And The Darker Side

Last Thursday in Ayacucho was a day of rather intense conversation, culminating in me contracting another annoying stomach upset, potentially from any number of sources, which flattened any plans I might have had for Friday.

In the early afternoon I visited the Museo de la Memoria, or ANFASEP as it is more commonly known, which is dedicated to the victims of the conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. None of the reported titles of the parent organisation quite match with the acronym: it is at least the Asociación Nacional de Familiares, but the most common spelling-out mentions Secuestrados, Detenidos y Desaparecidos (kidnapped, arrested and disappeared) adding at least two missing 'd's, while the acronym appears to be stuck with a redundant 'p'.

Quibbling aside, ANFASEP can best be summed up as the Peruvian equivalent of the Argentinian Mothers of the Disappeared. It was first formed in the early 1980s by a group of brave mothers determined to get answers about the whereabouts of their family members who had been snatched from their homes or workplaces, as the state made a scorched-earth response to the Sendero Luminoso uprising. ANFASEP has grown and strengthened steadily through the years, playing a role in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the recent uncovering of the remains of torture victims at the military base of Los Cabitos, about 40km from Ayacucho.

As I was the only visitor apart from a young anthropology student from UF Gainesville who was doing a project on the museum, I was fortunate to be able to have an extended talk with the acting curator, the señora Maribel.

Later, I had a long chat with the señora Ana, who runs a cafeteria in Ayacucho's (to date) only Arequipan-style colonial patio dedicated to commerce and dining. After that, I finally got to meet Ana's mother Celina, who is an anthropologist and has spent years working in development projects with NGOs and government institutions in rural Ayacucho (many thanks to Yalivi in Brisbane for the contacts).


Past Reminders

Tuesday's tourist trip was so pleasant I was starting to create an excessively warm and fuzzy image of the region. Casual conversation with smiling, excessively polite guide Leo on the way back to the city corrected some of that impression. While the city and its surrounds at least have made a remarkable recovery in only a few years, the legacy of its dark past has not disappeared.

Leo said he came from a small village in the south of the department and was about 8 or 9 years old during the worst part of the conflict. At the time, there was basically no middle way between the Senderistas and the military. Any one who was suspected of cooperating with either group ended up dead. There was also the forced recruitment by Sendero Luminoso of children as young as ten or eleven years. The only alternative was to migrate. For Leo, that meant moving to the capital city of Humanga. Thousands of his compatriots travelled further: to this day, several bus services in Ayacucho run direct to the Lima barrios of San Juan de Miraflores and Ate Vitarte, linking with the large immigrant ayacuchana communities there. Leo's seven brothers and sisters are now spread out across various different departments of Peru.

According to Leo, people in the Ayacucho region continue to have considerable sympathy for currently imprisioned former president Fujimori. They see him as having played an important part in ending the terrorist uprising, as well as having personally visited the region and being "the one president to deliver what he promised". Certainly, the one of the most prominent of the many slogans painted on roadside and walls in the region is "Keiko 2011", referring to Fujimori's daughter's likely run for the presidency at the next elections.

Alan Garcia, on the other hand, is close to being in the unpardonable category. During his first term as president, as the Sendero Luminoso uprising was worsening, he is supposed to have said something like: "Ayacucho is full of terrorists; we should just bomb the whole place". I'll write more in another post, but this is the same demagogic, authoritarian streak which many see as ultimately responsible for the recent fiasco, and tragic loss of life, in the northern jungle.


The Musuem of Memory

The ANFASEP museum was on a street corner, in a basic, dimly lit adobe building marked only by the murals painted across its walls. On the first level was a small meeting room lined with school assembly-style benches, while above was a small gallery containing photos, descriptions, and contemporary retablos depicting incidents from the years of conflict. The slogan for the musuem was "so it never happens again". It was by turns sad, poignant, and horrifying.

Although the musuem commemorates victims of both the Senderistas and the military, it has an unashamed focus on those who were detained, kidnapped and disppeared, which were almost exclusively tactics used by the armed forces.

The señora Maribel introduced the displays to me by trying to put into context what happened when the army was called in to respond the the Senderista uprising. For her, the key was language. Unlike in the countryside of Arequipa or Huancavelica where the majority of the population are competent in Spanish, in rural Ayacucho, most people could only speak Quechua. They were thus unable to commuinicate with the army units that were sent to the region, who in turn suspected that the local populations were plotting against them or deliberately speaking in code.

She tried to put herself in the shoes of the young soldiers who were posted into the region during the conflict. "For them, it was like an adventure. But the kind of adventure that could go very wrong".

Maribel had been in the city of Humanga for the entire duration of the conflict. For those who, like me, only have a vague knowledge of the war, it's worth noting that the capital was never actually held by the Sendero Luminoso. However, the descriptions of life during the conflict make it sound rather Baghdad-like: curfews, rationed electricity, explosions in the night, constant fear.

Señora Maribel spoke of hearing an explosion as she was walking down the street one morning and seeing what looked like a "rag doll" fly through the air. It was an eleven-year old boy, recruited by Sendero Luminoso from one of the poor rural communities, who had presumably been on the way to depositing a bomb in some state agency. Trembling with nerves, he would have clutched the device too closely to his stomach, setting it off.

Our conversation diverged on to many other topics, including literature and politics. The señora Maribel was unimpressed with Mario Vargas Llosa, who she said had was "completely limeño" and had a hostile attitude towards Ayacucho, which he had apparently never visited when he was writing his novel Death in the Andes. The novel is set in Ayachucho during the civil war, but is best summed up as an elaborate evocation of costeño paranoia toward the sierra.

She also groaned at my comments of people retaining sympathy for Fujmori. Her account corresponded with my background reading: the defeat of the terrorists had little to do with the government's military response, and was largely owing to a small group of Lima-based police intelligence who had tracked down and arrested leader Abimael Guzman, around whom a cult-like following had developed.

She reiterated the paradox of the Shining Path: its radical Maoist ideology supposedly held that no one was indispensable, yet, after the arrest of Guzman, the whole organisation collapsed "like a pack of cards". She described how Fujimori and Montesinos had ignored and failed to provide support for the police intelligence efforts to track Guzman, but then rapidly tried to take the credit when they were successful.

The señora Maribel poured a little cold water on my comments that the city and its surrounds, at least, appeared to have made a remarkable recovery. "It's mostly on the surface", she said. One of things most lacking for ordinary people was decent health care. Señora Maribel explained that the much-vaunted Seguro Integral de Salud offered only the bare minimum and did not cover many medications or even such acute care as cancer surgery. She described a case of a campesina woman with thryoid cancer who had been unable to acess or afford appropriate medical care, and as a result this eminently curable disease (with generally at least a 95% 5-year relative survival rate) had turned metastatic and was now in its terminal phase. Needless to say, morphine and decent palliative care were not covered either.

Realities of Ayacucho


After the musuem, I stopped by Niñachay, the cafe run by the señora Ana. She met her Ukrainian husband (a quailifed teacher who speaks four languages) working on cruise ships in the Caribbean, and they had narrowly decided not to migrate to Adelaide in favour of staying in Ayacucho until their three year-old son got a little older.

Ana was a lot more at ease in Ayacucho than her husband, but assured me that there was "nothing here" for older kids and adolescents.

She also pre-empted my question about the economy by assuring me that there was "no industry" to compare with Arequipa and that the flashes of wealth around the city were in large part distilled from the compounds of the coca leaf. "Why do you think there are so many banks?", she asked, lowering her voice. She said that a few months previously there had been a group of American soldiers posted in Ayacucho, who had undertaken what she thought was a surveillance mission into the VRAE region. They had come and eaten at her cafe, because she spoke English.

After I ate lunch, Ana kindly gave me directions to her mother's house and called to say I was coming.

The señora Celina was now retired from full-time work had was working on a consultative basis for NGOs and other institutions. She had arrived back from a trip that morning, eight hours away to the south of the department. I sympathised with the journey across rough roads (six hours to or from Cabanaconde wipes me out) and asked if she had travelled by 4WD. A slow smile spread over her face and I corrected myself: "ah, no, by kombi". Working in development has a romantic ring to it, but it takes just one long, bone-jolting journey on Andean roads in public transport to appreciate the real commitment it must take to work for the sparsely-funded organisations to which the señora Celina had dedicated so many years.

Celina gave me a brief overview of the issues affecting the region. The reality for much of Ayacucho, especially the south, is of land without much water, where agriculture remains stuck at subsistence level, plots of land are tiny and scattered, and migration to the city is often the only way to get ahead. As with my previous interlocutors, Celina shook her head about the alluring flow of dollars from the illegal coca economy, with their ugly collateral of entrapment and violence.

I quizzed her on what policies could help the region move forward. The first thing that she mentioned was improved roads into the VRAE region, which would help develop the potential of alternative crops like coffee and cacao, and move the emphasis away from coca.

She also said that she had been working on a project plan for developing leadership among rural women, one of the areas that she saw as very important but that struggled to compete for a budget against more high-profile "ribbon-cutting" projects such as roads and bridges. Another area that could do with more support was reproductive information, which was in demand by campesina women. She said that there had been a big push for reproductive education and family planning in the past (under Fujimori, some of this had its own very dark side), but this had lost emphasis and resources.

She was skeptical of the government's Sierra Exportadora programme, which seems to have fizzled out, and was in any case, ironically directed mainly at crops that grow best on the coast. Instead, she gave props to the Sierra Emprendedora (entrepreneurial sierra) movement, a loose association of local groups aiming to promote the development and marketing of local products, rediscovering and enhancing traditional methods of production

For the development studies students, it's worth noting that you tend to get pretty similar answers when you ask these questions. Basic infrastructure, health and education services, development of skills and leadership -- especially for women -- and assistance for the kind of economic opportunities and market access defined by local people themselves in terms of what they feel they do best.

Even the leaders of the supposedly "radical" groups involved in the protests in the jungle were at pains to state that " we don't oppose investment as such". For all the tortuous philosophical debate about "post development" we engage in in universities, I'm not sure there's massive cultural differences in the things people want from the modern world. It's the human interactions required to achieve these objectives, and particularly the concession of power and resources, that seem to make the process so fraught.

The Charms of Ayacucho

Walking around the city of Ayacucho, or Humanga as it is traditionally known by its inhabitants, you would hardly imagine it as the centre of the region that originated, and most suffered from, the terrorism of the Sendero Luminoso and the brutal military response in the 1980s and 1990s.



First impressions are of people going busily about their daily affairs, while cheeky, smiling children are everywhere. The city and its surroundings are picturesque -- it has a typical Spanish colonial layout, flower-fringed plazoletas, and cobblestone streets. At face value at least, Catholicism is a dominant presence. As everyone will tell you, there are no less than 33 churches in Ayacucho, in a city with a population of at most 200,000. The Semana Santa (Easter) celebrations are renowned as being the most impressive in Latin America.

With its proximity to the jungle and its cosy location nestled in a shallow valley, the climate is warmer than Cuzco or Arequipa, the air softer and less bone dry The countryside is greener; although it is now starting to dry up, I understand the rains return in December with more regularity and plentitude than further south. The tap water is clean and sweet.

Ayacucho also seems to be overflowing with educational instutions -- schools, technical institutes, academies and universities. This means that the place is still full of young people, and thus doesn't have the abandoned feel of some smaller towns in Peru.

On the downside, issues of transit are even more fraught than elsewhere, even if you just want to walk around the few central city blocks near the plaza. The pavements are extremely narrow, and in the tight and bumpy streets, traffic drives extremely close to the kerb (Hiluxes and Corrollas mix with numerous battered moto-taxis; there are few of the little yellow 'Tico' taxis that dominate in Arequipa).

People seem to have little problem with any of the following: walking very slowlyy two abreast and blocking the footpath; weaving from side to side while talking on a cellphone, making overtaking difficult; walking two abreast and not making space for someone coming the other way; or simply standing still in a group and blocking the entire path.

This means that to make any progress, you often have to step off the sidewalk into the street. At the same time, there is no safe zone in the street, as the moto-taxis -- wth zero suspension and ancient steering -- often brush the gutter. You therefore have to make rapid tactical decisions about stepping on and off the pavement, calculating the proximity and likely speed of traffic and obstacles. With the jammed intersections, crumbling kerbs, and unpredictable human and vehicular traffic, almost every street crossing is a mini-adventure.

I've asked several people what the basis of the economy is here. Given that Ayacucho is in the bottom half of Peruvian departments with respect to poverty, there seems to be a suprising amount of apparent wealth. I've noticed an inordinate number of 4WD Toyota Hiluxes in the streets, on a per capita basis, many more than in much wealthier Arequipa. To be fair, a number of these seem to belong to various government agencies that maintain a notable presence. However, while the first couple of my interlocutors posited "just agriculture really" or "mainly goverment services" in response to my question, others later confirmed my suspicions.

What gives Ayachucho its sheen of dollar wealth is its connection with the coca economy. The lowland regions of the department, known as the VRAE (Valle de los Rios Apurimac y Ene, pronounced like the first syllable of "Bryan") are among the most fertile and productive in the world for growing coca, and according to United Nations reports, production is increasing more rapidly there than anywhere else. It goes without saying that the majority of the coca is not grown for traditional medicinal and cermonial uses. The VRAE is a remote, lawless zone where the presence of the Peruvian state remains shaky and the remnants of the Sendero Luminoso mix with ruthless drug traffickers. Yet it provides an injection of cash into the capital that shows up in the disproportionate number of banks, cars, and well-groomed women in expensive jackets.

Around Ayacucho


On Monday I took a little tour of one of the 'northern circuits' offered by local travel agencies. It was a very pleasant trip in a private vehicle, a middle-aged US-Peruvian couple my only company apart from Leo the guide.

From the city, we wound further downhill into a narrow valley with cactus lining the quebradas, spaghetti-western style. Natural irrigation from the river supported a fertile zone of fruit and vegetable production. We headed back uphill to our first stop, the archeological complex of Wari. The Wari were a 'horizon culture' that dominated the area from the 6th to the 11th century. In their two periods of expansion, they dominated as far north as Trujillo and south to Moquegua (basically three quarters of Peru, excluding the Amazon).

The Wari capital was the first walled city in South America, and their empire prefigured the Incas in important respects, notably in architecture and administration. They also seemed to have an impressive system of stone ducts that formed a subterranean water supply in a similar manner to the Nazca culture.



We walked through the military quarters, public amphitheatre, sacrificial platform (animals and occasionally people), and the royal tomb. The latter (pictured below) was perhaps the most impressive of the sites. It is divided into four sections, of which only two have been completely excavated. Unlike the tomb of the Señor de Sipan, near Chiclayo, little in the way of personal items has been found, and Leo speculated that these had most likely been the victim of huaqueros, or grave robbers.

Only 10 percent of the archeological complex has been excavated, and much of the area is still covered by cactus. Work began in the 1960s, and was of course completely abandonded during the 1980s and 90s and only got underway again around 2000. The Insituto Nacional de Cultura oversees archological investigations, but is predictably lacking funds, and any support from international institutes or universities or the private sector would reportedly be very welcome.



Later we continued on to the Pampa de Ayachucho, where the final battle for Peruvian independence was fought on 9 December 1824 and the outnumbered, outgunned 'patriotic' army of Jose Antonio Sucre defeated Royalist forces. The broad, flat windy plain at nearly 3,000 metres above sea level almost seems designed for an old-style cavalry battle -- you can imagine Braveheart being filmed there.

Dominating the landscape was the 44-metre obelisk depicted below. Its construction was commissioned in 1974 to commemorate 150 years of independence (designed, ironically, by a Spanish sculptor). The various levels in the scultpure are supposed to stand for the different geographical zones of Peru.



The final stop of the day was in La Quinua, a strikingly pretty and clean village of tiled roofs and cobblestone streets where almost every family is dedicated to the production of ceramics made from local clay. Most are model churches, campesinos working, or children playing muscial instruments. The photo below shows some of the typical designs. I couldn't resist, and bought a couple of ceramic pieces and a retablo, which, if they survive the journey back to New Zealand, will become presents for some lucky people.



On Wednesday, I caught a kombi to the town of Huanta, just over an hour from Ayacucho. It's another attractive town, nestled in a green valley, with exceptionally well laid out plazas incorporating botanical displays. I think I was a bit over tired by the time I got there, and perhaps coming down with something, so only stayed a few hours before heading back to the capital, without learning too much about the place. But as I learnt later, La Quinua and Huanta probably give a distorted impression of rural Ayacucho.



The above pictures and descriptions should provide a prima facie case for why Ayacucho is overlooked and should probably receive a lot more international tourism. However, it's not all sunshine and flowers, and in a further post I'll try and do a rather more image-light summary of the other things I learned while in the region.

Catching Up and Travelling in Circles

Because I'm so long-winded and becuase there's always a tension between doing and writing, I tend to find that when I'm travelling my blogs are always catching up with one another, and often get out of order.

So it is that although I had started a more narrative-style piece from my time in the Colca, that's only going to get finished if I have time tomorrow, while in the interim I'm dashing off a quick 'planned movements' post.

Right now I'm back in Lima. It was Lizbeth's birthday yesterday, and Hugo had two returning Swiss clients to pick up from the airport, so it was decided to have the celebrations in Lima at the house of Lizbeth's uncle Antonio, attended by numerous members of her labrynthine family.

I've just bought myself a bus ticket to Ayacucho So far on this trip I've travelled Lima-Arequipa-Cuzco-Santa Teresa-Cuzco-Arequipa-Colca-Arequipa-Lima. I'm currently planning on working my way from Ayacucho through Andahuaylas and Abancay (check the map) to Cuzco and from there back to Arequipa. I will have described a big circle.

From there, I plan to head back to the Colca for a few days, and will also try to fit in some trekking and climbing. Hugo has offered to go with me to Ampato, but you can never tell if he's serious, and in any case I insist on doing a 'warm-up' trek or climb. At this stage, a likely possibility is the Salkantay trek in Cuzco, which is a more gruelling and remote alternative to the Inca Trail, with ascents up to 4,600 metres.

It's ironic. Most travellers who arrive in Lima are eager to escape the crowds, the pollution, the insecurity, and, in winter, the grey overcast skies. Sunshine, laid back villages, and picturesque landscapes beckon in the Peruvian interior. Yet, after nearly four weeks in the more tourist-favoured regions, coming back to Lima is a relief in a number of ways. Most prominent, surprisingly is the climate. June skies might be unremittingly dull, but the moist air feels like a balm after the rock-bottom humidity and ever present dust of the sierra in the dry season. In Arequipa, I've always got mild nosebleeds and lingering snuffliness, and in the past used to think that smoking was partly to blame, but it's been the same this time and I haven't been smoking. Yet, a couple of hours after arriving in Lima, all my cold-like symptoms had disappeared.

Another nice change in Lima is the food. There's certainly plenty of tasty eating to be had in the sierra, but you have to shop around a bit, and the food can be plain and stodgy at times. Lima is home of comida criolla, the cuisine developed in Peru with strong influences from Andalucia, and it is also where Chinese, Italian African, and Japanese touches have made the greatest impact. Seafood is generally delicious, and while chili, coriander and other spices add zing to most dishes and even in the cheap places, food is normally presented with flair.

Although I'm biased by the fact that questions of traffic and transport are a bit of an obsession of mine, I think I'm on reasonably firm ground on saying that they are among the most important issues facing Lima at the moment. The surge in economic activity over the past few years is a generally good thing, but the greater disposable income has meant more more people on the move, and more vehicles on the road. Traffic in the past was chaotic and dangerous, but usually flowed to some degree. The last couple of nights, we have found ourselves in Hugo's hired 4x4, absolutely stuck in crawling traffic, smoke-belching kombis mixing with the newer vehicles of the aspirational middle class. It is starting to resemble Bangkok.

To be fair, there are a lot of public works projects underway, some of which have already delivered sweeping new freeways and interchanges. Luis Castañeda is making a big legacy push before his term as mayor expires, and a number of projects are to be inaugurated on January 18 2010, including a bus way and the ill-fated electric train that was begun in the 1980s. It will be interesting to see what improvements occur, but Lima remains unique among large South American cities in not having a mass public transit system. If it wants to become a truly world class city, it desparately needs either a proper metro or a fully integrated busway system like Bogotá's Transmilenio.

With its football team at an all-time low, Peru is in need of sporting heroes. Fortunately, it has found one in the impressively-named Kina Malpartida, current women's world heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Last night, almost everyone in Lima was glued to the nearest TV screen watching Kina defend her world title against a Brazilian opponent. There was even a big screen attracting a large crowd in the Plaza Mayor. Kina's defense was comprehensive, totally dominating the fight and unleashing a massive straight right in the third round that convinced the referee to end the bout early. The crowds clapped and cheered wildly. In an ironic twist in this macho society, a tough woman has restored some of the deflated national pride and self-belief.