of our arrival, either. “Of course you can sleep here,” says the vice president of the village, to our relief. He directs us to a platform on the outskirts. It is a raised bamboo structure with a palm-thatched roof and no walls.
We lay out what bedding we can concoct from the contents of our bags.
“Hungry?” Rufo is glum.
“Starved. What do we have, amigo?”
“Let’s see. Ten pounds of rice. Ten pounds of sugar. Flour. Pasta. Gallons of vegetable oil. Tuna. Matches. Cookies.”
Pablo instructed us to buy supplies to offer as gifts to the villagers, who, he’d assured, would house and feed us. We didn’t bring any food to prepare for ourselves. Or pots and pans, for that matter.
“Sounds like the main course is tuna. And cookies for dessert.”
We eat the oily chunks with our fingers.
“Not bad.” Rufo’s buoyancy is returning. “Could be worse.”
“Could be raw pasta.”
“Or vegetable oil with matches.”
“Oh my—Rufo—what is that?” Something is moving at the edge of one of the bamboo slats we’re sitting on. Scuttling. Glinting. And then I see them: antennae.
Shark fins knifing my way.
White-eyed zombies closing in.
“Cucarachas!” Rufo is laughing. “They’re hungry too.”
“Kill it, Rufo! Go get it! Please. Go!” But Rufo is rolling around on the floor in fits. “Please! If my friendship means anything to you! I’m begging!”
I can put up with a lot. Namibian giant jumping spiders? Sure. Baby scorpions? No problem. Tarantulas? They’re kind of cute. Rattlesnakes? Okay, from a safe distance, fine. Even bedbugs in Singapore I dealt with. But not cockroaches. It’s the antennae. The way they wriggle is satanic.
“Rufo! Rufo, please! Rufo… I think I’m going to… uh… vomit.”
My belly is gurgling ominously. Months later, back in San Francisco, I will find out I have giardia. For now, my belly has become a take-no-prisoners battleground, the Gettysburg of parasites. I crawl to the edge of the platform and retch. Rufo collects himself.
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“Are you all right?”
I wipe my mouth and hoist myself back into a sitting position. My head is spinning, and I’m concentrating hard on not crying. Who do I think I am, for the love of god? Jane of the jungle? I just want to go home. I want my own bed, my own room, my own chunky granola and yogurt for breakfast when I wake up in my own civilized metropolis. Where smart cockroaches fear to tread. Where the TV is permanently off.
I avoid Rufo’s eyes. “I’m fine. No thanks to you, pajero. ”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I know. You should be.”
We clean up the tuna cans and arrange ourselves in our improvised beds. Rufo reaches over and taps my elbow.
“Do you forgive me?”
“I suppose I can find it within myself to do so. But you have to swear to keep them away.”
“Not a problem. Those fiends shrivel in terror when they get a load of Rufo the cockroach-slayer.” His face is lit up, suddenly, in a fearsome scowl.
Lightning. Followed by the bone-crack of thunder.
We spend the rest of the night curling pathetically away from the chilly needles gusting through the open walls.
In the morning Rufo pays a local family to cook us breakfast. We gobble down our fried eggs and bananas, sitting on a mat in the yard with the family and their dogs and roosters and pet guinea pig.
“Masato?” The father offers me a plastic cup filled with something that vaguely resembles Pepto-Bismol. Or could it be…?
“Is that chicha?” My spirits are lifting already.
“What?”
“You know, chicha, from yucca. Boiled and pounded and chewed.”
They all look at me and laugh.
“We call it masato here,” Rufo corrects gently.
“But we don’t chew it,” the father says, wiping his eyes. “We haven’t done that in years. We have a hand-grinder.” His wife retrieves it from a shelf, exhibits it with pride. No doubt that little gem of technology makes her life a whole lot easier.
But the flavor is bland, circumspect. The Miller Lite of chichas.
Rufo and I visit Kirigueti’s clinic. Built by optimistic Catholic missionaries, it has a laboratory and pharmacy, as well as rooms for examinations, surgery, dentistry, gynecology, and pediatrics. But the clinic has no medical staff. The building is run down, the equipment obsolete. I walk slowly through the empty rooms, examining the dusty surfaces, running a hand over quaintly outmoded instruments. The despondency returns.
One hundred and fifty new cases of syphilis were recently reported in this community of two thousand. These cases can’t be directly traced to the Camisea project, but the introduction of foreign workers has historically proven dangerous—or, as in the case of the Nahua, lethal—to indigenous populations. “Last year,” Marcelino Turco, vice president of Kirigueti, tells me, “a full half of our community was sick with different diseases.”
Pluspetrol paid the community $266,000 for the right to conduct a two-year project on their territorial land. But the payments have been divided among the families, rather than being invested in significant development programs—like staffing the clinics or schools. In some communities, the companies of the Camisea Consortia have tried to illegally extend their initial offers to cover the full forty-year estimated duration of the project. I think of the vast sums corporations in the U.S. invest in public relations. Here, they’re not even bothering to pretend they’re trying.
“Oh, yes, there have been many impacts, both positive and negative,” says Father David, a missionary from the Basque region of Spain. We are sitting on his blessedly cool patio, next to a lovingly cultivated garden, sipping iced tea. For a minute I forget entirely where I am. “On the positive end,” he continues, “their living conditions have improved. For example, now they have tin for their roofs.”
Father David has lived in Kirigueti for the past two years, after having ministered for several years to another community downriver. He is young, ivory-pale, with a narrow face and aquiline nose. He positively hums with energy: his fingers drumming on the table, his foot coaxing rhythms out of the concrete.
“But then there are the helicopters. I’ve never seen helicopters like here, twenty to twenty-five a day. Of course that affects the animals, the hunting.” Father David speaks at breakneck speed, his Spanish thickly accented. His words blur pleasantly in my ears, a mellifluous and passionate sonata. And then, he continues, some of the young men go to work for the companies. That changes family and social dynamics. “Most tragically, one little girl drowned in the high waves from a cargo boat. They paid her family eighty thousand soles, but how can you compensate for that?”
You can’t, I think, suddenly angry. You can’t compensate for any of what is being destroyed right now. “Money comes and goes,” said Dahua in Sarayacu. But here it’s still coming, and I wonder if that’s not for the worse.
Father David leans back, taps an elongated finger against his chin. What is needed, he tells us, is not development for the Lower Uru-bamba region, but rather development for the indigenous people of the Lower Urubamba. He sighs, fiddles with a crease in his robes. “Still, this is just the beginning. There will be unimaginable changes here. But you know what the worst impact of all of this is?”
Rufo and I shake our heads, both of us mesmerized by this intent, fast-talking believer.
“The worst of it is that they are forgetting how to do things for themselves. And this is the fault of the NGOs as much as the companies. The Machiguenga have come to believe that they have the right to all kinds of stuff, and that they deserve to have it handed to them on a platter.”
For some reason what comes to me now is the Gran Pongo: the water cascading from the cliffs in stunning abundance, the white blossoms of taffeta.
The brides waiting for their prince.
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On our way back upriver, we pay a visit to Camisea, the community nearest to the gas extractions. There is a large new building in the center of the village, and a second one is under construction. Piles of lumber lie about the central clearing. Electric saws drone. A huge bonfire is burning waste, and the smoke saturates the area, searing my nostrils, graying my vision.
We ask if we can speak to the village’s leadership. By now we don’t bother mentioning Pablo. “Certainly,” says the first person we approach.
We are escorted to a low-ceilinged classroom, where we settle down into two of the desks. The walls are decorated with shiny Pluspetrol posters extolling the project’s virtues. One lists its production capacities. Another details how modern and high-tech the operations are. A third catalogs its benefits to mankind. We wait.
“So sorry to keep you. I’m Bernave, vice president of the community of Camisea. And this is Camilo, the secretary.” Bernave is young, unusually decorous in a button-down shirt. We all shake hands. He tells us that Miguel, the president, will be coming soon.
We sit, and I ask him how the project has affected Camisea.
“Very positively,” says Bernave. “When the company came, we met and made agreements. They’ve fulfilled all the promises they made. They’ve helped us with the construction of new buildings and with electricity. They’ve also given us televisions, radio communication, and all the tin we need.”
Rufo asks how the extractions have affected their natural resources.
“Oh, everything’s fine with them.”
“Do you still have the same numbers of wildlife?”
“Well, there aren’t as many animals. The helicopter noise scared them away, so now we have to walk a day to find them. As for the fish—”
“There are hardly any fish left. I’m Miguel, glad to meet you.” The president paces across the room, shakes our hands, and sits down next to the secretary, who is busily recording the interview. I ask him the same question I asked his vice president. His jaw tightens.
“It’s affected us negatively in many ways. The animals and fish are gone. We have all kinds of new diseases: diarrhea, parasites, malaria, rabies.” Miguel is middle-aged, grave, cautious. He weighs each word, gauging its heft and merit before putting it out for consumption. “They’ve only hired a few indigenous to work on the project.” He looks across the secretary, now, at Bernave. Suspicious. “As indigenous, we’ve always respected our cultural identity and customs. Now we don’t even wear our cushmas, our traditional dress, anymore.”
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Miguel watches Bernave, who is quietly examining his fingernails. The secretary keeps scribbling furiously, although I’m not sure what he is recording. I am astonished by the tension between these two men. How do they work together? How do they lead Camisea?
“None of this is going to benefit us in the long run,” Miguel continues, his face heavy, his voice low. “It’s only going to benefit the companies.”
I am certain that he would rather not be here, rather not speak any of this. He would rather not have this role, rather not be living in these churning times. I feel an intense sympathy for him.
“Bernave,” I hazard, when the silence is verging on unbearable. “What do you think this community will look like in ten years?”
Bernave looks up, face instantly bright. “Oh, it will be totally different. We’ll have electricity everywhere. And running water. Televisions in all the homes, with a lot of different channels. Even the Internet.” He is eager. “We’ll be very developed.”
“Miguel?”
Miguel waits, bringing the ends of his fingers together and flexing them gently. “It will be very different, Bernave, you are right.”
He does not look at his vice president. Instead he watches my pen as I take notes. He speaks as if dictating a shopping list: “Many more colonists will come in. We will lose our animals. We will lose our natural resources.”
The president of Camisea seems to be aging before my eyes, shrinking, a tired old man curling toward the anesthetic of a second infancy. A Cassandra vanquished by his own prophecy, by the ears riveted to the rumble of construction, the jangle of televisions. “Our children will forget their traditions. We will lose our language.” Speaking very slowly now, each word a struggle, a step closer to the abyss. “Our way of life will change completely. Yes, Bernave. For the Machiguenga, things are going to be very different.”
197
We are back in the boat, throbbing our steady way out of the Lower Urubamba. The flatlands gathering gradually into goose bumps, hinting at voluptuous curves. Rufo sits in the back chatting with the driver. I am on the very front bench, wind slamming at me, spray tickling. Pretending I am flying over the water. Skimming low, very low, close as muscle to bone. A sheer lining between river and sky and nothing more, just a layer spread thin, straddled by all the other layers. One striation of clay in shale. That’s who I am right now. Lacking the organ to think. Or feel.
But it’s not working. I lean into the wind, letting it lick the tears from the corners of my eyes, daub them cool across my cheeks.
The Camisea Gas Project will ruin the Machiguenga. It will trample their land, livelihood, and culture. And it is obliterating a heritage that belongs to all of humanity, for the Lower Urubamba is a region of global ecological import. The rainforest plays a crucial—and immeasurable— role in maintaining the delicate and mysterious balance of the earth’s systems. The Amazon basin is the most biodiverse region on the planet, home to the world’s largest expanse of tropical forest and one third to one half of all species. The basin is being destroyed at the rate of eight football fields a minute. Over the past century of exploitation approximately ninety Amazonian tribes have disappeared, vanished into oblivion when their homelands were destroyed.
In 2000 a Pluspetrol oil spill damaged one of the largest protected regions in Peru, the Pacaya-Samiria Reserve; it contaminated the food and water supplies of the Cocamas-Cocamillas community, wreaking havoc on their health. But unlike Ecuador, there has not been a Block 1 here. Yet. Is that what it takes? The people of the Urubamba are neither unified nor organized in defense of their land. They lack the political education to understand the future that awaits them: they can have either televisions or their traditions—either the money or the environment. But not both.
And many of them want the money, the stuff. Why not? Their lives are so arduous, so tenuous, so impoverished. Who am I to say what they should think or want? I’m a gringa with the resources to flit about the globe, with access to every sliver of technology I want, with the prerogative to turn up my nose at television. I’m no better than a two-bit bleeding heart sitting in a mobile ivory tower, mourning the demise of my idyllic fantasies of the natives. I am furious with myself, now, furious at my lofty ideals and my privilege, at my own guilt and at how I back up like a nervous colt in the face of it. Furious at the limits of journalism and furious also at them, the Machiguenga, for letting me down. I laugh, and the laughter rattles out soundless, invisible fists against the punchball of the wind.
198
How will I write this story? I came here to report on how corporate globalization is laying waste to communities and cultures and the environment. The Inter-American Development Bank, the IMF, and Bush Inc. all fit neatly into the framework of my own radical critique. And most of the Machiguenga I spoke with lament the effects the Camisea project has had on their culture and environment. Yet they are simultaneously riveted by the power and prizes of technology. They want these, and they want their culture and an uncontaminated environment to boot. They want it all, and they are being paralyzed by wanting it all. Father David faulted the NGOs for encouraging the people to believe that they deserve it all. But why shouldn’t they have it all? Why can’t they, when some of us do?
I came here to listen—or so I thought. I came to listen, but what do I do when the voices contradict my own? As a community, the Machiguenga are ambivalent, and their ambivalence, I predict, will likely destroy them. Can I be both radical and objective? What is objectivity, anyway, when the world is stark raving mad, when war is presented as just another foreign policy option, and pillaging an economic solution?
All journalists choose their quotes, I tell myself. Every writer has an angle, conscious or no. So do the progressive magazines for which I am writing, and their audiences know it. And so we should: there’s no firm footing on the middle ground in a lopsided world. That’s why I wanted to write these kinds of stories—so I could go beyond a glib synopsis that begins on an “objective” note and ends with the party line. Those of us who actually have some kind of feeble grip on the bigger picture—and have the freedom to explore and present that, as I do as a freelance writer—are obliged to, right?
But I wonder about the voices I will be leaving out. And whether, ten years from now, those whose stories I do tell will be grateful or angry. Will their grandchildren call them right or wrong? Traitors or visionaries? Will history call this tribe assimilated or broken?
I wonder if history will call them anything at all.
Maybe there will be a national holiday to commemorate the vanquished indigenous peoples of Peru. Families will dish up great steaming bowls of fried yucca and banana, drink chilled masato out of cans, and give thanks for all that their ancestors did or did not do. For all that they have. And remind each other not to forget the sacrifices or the history or, most importantly, who they are.
I know what I need to write. I have been listening, and one of the voices I am obliged to render is my own. I watch the hills rising as the boat moves up the river, against the current. Mostly what remains now is empathy for these people and how trapped they feel. For Miguel, watching his world collapse around him. For Ismael, wondering where things went wrong. I will try to tell their story, but it is not my place to judge them.
The land is high around us now, ripe thighs and ample bellies, and ahead lies the Pongo de Mainique. Grandest Pongo of them all, the Machiguenga said, where the river demon lurks. The water is growing choppy, rushing at us in flaring squalls, but now I remember that fear is only fear, my old companion, and that it can be held, like a baby. So I rock it gentle against my chest and stay right where I am. Up ahead the brides are waiting, waiting for their prince. I can see them now with their veils in place and bouquets fresh, riveted by the annihilation and the glory, by the roaring silence.