To the Devil's Cave

The first time I heard the story in the previous post was from Lizbeth's brother Yamil, sitting eating breakfast in the Valle del Fuego in Cabanaconde and plugging him for contacts who could tell me more "ghost stories of the sierra".

Yamil has something of a fascination with things supernatural and was an enthusiatic informant. Among his tales of phantom figures and strange energies, he outlined the odd case of Señor Mendoza. "Why don't you look for the schoolteacher Rogelio Falcon", he advised me. "It was his father-in-law that disappeared"

Later that day I went looking for Rogelio. Yamil had told me that his house was close to a comedor half a block from the plaza, but when I asked in that place, they directed me to a street across the other side of the plaza. While I was poking around there, nervous about intruding on someone's private property, a an elderly señora appeared and I asked her about Rogelio.

"That young man there can take you to him, that one going into the shop", she said, pointing way back across the plaza to a figure that with my much younger eyes I could only just make out.

I wandered across and hailed the guy whom the señora had indicated. Lucio was another teacher at the local secondary school, who was originally from the Tacna region. He nodded in recognition when I explained that I was interested in the disappearance of Señor Mendoza. His understanding of the story was similar to Yamil's, although he added a few more details.

We wandered through the streets of Cabanaconde looking for Rogelio; he wasn't at either of the residences that Lucio knew of, but eventually we tracked him down coming out of the school. Rogelio was tall and lean, maybe in his late forties. He was happy to retell the story of his father-in-law and answer my questions. I have to say, I was taken by how amenable people were to a stranger, a gringo even, appearing at random to enquire into the intimacies of local families .

I shouted Rogelio and Lucio a coke, and we went to sit down in the school yard to talk. Rogelio was sceptical about local tales of ghosts and demons, saying they were "things our grandparents talked about, from when there was no electricity and they took fright in the dark". He didn't really think the devil had lured his father-in-law into the wilderness, either, although he swore that the figure of the devil was clearly marked on the hillside above where they had found the señor. "When we went up there in the morning and found him, the devil was there, plain as day", he assured me.

I was intrigued by the whole story. "Why don't we go up there", suggested Rogelio, as if reading my thoughts. We agreed that we would take a trip up to the devil's cave on Friday, after I had come back from my trek down to the oasis at the bottom of the canyon. I enlisted Yamil to go along as well. Yamil was eager, but nervous. He insisted that if we went, we should aim to arrive at 3 o'clock sharp in the afternoon. This was the holiest time of the day -- the hour Christ died -- and would counteract any malignant powers that might be present.

Friday came around, and to my mortification I had drifted so far into "Peruvian time" that I missed my rendezvous with Rogelio at the school, but I eventually tracked him down. We went to pick up Yamil, who was a little jumpy. He showed me a handful of coca leaves that he was carrying in his pocket as a source of good energy. Then he reached into his other pocket and pulled something out. "Here, Simon, take this", he said. He handed me an entire bunch of garlic.

We walked for maybe forty minutes uphill and west from the village, through the chacras where animals were grazing, on a route which headed up towards the slopes of Hualca Hualca. Near a big rock off to the left of the pathway, Rogelio stopped. "That's where we found my "father-in-law", he explained.

He also pointed out the shape on the hillside that was supposed to be the devil. But to his bemusement, it was no longer very obvious at all. We stood for about five minutes, changing our position and craning our necks, but try as we might, we couldn't see any configuration on the hillside that really looked like the devil.

Our next step was to climb up to the cave itself, but Rogelio said he was going to go back. He pointed out a trail that ran along the hillside across the other side of a stream, explaining that it was an interesting walk that went near an Incan archeological site; he was going to head that way, and if we took that route now we would just make it back to the village before nightfall.

We said goodbye to Rogelio and he started back. "I think he was afraid", said Yamil. Or maybe he had just got sick of playing the tourist guide and wanted to get home.

As we started off towards the cave, Yamil produced a battered packet of tobacco from his pocket. "You know how to roll these?", he asked. "Sure", I said looking a little bemused. "Well, can you roll one?", he said, handing me the packet. Tobacco smoke would ward off the malignant spirits as we got closer to the devil's lair, he assured me. I went along with it for the first few puffs, but then handed the cigarette over to Yamil. Scrambling up a hill at 3,500 metres above sea level is taxing enough as it is.

When we got up to the top, we found that there was not one, but several, possible "caves". One was a wide, shallow cleft in the hillside at ground level. There, we found clear evidence of a pago a la tierra, an offering to the earth. There was an empty bottle of wine and other items strewn on the ground, ticker tape of the kind thrown round at carnival hanging from the rock, and in the centre of the opening, a large gob of a waxy substance -- llama fat. In front of the cave was a broad flat stone that looked like it might have been artifically smoothed. From what I've learnt later, this probably served as the mesa or table of the curandero who performed the pago. Around a bend in the rock to the left, was a little pile of animal bones, which from later information I'm guessing were rabbit bones.

Up the rock face to the right was another cave-like opening, narrower and deeper. We scrambled up there, but didn't find anything of particular interest.

Yamil wandered back and forth, scrutinising his surroundings like a professional mystic. "On this side, there's nothing evil", he opined. "I just feel...power". He wandered up and peered at the llama fat. "This place has strong energy", he nodded sagely. "I think this isn't llama fat...it's the fat of a vicuña". I grunted sceptically. Yamil walked round to the side with the rabbit bones. "Oh, I don't like it here", he reported. "This is malign".

We took photos of the hillside at various distances, on the way up and the way down. Eventually, at middle distance, I became convinced that I saw the figure of a face. Meanwhile, Yamil was discovering various creatures and demons appearing at various places in the hillside. We struggled to point them out to one another, but it seemed we were seeing different things.

We only had about half an hour of daylight left, so we decided to head back to the village. Back in Cabanaconde, we downloaded the photos, zoomed in, zoomed out. The photo at the top of this post seems to clearly show a face, if not a demonic one. As we zoomed in on the pictures we had taken inside the higher-up cave, Yamil began to discern a number of details in the rocks around where I was crouched posing for the photo: a grinning cat-like demon here, the face of a soul in torment there.

Yamil was excited by the images that appeared in the photos. "This is a genuine discovery", he assured me. "We can take tourists up there". I was amused, but skeptical. Look long enough at a rocky hillside, and you'll find anything you want, I reasoned.

Yet, when I've shown people the image at the start of this post, they've spotted the "face" almost immediately. A couple who I've shown the upper cave photos to have also spotted the "soul in torment" without too much trouble.

Strange forces at work on the mountain, or figments of overworked imaginations? What do you think?

Señor Mendoza and the Devil's Cave

Señor Mendoza disappeared without warning, in the middle of the night, from his home in the village of Cabanaconde.

His family, including son-in-law Rogelio, a teacher at the local secondary school, searched for him throughout the town and the surrounding fields. But their searches were fruitless: after two days and two nights, Señor Mendoza was still missing.

A call was made to inform Señor Mendoza's daughter, who lives in Spain. The daughter, fearing for her father's life, went to consult a local curandero. The curandero did the required rituals, and then told her:

Your father is not dead. He is in the same place where they have been looking for him. They should send the night praying, and scattering holy water, and in the morning they should look again in the same place.

This message from the Spanish curandero was communicated to the searchers back in Cabanaconde, who did as had been instructed.

The next morning, they went out early to search again, on a pathway through the chacras up towards a place called Puqio. There, about forty-five minutes from the village, they found Señor Mendoza huddled under a big rock, below an opening in the mountainside which locals know as the Devil's Cave.


"At first we thought the devil had taken him", says Rogelio. "Now we think maybe he just wandered off in a coma. The place we found him was below the devil's cave, well below. And he he'd walked quite a long way to reach the path, from where he had been on the mountainside. That's where we found his glasses and his blanket".

"But it's true that where we found him, the devil is marked in the rocks of the hillside above. In the morning when we went up there, you could see the form of the devil, plain as day".

Maybe Señor Mendoza had just been absent-mindedly sleep walking. But somehow he survived on the barren hillside, without food or water, for three days and three freezing nights

What is true is that when they brought him back to the village, his wife showed her relief by scolding him: "What were you thinking?", she asked. "Why did you wander off like that and lose yourself in the wilderness?"

The old man looked at her strangely. "But why do you ask?", he said, "when it was you who took me there".

Señor Mendoza insisted that his wife had led him into the wilderness. When he had tried to walk back, she had blocked his path and wouldn't let him leave.

After that, for about a month, the señor kept getting up in the middle of the night and trying to leave the house. His wife, his daughter and son-in-law had to watch out for him, and restrain him when he tried to wander off.

This continued until the family contacted a local curandero. After ascertaining the reasons for the old man's restlessness, the curandero took him back up to the place where he had been found. The curandero performed a ceremony called a pago a la tierra, involving an appropriate mix of plant and animal offerings to the earth. After that, the señor was cured, and he once again slept soundly at night time.

"The curandero said he had left part of his soul out on the moutainside", says Rogelio. "We had to go out there and bring it back".

Salkantay Trekked: Third Entry

Into the Valley

Once he woke up, Gelmond did well again, nimbly preparing another meal on his stove, while the light faded in pink washes over the mountains and we shivered as the air sank off the icy slopes above us.



Next morning, I was woken by Hugo and Gelmond chatting in the tent next door. It was still dark, so I buried my head in the pillow and tried to continue sleeping, until I heard the sounds of gear being packed, and voices loudly speculating that they might just carry on and leave Simon in the campsite.

I crawled outside to find ice on the tent, and Hugo and Gelmond nowhere near as advanced with packing up as I had thought. They swore they had heard a huge boom shortly before 5am, presumably a chunk of ice separating itself from one of the glaciers. Hugo said he had taken the somewhat contradictory steps of counting down the average nineteen seconds one has before being swept away by an avalanche, and unzipping his sleeping bag to be ready to make a run for it.

I'd put in earplugs during the night to drown out the annoying drone from Mountain Lodge's diesel generator, and hadn't heard anything.

After breakfast, we retraced our steps from the evening before. It was only fifteen minutes walk downhill before the cold started to dissipate and the trees reappeared.

We gradually wound our way down the valley, the vegetation turning lusher, orchids and bromeliads throwing splashes of colour through the trees. Whenever we found a property with space that looked suitable for camping, we sought out the resident señora to discuss the possiblity of working with us in the future.


Hugo's conversation with each local smallholder went something like this: "Listen, I've got a hotel near Santa Teresa, and I'm going to operate the Salkantay trek. I'll bring groups. You should put some sort of table there; use stones for seats so the tourists can sit down. Whatever you do, don't sell your place. Improve, invest. Is that a kitchen you've got there? We'll bring supplies and cook here; how much do you charge? Do you have mules? Definitely don't sell. Hey, you don't want to sell that bit to me, do you? How much do you want?"

The nicest place we saw was Los Andenes, where the local residents had cleaned up and improved ancient pre-Incan terraces that descended in orderly layers to the river, beautifully flat with soft grass, a camper's dream. But by the time we got down to the most popular camping spot at Challuay, Hugo had promised his close collaboration with at least four different families.

At Chaullay we had an extended conversation with the resident señora, who explained that, as elsewhere, tourists could camp for free in exchange for buying something at her shop, or leaving a small donation.

She explained that the residents of the entire route, from Mollepata to Playa Sahuayaco, have formed the Cooperative of Alto Salkantay. The Cooperative advocates for the community and tries to ensure a common front, for example requiring that mules be charged out at no less than S/. 30 per day.

Ten minutes away across the river was the third in the chain of Mountain Lodge hotels. The señora said that the locals felt cheated because they had sold the land to a Peruvian, who had on-sold it to international investors. She said gravely that the relations with the Mountain Lodge people weren't very good, and that there "could be problems". It seemed that there had been all kinds of promises made, such as bringing electricity and building a school, which hadn't yet been delivered on I was having visions of another interesting development studies case study, but we had to move on.

Hugo's contribution was to sing the praises of the Pelton wheel, which his brother Alan had installed at Hugo's Lodge, and which powers the whole property using only the power of falling stream water. He told the señora about a second-hand Pelto that he knew of, going cheap. "You can generate your own electricity", he assured her. He promised to bring her tourists as well.

Another hour, and we prepared lunch in another pleasant grassy area beside a farm house with a shop, pigs and dogs, before heading off on our final stretch. The route on the way to the village of Playa Sahuayaco ran past some basic hot springs at Collapampa, where we dithered for a while. We had heard rumours about a road that descended from this point, and Hugo in particular sniffed the chance of a smoother, more rapid journey to Playa -- though everybody we asked insisted that the road was no quicker than the traditional mule trail.

Across the river above the hot springs there was indeed the end of a road, but the only way across was a 'bridge' of flimsy tree trunks stacked loosely, a couple of metres above some vicious rapids. While we were lingering, some locals came down from the road and stepped gingerly across. But I couldn't see us finding any way to cross with our heavy backpacks. It just wasn't worth risking death for a dubious time saving. We learnt later that there had been a locals had knocked down a more substantial bridge, to stop motor vehicles usurping the arrieros' traditional business carrying cargo up the valley.

It was only day two of the trek, but by mid-afternoon some of us had begun to fray around the edges. Hugo had declared, not without some pride, that he was "completely unprepared" for the trek. He had chortled at my and Gelmond's modern gear: his only nod to convention was a nice soft shell jacket, which he combined with cotton t-shirts, jeans, and a backpack best suited for daytripping. When it got cold at night on the pampa, he begged to borrow my chullo to warm his head. To take his share of the load, Hugo had agreed to carry the 4-man tent. Without enough space in his pack, he carried it along under his arm, and unsurprisingly lost his balance and slipped several times on the way down from the pass. On day two he somehow manged to stuff the tent inside his backpack, which meant that he at least stayed upright.

He also sang the praises of his boots, which he claimed had lasted eight years after he picked them up second hand for a pittance. But as fine a job as they might have done, the Salkantay trek was a bridge too far. On the second morning Hugo noticed that a hole had appeared in the bottom of one boot, and by lunchtime the whole sole had collapsed in. He began to hobble a little, and his feet got wetter with each stream we crossed.

For my part, I was embarassed to find that a large blister had developed on my right foot. Surely my feet weren't that tender -- and weren't my thick, soft, $35 Icebreaker trekking socks supposed to protect them? The best I could do was blame it on the pressure resulting from my backpack's poor weight distribution. To my chagrin, I had to admit Hugo had been right to make us skip the first day of the trek.

The afternoon wore on, and the trail seemed never-ending, rising and falling alongside the river as the countryside slowly became flatter and more civilised. We asked the arrieros coming the other way about transport to Santa Teresa, and they shook their heads and said the least scheduled service left Playa at 5 o'clock. It was starting to look like we would have to spend the night in Playa, a huge disappointment after we had spent the day imagining hot springs and soft beds.

As the sky turned dark, Gelmond stirred himself for one last effort. He lengthened his pace, striding off around the bend and into the distance. I in turn slowed down a little to keep Hugo company, and winced each time the ball of my right foot bore weight and rubbed at its expanding blister.

Finally, with the path becoming flatter and smoother in the moonlight, we rounded a bend and saw twin points of light suggesting -- could it be -- a medium-sized vehicle. I ignored my blister and sprinted the last 200 metres to the village. There was indeed a waiting minvan -- Gelmond had made it just in time and had held up the kombi.

We climbed in gratefully. The twenty-five minutes ride to Santa Teresa was as rough and bumpy as you'd expect on any back country Peruvian road -- but for once, getting thrown around the inside of a minivan didn't give me any cause for complaint.

Salkantay Trekked: Second Entry

Thanks to Our Four-Legged Friends

By the time we walked up from where the car left us to the start of the track, Hugo was red and puffing hard. I was outwardly in much less trouble, but during the gentle 100 metre walk I felt like I was carrying a pack filled with bricks. Without making further comment, Hugo turned left and carried on up a track to a small house with three mules standing around in front.


The negotiation for a mule was a complicated, three-way process. On the one hand, was the relatively simple matter of setting a price with the owner. More subtle was the game between Hugo, Gelmond and I to assign responsibility for getting the mule. "We need it to carry the tourist's backpack", shrugged Hugo to the arriero.

"My backpack?!", I spluttered. "Don't you mean you want the mule to take your backpack?". "What I have to carry, I carry", said Hugo, with a look for forbearance, as he recovered his breath. "I get there in the end".

"Well, I can carry what I need to as well", I insisted. "I'm not going to be the only one to need a mule".

And so it went round in circles, while the arriero waited patiently, until eventually all three of us admitted that we would be quite grateful to load our backpacks onto the back of the sturdy pack animal, and after sharing some tuna and bread with the arriero and his wife, we finally set off.

Without luggage, the three-hour trek to the top of the pass at 4,600 metres was comfortable, at least for Gelmond and I, although Hugo continued to huff and lag behind. The scenery was jaw-dropping: with each curve, we drew closer to the bulk of Salkantay, its jagged castles of ice hanging off the brutal rock faces.

At 4,300 metres we passed the arriero's camp, where the arriero's wife parked her mule to rest and take care of their young child until her husband made it back from the summit. Conditions in the camp were basic, and the local practice of wearing sandals a stone's throw from the snowline made me wince -- but seeing the grins of the arrieros and their families as they relaxed en route beneath the towering cordillera made the term "poverty" seem not quite appropriate.



We left the mule at the top, and it was here that things got a lot more uncomfortable for me. By the end of the trip I had decided firmly that my next investment would be in a proper trekking backpack. My Great Outdoors pack has served me loyally and been incredibly durable over twelve years, and countless trips by plane, boat, bus, train, minivan, taxi, motorcycle and mule. But it's not really designed to carry 25kg along mountain trails. The weight was distributed poorly and left me feeling top heavy, while the two-man tent tied to my back pulled and twisted my neck muscles. I made slow progress down the rocky but hardly threatening path, and got in an ever more petulant mood as the lack of sleep also took its toll.

In a small sheltered spot by a stream, Gelmond performed heroics to get his gasoline stove working and cooked us a solid lunch of rice and beans.



We trekked on through the sparse and frigid terrain of the pampa, passing a number of likely camping spots as well as another of the Mountain Lodge hotels, a rustic stone facade promising comfortable beds for those who could pay. I wanted to pick a campsite and crash as soon as possible, but Hugo was convinced we could carry on down to the "place where all the tourists camp". We asked a series of arrieros heading back the other way how far this was, and were told "an hour and a half". About an hour later, it was still "an hour and a half, before those leading the next mule train told us "three and a half hours".

Beyond the pampa, the valley narrowed and dropped, and thick swathes of forest reappeared along the gorge as the vegetation found shelter from the mountain winds. There were maybe forty-five minutes of daylight left when we found an enticingly flat looking stretch of grass next to a small shack. After calling out for a while to see if we could find who the property belonged to, a skirted señora appeared and told us it was abandoned. "But there's no water", she pointed out. "I let people camp at my place as well. I have water there. It's not far -- the first house on the left back up the hill".

I was keen to stay where we were, but Hugo insisted that we had to "make contacts". So we headed slowly back up the hill. Hugo began to complain after five minutes, but it took another twenty, tortuously climbing, before we found the señora's property, back up on the frigid pampa, under the shadow of the glaciers.

We were all pretty beat, but Hugo and I set to pitching the tents, he efficiently, and I slowly and clumsily. As Hugo chortled at my wonky guy ropes, we were suddenly struck by something we hadn't experienced all day: complete silence. No matter how tough the going, Gelmond had made it his personal mission to maintain a continuous stream of conversation. He had flowed seamlessly between his many anecdotes of romance, reflections on the indiscipline of his younger brother, and history lessons about the tactics used by the Incas to subject other tribes to their rule.

At the end of the trip, as we sat exhausted at Hugo's Lodge sipping cups of tea, Gelmond launched into another dissertation on the correct way to prepare certain traditional dishes. Hugo said: "Gelmond. I bet you were never one of those guides that got reports that said something like: The guide didn't talk much. He didn't really explain anything to us."

On this occasion, we looked back up to the mound above us, from whence came only a gentle snoring. Gelmond was stretched out flat with his head on his backpack, sound asleep

Salkantay Trekked: First Entry

More than an intrepid adventure, the Salkantay trek was an opportunity for three guys who had seen better days to imagine themselves as having made a heroic journey, while being quietly thankful that it was all over quickly.

Now in probably the worst state of the three of us, in his youth Hugo had been easily the most daring, an ascent of precipitous, 6,000-metre Hualca Hualca his most impressive feat. Gelmond was the youngest and strongest, but was not close to being in the same shape as when he spent a year and a half as a trekking guide in Arequipa. For my part, some years ago I had managed to climb to the summits of Misti and Chachani and complete the epic Cabanaconde-Andagua trek in four days, but I'd lost a good deal of form since then.

For the record, Salkantay is a trek of staggering beauty and drama. The photos in this post give you some idea, but fall well short of capturing the experience of coming face-to-face with apu Salkantay, breathing distance from its monumental glaciers. The route follows a broad, easy path, drummed into shape by the hooves of several centuries of mule trains. The proximity of the ice also means that you're never far away from water, and can walk the whole way comfortably with a single water bottle.

No Sleep 'Till Salkantay

If the trek was always going to be somewhat testing with us carrying all our equipment, Hugo and Gelmond went out of their way to ensure that we were in the worst condition possible at the outset. While I was taking the bus from Arequipa to Cuzco, and snatching a little sleep on the bumpy descent from Juliaca, they spent Friday night prematurely celebrating "friendship day", which is quite a big deal here and was technically on the Sunday. When I arrived, they were groaning with hangovers, and insisted they had had even less sleep than me.

By midafternoon, the asprin and hamburgers had taken effect, we had bought most of our provisions for the trek. Hugo had taken possession of my bed, and had a decent nap while Gelmond and I went out to buy gasoline, matches and rope. Naturally, it was then obligatory for us to go out and have a few more drinks, to, um, I think there was a reason somewhere...

Around midnight, I dragged myself away from the bar, insisting that I had to get some sleep. I made it back to the hotel not long after midnight, but then spent almost the entire time until the alarm went off at 4:00 am tossing and turning fitfully, dreaming that I was being woken up to go on the trek.

When we finally dragged ourselves down to the street the next morning, it was 4:30 am and still pitch dark . We took a taxi to the corner where buses and colectivos leave for Mollepata. A few people and provisions were being loaded on to an ancient-looking bus, which we were informed would take around three hours to get to Mollepata.

"How about by air?", groaned Hugo. "Isn't there a flight?"

"This is the flight", said a voice in the darkness. A taxi driver appeared, pointing to his battered-looking Toyota Corrolla. We figured it was amuch better-value option and hopped in. Once in the car, travel plans underwent some rapid revisions. Mostly, trekkers doing Salkantay start from village of Mollepata, at around 2,800 metres. However, Hugo began negotiating a price to go all the way to Soraypampa, where the road ends at 3,600 metres, and which is normally reached at the end of the first day. Hugo thought that this stretch was an artificial extension of the route across the moutains, lacking distinctive scenery, and gratuitously added to make tourists spend more time walking.

I was skeptical: it seemed like cheating, and I had been set on doing some serious trekking. But my desire for hard core camping is almost entirely theoretical, and when Hugo started mentioning the possibility of hot pools and a soft bed within two days, my sleep-deprived body started to back up his arguments.

It wasn't hard to see why the taxi driver wanted to charges us more than double to Soraypampa. After Mollepata, the road was replaced by a bumpy track that should really only be travelled by 4WD vehicle. The Corrolla ground and bumped its way over ruts, and several times we had to get out and push. As we got higher, there were ever more spectacular view of Nevado Umantay, part of the same cordillera as Salkantay. By 9:00 am we finally arrived at Soraypampa, whose most notable feature is the Mountain Lodge hotel, a well-appointed dwelling funded by Chilean investors and aimed at those who pay several thousand dollars to end each day's trekking in the lap of rustic luxury.

We gazed in awe at the bulk of the cordillera towering above us, and dragged our bulky packs out the back of the Corolla.

Trekking Salkantay

Another brief "planned movements" post. Tonight I'm leaving Arequipa for Cuzco, where tomorrow morning I'll meet up with Hugo and Gelmond. The three of us plan to do the Salkantay trek, which is a moderately challenging walk through the back country of Cuzco, taking four days and ascending to 4,600 metres.

Salkantay is often presented as an alternative route to Machu Picchu for those who can't or don't want to do the traditional Inca Trail. The trail emerges from the bush not too far from Santa Teresa and Hugo's Lodge, but not close enough for Hugo's liking. The idea is therefore that we will try to find a "new route" that terminates close to Santa Teresa; Hugo will then convince agencies in Cuzco to programme this route and bring trekkers to his lodge for their third night.

We'll be by ourselves, without cooks or mules, and carrying all our own gear, although the first couple of days we will undoubtedly be following in the footsteps of other tour groups. I'm a bit nervous about the "exploring" bit, given that both Hugo and Gelmond tend to be a bit light on details (e.g food, travel time, etc) and make up for it by stoicly suffering the consequences. I'm a bit more of a wimp, so prefer to be better prepared.

This is going to be my trekking/climbing expedition of the trip. My ambition to climb a high mountain like Ampato is not going to be fulfilled. Time and logistics had pretty much ruled it out anyway, but the mild stomach upset I alluded to in the last post put the final nail in the coffin. I probably lost a couple of kilos over a couple of days, and if I wasn't quite in shape to make it to 6,400 metres previously, I was even less ready after getting sick. But with the element of exploration, this trek is in its own way just as adventurous.

Assuming that it all goes well, I should make it back to Cuzco by the 9th, and Arequipa by the 10th. A couple more errands to run in Arequipa -- among other things, I have to pick up my Universidad Nacional de San Agustin library card -- and then it will be to Lima to take my flight home after what seems like a ridiculously short time here.

It goes without saying that there are unlikely to be any posts for about five days, but I hope to at least have some interesting photos when I next post.

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.

Images of the Colca

This post is a bit of a cop out given that blogging is supposed to be a primarily written medium and I generally aim to do a reasonable job of narration and description.

However, much of what I've learned and experienced over the past week or so has to go into my 'enthnographic research methods' project, while some things won't show up until my Master's thesis next year. I'm therefore reserving the more writerly tasks for things that I'm going to get graded on, and this post is little more than a series of glorified captions.

So, here are some snaps from my time in the Colca Valley last week.

This is a view over the village of Cabanaconde from near the mirador of Achachuia (a lookout point into the nearby canyon). The mountain in the background is 6,025-metre Hualca Hualca, from whose slopes Cabanaconde has traditionally received most of its water. Unsurprisingly, it is considered the main apu or mountain divinity for the village.



Anyone who has been near Peru, or been subjected to any of my accounts of travels there, has probably seen enough images of the Colca Canyon. But I think this one is worth including anyway. Taken from Achachuia, it gives a reasonable idea of scale, showing the drop from mountaintop to the river. This is not the deepest or most precipitous part of the canyon -- the section near the Cruz del Condor is considerably more spectacular. However, Gelmond assures me that the deepest part of the canyon is actually quite a lot further downstream, when the river has already become the Majes. That's something I'll have to check out some day.

The green strip in the above picture is Sangalle, which was once a verdant orchard, but now offers tourist accommodation, camping, and swimming pools. The area known as the Oasis is owned by Lizbeth's family and currently administered mainly by her younger brother Pablo. Pablo is aiming to convert the accommodation at the Oasis from rustic bamboo bungalows with dirt floors to rooms made of adobe, with tile floors, corrugated-iron and palm thatch roofs, and glass windows. He is building a new kitchen with space for a restaurant, and hopes to install an electric generator in the near future.

The picture shows rows of adobe bricks drying in the sun. They are made of mud poured into a mold, reinforced with wiry ichu grass, and then left to dry for five to six days. After this time, the adobe is rock hard. Although adobe doesn't withstand earthquakes well, it is still the dominant building material in most of the Colca Valley, and would certainly offer improved sleeping conditions for tourists at the Oasis.

The latest addition to Pablo's modernisation drive is a large refrigerator, which will apparently run on gas. Apparently, it took 14 men to bring the fridge down Cabanaconde. If you've ever done the trek down into the Colca Canyon, or something similar, you can appreciate what a monumental task that must have been. As a reward for their effort, Pablo's father put on a burrillada. Translated literally: they ate a donkey.


Cabanaconde's corn is famous as the tastiest and most nutritious in the valley, and perhaps in all of Peru. The harvest ends in May, and at the time of my visit, people were mainly occupied in collecting, deleafing, and drying the corn which had been collected in great heaps in 'corrals' after the harvest. The señora in the photo below kindly agreed to let me watch and learn about the process and take some photos of her and her family at work.


After nearly a week in Cabanaconde and the Oasis, I headed to Yanque, a village about two hours up the valley towards Chivay. There, I was met by Edy, who works at Lizbeth and Hugo's place and is studying gastronomy in Arequipa. He is from the village of Ichupampa, about 30 minutes walk from Yanque, and was back there for a couple of days for his birthday. He had offered to show me his village while I was in the Colca valley.

On the way to Yanque, I discovered that the locality was coming to the end of four days of fiestas. The final flourish was an afternoon of bullfighting at the local ring. On our way towards Ichupampa, Edy and I decided to stay and watch.

This is a view of part of the crowd watching the bullfighting, including the band, which struck up a Mexican-style flourish as the bullfighters entered the ring, and then continued for the rest of the time with variations on the distinctive, swirling local melodies. The mountain at the right is Hualca Hualca (seen from a different side than in Cabanaconde), while the peak poking its head over the horizon, Putin-like, is Sabancaya, the volcano that erupted in 1994, melting the ice cap of nearby Ampato and leading to the discovery of the mummy Juanita.


There were four bullfighters, one each from Puno, Arequipa and Cuzco, and one all the way from Venezuela. Below is an action shot as one of the more boisterous bulls managed to separate the bullfighter from his cape. We stayed to watch four bulls, and left before the toro de muerte, or the bull which is to be killed. I kind of preferred it that way.


Between the bulls was an impressive exhibition of the marinera, a dance of criollo (Spanish colonial) origin and practiced with the greatest attention on the north coast of Peru. The dance follows a pattern whereby the women elegantly dances around waving her handkerchief at the man, who describes tight circles on his horse and occasionally takes off his hat to salute the lady. It was pleasant to watch, and I was particulalry impressed with the performance of the horse, which they call a caballo de paso.


The below picture is of Edy with his aunt outside her small 'milk product plant' in Ichupampa. Edy's aunt and uncle have small plots of land which they largely use to graze animals, as do most of the residents of the locality. They received some assistance from an NGO called DESCO to establish the plant and were taught how to make saleable cheeses and yoghurts under appropriate conditions of hygiene. Their daughter was the one who was mainly responsible for the commerical side of the process, and she has now moved to the Majes Valley with her husband, although she is still assisting her parents to an extent. Edy's uncle told me that it is difficult with just the two, but they are struggling on, and that the NGO 'puts pressure' on them to keep the business running.

The milk is pasteruised and flavouring is added to the yoghurt, but not preservative. This means that it only lasts 3 or 4 days, and most is sold locally. We bought a cheese to take with us to Arequipa, and some delicious yoghurt which we consumed in the bus on the way.

That Incan Ruin in the Back Yard

If you've done the rounds of the Incan ruins in Cuzco, the stone work in the photos below should be quickly recognisable. The large, rectangular blocks, smooth surfaces, and uncanny fit, are all hallmarks of the architectural structures to which the Incas accorded importance. The contrast is notable with the rubbly stone work to the right of the picture, while it can be seen that these stones and the Incan blocks have all been glued together with the dried mud used as cement in the traditional adobe constructions of the region.

For various reasons, I didn't get a very good angle on either photo, and you can't quite see that the large, 'Incan' blocks form the left hand side of a doorway, which has been filled in with the rubbly stones. The right hand side of the doorway (out of picture) was also made of large, smooth blocks.

So, is this doorway in some obscure corner of Machu Picchu, or one of the lesser ruins dotted around Cuzco and included in a tourist route? No, in fact it is sitting quietly in the back yard of a private residental property in Cabanaconde in the province of Caylloma, Arequipa. The doorway was apparently part of the palace of a regional Incan governor. Now it's an anomalous structure out the back of someone's little corner shop.

It's things like this which kind of sum up what is so attractively offbeat and incongruous about Peru.

I'm not going to reveal the exact location, so as not to subject the owner of the property to excessive harassment. Yes, I know that I only have about thirty readers, of whom most probably won't be in the region in the near future. But it only takes someone from the Lonley Planet or similar to happen across this post, and the next thing you know the place has become a tourist curiosity, whether or not its owner is ready or willing.

As you'd imagine in the case of a piece of architecture that has presumably sat virtually untouched for over 500 years, there are stories of strange powers attached to the Incan doorway. However, I won't say any more for now -- the details need to be worked into the report for my ethnographic research project.

Radio Silence and the Tragedy in Bagua

Tomorrow I head off to the Colca valley at 2:00 pm in the afternoon. I feel like I've spent a couple of days too many in Arequipa and haven't advanced as much as I'd like with the main purposes of my trip. But it's probably been worth it to get over the various niggling problems and soak up some comfortable living before venturing into harsher conditions. Surely four essentially sleepless journeys of more than 15 hours within two weeks justify some recharging of batteries, especially when combined with jet lag, a cold, mild diarrhea, and a smattering of bites from both bed bugs and mosquitos?

I'll be in the Colca region for anything from 5 or 6 days, to 2 weeks, depending on how much progress I make with my studies, how nice people are to me, and whether I come back to Arequipa between my time in Cabanaconde and my intended visit to the village of Ichupampa. There is internet in Cabanaconde, but it is likely to be slow, and in any case I should be busy with other things than sitting in an internet café. There is therefore likely to be radio silence on this blog for a while, and the posts will continue to come in fits and starts.

In the absence of blog posts, I nevertheless hope to maintain my 'scratch notes', 'field notes proper', log, and transcipts< / obscure academic reference>. Ironically, most of the latter are so far stored, not in my dog-eared notebook, but in an unpublished 'in draft' entry on this website. Google's servers are the new poste restante.

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Ironically, being in Peru I find myself almost less in touch with current events than when I'm in New Zealand. We didn't have any internet at Hugo's Lodge, with the nearest access 4km away in Santa Teresa (although now Hugo has installed a satellite service), and in Santa Teresa it was hard to come by any newspapers, let alone something serious like La Republica. For this reason, I had been rather ignorant of the gathering tension in the northern jungle, in which native communities were blocking major roads and demanding the derogation of legislative decree 1090, which they claim opens their communal lands to easier exploitation by mining and petroleum companies.


I'm therefore just piecing together information about the terrible tragedies that have occurred around the town of Bagua, near the main route to Chachapoyas and Tarapoto, where confrontations between police and native communities have resulted in the death of at least 23 policemen and an unknown number of local community members.

As conflicting reports filter in from the TV and radio, and different groups try to put their side of the story forward in the media, the only thing certain is that there terrible things have occurred, and there is bitter agony all around. It's somewhat reminiscent of the events in Pando in Boliva last September, although worse, in that most of the violence there occurred in a single confused clash, which doesn't seem to have been the case here.


The political drama brushed by obliquely last week, when, as we drove in Hugo's 4WD on the way to Santa Teresa, we passed numerous minivans and trucks laden with "natives" who were returning from having blocked the way to Machu Picchu as part of a national protest. However, Cuzco's ceja de selva is not really a focus of the conflict, and as far as I can tell , almost all of the residents are recent immigrants from elsewhere in Peru, mostly the sierra.


For those who have picked up some news through the international media, they might like to set these shocking occurrences against any impressions I might have given of a warm glow of material development in Peru's main urban centres. They might also note that a number of commentators have quickly made the connection with the wider context set by president Alan Garcia's "Dog in the Manger" discourse, which I criticised a while back. Regardless of the details of exactly what happened and how, when a whole class of people are treated as mere obstacles in the path of progress, outbreaks of conflict and violence are hardly unexpected.

New Inca Trails

If I had got up at 5:00 instead of 6:00 as Gelmond had wanted, we would have had time for breakfast. If we'd had time for breakfast, we would have had something more than three oranges each to sustain ourselves. As it was, when we finally got going on the walk shortly before 6:30, we had to hurry, lest the clouds puffing off the moutainside obscure the views of the snowy peaks and the heat of the day catch up with us in the middle of the trek. To be fair, I hadn't yet figured out that Gelmond's time estimates for "there and back" were more accurate if taken as referring to the outward journey only, so was less worried than I should have been about the lack of breakfast. But once again, the discomfort that intruded on an interesting and spectacular trip was mostly my own fault.

After arriving at Hugo's Lodge, I had been introduced to the local team. Walter, from the village of Ichupampa in the Colca valley, who I already knew from when he worked as a domestic employee at Hugo and Lizbeth's place, was working as a cook. Aquilino, a local guy of indeterminate age but with wiry strength, cleaned, laboured, and helped in the kitchen. Gelmond was Hugo and Lizbeth's favoured guide for their Sudamerica Tour trips. A twenty-eight year old native of Arequipa, he had become a minor expert in architecture, iconography, prehispanic history, Peruvian geography, and cooking. His enthusiasm for guiding had earned him a personal mention in the latest Footprints guide to Peru. He almost never stopped talking.

A week previously, Gelmond had gone with Jaime, a compadre of Hugo who owned the land further up the hill (beyond Hugo's property of five or six hectares, the terrain is communal, until Jaime's land begins above an irrigration canal). Jaime made only occasional visits to his terrain, and most often ascended directly from Santa Teresa. They had taken a mule and worked their way up to the little house inhabited by Santiago, Jaime's caretaker. On the way down they had passed a pretty waterfall and a cave where they found some fragments of ceramic of indeterminate age. Gelmond thought the route would be an attractive one for tourists, given the views, the variety of flora and fauna, and the fact that the pathways were effectively Inca trails. I was keen to do some trekking, so we agreed that the two of us would undertake further reconnaissance.

The first stretch of the trek was on a broad, comfortable path along the side of a quebrada that cut into the mountainside at right angles to the rio Urubamba. We were under shade for most of the way, and the only discomfort came from the rapid pace set by Gelmond. Less than twenty minutes uphill from the lodge, there were striking views of the peak of Nevado Salkantay, its snows reflecting the ealry morning sun.



After a bit less than an hour we arrived at an irrigation canal that was being developed by the local campesinos. From there, the way got steeper, and was complicated by the fact that Gelmond couldn't find the path he had taken with Jaime the previous week. He had marked the entrance as being ten steps from the end of the canal, but in the following week the canal had been extended significantly. So it was that instead of working our way up the zig-zag pathway that we eventually found on our way down, we ended up scrambling across the mountainside through thick grass, thorns tearing at our clothes and skin.



Half an hour or so of this and we eventually came to a flatter, clearer stretch by a grove of avocado trees where the path reappeared. There were further spectacular views of Salkantay and back down the valley, until we were immerse in tangled bush. Here, as we were to later repeat to numerous travel agencies in Cuzco, orchids "grew like weeds". It wasn't really the season for orchids, and most were dry or without flowers, but at the right time this would clearly be a paradise for botanists and flower lovers.


After working our way through the bush for around half an hour, we climbed a short rise to find a tidily cultivated plot of vegetables leading up to a tiny shack of wooden stakes with a roof of thick straw, rather giving lie to Gelmond's promise of a casa at the end of our climb. We negotiated geese, hens, and a rather snappy, nervous dog, before the stooped figure of Santiago appeared around the side of the shack.



On the way up, Gelmond had told me Santiago's story. Santiago was one child of a campesino family of six or seven. In the past, it was common for parents to send the elder children out to work as peones for a landowner, which would then support the youngest one or two to progress with their schooling. Santiago had worked on the land for the same family for twenty-five years. But when the owner died, his children decided that they didn't need Santiago any more, and threw him out.

Jaime said he had found Santiago amid some fields near Santa Teresa, weeping. He had been sleeping in a cave, surviving on the moisture that dripped from the roof. Jaime took pity on him and said he could come and live on his property. Gelmond said he only paid him a few soles a month, but brought him substantial provisions including flour, sugar, rice, coffee and cigarettes, which amounted to quite a bit of money.

As we approached the shack, Gelmond said: "now comes the difficult part -- I have to try to speak Quechua". Santiago spoke almost no Spanish, and was also rather hard of hearing. In fact, Gelmond's Quechua amounted to a few phrases, and Santiago seemed to be nearly deaf, so comunication was mostly limited to smiles and hand waving.

After we said hi to Santiago, we dropped down into a little dip with a stream where we collected water and ate some carrots that were growing alongside the brook. By the time we got back, Santiago had prepared us coffee, which we drank sitting on a little bench inside the shack, watching a multitude of little cuys ferreting in the straw under Santiago's bed. The surroundings were definitely rustic, but the obligatory radio broadcasted the familiar plaintive strains of a huayno from Ayacucho, picking up its signal from a station in Santa Teresa.

We then carried down through thick bush along a barely-existent trail for about twenty minutes to the waterfall. A little beyond that was the cave. Gelmond explained that the lining of the interior with sand was another sign, along with the ceramics, that it had been used for shelter at some stage. We hid most of the ceramic in a discreet spot, and took one rounded fragment for testing by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura in Cuzco or Arequipa.



As we struggled back up through the tangled vegetation, I commented that it was a bit like being in Indiana Jones, and we both lamented the terrible job the most recent film had made of its supposed setting in Peru. "I wanted to write a letter of complaint to the production company", said Gelmond.

According to Gelmond, I was probably the first foreigner to walk the route, after himself, as a representative of the "Independent Republic of Arequipa". With my somewhat clumsy gait that led to a couple of slips, and my complaints about being hungry and thirsty, I didn't think I made much of a pioneer. But it wasn't an entirely unreasonable supposition that I was the first gringo to pass that way: despite the proximity to Machu Picchu, some of the places and geographical features of the region don't even appear on Google Maps.

Gelmond's explained his theory that the true home of the Incas, as well as the major cultures before them, had really been the ceja de selva, the fertile fringe between the sierra and jungle that we were in. That explained why so much of the iconography and religious traditions of these cultures were based on warm-climate animals and plants. So why, I asked, had their centres of power all been based in the sierra (Chavin de Huantar near Huaraz, Wari/Tihuanaco in Ayacucho/western Boliva, and the Incas in Cuzco)? Gelmond reasoned that these were strategic sites for dominating the surrounding area, and allowed the preservation of foods that would quickly go off in the warmer lowlands.

We walked back the way we had come. The previous week, Jaime and Gelmond had continued around the mountainside and dropped down directly to Santa Teresa, but this was an extremely steep route, and Gelmond said that for all his trekking experience, he had nearly fallen four times. They had left the mule in a forest grove, as the descent was not safe for it. Given that I was now being overcome with low blood-sugar clumsiness, retracing our steps was definitely the prudent option.

Following the path on the way down, we discovered the gentle zig-zag through the long grass that we had scrambled up a couple of hours earlier. The trail was marked by mule droppings, indicating where Gelmond and Jaime had ascended the week previously. When we finally came in sight of Hugo's Lodge, lunch was about to be served, and we set ourselves on it like famished men. We had taken about six hours. It was a fascinating and spectacular walk -- but the last time I'll knowingly set out without breakfast.

From the Snows to the Jungle

"Abra Malaga" has a romantic, almost mystical ring to it, and it was this vague promise evoked by the name of the pass we were to cross that I set against the concrete forebodings inspired by "Cuzco", "jungle", "road" and "bus".

My premonitions of a painful journey over narrow and potholed byways were mostly misinformed. After the rolling descent from Cuzco to Urubamba and the obligatory detour through the ancient cobblestone streets of Ollantaytambo, a smooth, broad and superbly-engineered road serpentined its way up to 4,316 metres above sea level, bringing to mind the highway that climbs across the Andes from Santiago to Mendoza. The ashphalt then continued most of the way down to the Urubamba river, only losing a little shape after crossing three or four waterfalls, and eventually giving way to a well-maintained and relatively smooth dirt road along the side of the valley for the last hour or so to the town of Santa Maria.

The promise of exotic landscapes, however, was more than fulfilled. As the bus finally ground its way to the top of the pass, tour groups on bicycles with matching jackets were preparing for their descent next to a sign that warned of a "Zone of Mists", which itself was nearly swallowed by swirling, watery cloud.

A couple of s-bends below the pass, the mist parted enough to reveal an enormous glacier on the flank of 5,682-metre Nevado Veronica, its icy teeth seeming almost close enough to touch (more awe-inspiring than suggested by the photo above of the entire peak, taken in clear early morning skies on the return trip).

Further below, the straw grass of the puna rapidly turned to moss-draped cloud forest, while the thinning mist revealed broad swathes of hillside covered in dark greenery sweeping steeply down to the tight serpentines of the Urubamba river, far below. As the altitude lessened, the cloud forest turned to subtropical trees and ferns, and the familar flat leaves of banana plants began to appear.

After the bus dropped onto the dirt road that worked its way down the valley towards Quillabamba, little villages began to appear, bougainvillea brightening the rustic buildings of partially-painted adobe and corrugated iron. Walls were invariably covered with giant upper case letters promoting the candidacy of one candidate or another for the district mayoralty. The roadside was hedged with cultivation, of maize, bananas, papaya, mangoes, mandarins, coffee, and tea. One small village announced that it was the "national capital of tea", and just beyond, people with baskets worked in tidily cultivated plantations that looked straight out of a Dilmah advertisment.

Yet, despite how pleasant all this sounds, this oversensitive gringo was in significant discomfort for much of the way, and had to make a considerable mental effort to take in and enjoy the sights.

The previous night I had taken the bus from Arequipa to Cuzco with Lizbeth's sister Karina who was heading back to work at Hugo's Lodge. At just over nine hours, the Arequopa-Cuzco journey is not overly arduous, but I hardly slept a wink as the bus heating was kept on full blast. I watched miserably as the screen at the front of the cabin that showed the time and temperature ticked upwards from a pleasant 22 degrees when we left Arequipa to eventually stall on 28 degrees.

Before the start of the journey, I had insisted that I wanted to do it in stages, since I had already had two trips of over 15 hours in the previous week and was only just getting over the jet lag. We talked of the possibility of staying the night in Cuzco or Ollantaytambo before continuing onwards. However, this suggestion kind of got overridden by Hugo's urgent message that he needed meat for a large group that was arriving at his hotel, and could we please bring him some from Cuzco.

Arrival in Cuzco was scheduled for 5:00 am, but we didn't get in until 6:30. The bus for Santa Maria left at 8:00, so it was a rushed hour and a half to buy the tickets (at a different terminal), grab some breakfast, go to the market to buy some meat, and get back to the terminal in time to load the luggage and get on the bus.

By the time we arrived in Urubamba a little over an hour later, I was still a bit dazed, but starting to appreciate the landscape and the journey. Here I made my great mistake. As luggage and passengers were loaded, many of the Cuzco passengers filed off to use the toilets in back of a local comedor. I decided I couldn't be bothered, owing to some combination of the long line, the distinctly rustic state of the toilets, and not really needing to go.

Around half an hour later, when the bus passed through Ollantaytambo, my long cup of black coffee from breakfast had caught up with me and I felt like I could use a bathroom. In another little while, as the road started to serpentine upwards, this feeling started to gain urgency. When the bus stopped at the last sign of civilization, two thirds of the way up to the pass to fill up with water, I was hoping for a genuine mechanical problem that would allow passengers to get off the bus and relieve themselves. When we reached the top of Abra Malaga, there was little else on my mind. Half way down the other side, I could barely move, and I let out a loud groan when an older guy who had got on at Urubamba estimated that it was "about another hour and a half" to Santa Maria. "I really need to go to the bathroom too", he said.

Some readers might have seen my piece about "bus buskers". On this trip there were two. The second busker, who waited patiently for twenty minutes while a young guy told jokes and did tricks, was selling Chinese herbal remedies, pills with a mixture of ginseng and resihi mushrooms. After the usual long spiel about the terrible state of the Peruvian diet, he moved on to describing specific problems with the liver and kidneys which these remedies could ameliorate, as well as their effectiveness in preventing (for the men) an inflamed prostate and (for the women) vaginal infections.

The bus busker made a particular example of himself. His other job was working as a conductor for rival company Ampay, which did not have a bus running this particular day. He assured us that his frequent journeys between Cuzco and Quillabamba required him to maintain a regular intake of the remedies. "I damage my kidneys every day", he said.

As the bus left the asphalt and wound its way along the valley, I was sure that we would soon be in Santa Maria. Each time the vegetation started to be dotted with banana plants and electric cables appeared overhead, I chanted a little mantra under of breath of "be Santa Maria, please be Santa Maria". But each time, it was only a small settlement with a handful of corrugated iron roofs, and yet more political advertisments.

Finally, there was a shout of "who's getting off in Huyro?" We were about to arrive in the capital of the Huayopata district, and the bus would stop. While a couple of passengers were extracting their luggage, I and the older guy jumped off the bus and sprinted across the road. A woman with a kiosk outside the municipality building answered my urgent query. "Through the building, to the right, and to the right again".

As I finally obtained relief, I noted that the other guy must have been even more disoriented than I. He never appeared in the bathroom whiel I was there, and he only got back on the bus some minutes after I did.

From there I could sit back and enjoy the rest of the journey, which only lasted another twenty or so minutes before we finally got off in Santa Maria, to a warm wash of tropical air, and a hand that pulled at my backpack as we waited to unload the luggage. It was Hugo, playing the clown. His Hyundai 4X4 was parked a few metres away, and after grabbing some lunch in a nearby comedor, we set out on the 45-minute drive along a narrow dirt road above the precipitous river gorge, to the town of Santa Teresa, and down to the fabulous new hot springs complex of Cocalmayo. That was the end of the road, so we parked the truck, and walked the five minutes across the bridge and up the path to my first view of the famous Hugo's Lodge.

Arequipita Linda

In Lima, you almost have to know what you're looking for to notice the effects of the Peru's rapid economic growth over the last few years (it's only since 2005 that the GDP per capita has exceeded that obtained in the 1970s). In Arequipa, the changes are much more obvious.

The calle Mercaderes, which runs east off the main plaza, and is the retail heart of the city for middle class shoppers, has been cleared of traffic along all its five blocks, with the sidewalks turned into flat tiles merging with the street's cobblestones. What used to be a chaotic though vibrant scene, pedestrians tipping off the pavements into the path of the congested traffic, is now an almost European-style mall.

Some of the principal avenues have been repaved with ashphalt and are near enough as smooth as those in a typical Western city, while I'm informed that upgrades for several more are scheduled. Cobblestone alleyways through the historic centre have been opened up and beautified, with the addition of bourgeois touches like flower pots and park benches.

Yet the public development is exceeded by the private. Retail has gone bigger, brighter, and more formalised. Nestled under its 6,000-metre volcanoes, Arequipa now actually has a couple of stores selling mountain gear. On the calle Mercaderes there's a menswear store, while on La Merced heading south from the plaza exotic new shops selling beds, furniture and solar water heating systems have appeared since my last visit. There's a diverse array of new cafes, restaurants, and hotels, while tourist oriented pizzerias, laundromats, alpaca-wear boutiques and, of course, travel agencies have filled in the available space on Santa Catalina, San Francisco and Jerusalen. Tasteful advertising frames most of the new businesses. Local makers of banners and signs rustically carved in wood have clearly enjoyed bonanza years.

Interspersed amongst the ubiquitous yellow 'Tico' taxi bouncing over the cobblestones are a handful of Hyundais and Toyotas and the occasional shiny 4WD. On the streets of the city, as far as I can tell, there are fewer beggars, vendors of random consumer items, or children selling sweets.

Walk from the centre into the inner suburbs and you see repaired walls, painted facades, less rubbish, even the odd private car or pitched roof. In streets such as those leading up to Hugo and Lizbeth's place there are more trees, shrubs and cacti planted along the sidewalks.

What it all adds up to is the significant expansion of that elusive entity, for Latin America, the middle class. If there's something unreflexively thought of as 'development', Arequipa has been seeing some of it. It's not as if there is exaggerated, flashy wealth sprouting up next to complete misery. Rather, the wealth seems to have been spread around moderately well -- perhaps coming down in splashes, instead of a trickle. More people have the means and the confidence to spend, and things to consume are appearing to meet their demand.

Much is still the same: the ancient, dirty kombis, the cracked and crumbling sidewalks, the pollution. But with the rough edges of decay and desperation softened, Arequipa is on its way from being a place of melancholy beauty to becoming a truly spectacular city.

I have to admit that it's surprised me somewhat. I've been used to reading the trenchant criticisms from the likes of Humberto Campodónico and other commentors, of the Peruvian government's unreformed neoliberalism and failure to take advantage of the boom times, the claimed manipulation of poverty statistics, and the lack of progress with economic diversification, health, education, pensions, or improved labour conditions.

However, the development that has occured is still consistent with those criticisms. So much money has flowed into the country, and hence government coffers, that although the adminstration hasn't done anything particularly progressive, in absolute terms it has had greatly increased resources to deploy. Arequipa is a mining region, and has benefited from the Canon Minero, a portion of the taxes paid by mining companies that goes directly to the affected regions. It's also the country's second-biggest, and most orderly, urban area, with an existing civil society and a core of educated, ambitious residents capable of developing an interconnected domestic economy if given the chance. If anywhere is going to take advantage of good times, it's here.

The question is how widepread and durable all this is. My impressions so far are all from walking and driving around the centre of Arequipa city, which has always been among the most middle class places in Peru. What is it like in outskirts and the pueblos jovenes? Have they also seen improvements? What about the rural areas? Have the beggars and street sellers really got jobs or improved their living standards, or have they been shovelled away out of sight by a government wanting to give a good impression to tourists and investors?

There's also the odd fact that for the moment, at least some Peruvians are more optimistic than those elsewhere in the world. Several people have told me that "the world economic crisis isn't really affecting Peru". Perhaps not that much so far. For one thing, at a macro level, Peru's government and major banks (like those of Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia) have managed their accounts with technocratic efficency and didn't do anything stupid during the good times. There are also enough accumulated foreign reserves for the government to be able to apply an economic stimulus (through not to the same extent as Chile, which having squirreled away earnings from its copper exports, is one of the few countries to be able to act as Keynes foresaw and inject funds from its savings rather than borrowings).

At some stage, however, the world situation is going to affect Peru. The downturn of soaring mineral prices that have driven much of the economic growth, lesser demand and lower prices for the 'non-traditional' agricultural and garment exports, and fewer tourists arriving, will mean that the boom will end and export-led growth will likely slow dramatically. That's when it will become apparent just how much progress has been made with important but less visible things like the improvement of education, the recovery of civil society, the establishment of basic infrastucture in rural areas, and the integration of these areas into the wider economy.

In Arequipa, I see the growth in retail and services as being driven by an expanding middle class, rather than being just the rosy flush of a transient mining and tourist boom. But so much is directed at the international tourist that the concerns I outlined in this post still hold. Since I was last here, the number of travel agencies has increased significantly again, while tourist numbers or destinations haven't really changed. What will happen when all those people who have sunk loans or savings into their shiny new offices come up against the reality of fierce competition for dwindling numbers of clients?

Peru has seen booms before, often based around a single raw material, and generally dissolving into thin air leaving little more than social dislocation and a damaged environment. This time, will the development stick? Or will the raised expectations of the last ten years make the come down even harsher and more destabilising?

Voices of the Not So Poor

It wouldn't cost that much more, in international terms, to fly from Lima to Arequipa, but for me it wouldn't be quite right. After arriving, I wanted to work my way into the country by land, as if making its acquaintance again.

On my way to the bus station in Lima, I had a more jovial and conversational taxi driver. Still preoccupied with the theme of security, I asked him which parts of Lima were more or less safe. He thought a second and said: "only really the very centre". He said that things had got no better in the last couple of years. What was worse for citizens was that the very police supposed to protect them were sometimes implicated in the crimes. He cited two cases where police were accused of robbing motorists who had stopped or been pulled over.

My driver acknowledged that some things had been improved in Lima; public works and the modernization of some parts, but that while credit had to be given to Luis Castañeda for gettig things done, "no one holds him to account".

He was particularly critical of public education and health services:

"if it's an emergency and you're dying, you'll get treatment; anything else, they send you off to wait, even though you're sick. Then you get the basic treatment, but they send you off to get a whole range of scans and tests, which of course you have to pay for. Or there's some process to get reimbursed, but you know, those processes...and then you have to pay more for brand medicines, otherwise you only get the generic ones, which aren't effective, and you have to take ten times as much".

We moved on to talking about politics, and my driver reported himself unimpressed with Alan Garcia, who this time around was only doing better because, he had more money:

"Last time things were ok from 1985 to 1987, until the money ran out. It's like, in football, if you've got some skill, you're playing with good team mates, you get on the field, you'll do ok".

Not quite following the analogy, I asked: "So, is Alan a bad player surrounded by good team mates, or a good player surrounded by bad team mates?"

"I think he's a bad player surrounded by bad team mates", said my driver.

His theory on what underlaid Peru's problems was a familar one: "insitutionalized" corruption, at every level. I asked him how he thought that could be changed, and after a moment's thought he replied: "with difficulty...with great difficulty".

At the Ormeño bus terminal on avenida Javier Prado, surgical masks were again ubiquitous. The terminal has been improved, and now has a cafe, nice seats and a TV. However, passengers were scare, and when the Arequipa bus was called only a handful of people hopped on. The announcement for the bus indicated its destinations would include Cañete, Chincha, Ica, Nazca, and Camaná, before arriving in Arequipa. This contradicted the stated "direct" service of the Royal Class buses, but given the paucity of clients, I could forgive them.

On board, I struck up a conversation with practically my only fellow passengers in the front of the bus. Carlos and Claudio were from Ayapata, which they explained to me is reached from Juliaca, first heading southeast to the frigid Andean town of Macusani and later dropping down to around 3,000 metres on the way towards the jungle of Puno.

They explained that the main industry there is gold mining. With the current high prices of gold, it has become worthwhile to work over the tailings of old mines, and business is good. Carlos is a middle man, buying the gold off the prospectors, while Claudio is himself a prospector. He said that on average he could get 2 grams per day, worth around $250 USD, but some days there could be 10 or even 20 grams.

Carlos told me that in their territory, "the state is almost entirely absent", and the government does nothing for them, except for the paved highway from Macusani to Puno, "which in any cse was put in by Fujimori". He also criticised the level of bureaucracy that the central government imposes on the regions, and makes it difficult to get any projects moving. "They make an example out of the Puno regional government for only spending 1 percent of its investment budget, but it's them who made it so hard to do anything".

I asked if the state didn't even provide basic functions like police and health services.

"No, we threw the police out", said Carlos. He said that the police post used to be staffed by unwilling recruits sent from the likes of Lima and Arequipa, who didn't fit into the local culture. He claimed that they abused local women, and hassled local youths by constantly imposing fines on them. Now, security was provided by the ronda campesina, a kind of district-wide, rural neighbourhood watch. If a thief was caught in the community, "we take care of him ourselves".

In their community, Carlos and Claudio had developed a cooperative project to generate hydroelectric power, but wanted to expand it from 100 MW to 400 MW, to be able to supply the whole district with electricity. They had met with similar community groups from Junin who had received loans from NGOs to support them, and they wanted my advice on how to get something similar going. I gave them the names and addresses of some Peruvian NGOs that could possibly help.

According to Carlos, the community was welcoming the development of the Interoceanic Highway between Brazil and Peru, which, if they could get a 13km connecting road built, would greatly improve the ability to get their products to market, including subtropical fruits from the lower part of the territory.

This would be a typical story from the development literature: mariginalized rural, ethnic community, ignored or abused by the central government, working things out for themselves and becoming more empowered in the process. But reality usually has something incongruous to add to the picture.

As Carlos dropped off to sleep, Claudio, who had been pretty quiet, began to tell me about the Chinese herbal medicine for which he was a sales representative. I'll have to find the pamphlet that he gave me for the exact name and description, but it apparently involves different pastes, creams and tonics, which cure a range of ills, and are sent prefabricated from China according to a secret recipe. According to Claudio, this medicine was originally introduced to Peru after some soldiers with lingering ailments from the Peru-Ecuador jungle frontier war found that it was the only thing that worked for them. It was now so popular that a company representative had been received in the government palace by Alejandro Toledo.

Disturbed that Claudio was turning quacky on me, I said ¨what about the gold mining?". "Oh, I do both", he said. He explained that the medicine was sold through a system of "affiliation", and offered to get me the affilitation papers out of his suitcase. I politely declined, and adjusted my conceptual settings to recognize the possibility of a Chinese-origin Amway scheme operating out of remote Quechua communities.

The jet lag was still messing with me, and by the time we got to Ica, I was practically the only one still awake. A young guy occupied the seat behind me, and I apologised for the angle my seat was pushed back at. He introduced himself as Abraham, and said he was originally from Chumbivilca, a remote pueblito about halfway between Arequipa and Cuzco. He was an operator of heavy machinery, and had been working on construction projects in the area affected by the 2007 earthquake. He said that he earned about 1,500 soles monthly for working "at least" 10 hours a day, six days a week.

This, readers, is now up to what would count as a "decent" salary in Peru. Even as the sole income for a family of four or five, it would still leave them miles above the poverty line. But take into account the conditions and the hours of work, and you'll admit that what amounts to $125 USD per week is nothing to get excited about.

I asked Abraham how the reconstruction of the earthquake-affected zone was going and he said it was more or less on schedule. I recalled that he would mainly be working on the highways. What about the planned rebuilding of people's houses, I asked?

"Ahh, well, that's going a bit slower", he said.

Planned Movements

On my first morning back in Arequipa, Hugo rang from his jungle lodge near Santa Teresa and insisted that I come and visit him there as soon as possible. He would meet me in Cuzco, from where we would travel together to the lodge, spend 4--5 days and then return to Arequipa. Hugo said he wouldn't be returning to the lodge for a while after that, so it was best that I come now. I said ok, but I would travel on Wednesday the 28th, rather Monday or Tuesday as Hugo had suggested. I needed a couple of days to recover from travelling, and run some errands in Arequipa.

Later I spoke to Lizbeth's brother Pablo about wanting to spend some time in the Colca valley talking to people for my ethnography project, doing some reconnaissance for next year's thesis research, and just experiencing a little of campesino life. He said I should come up to Cabanaconde for 10--15 days after returning from Santa Teresa.

So if I do manage to do the intended mountain climbing it will be a bit later, which is not a bad thing, as it gives me time to adjust to the altitude and get over the minor irritants like the cold I seem to be coming down with and the handful of bed-bug bites I picked up in Lima. Throw in a possible visit to my new acquaintances in Ayapata (see previous entry) and the planned trip to Ayacucho, and that just about uses up my entire time here. Too much to do, etc.

Snapshots of Lima

Even when winter is arriving and the sun is slowly losing its battle with the coat of hazy fog that encroaches from the Pacific, Lima's air has a tactile thickness that makes you feel as if it's working its way into your pores. I also reckon it takes on different qualities during the day, evolving from a ripe flavour of decaying vegetables early in the morning to a heady odor of used cooking oil by the evening; always underlaid with a rich base of dust and exhaust fumes.

Over the last 10--15 years, the governance of Peru's capital has been somewhat better than that of the nation as a whole. This has probably been aided by the fact that it's problems are at least tangible and geographically concentrated, and that, despite the chaos, this is where most of the country's money flows through.

In recent times, Lima's municipal government has taken the approach of carving out small, public oases of order and calm, of which the most notable has been the resoration of the historic centre of the city since the mid-1990s. The grand colonial architecture has been restored and security for locals and tourists alike is assured by the armed, paramilitary-style serenazgos, like those pictured below, who literally have a squad on every second corner within the few designated central city blocks.





While this approach is open to the normal criticisms of elitism and authoritarianism, it's hard to disagree with entirely. When social problems are so massive that they can't be tackled all at once, and many of them are inter-generational, you have to start somewhere. Security, some green space, and well-maintained public facilities benefit everyone and have a direct effect on the quality of life. The alternative is to give the city up to complete chaos and let the rich wall themselves off in private compounds. It would just be nice if the same objectives could be achieved without quite so many guns.

Next to its headquarters on the west side of the Plaza Mayor, the municipality had an exhibition showing the changes that have occurred through various building projects that are part of the Construyendo Peru programme. It was quite impressive, and represented a welcome effort by government to communicate with citizens about the fruits of their taxes.

A noticeable feature, however, was how often the name of the mayor, Luis Castañeda Lossio, appeared on the posters and exhibits. To me it looked rather like a case of using the state to promote the politician. The same day, I saw an article in La Republica confirming this view. Congress is drafting a law that will prevent local government advertising particular politicians or parties as part of public information campaigns. One of Lima's district mayors was complaining that the law was 'discriminatory', as it should also apply to central and regional government, public ministries, and so forth.

In the pedestrian walkway next to the municipality was another exhibition, of photos by evangelical Christian photographer Graham Gordon. The exhibition was titled Rostros Diversos, los Mismos Derechos ("Diverse Faces, the Same Rights"), and featured images of Peruvians from all backgrounds, organized around eight groupings of universal human rights. The municipality of Lima was a key sponsor, while, among others, the European Union had added its endorsement.

It's hard to know how much to take from the motherhood-and-apple pie tone of the exhibition, but some of the commentary offered a mild rebuke to Alan Garcia's administration, only metres away across the plaza in the Palacio del Gobierno. Garcia and the likes of former Prime Minister Jorge Castillo have famously argued that development will only come through large-scale investment involving privatization of resources and the breakup of communal property; those who oppose such moves are "dogs in the manger" impeding progress. However, the text next to the photos under the "right to territory" declared that:

...these rights are being jeopardised by the priority that is being given to mining, petroleum and logging companies over communal territories. Priority needs to be given to the development of indigenous peoples, based on the protection and sustainable use of natural resources, and respect for their cultures and the lands that they have traditionally occupied.

For evidence that the central city restoration project is limited, and in some ways merely symbolic, you just need to walk a few blocks east to the avenida Abancay, where the city resdiscovers its edgy, grimy, chaotic character. It's all but impossible to capture this in a photo, which will always miss the noise, the smoke, the odors, the constant movement and the vague sense of physical threat that only partly comes from the worried urgings of hoteliers, officials and taxi drivers to be a good tourist and not walk down the avenida Abancay. But for some idea of the change in a few blocks, I offer the contrast between the following two photos.




On day two in Lima, I had already booked a ticket to Arequipa, keen to get on with the main purposes of my trip. Before leaving, I wanted to at least see something new, so I decided to cross the Rimac river to visit the bullring at the plaza de Acho. There's a long, impressionistic passage in Alfredo Bryce Echenique's Un Mundo para Julius that describes a family outing to a bullfight. The book is set in the 1960s, and from my own experience of Lima I couldn't really imagine the scene, so I thought I would walk by and take a look.


Things have certainly changed from Julius' world; crossing the Rimac towards the bullring, the view is dominated by the pueblos jovenes sprawling up the Cerro San Cristobal (above). On the other side, nestled between the grimy bridge underside and the dust and chaos of the avenue, I lunched at a restaurant specialising in Arequipan food, with a bright and spotless interior and run by a softly-spoken woman from the village of Yanqui. This reminded me that the oases of cleanliness and order in Peru are not just those created by a patrician municipality, but more often are carved out in individual homes and businesses by people determined to make the best of their lives and surroundings.

I found the plaza de Acho, a faded and sad-looking coliseum, smaller than I had imagined. The entrance way led to a 'taurine musuem' that didn't appear to have any visitors. I didn't have time to go inside, so contented myself with walking around the outside. The most poignant image was this door, presumably once a prestigous entranceway, judging by the sign which announces that entrance is restricted to "officials, bullfighters , police, journalists, invited guests and children".





Across the street from the plaza, and near the base of one of Luis Castañeda's advertised accomplishments, a rather steep footbridge across the avenue, I took an obligatory couple of photos of the bullring's exterior. I was beckoned across by a group of people sitting around a cebiche stand. While I acceded to topping myself up with a plate of cebiche and canchita, a voluminous woman called Marta subjected me to a lecture, wanting to know what was I thinking, a tourist, in coming to this spot by myself. "As long as you're with me no one will touch you; I'm from the barrio", she told me. Then, when I had paid the cebiche stand woman, Marta demanded a tip for being so helpful and protecting me. I gave her two soles, "for the conversation".

Dispatches in Transit

When it was my turn to step forward to the Peruvian immigration desk, the official was pulling the surgical mask far enough away her face to be able to speak into a cellphone. She was talking to her daughter. It seemed that a particular tradesman was supposed to turn up at their house by 8 pm that evening but had never arrived. There was now a new appointment, for around 10am the next morning. "Don't worry, mi hijita", she said. Your papá will be there as well". Back in Peru, I thought, grinning as the official stamped my passport. "Have a good trip", she said. "Thanks for waiting".

My taxi driver to the centre of Lima also had a surgical mask on. As we drove away from the aiport he pulled it off with a grunt of annoyance. "Can't stand wearing this thing", he told me. "The muncipality makes us, or we get fined".

Earlier in the day, at Santiago airport where I stopped over for 7 hours before the connecting flight to Lima, there were also official precautions against the H1N1 influenza. Everyone who got off the plane, whether entering Chile or in transit, was redirected into a little side room where they had to fill out a form giving contact details and declaring any flu-like symptoms, and then join a rapidly growing line to have a photo taken by a single masked official. The official repeated the same mantra over and over: Permanezca inmovil. Mire directamente a la cámara. Gracias. Puede continuar. ("Stay still. Look directly at the camera. Thank you. You can continue"). After the first twenty or thirty photos everything became more efficient, and the official had to cut himself off: Permanezca inmovil. Mir--Gracias!

I couldn't help wondering what the Chilean authorities were going to do with all that data (starting with around 300 passengers on just one full Airbus). With the forms being handed out and collected separately, it just required a couple to get out of order to frustrate any matching process with the photos. As for contact details, the only useful thing on my form was my email, which I think was probably illegible.

Peru was less counter-productively obsessive. All passengers getting off had to fill out a form about symptoms, and there were two nurses from the Callao health service waiting bashfully by the plane door to offer "advice or assistance", but no compulsory photo session. The masks, however, were just as ubiquitous.

My taxi driver from the aiport was friendly enough, but not very talkative. I told him it was first time in Peru for over two years; I imagined quite a bit had changed. He laughed briefly. "Nothing much has changed", he said. " You'll see". He looked dead tired, and said he had been working since 7 am, and would continue until dawn."Why do they make you work such long hours?", I asked. "I requested it", he said. He told me that he earned a fixed rate of 950 soles per month, around $300 USD. The extra hours would attract a bonus, but according to my driver, shaking his head sadly, "it's not enough".

Peruvians to Get New Zealand Working Holiday Visa

Peruvians between the ages of 18 and 30 will soon be able to apply for a one-year New Zealand Working Holiday Visa, according to representatives from the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) and the Peruvian Embassy in New Zealand. Sources say that a formal agreement is likely to be signed by New Zealand and Peruvian government representatives at the APEC meeting that begin in Lima this week.

The Working Holiday visa allows young people one year in which they can combine travel in New Zealand with part-time work. New Zealand has extended access to this visa to most European and other OECD countries, as well as other Asian and Latin American countries including Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay and Brazil. The number of places available for each country has typically been 200, but may be increased depending on demand. Chile is now allocated 1,000 places, after the number of applicants consistently exceeded the available visas.

In order to obtain the visa, applicants have to show evidence of sufficient funds (currently $4,200 NZD), a return ticket or funds to purchase one, travel insurance, and medical clearance (specifically a TB-free certificate). They are also not allowed to bring dependent children with them and are only allowed to use the visa once.

People with Working Holiday visas in New Zealand often end up fruit picking or working in the hospitality industry. This may mean some hard work, but wages are usually high enough to save money to travel further, and most Latin American backpackers say they have a good time in New Zealand.

Categories: Working Holiday Visa, Peru, New Zealand, Latin America, backpackers

Ghost Stories of the Sierra IV: Isabel and the Duendes

Another story of Lizbeth's from her youth in the sierra. To the village of Cabanaconde, where her family live, a few men would occasionally arrive with a llama train from a remote settlement two days walk into the mountains, on the border between Arequipa and Cuzco. They walked without shoes, having rubbed alpaca fat into their feet to harden the soles. In their community they ate only charqui (dried llama meat) and chuño (dehydrated potato), so would bring salt and firewood to Cabanaconde to exchange for maize and other provisions.

One day, a man from this settlement brought with him a girl of about ten or eleven, who was his daughter, and left her with Lizbeth's mother. The girl's name was Isabel. Lizbeth's mother sent her to live with her sister in Lima, and when Lizbeth went to stay there when she was studying, Isabel would comb her hair and tell her stories about life in the mountains (years later, I myself would meet Isabel in a crowded, friendly house in the barrio of San Juan de Miraflores).

One story that Isabel told Lizbeth was of an incident that happened when she was about seven years old. At around 5:00 in the evening her mother had sent her home alone from the fields with her baby sister. She went into the family's little shack and prepared alpaca milk for the baby. Then she went down to the river to wash her hands and go to the bathroom. While she was occupied, she heard the baby crying nearby. She found it at the water's edge, without any clothes. Frightened, she picked up the baby and went back to the shack. Through a crack in the wall, she saw two duendes, laughing, down by the river. These are little creatures, old, with pale skins but with normal clothes, that appear around sundown, when the souls go to rest.

Isabel heard the alpacas running around nervously outside. A puma was nearby, causing the alpacas to take fright. She went outside and began to gather firewood, to light a fire and scare away the cat. When she went back into the shack, the baby was no longer there. She found it down by the river, half in the water, stone cold.

The duendes were responsible. They are old and malicious, and need to tap the strength of humans to maintain their life force. To try and make themselves younger, they had taken over the soul of the baby.

Radical Solutions?

Before I started a Master's in Development Studies, I was already interested in questions about development and mused frequently about them on this blog. After one-and-a-half semesters of fairly intensive studying and reading, it's interesting to look back at how my understanding and views have changed.

In deleting some emails, I came across a mini-rant (pasted below in italics) I'd sent to my US-based sister about the trade deals with Peru, Panama and Colombia, which were at the time a topic of discussion in both the mainstream and grassroots media there.

These were my thoughts a year ago:

I am on balance a supporter of the FTA for Peru because of the commercial opportunities it offers. However, a rudimentary examination of the existing agreement demonstrates that Peru, Panama and Colombia are being forced to suck eggs in order to get their deals. The US has been using its weight in the bilateral negotiations to impose conditions it can't get through the WTO (esp. with regard to intellectual property). This has little to do with the appropriateness or plausibility of these conditions for the country (US-standard copyright protection in Peru within 3 years, yeah right) but rather with a wider agenda.

I reckon if the US really wants to support development in the Andean countries, it should do the following:

1. offer unilateral tariff reductions on all products for a 10--15 year period (similar to the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, but with more certainty)
2. trade partners required to move towards international/WTO standards on labour, environment and intellectual property (i.e. NOT US-level standards for the latter); milestones to be met to ensure continuation of tariff-free access after 5 and 10-year review periods
3. reduce or freeze direct-to-government aid (including export subsidies disguised as aid), but offer technical assistance especially in local government, law enforcement, education, infrastructure development, agricultural productivity, distribution, marketing, etc. Foment partnerships between schools, universities, police departments, public service, small NGOs, churches, etc. Loans available for insfastructure conditional on robust analysis of the viability of the project.
4. trade partners remove or reduce tariffs on all or most non-agricultural products; non-complementary agricultural products to be left alone for the first 5 years
5. investment protections in place but trade partners allowed to place 'development' conditions such as use of local products or technology transfer
6. legalize cocaine, but slap on big import and sales taxes; coca leaves can be imported tariff-free

The last one is only partly in jest. At present, cocaine is one processed, added-value product that is highly profitable and makes its way easily into US markets (despite all attempts at law enforcement). It's also inevitably associated with significant violence and corruption. What needs to happen is the opposite of the historical: developing countries have a chance to produce and market added-value, mainstream products, while drug-related activity is disincentivised through making it uncompetitive. Such an approach would see all the cocaine labs move inside the US, where their activity would be tightly regulated by ATF officers...). Meanwile, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia would fill US health food stores with a range of coca teas, sweets, oils, and essences. Groups like the FARC, Shining Path (now moprhing into narcotrafficking operations in Peru), paramilitaries lose their funding and much raison d'etre, either disappearing or being forced to become normal political entities.

Many weighty articles and long perambulations through the thickets of economic history, sociology and politics, I've become much better informed, feel more able to engage in debate, but my views are not a million miles away from what they were then.

Overall, I'm even less sure about the net benefit of the US-Peru trade agreement than I was, in part because I've been made aware that the link between overall economic growth and benefit for the majority is even more tenuous than I realised; in part because of gaining a greater understanding of just how one-sided and hypocritical the conditions in the trade agreements are (and how few of them are even about trade).

As I've learnt recently, suggestion 3 above is just a partial version of what's been on the agenda for international donors for a while through the 'good governance' agenda and the OECD's Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness. There's been a commitment to phasing out 'tied aid' (i.e. exports subsidies disguised as aid) and 'technical assistance' is a major buzz phrase in the aid community (along with its sibling 'capability development'). However, this does still seem to suffer from the longstanding high-handedness of development assistance, and mainly be aimed at bureaucratic elites.

If we do care about 'institutions', a nice alternative approach would be for some kind of properly-funded 'adult exchange programme', where the likes of police officers, petty officials, local council members, etc from developing countries could spend a three-month sabbatical in the equivalent department in a rich country -- and vice versa.

Suggestion 6 is of course mostly flippant, but I'd still be interested in people's reaction to it. The drug trade is not a good thing -- but at the end of the day it's just another manifestation of the inexorable market logic that is elsewhere trumpeted as the solution to everyone's problems. It's rarely mentioned even by liberal commentators, but there's little that's more perverse than a social problem in the rich world being tackled by spraying poison all over environmentally fragile land in a much poorer country.

Categories: development, Latin America, trade, cocaine, coca, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia

US Senate Passes Peru Free Trade Deal

After all kinds of delays and false starts , the US-Peru free trade agreement was passed on Tuesday 5 December by the US Senate with a vote of 77-18.

The Peruvians are pleased with the fact that this was an unprecedented vote in favour of a trade agreement. By comparison, the Chile agreement was passed by 65-32 while the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) scraped through by 54-45 and is not counted as a 'treaty' by US law.

For Americans from both the main parties, the Peru deal has ended up being something of a no-brainer, for strategic rather than economic reasons. With Colombia unacceptable for the Democrats at the moment, and the rest of South America hostile or disinterested, the US was in danger of being left with no real friends between Costa Rica and Chile.

From Peru's perspective, there's not much doubt that the trade agreement will lead to further economic growth and more money flowing into the country. Whether that translates into material improvements for the majority of Peruvians depends greatly on the competence and commitment of the government. What is needed is the 'free trade agreement for the interior' promised by president Alan Garcia during the 2006 election campaign.

A good start would be to establish a system of compensation and assistance for the small agricultural producers who will be affected by competition from subsidised US imports. However, La Republica reports that the Peruvian government is still not sure of how such compensation will be provided, nor to whom. There is less than $40 million USD earmarked for this purpose, compared to a $4 billion fund in Mexico and $100 million in Chile. Minister of Argriculture Ismael Benavides said he couldn't explain the reasoning for this amount, since it was determined by the previous government. "I don't know who was the genius that came up with those figures", he said.

Of Dogs and Demagogues

While commending Peruvian president Alan Garcia for engaging directly with the public in written form, I have to join many other critics in finding his arguments distinctly lacking and his style dogmatic and bullying.

At best, his 'dog in the manger' article amounts to a grand statement of faith in the tenets of neoliberalism, about ten or fifteen years out of date. At worst, it's an apology for a continuation of the 'open veins' economy -- sucking out the country's natural wealth for the benefit of foreigners and a small local elite.

The first major problem with Garcia's article is that he offers nothing really new. Peru's president could be channelling the International Monetary Fund as he stresses need to establish (large-scale) private property rights and declares his faith in the transformative power of 'investment'. But Peru has already had at least ten years of neoliberal orthodoxy, and five years of steady economic growth, little of which has so far trickled down to ordinary people.

It was impatience with this state of affairs that drove the 2006 election. Garcia was elected to deliver a stronger State and enact social democratic reforms. His slogan of 'responsible change' captured rather well the national mood for improving the lot of the majority, while maintaining a cautious faith in free-market fundamentals.

On the campaign trail, Garcia promised to finish the stalled General Labour Law, end large-scale employment outsourcing, establish royalty payments for mineral resources (whose soaring prices are giving mining companies bonanza profits), and review the trade agreement with the US 'line by line' to strike a better deal for Peru.

These are politically difficult tasks, and the current government can't be entirely blamed for not having made much headway with any of them. But instead of explaining how the same objectives can be achieved gradually or through different means, Garcia seems to have tossed aside any ambition for the government to play a role in building a fairer society.

Worse than Garcia's ideological swing is the weakness of his excuses for not doing more. When he says that there is no money to meet demands for a health and social security safety net he conveniently ignores the fact that Peru has the lowest tax take in Latin America, notably lower than comparable market economies like Chile and Colombia. He completely dismisses concerns about the environmental impact of mining as 'last century' but presents no plan for an independent environmental authority that might be trusted to assess the real impact of individual mining projects.

The second major problem with Garcia's rhetorical positions is that they're divisive and antagonistic. The ongoing poverty and exclusion, especially of those in the rural south of Peru, means democracy remains extremely fragile. Strike and marches are commonplace. Nationalist leader Ollanta Humala is always ready to stir up trouble, and memories linger of his brother Antauro's aborted 'uprising' at New Year 2005.

You'd assume that a social democrat with ambtions to statesmanship would try reaching out to those who voted for Humala and convincing them that more can be achieved through democratic reform than by constant fist-shaking. Instead, Garcia chooses to blame and browbeat. His tirade about the 'idleness' of the land, forests and oceans appears to imply that the occupants are themselves idle, and to be blamed for their own poverty. He accuses dissenters and and environmentalists of being 'old communists', brushing aside the same genuine concerns about the environment and labour rights that led US Democrats to insist on changes to the US-Peru trade deal.

Finally, and most seriously, Garcia offers nothing positive. There are no case studies of successful small business or communities; no empowering vision of how ordinary Peruvians can develop their unique skills and traditions into valuable niche industries -- indigenous textiles, jewellery, crafts, eco-tourism, wine and pisco, highland crops and health foods being just a few contenders.

There is dismissal of any other form of ownership other than large scale commercial property. Garcia is probably right in saying that there needs to be more medium-size farms with the ability to invest in modern production. But he fails to describe how ordinary Peruvians might make such advances themselves through co-operatives, better access to credit, or his own government's Sierra Exportadora programme. The suggestion seems to be that small landowners should just sell up to foreign investors and join the migration to the already-overcrowded cities.

The only mention of a positive example is the town of Ilo, which Garcia says is 'the most advanced in Peru' thanks to 'mining and fishing'. This is disingenuous. Ilo's progress has come after 20 years of co-ordinated community action, battling with the Southern Peru Copper Corporation to clean up the town's contaminated air and beaches As late as 1997, sulphur dioxide emissions around the town were fourteen times the level recommended by the World Health Organization.

A further irony lies in the countries he holds up as examples of progress: Germany, Japan and Korea are all relatively resource-poor nations that got where they are today through the hard work and ingenuity of their people, rather than by exploiting mines and forests.

With deep divisions that go back to the Spanish conquest, Peru desperately needs constructive leadership that convinces people they are capable of improving their own lives. Technocratic previous president Alejandro Toledo was a failure in that respect -- muddling his way to a historically low approval rating of 7 percent. Alan Garcia is a much more populist figure, with a gift for appealing directly to the public. It's a pity, then, that in this case he has wasted his considerable rhetorical talent by delivering a message that is anything but unifying.

Categories: Alan Garcia, economic development, Peru, el perro del hortelano, Amazon

Alan Garcia's Dog in the Manger

It's always good to see governments be open with the public about the vision that drives their policies and actions. It's also relatively rare that they attempt to persuade by written arguments that can be analysed and critiqued. For this reason, it's quite impressive to see Peruvian president Alan Garcia publish a lengthy op-ed in Lima newspaper El Comercio, in which he argues that Peruvians opposing greater exploitation of the country's natural resources are 'dogs in the manger' who are impeding progress.

So I've translated the entire article and posted it below. Even for those who aren't especially interested in Peru, this is an interesting contribution to the debates about economic development, environmentalism, sustainability and democracy. This is not to say that I agree with all or even most of Garcia's argument: in many respects it's disappointing, out of touch and even perplexing in its choice of theme. In another post I'll discuss some of these criticisms.

Translation note: I've kept it pretty literal, so it has a slightly awkward feel in places. Garcia uses in several places the expression 'poner en valor' (literally to 'put into value'), which I understand has no real English equivalent, being a Spanish transliteration of the French phrase 'mise en valeur'. I've generally translated this as 'to make productive'.

By Alan Garcia Perez, President of the Republic

There is great demand for legal titles to family homes. Every Peruvian knows that a legalized property that can be sold, mortgaged, or passed on through inheritance, can improve their situation. But Peru as a whole has the same problem and doesn't know it. Many of her goods can't be made productive, can't be sold, invested in, or made to generate employment.

There are millions of hectares for forestry that are idle, millions of hectares more that communities and local associations haven't cultivated nor will cultivate, as well as hundreds of mineral deposits that can't be exploited and millions of hectares of sea that are never commercially fished. The rivers that run down either side of the cordillera are a fortune that goes to the sea without producing electrical energy. There are, as well, millions of workers that don't exist, although they labour, since their jobs don't provide them with social security or a pension for later on in life, because they don't contribute what they could to building national savings.

So there are many unused resources that aren't tradeable, don't receive investment, and don't generate employment. And all that because of the taboo of left-behind ideologies, because of idleness, indolence, and the law of the dog in the manger who prays: “If I don't do it, let nobody do it”.

The first resource is the Amazon. It has 63 million hectares and abundant rainfall. Within it forestry could be established, especially in the 8 million hectares already destroyed – but for that, property rights are required; that is, a secure plot of land of 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 hectares, since on smaller areas of land there won't be formal, long-term investment with high technology.

At present the only concessions that exist depend on the will of the Government and the bureaucrats who can [later] modify them. For this reason nobody invests, nor creates one job for every two hectares, as should be the case; nor is there wood processing or furniture exporting. For the most part, these concessions have only served to extract the finest wood, deforest and abandon the land. In contrast, formal property ownership by large collective businesses like pension funds will allow long-term investment, from planting through to harvesting, years later.

Those who are opposed say that property rights cannot be granted in the Amazon (and why so in the coast and the sierra?). They also say that granting property in large lots would give profits to big business; sure, but it would also create thousands of formal jobs for Peruvians who live in the poorest areas. It's the dog in the manger.

Let's respect the virgin native forests, but let's start with the 8 million hectares that have been turned into deserts and destroyed in recent years by the scorched-earth concessions, the [cultivation of] coca and indiscriminate logging. There, a million jobs can be created, as well as employment in the manufacture of furniture.

It's an embarassment that Chile exports US $2 billion in wood without having a hectare of the Amazon, Uruguay $1 billion, Brazil $8 billion, while Peru barely exports $200 million.

The same is true in a second area – the land. For there to be investment, secure property rights are needed, but we've fallen into the trap of granting small plots of land to poor families that don't have a cent to invest, so apart from the land, they have to ask the State for fertilizers, seeds, and irrigation technology as well as guaranteed prices. This 'minifundista' model without technology is a vicious circle of misery. We must support medium-sized properties, and an agricultural middle class that knows how to obtain resources, find markets, and can create formal employment.

But what do we see in this country? When someone sees a beautiful beach, someone else already claimed it years ago and hasn't invested a cent to make a nice swimming area, so it will stay for decades more without value. The hills that surround Lima are like that – where investment could work miracles. So are all the cement quarries claimed but never worked.

In addition, there are true peasant communities but also artificial communities that have 200,000 hectares on paper but only use 10,000 hectares while the rest is idle property, 'dead handed', while its inhabitants live in extreme poverty waiting for the State to bring them help instead of making their hills and land productive, leasing them, trading them. Because if this land is unproductive for them, it would be productive with a high level of investment and the know how that a new buyer brings.

But the rhetoric and deception says that these lands can't be touched because they are sacred objects and that this communal organization is the original organization of Peru, without realizing that it was a creation of Viceroy Toledo to round up the indigenous people into the unproductive lands.

The third area is mineral resources, of which Peru has the greatest riches in the world, not only for the quantity but also the variety of minerals, so that if there's a drop in price it can be compensated for with other products. However, barely a tenth of these resources are being exploited, because here we still debate whether mining techniques destroy the environment, which is an argument from last century. Of course it destroyed [the environment] in the past, and the environmental problems of today are basically because of the mines of yesteryear, but currently mines exist alongside cities without problem. And in any case it depends on how strict the State is in the technological requirements placed on mining companies and in negotiating greater economic and labour participation for the regions where the mines are.

When I go to the city of Ilo and see its urban development, which is the most advanced in Peru, I know it's the product of mining and the fishing industry, and it pains me to compare this with the town of Ayabaca, which has more mineral resources than the Cuajone mine in the south, but lives in great poverty. And it's there that the old anticapitalist communist of the 19^th century disguised himself as the protectionist in the 20^th century, and changed his shirt once more in the 21^st century to be an environmentalist. But always anticapitalist, against investment without explaining how, with a poor agriculture, a leap forward can be taken to greater development.

And against petroleum they've created the figure of the 'isolated' jungle native; that is, unknown but presumed [to exist], because of which millions of hectares must not be exploited, and Peruvian oil must stay in the ground while the world price of oil is US$90 a barrel. It's preferable that Peru continues importing and improverishing itself.

A fourth area is the oceans: Japan has fewer marine riches but eats five times more fish per capita per annum than Peru, because it has developed its aquaculture. But here, whenever it is proposed to grant an area of sea for an investor to put their fish farms, this is opposed by the local small-scale fishermen who see the birth of more modern competition and say that it will block their free access and pollute the ocean, while others invoke the Sacred Sea of [Peruvian war hero Miguel] Grau, instead of accepting this activity that could generate hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In addition, Peru has enormous riches from the rain that falls in the cordillera. It's calculated that 800 billion cubic metres of water annually flows down in the rivers that head towards the Pacific and the Atlantic. Of that which goes to the Pacific, we use a small amount for agriculture and electrical generation, but with the water that goes to the Atlantic, we do practically nothing.

How to make the most of it? Now that the price of oil keeps going up, we must think about electrical generation that is renewable, almost inexhaustible, and clean. And to think about its use and sale in continental terms. Large electric plants on the Marañón and in the rapids of the lower Urubamba would allow us to sell energy to Ecuador, Colombia, Chile and Brazil. For this it would be necessary to obtain large amounts of private or international capital that needs long-term security to invest billions and be able to achieve a return on the investment. But the dog in the manger says: 'Why are they going to make money from our rivers? Better that the regional government does it' But they don't say with what money.

In fifth place, people's own labour is not made productive for those who work. Informal employment is dominant, which is work not incorporated into the economy and without legal status; it doesn't provide social security because payments are not made, and it doesn't contribute to any pension system. To give value to this work and benefit the individual, the logical thing would be to make progressive advances so that the employees of small business, who number in the millions, have in the first place the fundamental minimum rights – health insurance, a pension, and an eight hour day. That's more than they have now. This would strengthen the pension fund and health insurance fund.

But the demagogues oppose this progressive access, saying: “Full rights must be given immeidately to all the employers of small family or informal businesses”. But they don't know (or perhaps they do) that the only thing they'd achieve is that the small businessman, unable to pay these costs, would close the business and lay off lots of employees, so the cure would be worse than the sickness.

There are also others who say: “If it's not possible to provide workers all the fringe benefits and 30 days holidays just yet, the State should provide full health cover and a minimum pension without them having to contribute. But it turns out that these are the same ones who are against investment in forestry because the jungles are sacred, against opening more mines because Peru should only be agricultural, and that don't want aquaculture in the oceans. And so, without investment, without jobs created, they think that the State is a bottomless well from which all resources can eternally emerge, and they end up saying: “Cut the work day to 6 hours, pay more salaries, even if Peru doesn't produce any more”.

As a final point, I could add that neither are the brains of our students and childrens made productive. Education is delivered in the majority of cases to pass with an 11 [out of 20] instead of promoting excellence and to aim at an 18. A group of bad teachers and bad bureaucrats refuse to be evaluated in order to hide their mediocrity and so the system carries on producing worthless results. And the same ones as always say: “Give me more, without me changing or making any effort”. So, they are allies of informal mining, clandestine logging, peasant poverty, informal employment and lack of merit or effort.

Faced with the philosophy of the dog in the manger, reality tells us that we must make productive the resources that we don't use and work with more effort. We have the example of successful peoples: the Germans, the Japanese, the Koreans, and many more. And this is the bet for the future, the only thing that will make us progress.

Categories: Alan Garcia, economic development, Peru, el perro del hortelano, Amazon

House to Vote Today on Peru Trade Deal

The United States House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress, is set to vote today (Wednesday 7 November) on the trade agreement with Peru. Peruvian representatives are hoping that the agreement will pass by a greater margin the US-Chile trade agreement, which was ratified in 2003 by a margin of 270 votes to 156.

The vote is expected to occur in the afternoon, after Congress receives the visiting president of France, Nicolas Sakorzy.

Update: the US House of Representatives eventually voted on the Peru trade agreement on the morning of Thursday 8 November. The vote passed 285--132. Breakdown by parties was:
Republicans: 176--16
Democrats: 109--116

There were eight abstensions from each party.

Categories: free trade, United Statess, Peru, FTA, trade agreement

FTA for Peru by 15 November

In following the progress of the US-Peru free trade agreement, I've learned a bit of POLS 101 stuff about how a trade deal passes into US law. First it has to be subjected to a 'dummy vote' by the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee. It's at this point that the President prepares the bill that will be voted on by Congress to formally ratify the agreement.

This bill is then passed to the same committees for a formal vote, before finally going to a vote in full sessions of both the House and Senate.

The process thus has six stages in total. The Peru agreement has now passed through the first four of these stages, which is to say that, following approval in the dummy committee votes, an implementation bill has been introduced into Congress and has been passed (with unanimity) by both committees. Although the 'fast track' authority of President Bush was ended on 1 July 2007, trade agreements signed prior to this point are subject to the fast track rules. This means that once the relevant committees report back on the bill, both chambers of Congress have 15 days to vote.

By this logic, the Peru trade agreement should go to a full vote by 15 November, since the final committee vote (that of the Ways and Means Committee) occurred yesterday. The agreement will need 218 votes to pass in the House. Peruvian news sources report their officials as estimating that it will have at least 300 in favour.

The Inca and the Alpaca

In a small side room off the hot factory floor, women in blue smocks are intently picking apart bundles of brown fleece. Despite the cramped conditions it is, according to Incalpaca administator Adrian Corso, one of the preferred tasks for factory workers. The women are selecting the finest fibres from the coat of the vicuña, rare and beautiful animal that lives above 3,800 metres on the dramatic Peruvian altiplano.

Highly prized by the Incan nobility, the vicuña's wool is now worth about $500 USD per kilogram -- more valuable by weight than silver. Most of the best-quality fleece is concentrated in a small triangle on the animal's chest, which is shorn once every two years.

In the shop out front of Incalpaca's factory in Arequipa, a shawl made of the silkily fine vicuña fleece is housed in a glass case, like a precious jewel.

But if the vicuña brings the glamour, it's the chubbier, domesticated alpaca that provides most of the substance. Adrian takes us through the production process, as piles of alpaca wool are fed through Italian-made industrial machinery to be washed, heated, cooled and dried before being spun into fabric. From there it's turned into the coats, sweaters, scarfs, shawls and rugs that form the factory's output.

In the Peruvian sierra, zone of awe-inspiring scenery but also persistent poverty, Incalpaca is an economic success story. The South American camelids -- which include the llama and wild guanaco as well as the vicuña and alpaca -- have been interwoven with the Andes' human history for at least two thousand years, and still provide the main economic sustenance for many peasant communities living in the high mountains. Traditional Peruvian weaving in alpaca wool is renowned for its skill, colour and flair.

The outside world has also long recognised the value of the remarkably strong, warm and soft alpaca fibre. Cloth from alpaca was first successfully manufactured in the English town of Bradford in the 1830s, the wool having made its way from Spain via Germany and France. In the 1950s, Incalpaca's parent company Grupo Inca and its main rival in Arequipa, Michell, began the local processing of the raw wool. But it's only in the last 25 years that export-quality garments and rugs have been produced on an industrial scale in Peru.

Now, Incalpaca's Arequipa factory employs 1200, and sends 90 percent of its products to the United States, Europe and Japan. It's one of the industries likely to benefit most from the free trade agreement with the United States set to be ratified by the US congress by the end of October. Between 2001 and 2005, the value of Peru's textile exports doubled, to more than $1 billion USD. Incalpaca and Michell together contribute about $50 million to this total. Incalpaca's general manager Germán Freyre has estimated that a trade agreement with the US could boost sales by 15 percent.

Critics of the trade agreement have raised concerns about its potential to cause environmental damage and exploitation of labour. But compared to mining, which still dominates Peru's exports, the alpaca industry gets a pass on both counts. While the factory floor is hot, it's clean, and numerous colourful warning signs place a premium on safety. The workers, who are paid production bonuses in addition to the basic wage, are certainly better off than their unemployed compatriots who have to eke out a living driving taxis or selling in the street.

And as animals adapted to the harsh conditions of the altiplano, alpacas have an inherently low environmental impact. Incalpaca still sources some of its wool from the small communities that raise alpacas in the remote highlands. It also has its own animals in open ranches near Arequipa's airport and on the Pampas Cañahuas plateau at 4,000 metres, where tourists come to watch the vicuñas. Alpacas are sensitive animals that need plenty of care and attention, and 40 more staff are employed to look after them.

Pass through the international airports in Lima or Santiago in Chile, and Incalpaca's 'Alpaca 111' shops stand out, with their shelves full of fine fleeces in earthy colours. While the garments make a fine advertisment for the Peruvian heartland, most are in very classic, conservative styles. You can't help wondering what opportunities there are for integrating the alpaca's qualities and image with more youth-oriented fashion or sportswear. Young designers in Arequipa agree, and talk eagerly about developing their own more cutting-edge lines, something that will become easier as the country's trade links are strengthened.

In the 16th century, indigenous Peruvians led the world in textile design and production. Today, Peru is gradually carving out a high value economic niche based on rediscovery of its unique crafts, traditions, and environment. Its one industry that could help the country thrive in the global economy on its own terms.

Categories: Incalpaca, alpaca, vicuña, Arequipa, Peru, trade

Peruvian Communities Vote Against Mine

Peruvian news sources report on a highly-charged plebiscite in the sierra of Piura, northern Peru, where local communities voted overwhelmingly last Sunday against the development of a planned copper mine, which local farmers and environmentalists say could poison water sources and affect biodiversity in the region .

More than 90 percent of voters in the districts of Ayabaca, Pacaipampa and Carmen de la Frontera, voted against the plans of Chinese-owned company Minera Majaz to mine copper and molibdenum in a project known as Rio Blanco. Around 60 percent of 31,000 registered electors turned out across the three districts, some walking many hours to arrive at a polling station.

The vote, which was organised by the mayors of the three district municipalities, was criticised in advance by Peru's national government, which called it 'illegal' and 'non-binding'. Peru's electoral office (ONPE) and national election jury (JNE) had refused to recognise the plebiscite, and called for the confiscation of official electoral materials that were to be used in the vote.

But the vote went ahead peacefully, despite prior claims of threats against locals who do support the mine. International observers from Ecuador, Bolivia, Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland attended.

Majaz Minera is a subsidiary of British company Monterrico Metals, which has recently been acquired by Chinese consortium Zijin. Exploratory work has been occurring in the region since 2002. Preliminary results from a study by the University of Texas suggest that this phase has already caused some damage to the region's biodiversity, which includes the Andean spectacled bear and highland tapir. Local farmers fear that mining operations will diminish the quantity and quality of rivers which irrigate both the western (Pacific) and eastern (Amazonian) slopes of the Andes. The latter is a notable coffee-exporting region.

The Peruvian government has claimed that the vote was promoted by 'anti-mining' NGOs, who along with foreign missionaries it blames for stirring up opposition to the mine. Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo said that 'people who oppose investment can't demand its benefits'. President Alan Garcia called anti-mining activists 'old communists' responsible for 'a conspiracy to stop the country growing and producing'.

But analysts say that opposition owes more to bad historical experiences with mining operations in Peru. They cite lack of direct benefit for mining regions, weak governmental regulatory capability, and a poor record of mining company environmental and labour practices.

Also, Peru doesn't have a Ministry for the Environment or independent environmental agency. The organisation responsible for assessing environmental impact reports for mining projects is the Ministry of Energy and Mining, which is also charged with attracting and promoting mining investment.

Del Castillo is now calling for dialogue between the government, mining company and local authorities. District mayors have said they would be happy to engage in dialogue but that it must include community leaders from the respective districts.

The mining company, whose public face until now has been its English spokesman Andrew Bristow, says it is also prepared to talk. But for now, local communities have had the final say.

Categories: mining, Rio Blanco, Peru, Majaz, Piura

Trade Agreement in the Final Stretch

After many doubts and delays, there's now a better-than-even chance that Peru's free trade agreement with the United States will be ratified in the near future. According to statements made by US officials to the Peruvian media, the House Ways and Means Committee is set to hold a hearing on the 25 September, after which the agreement would be voted on sometime in October.

Of the four trade deals negotiated by the US government before President Bush's 'fast track' authority expired in June, Peru's will be the first to go to a vote, and the most likely to be approved (the others are with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea). But with some Democrats still unconvinced about the Peruvian government's commitments to enforcing labour standards, there may be yet be stumbles as the agreement goes through Congress.

When I last posted on the topic, Republicans and Democrat leaders had stuck a deal to allow the Peru and Panama agreements to be considered if their labour and environmental conditions were strengthened. Amendments were drafted, and swiftly accepted by Peru's congress. A deputation of US representatives was to visit Lima to offer 'technical assistance' to ensure that Peruvian labour and environmental standards were on the road to acceptability.

That visit in August -- where Democrat Charles Rangel met with president Alan Garcia, representatives of all political parties, and labour unions -- produced warm words and grand statements. Garcia said that the agreement could be the start of a 'new New Deal' in international commerce. Rangel opined that it could be a 'flagship' agreement, noting that 'for the first time, workers' rights will be a part of trade agreements -- to be enforced'.

But not everyone was convinced about the Peruvian commitment to improving labour standards. On the campaign trail in 2006, Garcia had promised the elimination of 'services', companies that provide outsourced labour to other businesses. But a year later Garcia had changed his tune, proposing that such companies merely be regulated rather than eliminated. In August the government announced a law would be prepared with the aim of reducing the number of employees contracted through 'services' from 20% to 10% of the workforce.

According to American magazine Inside US Trade, some Democrats are also unimpressed that their concerns about outsourcing and union rights are being addressed through a series of governmental Surpreme Decrees -- which can be modified later -- rather than through the unfinished General Labour Law. The latter is currently stalled after being negotiated over the last five years. The two largest Peruvian labor federations, CGTP and CUT, have sent an open letter to congressional Democrats asking them to vote 'no' to the trade agreement.

Nevertheless, a hearing of the Senate Finance committee on September 11 on the Peru deal met with few objections. The American labour federation AFL-CIO is agnostic about the deal and has decided to neither promote or actively oppose it, but to concentrate their efforts on opposing the Colombia and South Korea agreements. AFL-CIO policy director Thea Lee said that the new labour and environmental conditions "represent significant progress in crucial areas we have fought to achieve for many years".

Political analysts say that 60 to 120 congressional Democrats are likely to vote in favour of the Peru agreement, meaning that it would pass with a considerably more comfortable margin than the Central American FTA, which passed by 2 votes with just 15 Democrats in favour. But after all the twists and turns that have occurred so far, nothing is certain yet.

Categories: free trade, United Statess, Peru, FTA, trade agreement

Fujimori to Be Extradited?

Although it hasn't been officially anounced, Chilean news sources are saying that the Chilean Supreme Court has ruled in favour of extraditing former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori to Peru to face trial on two charges of human rights abuses and one of corruption.

Chilean daily La Nacion said that judges from the criminal wing of the Supreme Court had voted 3 to 2 in favour of extraditing Fujimori, and claimed that one of the judges had changed his opinion, reversing an earlier majority decision to reject the extradition plea.

An official announcement on the ruling is likely to be made on the 20th or 21st of September.

More to come.

Policy Good, Implementation Hard

The always-pithy Economist has had a couple of good dispatches recently on Peru. Both deal with the tough challenge facing the administration of Alan Garcia in delivering on his election promise of 'responsible change' to reduce poverty and develop a more inclusive economy.

As much as it was slightly bewildering to an outsider that Peru would elect Garcia again after his disastrous first term in the 1980s, it was hard to argue with most of his stated policies: austerity in central government, devolution of more resources and responsibility to the regions, rationalisation of overlapping social programmes, improvement of education standards, investment in infrastructure such as water and roads, warmer relations with Chile, free trade with the US (with a better deal struck for Peru), and the 'Sierra Exportadora' programme to help link highland farmers with coastal exporters.

The swift move to implement popular actions within the first 100 days, such as cutting his own and other politicans' salaries, suggested that Garcia might actually carry through with an ambitious programme of reform.

But with the best will in the world, turning policies into action can be harder than it looks. The first challenge described in the June 9--15 Economist is actually implementing the infrastructure and poverty reduction programmes. As anyone who has worked in government will tell you, availability of money isn't always the problem-- 'getting it out the door' can be the hardest part. The challenge is to balance the requirements for transparent process, and value for taxpayer dollars, with the need to get a move on.

The Economist reports that of the $1 billion 'investment shock' earmarked for water, roads, school and clinics, only 30% is on track to be spent in the first year. This is largely due to inexperience in local government, and there's apparently been a lot of argument about whether financial controls should be loosened to allow quicker spending. As much as rapid progress is desirable, giving too much scope for corruption in a place with Peru's history may be worse than doing nothing.

The more general challenge, as summed up by the July 28--August 3 Economist, is maintaining the confidence of the population while the benefits of economic growth are gradually distributed more widely. Peru has averaged 5% growth over the last six years -- the steadiest in Latin America. But much of the interior of the country has yet to see any real benefit, and while poverty rates are now slowly coming down, in the some parts of the sierra they have actually got worse.

During July the country was racked by protests, led by the powerful teachers union SUTEP, and there was controversy over a government decree that local government leaders were not allowed to incite or lead protests.

When I lived in Peru, strikes and protests were as regular as a Friday trip to the pub, and it was de rigeur to call for the resignation of president Alejandro Toledo. This was partly due to Toledo himself, who appeared muddling, technocratic, and out of touch. President 'Alan' has all the popular touch you could want -- as even his critics admit -- but a silver tongue is not enough to soothe the frustrations of people facing ongoing hardship. Prior to the earthquake, Garcia's approval ratings had plummeted from a year earlier, especially away from the more prosperous coast.

The real problem is that people in the Peruvian sierra have been poor and excluded for so long; any government is not just dealing with the legacy of the previous administration, but approximately 500 years of social division and neglect. Protest and atagonistic politics, as exemplified by the likes of Ollanta Humala, have become ingrained as the only way to engage.

This creates a vicious circle where people and businesses who do have some chance of making progress are hindered by the disorder and lack of confidence. Hence the attraction of an almost Blair-ist promise of 'responsible change'. But for the large mass of people struggling as much as always, 'responsible' is coming to be seen as a euphemism for 'too slow'.

span class="category">Categories: development, Peru, poverty, Alan Garcia

That's My Piece of Sea

Like grownup siblings still embittered by a childhood dispute, Peru and Chile seem determined to draw out the consequences of the 19th-century War of the Pacific as long as possible.

Domainating the attention of politicians and media at the moment -- especially in Peru -- is the question of the maritime border.

Peru maintains that, while its land border with Chile was set by the Treaty of Arica in 1929, the maritime limits have never been satisfactorily settled. However, Chile says that the maritime border was defined by two fishing treaties signed in 1952 and 1954.

The technical controversy is over whether each country's 200-mile exclusive economic zone should be delimited by the geographical parallel, as agreed in the fishing treaties, or by a bisection of imaginary lines perpendicular to the respective coastlines, as established by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (see diagram, taken from Wikipedia entry on the topic.)



Peruvian governments have been trying to begin negotiations on the matter since 1986. The Chilean response has always been that the matter is settled by the fishing treaties, so there's nothing to discuss.

In 2005 the Peruvian congress drew up a law to define the 200-mile maritime zone over which it has sovereignty. This included about 38,000 sq km of water currently under Chilean adminstration -- the shaded area in the map.

With no progress possible through diplomatic channels, Peru decided to take the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a decision announced by president Alan Garcia in his discourse to the nation on 28 July this year.

A preparatory step was to draw up a a cartographic map illustrating the area claimed as sovereign by Peru. The map was published in the official daily El Peruano on 12 August, prior to being presented to the United Nations

Chile's response to the publication of the map was one of official surprise and offense, claiming that the map was a unilateral action that 'ignored' the existing treaties. Chilean foreign minister Alejandro Foxley sent a formal note of protest to the Peruvian ambassador and called the Chilean amabassador to Peru back to Santiago for consultation.

But Peruvian representatives responded that there had been plenty of warning of the process that was to be followed, and Chile had been forewarned of publication of the map

Rising tensions were defused when the earthquake struck southern Peru on August 17, and Chile was among the first countries to send aid to the victims.

However on 23 August Foxley further complicated the matter, stating that settlement of long standing Bolivian claims for access to the sea could be prejudiced by Peru's claims. But this was brushed aside by Bolivian president Evo Morales, who said on a visit to the eathquake zone in Pisco that "I know the Peruvian government isn't going to be an obstacle to resolving this matter with Chile".

The whole debate is put into perspective by an entertaining piece of reportage from Rodrigo Barria Reyes of Chilean paper El Mercurio. Barria Reyes describes the fruitless search by a 518-tonne, 33-man Chilean navy vessel for a tiny 4-man Peruvian fishing vessel suspected of entering Chilean-controlled waters without permission.

The main target for Peruvian fisherman from the port of Ilo is the blue shark, whose fins are considered in some Asian markets to have potent aphrodisiac properties To reach international waters where the sharks are abundant, boats have to cross the Chilean-patrolled zone. Those that don't request permission, or fish in Chilean waters, are towed back to Arica where their cargo is dumped and they are fined and deported.

In this case the Peruvian boat was trespassing, but made a quixotic dash back into Peruvian waters before the Chilean navy could catch it. El Mercurio reports that the fisherman braving the high seas in search of shark fins make $600 for a 15-day trip. Meanwhile, Peru has set aside $2 million USD to fight the court case in The Hague.

To an outside observer, it seems incredible how much importance is attached to a patch of ocean. It's appropriate that the El Mercurio article described the tiny fishing boat as 'Lilliputian', because the way in which arcane details of geography are being scrutinised by politicians, lawyers, historians and bloggers in both countries is reminiscent of something from Gullivers Travels.

To be fair, the leaders of both countries have been at pains to stress that border issue is completely separate from the two nations' economic and social relations. Both governments have tricky balancing acts to maintain. Foxley and president Michelle Bachelet need to placate the hawks in opposition who accuse them of having a muddled and over-accommodating foreign policy, while Garcia needs to stay a step ahead of Peruvian nationalists like Ollanta Humala who are always ready to stir up anti-Chilean feeling.

Far more than the material value of the territory itself, the current fuss is a reflection of the place that the War of the Pacific continues to play in both countries' collective psyches. And while it seems to be Peru that continues to obsess over the past, some Chileans argue that there's a lot their country could do to restore good will. In a guest column in La Republica, Chilean journalist and university professor Felipe Bianchi Leiton said that Chile should formally apologise to Peru for selling arms to Ecuador during its border dispute with Peru in 1995 -- when Chile was supposed to be a guarantor of the peace.

He further argued that Chile should return the books stolen from the library of Lima during the War of the Pacific, and give up disputing denomination of origin rights for pisco. Finally, Leiton stated that Chile must accede to the Peruvian request to extradite ex-president Alberto Fujimori to face trial in Peru.

But the effort to make Fujimori face trial is a different question altogether.

Categories: Chile, Peru, maritime border, limite maritimo, Alan Garcia, Evo Morales, Alejandro Foxley

It's About the Governance

The establishment of a commission to lead the reconstruction of eathquake areas of southern Peru hit its first bureaucratic snags almost straight away.

Prior to the Peruvian congress approving the creation of the independent body dubbed 'Forsur', the presidents of two of the three affected regions voiced their objections. President of Ica Romulo Triveño and Huancavelica's Federico Salas argued that Forsur was against the spirit of decentalization policies, and that reconstruction should be managed by regional governments.

Others expressed unease that the business members of the executive council of Forsur would not be considered public servants, and that Forsur would be able to contract directly for goods and services, bypassing normal tendering processes. This, said La Republica, was to 'confuse the emergency stage - - when such a measure is justified -- and reconstruction, which is assessed over three to four years'

At least one blogger also raised concerns about the reconstruction 'tsar', businessman Julio Favre, who sounds something like a Peruvian Bob Jones. Some past quotes:

'If I had to choose between giving work to 60o and saving 4 herons, I'd choose giving work to 600'

'It was really Marxist front organisations that were behind the protest' (speaking about a march against corruption led by Lima's archbishop).

Regarding the reconstruction project, Favre --who will receive no direct remuneration for his role -- said that 'if we follow all the bureaucratic processes we'll be starting the construction in two years, and we want to [finish] it in one year'.

In eventually approving the creation of Forsur on Tuesday evening, Congress struck a compromise. It agreed that Forsur will be able to contract directly for the removal of rubble and rehabilitation of basic infrastructure such as water and drainage, while other, non-emergency contracting will be carried out transparently through an 'abbreviated purchasing mechanism'. The directorship of the independent body will comprise three regional presidents, four provincial mayors, six ministers, and four businessman. It will be based in Ica.

This still didn't satisfy Ica president Triveño, who is planning to present a consitutional claim against the creation of Forsur on the grounds that it replicates the functions of an already-created regional organisation.

Bureaucratic tangles aside, what is happening on the ground to assist people who lost their homes and possessions in the quake?

-- The government will allocate 23 million soles ($7 million USD) to supply warm clothing, food and water for the victims of the quake. This will be managed by the United Nations World Food Programme, which will be in charge of acquiring, packing and delivering the supplies

-- 400 emergency wawa wasis (creches) will be established in the affected zones to look aftter 4,000 children between the ages of three months and four years.

-- Venezuela has sent 200 prefabricated emergency houses, and Chile 100 more

Minister of Labor Susana Pinilla announced that the Construyendo Peru programme, in which people affected by the quake are being temporarily employed to clear up the rubble, is likely to be extended from 8,000 to 12,000 jobs

-- but the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders say there are still 'dozens' of small rural communities that have not received any aid, 10 days after the quake, and people are sleeping outside without any shelter and barely any food or water

On With the Reconstruction

The rubble is still being cleared, and 41 bodies haven't yet been found, but plans for reconstruction in the parts of southern Peru hit by last week's earthquake are underway.

On Monday the 20th, Peruvian president Alan Garcia indicated that he would propose the establishment of an independent body charged with leading the reconstruction. He said it would be led by a an "irreprochable person of great industry and decisiveness" who would "movilize all sectors to reconstruct the affected zone".

On Friday 24th, Garcia confirmed that businessman Julio Favre would be the designated leader, working through a committe including local mayors, regional presidents, as well as relevant businesses and their technicians and architects.

The vision as elaborated by the Peruvian president appeared to be one not just of reconstruction but of modernization and transformation. He suggested that as well as erecting properly-designed buildings and infrastructure, the project would double-lane the Ica-Lima highway, and make operational the previously unused port of Pisco.

By Saturday 25,Favre, already denominated the reconstruction "tsar" had put together his project team to lead Forsur (Fondo para la Reconstrucción del Sur), and local reporters accompanied him and Pisco mayor to inspect an area of terrain to the south of the city where it was intended the rebuilding would start.

President Garcia announced that Forsur would have available a budget of 260 million soles ($85 million USD), and would also construct housing for 'one or two thousand people'.

After the Earthquake

Amidst the inevitable chaos, neglect of people living off the beaten track, and one or two engregious incidents of corrupt behaviour, Peru appeared to do a relatively effective job of responding to last week's earthquake

Two days after the tremor, on Saturday the 18th, local news sources reported a general sense of panic and desperation in Pisco and Ica, where people were living in improvised shelters made from sticks and sheets of plastic.

There was also widespread insecurity. As was seen in New Orleans, actual criminal acts mixed with desperate quake victims looting ruins and breaking into empty shops to find food and supplies, heightening the sense of lawlessness . There were reports of organised attacks on convoys bringing emergency help to the area, and when trucks arrived most were set upon with desperation by people who were ravenous for food and water.

In response, the government increased the number of military units in the Pisco area from 400 to 1,000, sending army, navy and air force units in addition to more than 2,000 police. The Minister of Defense, Allan Wagner, reported that by Saturday morning the assaults on vehicles bringing aid had been 'neutralized'. But reports of looting still drifted in.

On Sunday 19th, Peru's civil defence agency Indeci announced that 503 people were dead, 1,042 injured, and 33,939 families had suffered damaged or destroyed homes. The agency also reported that 2,800 tonnes of clothing, food, shelter, and other goods had been delivered. Statistics varied: the regional president of Ica, Rómulo Triveño, claimed that 45,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed in Ica alone, affecting 253,000 people .

Seventy-two hours after the earthquake, electricity and water were being restored, though this was a slow task in the areas of Pisco and Ica most affected by the quake. In Pisco, where less than 10% of the city had electricity, emergency and medical operations were being powered by generators.

Other Peruvian regions and municipalities rushed to organise aid, and the National Stadium in Lima was the designated centre for collection of donated goods. Thousands of limeños headed to the stadium to give clothing, tinned food and useful equipment, while at least 500 volunteers worked round the clock to collect and pack the donations.

The Peruvian earthquake was also a popular international cause, and offers of help flooded in. In addition to the countries that had already given help, by Monday Mexico, Ecuador, Panama, Brazil and Italy had also dispatched aid. Chile sent further assistance, while Argentina set up an 'air bridge' to Pisco. The Mormon church (with 430,000 Peruvian members) promised a 747 loaded with supplies from Salt Lake City while the Pope himself sent $200,000.

But for people off the beaten track, help was slow to arrive. Reporters from La Republica found that in the settlement of El Bosque, just 15 minutes from the centre of Pisco, people complained that after three days they had not yet received any assistance. On the Wari-Liberatadores highway inland from Pisco to Huancavelica, settlements where the majority of dwellings were destroyed had not seen any help by Sunday.

President of the Council of Minister Jorge del Castillo justified the lack of help for outlying areas, saying that it was necessary to 'prioritize the places worst affected by the earthquake'. Some blame could be directed to the authorities for not having better systems of distribution. But people's inability to reach central areas where aid was being distributed, or insecurity about leaving their few remaining belongings for fear of robbery, reflect everyday reality in Peru.

Meanwhile, the government was looking ahead to future issues of reconstruction. Minister of Labor Susan Pinilla announced on Saturday 18 that a programme called Construyendo Peru would be set up to begin reconstruction work. People affected by the quake would be given priority for the 4,000 jobs, the first week's wages paid in advance.

With the need to spend large amounts of aid money quickly, there's always a risk of misappropriation and corruption. Minister del Castillo announced that the government would establish 'mechanisms of transparency' to keep clear account of national and international aid.

Of course, no mechanism can prevent the dishonesty of individuals, as was seen when a Civil Defense employee in the Lima barrio of La Victoria was caught with half a tonne of donated goods that she'd taken home for 'safe keeping'.

In the local media there were many critics of the government response as delayed, disorganized and haphazard. To be fair, some of the defects which exacerbated the quake's effects -- precarious building construction, ancient water and electricity infrastructure, isolation of people in peripheral areas -- are chronic ones that can't be blamed on any one administation.

But the most notable feature was the outpouring of good will and solidarity. Temporarily, the different sectors of Peruvian society -- central and local government, private companies, civil society groups and individuals -- were united at least in the wish to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate.

If only, as several columnists wrote, that attitude could be sustained past times of crisis.

Categories: earthquake, Peru, Pisco, Lima

Earthquake in Peru

It's always a worrying sign when the death toll rises rapidly. The first news I heard about the 7.9 Richter scale Peruvian earthquake was several hours after the event, and already early news reports of deaths in single figures had blown out to 330 in later reports. It now looks as though the death toll will be around 500, while an estimated 17,000 people have been left homeless.

Worst hit were the towns of Ica,Pisco, Chinca and Cañete, three--five hours to the southeast of Lima. The majority of casualties appear to have occurred when buildings simply collapsed on top of their occupants.

It's worth checking out this video clip (click to play, audio in spanish) to get some idea of just how badly Pisco has been damaged. The piles of rubble make it look like a particularly war-torn part of Chechnya. Reports say that between 60 to 80 percent of the city has been destroyed. The Guardian has a good summary of events, and some geological background to the quake.

Injured people are being ferried by 'air bridge' to Lima hospitals, and aid and supplies are coming in from the government, Red Cross and private companies. International agencies have already given or offered $40 million of aid. Chile was one of the first countries to assist, sending a Hercules transport plane, while Spanish and Bolivian rescuers helped to look for survivors, and Colombia was reported to have discpatched a ship with supplies to the port of Pisco. Peruvian president Alan Garcia, never one to miss an opportunity to make a wider political point, said that "this gesture shows the brotherly relations of Peru and Chile despite differences over the maritime border".

Sadly, there have also been numerous reports of criminal gangs taking advantage of the darkness in Chincha and Ica to loot and attack houses. It is thought that prisoners that escaped from the Tambo de Mora penal facility during the earthquake may be responsible for some of the criminal activity. Frightened citizens rang TV and radio stations describing armed gangs roaming the streets. President Garcia has announced that he will send an additional 600 police to the affected areas.

Supplies including water, food, medicine and tents have been dribbling in along damaged highways. TV cameras -- always efficiently deployed -- showed people in Pisco living a post-apocalypse reality, huddled on dark streets in blankets and improvising communal meals. But they were still better off than those in isolated rural areas, who were reported to still be with out assistance, 48 hours after the quake.

As terrible a tragedy as this, perhaps the real story is that a complete catastrophe was only just avoided. In Lima, buildings wobbled and swayed, leaving residents shaken but largely unharmed. The city has close to 10 million people, many in dense concentrations of poorly-constructed brick, plaster and concrete. Had the quake been centred a bit further to the north, the results woud have been scarcely imaginable.

Categories: earthquake, Peru, Pisco, Lima

I Wasn't Making It Up

A study by the International Labour Organization of 50 countries indicates that more than a quarter of the world's workforce works more than the ideal maximum of 48 hours.

Top of the list of the most overworked countries is...Peru. Yes, despite the popular perception of layabout Latinos, the study found that 50.9 percent of Peruvians work more than 48 hours per week.

Well it's striking that Peru is in very first place, I'm unsurprised that it's there or thereabouts. As I've described before, long, arduous working hours are the lot of the majority in Peru. The working week is six days long, with very few exceptions. And the most common work day is 10--12 hours in length, rather than eight. For those that must reply on informal work to get by, the day is as long as it takes to scrape together the required handful of soles.

The BBC report on the study says that:

The ILO blames the growth of service industries, such as tourism and transport, plus an expansion in informal working arrangements, for the excess of global working hours.

In general this is probably true. In the case of Peru specifically, another important reason is, ironically, the sheer lack of jobs. People who are employed in any kind of stable arrangement consider themselves fortunate, and are not in a position to demand kinder working hours or conditions. And many people are employed by small businesses that are themselves struggling to get by in the oversupplied marketplace. The hours worked by employees are driven by the hours the business needs to operate to break even.

This rather puts into context the concerns about labour standards in the trade agreement that Peru has recently negotiated with the United States. As reported in a previous post, a key element of the compromise reached by Democrat legislators and the Republican executive to allow the agreement to pass was a requirement for parties to ratify ILO labor standards. This didn't satisfy many grassroots Democrats, who angrily questioned whether the standards will be enforceable.

But while the criticisms were at times coated with a veneer of internationalism, they were, understandably, really about US internal politics and concerns. Not a lot of the critical reaction was motivated by an appreciation of Peru's position (or that or Colombia or Panama, about which I know a lot less).

Now, I fully agree that it's a good thing to have labour standards written into agreements. Jobs created by trade should be decent ones, and the right of workers to share in the benefits of increased commerce should be fundamental.

But Peru has already signed up to all the ILO principles and standards, and the general ideological mood -- unlike in the US -- is that they are fully desirable. For the meantime, however, these are less relevant than the need for more and better jobs.

It's true that the US State Department found that in Peru the existing labour regulations are poorly enforced, up to 30,000 people do forced labour, and tens of thousands of children are working.

But all this happens in an environment where people feel they have little choice. The government could certainly be more active in enforcing the employment regulations. But there's little it can do about the children sent off to wander the streets at all hours selling sweets and shining shoes. It's not multinational corporations exploiting these kids, but their unemployed mothers sending them out to help ends meet (you might ask where the fathers are, but that's another story altogether).

Peru is not Colombia, where trade union leaders have suffered the unfortunate setback of being frequently murdered (in part due to the real and imagined connections of trade union leaders with the FARC). Peruvian unions do exist, exert some muscle, and from time to time have some success in winning concessions. There's no question that the lot of miners, for example, could be greatly improved. But the most arduous conditions and worst abuses are suffered by those who can't count on a stable job, or have to work for themselves. I can't give you the stats at this point, but I would guess that the physical risks faced regularly by a Lima taxi driver would make a New York policeman blanche.

Only when there more genuine, decent sources of employment will the negotiation of a fair balance between employer and employee become the critical issue. Finding ways to raise productivity, add value to primary products and improve internal communications and infrastructure is vital to development. All these things happen in the presence of the kind of opportunities offered by stable access to large markets, which is what a trade agreement secures.

While countries like Peru shouldn't have to suck eggs and accept conditions as over-reaching as the intellectual property requirements in the original US deal, there would be very few who would argue that they'd be better off with no trade deal at all, or with an indefinitely stagnated one. In the absence of a trade agreement, extractive industries like mining and forestry (not to mention the drug trade) will carry along happily, there being generally few trade barriers to raw materials. And well-meaning people will continue to have little chance of influencing the labour standards in those industries.

Activists might beat up on Democrat leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel for 'selling out' to the Republicans, but themselves have few constructive suggestions for how to support responsible development in countries like Peru. Say what you like about Pelosi and Rangel, but you could credit them with being influenced at least in a minor way by what is really needed for Peru to improve the living standards of its people.


Categories: free trade, United Statess, Peru, FTA, trade agreement, labor

Mercado Santa Anita: After the Fall

In the end the outcome was perhaps the best possible alternative to potential tragedy -- farcical anticlimax. Three police bulldozers broke down the back entrance of the Mercado Santa Anita, and in flooded the more than 1,000 police officers that had gathered outside in a show of overwhelming force.

First in were the the stormtrooper-like 'robocops', with their 10 kilos of electric shock-delivering body armour, who were later fawned over at length by the female TV reporters. Amidst a few salvos of teargas, and some half-hearted attempts by the occupiers to set fire to their stalls, it took just 20 minutes to clear the compound.

The tubthumping leader Fernandino Nieto, who had promised 'rivers of blood', shaved off his moustache, slicked back his hair, and tried to fade off admidst the exodus. But he was recognised by police and detained.

Official sources were eager to talk up the violent defenses that the occupiers had apparently been preparing. La Republica's reporter Alfredo Pomared put it in context with a nice piece of subtle scepticism:

As evening fell, Minister Alva Castro showed the supposed weapons that the occupiers had intended to use in their defense: grenades, shotguns, revolvers, and molotov cocktails, among others. What's certain is that La Republica was the only print media in the compound at dawn, and after a long walk, was witness to the discovery by the police of a bucket of water mixed with chili pepper and vinegar, two swords, and an air rifle for hunting small animals.

In an effort which doubled as a public relations exercise, a wave of female police officers were sent to 'rescue' the children who had been stuck in the market. Some were taken to hospital, although it was unclear how their need was assessed. It was originally intended to detain and charge the parents, but this plan was thankfully later scrapped after the judge ruled that the children hadn't, after all, been used as 'human shields'.

As the bedraggled occupants streamed away from the area clutching the few things they managed to salvage (blankets or a radio here; a live chicken there) the TV reporters from 90 Segundos were keen to ensure they didn't escape without having it rubbed in. "What did you manage to take with you?" and "are there any children?", they asked. Some people, visibly upset, shouted "don't film!" and pushed at the camera, actions which were noted as confirming their uncouthness.

With the market cleared, hard-working agricultural wholesalers in the chaotic, overcrowded La Parada area of central Lima, where around 80 percent of the city's produce is sold, were looking forward to moving to new improved premises in Santa Anita.

For those who had been occupying the premises , it was a different story. A rag-tag group clutching their few remaining possessions found their way to a small park in the barrio of Ate Vitarte. There they huddled on what was the coldest night of the year, and the next morning struggled to scrape together breakfast for the children.

Some of the Santa Anita refugees had only arrived in the market a few months previously and were bewildered by what had happened. Many had wanted to leave the compound previously, but had been prohibited from doing so by their 'leaders'. One man with a face full of woe explained how he had sold his dwelling in the countryside and paid land pirate Herminio Porras 5,000 soles ($1,600 USD) for his spot in the market.

With many residents of the area around the park quickly growing impatient with the invasion of their neighbourhood, the refugees from Santa Anita were left facing, like so many others in Peru, an uncertain and perilous future.

Categories: mercado Santa Anita, Peru, Lima

The Mercado Santa Anita: Law and Order or Crushing the Little Guy?

Peru faces two great social problems that, though distinct, spring from the same roots and feed off and complicate one another. The first is the obvious one that you can read about in the statistics: poverty. Nearly 50 percent of the population still lives below the poverty line; only around 30 percent have formal employment.

Moreover, not much has changed as the economy has stabilised and grown in recent years, exacerbating the sense many people feel of exclusion from the formal system. Without employment, property, or credit, a large section of the population has to get by however it can.

The second big problem is the disorder and insecurity which plagues much of the country, and especially Lima. The headlines feature high-profile crime such as murders or holdups of interprovincial buses. But for many people, it's the low-level annoyances that grate most. The rampant petty theft. The dirt, rubbish, and pollution. The dirty, noisy, unlicenced kombis causing accidents through dangerous driving. Disrespect for laws and regulations; poorly maintained premises with exposed wiring. Strikes and marches that block roads, cause delays and damage property.

For many Peruvians, the second problem is even more pressing than the first. This is not just an attitude of the elite or the middle classes; on the contrary, it's often those with very little who are most driven to despair by what they sum up as 'all the informality'. This is because the disorder undermines their tranquility, security and dignity. With these qualities, material hardship can be managed. Without them, it verges on the unbearable.

The current, potentially tragic situation playing out in the Mercado Santa Anita in Lima, and the public response to it, exemplifies the confusing collision of these two problems.

The Mercado Santa Anita is an 82-hectare compound on the outskirts of Lima. It's currently the scene of a stand-off between local authorities and several hundred stand-holders who have operated their businesses there for around five years, and for nearly four weeks have been resisting a court order that they vacate the premises.

The court says the land belongs to the Municipality of Lima, who are planning to construct a modern wholesale market on the site. Those currently occupying the area say that they have rights through their occupancy and investment in their businesses, and claim that the Municipality plans to sell the land off to the Peruvian's favourite bete noire - 'Chilean interests'.

As the police prepare to storm the premises to eject the occupants, there's been a sense of foreboding and worries that if blood is spilled, it will create a lingering, bitter rent in the country's already strained social fabric.

I'm indebted to Peruvian blogger Peruanista for a fuller historical account of the market's background than can be gained by perusing official sources.

The idea for a wholesale market in Santa Anita was first conceived in the 1960s, and in 1974 ex-president Fernando Belaunde signed a decree expropriating the land for use as an agricultural wholesale market. The terrain passed into the hands of the Municipality of Lima in 1984, but - as tends to be the case with grand projects in Peru - development plans made little progress. It was in 2002 that the market was occupied by several thousand agricultural producers and wholesalers, who, despite efforts to remove them, established themselves, invested in their stands, and more or less prospered.

As always in Peru, it's more complicated than just the struggle of common people to get ahead. A Machiavellian figure called Herminio Porras, one-time congressman in Fujimori's party, has been prominently involved in illegitimate sales of land in and around the market. He's currently under house arrest, but his dealings have already sparked a couple of violent incidents, and no doubt have a part in the poisition some of the occupiers find themselves in.

With all legal recourse now exhausted, the occupiers of the market have turned, unsuccessfully, to various sources for intercession. The People's Defender begged off the case, and Catholic bishop Luis Bambaren quickly gave up a mediation role. President Alan Garcia has also washed his hands, saying that 'if someone invades your house, you don't negotiate with them about the conditions under which they will stay'. Not quite a fair analogy - people don't normally leave their house abandoned for thirty years!

One hesitates to throw around the expression 'corporate media' as a slogan. But much as I appreciate the contribution of TV channel 90 Segundos to keeping me up to date with events in Peru, their coverage of the issue has ben less than balanced. The sight of attractive, smartly-dressed young TV presenters haughtily bemoaning the disorderliness and 'bad manners' of simple countryside people leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth.

The occupants have routinely been described as 'the invaders' and accused of using their children as 'human shields' to avoid ejection from the market. The occupiers argue, quite reasonably, that their children must stay with them because they're not handing them over to anybody else.

As the occupiers in Santa Anita became more entrenched and hostile to the media, coverage has become a mix of the slightly Orwellian and the laughable. Unable to get access the compound, the 90 Segundos reporters drove around the exterior for a while, then resorted to showing viewers 'satellite images' of the area (thanks to Google Earth) and models of what the market would look like when it is redeveloped ('complete with bank branches and offices'). We watched drills undertaken by squads of riot policeman as they practiced moving forward against a 'violent rabble'.

In recent days, weapons caches have been 'found' near the market and 'linked' to the occupiers. (They may well be genuine finds, but after reading Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant depiction of the manipulation of public opinion in Conversacion en la Caterdral, it's hard to take such televised uncoverings entirely seriously). A connection has also been claimed between an NGO supporting the occupants and the Venezuelan embassy (involvement of Venezuela is the 21st-century equivalent of a Communist plot).

But the media can't be entirely blamed for the hardening of public opinion towards the occupiers. Many people see the situation as a test case for the rule of law. Some of the views expressed on the situation on a Peruvian website include:

It's time that authority is imposed in this country; Peru suffers because of the informality and disrespect for rules and laws...sadly it seems that everything is done through marches and blocking highways - we're part of a country of savages. (Eduardo Ojeda)

It's time that somebody got this house in order. It's not possible that, as much as people might think themselves "poor", they do whatever they feel like with that excuse....If we want the country to progress and for the people to have a better standard of living, we must start by complying with the laws and rules. (Jorge Torres)

The occupants' leader Fernanidino Nieto has hardly helped the situation by declaring that "rivers of blood will flow" if they are ejected. But there was also some nobility in his response when the water and electricity inside the compound were cut off a couple of days ago. 'We don't have electricity in our farms in the countryside", he laughed to reporters. "Our light shines from our eyes'. If ever a Naomi Klein-type voice was needed to tell the other side of the story, it's now.

The glimmer of hope amidst all the tension is that Peruvians never quite lose their sense of humour, or of absurdity.

In one recent TV clip, a young man on security duty for the market occupants was closing a gate to the market compound as a young TV reporter tried to peer in. "Hey, what are those tyres for?" she asked, pointing to a pile of old tyres inside the gate (the presumed intention is that they would be burned as part of resistance to any police invasion). The young guy glanced over his shoulder. 'Those tyres, señorita?', he asked innocently. For a moment, you could see him figuring whether he should try to deny that any such tyres existed, or come up with a totally implausible story about their innocent purpose. Then he remembered he was supposed to be a tough guy, grunted "I can't tell you", and shut the gate.

And if anything (temporarily) trumps the struggle against poverty and disorder, it's the chance of a spectacle. By the weekend crowds had gathered around the market, expecting that the police would be coming along to dislodge the occupants. As it happened, they had decided to put if off for another day. This left a lot of people milling around, attracting many itinerant vendors, who were able to sell screeds of gum, cigarettes, and soda.

A middle-aged man in the classic yellow uniform and mobile trolley of D'Anafrio ice creams was doing a roaring trade among the throngs of bystanders. He confirmed that the possibility of a market being stormed was good for business. "This is how we make our living" said the D'Anafrio man.

Categories: mercado Santa Anita, Peru, Lima

Trick or Trade? Uncertainty Remains on US-Peru Trade Deal

With flak coming from all corners of the political spectrum, the Democrat-Republican deal to allow the US-Peru trade agreement to pass must have got something right. Or perhaps its most salient feature it that, for now, its details are unclear.

In a previous post I linked to an outline of the deal. A fuller summary can be seen here. To retirate, the key points are that:

• parties to trade agreements with the US will be required to adopt and enforce the five basic standards in the 1998 International Labour Organization declaration, and the labour sections will be subject to the the same dispute resolution mechanisms as the rest of the agreement
• parties must ratify and enforce seven key multilateral environmental agreements, and the environmental sections will be subject to the the same dispute resolution mechanisms as the rest of the agreement
• intellectual property requirements are softened to allow earlier availability of generic medicines to US trade partners
• Peru is specifically required to crack down on illegal logging of mahogany

In the Times Online, columnist Irwin Stelzer blustered that this represented "the end of free trade as we know it". He lamented that:

We can sue our trading partners if they violate the agreement, and they can sue us. For example, if some country such as Panama decides we are violating trade-union rights here at home, they can bring a suit to press Congress to change the law.

Stelzer failed to mention that , in requiring wholesale adoption and implementation of American trademark, copyright and patent laws, the original agreement cut across national sovereignty in far more significant ways.

At the other end of the political spectrum, US netroots activists were furious with the secretive process that had been followed and bemoaned that drafting of the actual legislative language would be delegated to the Bush White House. They also cast doubt on how enforceable the labour and environmental conditions would be.

Blogger David Sirota lambasted the press for applauding the deal when they hadn't seen the all-important legislative language. He pointed to similar, unfulfilled claims about labour and environmental standards being made in relation to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) more than ten years ago.

However, a blogger identifying himself as DemHillStaffer claimed that "we defeated the Bush trade agenda and got 100% of what Democrats have been demanding for years". He asserted that the labour and environmental standards will be "FULLY enforceable and subject to the same dispute settlement procedures as every other part of trade agreements, including investment, and intellectual property...EXACTLY what Democrats demanded before the election".

In a later update, Sirota reported the White House as saying that labor and environmental standards would not be written into the core text of trade agreements, "but instead will mean merely unenforceable NAFTA-esque 'side agreements' or even weaker 'letters' of understanding".

In fact, this is something Peruvian representatives were saying at least a week ago.

Somewhat missing in all this angst was what Peruvians might think about the deal. Alan Garcia's government has been presenting the trade deal as a sine qua non for the country's development, by supporting export-led growth and creating much-needed jobs.

But while Peru's televised media has repeated this line, it is far from a universal viewpoint. In La Republica, columnist Javier Diez Canseco launched a scathing attack on Garcia, whom he characterized as 'Toledo II' (previous president Alejandro Toledo, who was a cheerleader for the free trade deal, and who helped the outgoing Peruvian congress controversially push the agreement through on the eve of last year's election).

Diez Canseco pointed out that Garcia had raised significant concerns about the trade agreement during his election campaign and promised to "retire his signature [if Toledo signed the agreement] and review it line by line". But now in government, Garcia had allied himself with "the powerful business Right" and become a "yes man" for the agreement. To the Democrats proposal that Peru's trade preferences be unilaterally extended for two years while issues were sorted out, Garcia "remained mute".

With ratification looking imminent, the attention in Peru has turned back to the impact of the trade agreement on agriculture. The most prominent concern in Peru has been that the FTA will allow an influx of subsidised American products which will push out small farmers - who will then have the option of joining the influx to the already overburdened cities, or perhaps turning to growing coca.

The government has suggested that a system of compensation will be put in place for farmers affected by the trade deal - particularly producers of corn, wheat, and cotton. But La Republica reported that the agricultural subcommission charged with developing such a system had not yet determined which products would be significantly affected, let alone worked out how to implement such compensatory subsidies.

In any case, with specific regulatory change required of Peru at least in respect to mahogany logging, and many rank-and-file Democrats apparently wanting the new conditions to be written into the agreement itself, it's hard to see how only "process" remains for the agreement to enter into force. There may yet be an opportunity for Diez Canseco - and other Peruvians angered by the lack of transparency in trade negotations - to see "a national and congressional debate on the issue".

Categories: free trade, United Statess, Peru, FTA, trade agreement

A Marriage Made in Heaven

Arequipan adventure travel agency Zarate Expeditions and the provincial government of Arequipa are collaborating to produce the second edition of "the world's highest mass marriage" on 1-2 December this year. Couples are invited to get married in either a civil or religious ceremony, on the summit of the El Misti volcano at the breathtaking altitude of 5,825 metres above sea level.

The first mass marriage on the El Misti took place in November 2000, when a total of 36 couples made the trek to perform their nuptials under the summit's giant iron cross.

Apart from the obligatory stab at the Guiness Book of Records, the organizers are hoping to promote Arequipa both as a tourist destination and as a centre of religious faith (the city is known as the "Rome of Peru" for its staunch traditional Catholicism).

The event is also intended to promote the family unit and the harmony of cultures, since, according to the organizers, the journey to the summit will be "a pilgrammage [achieved] through the force of love" (though I would also recommend consideration of Diamox for those couples hoping to make it to the altar).

The proprietor of Zarate Expeditions is Mickey Zarate, known for discovering the famous "mummy Juanita" on Nevado Ampato in 1995, along with American explorer Johan Reinhard

As well as the agency and the provincial government, the police, army, Red Cross and tourism commission are lending their support. The organizers are also looking for sponsors to support the resources required to carry out the event.

Anyone interested or seeking further information can contact Zarate Expeditions directly.

Categories: Arequipa, El Misti, Peru, marriage, high altitude

Peru - US Trade Agreement Likely to be Ratified

The free trade agreement between the United States and Peru now looks certain to be approved by the US Congress before its August recess, after Democratic legislators and the Republican administration reached an agreement that will also set a framework for future US trade agreements, including those that have recently been negotiated with Panama and Colombia.

The Democrat-Republican accord that opens the way for ratification was announced last Friday 10 May by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called it "a new day for our trade policy".

Pelosi stressed that "we have certain principles which we must accept as the foundation of how we talk about trade...labour standards form a core element of our agreements".

The stronger labour and environmental standards that Democrats had been arguing for are now likely to be included in annexed letters to the main agreement, meaning it will probably not have to be renegotiated, or re-ratified by Peru's congress. These new policies include requirements that US trade agreement partners adopt and enforce five core International Labour Organization labour standards and seven major multilateral environmental agreements. Intellectual property-based restrictions on generic medicines are also softened, and Peru is specifically required to act against illegal logging, particularly of mahogany. A summary of the key adjustments to US trade policy can be read here.

If ratified as expected, the agreement will come into force towards the end of 2007 or early in 2008. Until then, Peru's existing trade concessions under the Andean Trade Preferences and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) will be automatically renewed.

Peruvian sources credited the recent visit of President Alan Garcia to Washington with helping convince US legislators of the importance of the trade agreement to Peru's development.

In a forthcoming post, I'll summarize the key issues and controversies of the US-Peru trade agreement.

Categories: free trade, Latin America, Peru, FTA, TLC

Ghost Stories of the Sierra III: Gerardo's Second Sight

It was Lizbeth's brother Pablo who added a missing link to the story as we sat around chatting while we looked after the otherwise empty house on the avenida Gutemberg.

According to Pablo, it had been six year-old Gerardo's disturbing visions that provoked Hugo and Lizbeth to perform the pagamento, or offering (literally 'payment'). A couple of weeks previously, when Pablo was on another visit down from Cabanaconde, the family had been sitting around the kitchen table, just before bed time. The back door was open, and Gerardo had wandered out to the patio.

Lizbeth got up from the table and went to get Gerardo to take him to bed. He was standing at the far end of the patio, staring fixedly out beyond the back garden, to where the lights of Arequipa flickered weakly into the darkness beneath the bulk of Nevado Chachani. He was waving his hand and saying in his childish voice, "bye bye...good bye".

"Who are you saying goodbye to?" asked Lizbeth. Gerardo looked up at her with a puzzled frown. "The souls", he replied.

The rest of the story Lizbeth had already told me with a kind of awed relish, though she refused when I asked her to retell it in detail a couple of evenings later. "I can't tell it at night time", she said. "It sends shivers down my spine".

According to her, it had been a routine decision that it was time to make a pagamento; a ritual which they had done several times before. Such a ceremony relates to the prehispanic practice of making offerings to the pachamama, the Mother Earth, to give thanks for her fruits. Like many aspects of Latin American culture, it has become creolized, mixed with Catholicism, and worked into urban middle class life.

Lizbeth had gone to find a local woman, expert in such matters, who had explained how they should carry out the ritual and what items should be included in the offering. Hugo and Lizbeth followed the instructions, wetting the earth around their front entrance and burying the designated items. Later the same day the woman came to their house, bringing some strange shells, stones and quartzes. She placed them on the mantelpiece and assured Lizbeth that they would bring extra good luck.

That night, Hugo and Lizbeth were in bed, watching TV and discussing what needed to be done the next day. For no apparent reason, an aloe plant sitting in the window fell to the ground. Lizbeth went and put it back in its place. Moments later, it fell down again. Then the door to their room swung open. Lizbeth got up and closed the door; a draught must have blown it open. This time, the door handle slowly turned, as if by an invisible hand, and the door was flung open again.

They both felt a force enter the room; a wind swept through the house, though it was a still night. A malignant energy coursed into the room.

"When an evil spirit comes, you can't show it fear", explained Lizbeth. "You have to swear and curse at it, tell it to be gone". This she tried to do, but the spirit was powerful. Hugo roused himself and went into the living room, shouting at the spirit. He found a bottle of holy water on a shelf and began to splash it around the room, ordering the spirit to leave.

" And then the idiot grabbed me by the arm" recounted Lizbeth. "So it passed from him to me, and I wasn't as strong". Objects were shaking on the shelves. A statue of the Virgin Mary crashed to the floor and cracked.

Eventually, Lizbeth thought of the shells on the mantelpiece. She picked them up and threw them out the front door. The turmoil subsided, and the malignant energy left the room

The next day, Lizbeth took the shells back to the woman. "These are not good", she told her. The woman shook her head and insisted that they were benign, bringers of good luck. "If you don't want them, you should get rid of them yourself", she said. But Lizbeth was admant that she was leaving the shells behind.

They also decided that the pagamento had been done wrong; they would need to dig it up and start again. But the next week when they excavated the site, the things they had buried weren't there; all they found was dog poo and the bones of what appeared to be a small animal.

A couple of weeks later, Gerardo and Renzo (who was visiting from Lima) were sent up to stay with their cousins in the sierra. Lizbeth's parents run the well-known Valle de Fuego hotel in Cabanaconde, while her brothers help with the business or farm the family lands.

One night in Cabanaconde there was an electricity outage, and the village was thrust into darkness; the fault couldn't be fixed until morning. Pablo's mother asked him to sleep with Gerardo and Renzo, as Gerardo refused to be alone in the pitch darkness. Pablo took them down to the family hotel, where he could sleep in the same room.

As he prepared for bed, he felt a strange and an accountable fear. In the night he slept poorly and was plagued by nightmares. "When I have bad dreams, I turn my pillow over to make them stop", he explained

Sometime after midnight, Gerardo woke up and began to cry out. "Nooo" he wailed. "I don't want to! I don't want to!"

Pablo was roused from his disturbed sleep. "What don't you want?", he asked.
"Please! I don't want to!" screamed Gerardo.

Pablo tried to comfort Gerardo, to ask him what the matter was. But Gerardo was as if possessed, and unable to speak coherently. Trembling, he tried to say something, but his tongue was stuck. Pablo thought Gerardo was trying to form the word "Emilia" - his grandmother, Pablo's mother.

"You want to go to Emilia?", he asked. He tried to think of something that would calm his nephew; he remembered that Gerardo had been excited the previous day about going for a horse ride. "Let's go find Emilia, to ride horses" Still trembling, Gerardo nodded. Pablo found his flashlight, and ferried his nephew the couple of blocks down to his mother's place, where he left him for the rest of the night.

In the morning they heard the news. Six drunkards had been quaffing meths in a local den. In the dark caused by the blackout, they had picked up the wrong bottle, one that contained poison. It was assumed that in their already inebriated state, they hadn't noticed what they were drinking. In the morning, all six were found dead.

Categories: Peru, Arequipa, Colca, Andes

In Peru, Working Hard is Not Enough

On the suburban block in Arequipa where Hugo and Lizbeth live, there's no fewer than six family-run grocery stores. That's six on the one block, not the whole street.

There's also a constant stream of yellow "Tico" taxis buzzing by. According to Hugo, there are 40,000 taxis in Arequipa. With a population of around 1.3 million, that means a remarkable ratio of approximately one taxi for every six families.

Taxis and grocery stores provide just two examples of Peru's overcrowded economic geography, where too many service and retail providers compete to supply a limited market. Regardless of how hard they work, the pickings are stubbornly slim.

This situation stems from the Peruvian economy's inability to provide more than 30 percent of its people with formal employment. By necessity, the others become self-employed entrepreneurs. But most don't have the ability to accumulate capital or invest in something risky and innovative. So they must scramble to carve out a share of the limited internal market for basic goods and services.

Fifth-form economics tells us that supply increases to meet demand. But what this means depends on where you are. In Western countries, the decision to 'supply' is usually based on whether an enterprise can turn a decent profit. In Peru, the threshold is much lower, based on the need to simply subsist. So, wherever there's a stable, predictable demand for a good or service, the market is not just supplied, but saturated.

Meanwhile, other costs don't go down. Most taxi drivers, for example, have to work hard just to cover the rental of their vehicle and keep it gassed up. With a typical taxi shift running from around 7:00 am to 7:00 pm. it's effectively only around 2:00 pm that drivers actually start earning money for themselves.

And taxis or corner stores are fairly high up the complex hierarchy of service providers. At the bottom are the people, mostly children or the very old or disabled, who sell sweets two or three at a time out of big bags. This is effectively indistinguisable from begging.

Then there are the itinerant vendors who peddle cigarettes and gum from trays hung around their shoulders. Success is graduating to having a trolley which is parked on a street corner and adds cookies, potato chips and bottled drinks to the inventory. At night, these "carritos" sell hamburgers, hot dogs, herbal drinks and anticuchos. Other people carve out a little retail niche by buying and reselling popular items a few at a time. In tourist areas they wander along vending t-shirts, crafts, paintings, sunglasses; on the market streets it's nail scissors, cutlery, photo albums, shoelaces, or anything else that can be moved.

All this is great for the consumer, who has a choice of products at her fingertips most hours of the day and night. But the majority of hopeful entrepreneurs are barely getting by.

And being skilled is no guarantee of breaking out of the rut. In a turnabout that would make the Western householder chortle with irony, tradesmen wait around on the street to be hired. You can wander down to the corner and find an electrician, carpenter or builder for as little as 15-20 soles per day ($5-7 USD).

The phenomenon of chronic service oversupply continues up into an industry that in theory should be turning a decent profit - tourism. When I first arrived in Arequipa in April 2004, I estimated there were about 90 agencies selling the same things - the Colca Canyon, Misti, Chachani, and city tours. By March 2007 the number had risen to about 120.

What hadn't changed was the number of tourists. Even within Peru, Arequipa struggles to attract its share; the regional government, which has done little to effectively promote the area, estimated in 2006 that just 14 percent of visitors to Peru make it to Arequipa.

No one was offering anything very different or innovative, and the conditions for tourism hadn't changed. The road into the Colca valley was as potholed and arduous as ever. The same two bus companies offered the same crowded, uncomfortable service up into the sierra.

In such a static market, the growing number of providers produces a predictable result - intensifying competition on price. Relatively few of Arequipa's agencies actually operate the tours, which involves organizing transport, food and guides for the tourists. But the craft shops, internet cafes and hotels that throw in a desk and a sandwich board advertising "Colca, Chachani, Misti" are happy to clip the ticket, and shave a few dollars off the margin of the eventual operator.

And even among the operators, there's little compunction about joining the race to the bottom. Costs are squeezed by hiring a less experienced guide, providing less food for the tourists, or simply by taking a loss on the first few sales in order to get a group together.

A couple of years back, Lizbeth employed a woman called Yunisa in the Incaventura agency After a while, Yunisa quit and started her own agency. She installed herself in the corner of a crafts shop, half a block further up the calle Santa Catalina. Her sales tactic? She waited until tourists came out of the Incaventura office, having had the tours explained to them. Then she sent one of the three or four girls that hung round her office to run after the tourists, bad mouth Lizbeth, find out what price they had been offered, and undercut it.

Little encapsulates the Peruvian economic situation better than these "jaladores" (literally "pullers"). Normally students or otherwise unemployed young people, they are paid purely on commission, but this hardly dents their eagerness to work. They are often bright, articulate, and may even speak some English. But with a limited pool of possible sales to be made, any hard-won income is earned directly at the expense of each other.

In fact, in some places, so intense is the competition to "jalar" a tourist that it's to the mutual detriment of all. In central Cuzco the tourist is assaulted at almost every step by people promoting tours, bars, and restaurants, or selling crafts, jewellery, and clothing. It makes for a somewhat hostile environment, which doesn't encourage visitors to stay around and spend more of their money. Often their response is to retreat to the sealed-off, foreign-owned venues where they won't be hassled.

Tourists themselves hardly help the situation. They come with the expectation that Peru is a cheap country, and expect to have amazing adventures for orders of magnitude less expense than what they would pay for a similar experience in a developed country. In Arequipa, many are happy to cruise from agency to agency, looking for the cheapest offer. They assume that if someone charges them a few dollars more, they are being ripped off. I wonder whether their attitude would be different if they knew that the $2-3 USD they just bargained off a tour price had come at the expense of a couple of meals worth of wages for the guide, or the meagre commission of the girl who works in the office, or the profit margin of the agency which is used to pay its rent and employment costs?

Despite its diminishing returns, tourism is still seen as a bright propspect by many. These days, I instinctively groan when another young student tells me enthusiastically that "one day I'd like to open an agency of my own". How many more do we need, I ask?

Some people have bright ideas, like Tessy and Rafael who are saving to set up a hotel and tourist operation in Cotahuasi, picturesque location of the world's deepest canyon. But for now it's not viable; the destination is poorly promoted, and it's 11 juddering hours away from Arequipa on a mostly unsealed road. Few visitors make it that far.

The well-meaning outsider is tempted to question why more Peruvians don't band together to produce something of higher value, and to criticize the unfortunate habit of ripping off or undercutting one's neighbour. But once you appreciate the lack of confidence created by an unstable history, unhelpful government, and inadequate infrastructure, the tendency to grab at what's going becomes more understandable. So, until Peru can find ways to allow ordinary people more of a chance to get a slice of the economic pie, its citizens are condemned to continue the current vicious circles, scrapping over stale crumbs from the crust.

Categories: Peru, Arequipa, economics, tourism

Getting Things on Track

After years of false starts and delays, Lima may be about to get its long-awaited electric train system. Peruvian TV reported that the bidding process will begin this month for construction and operation of Line 1, which will link the south of the city with central Lima.

The project was first conceived in the late 1980s, during the disastrous first term of Alan Garcia. A special authority was constituted to oversee the project's development, but it has become known as the "ghost train", after twenty years of delay and $400 million USD squandered. Just 9.8 km of track has so far been constructed, linking Villa El Salvador with San Juan de Miraflores.

The successful tenderer will be expected to begin construction in January next year of the remaining 14 km in Line 1, which will continue through to the plaza Grau in central Lima. They will have a 30-year concession for operating the train line. A spokesman for the metro authority estimated that it would carry 300,000 passengers daily - a total of around 100 million per year

Lima is the last Latin American city of its scale not to have a mass-transit system. Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo , Santiago de Chile and Medellin already have comprehensive metro systems, while Bogota has a network of guided busways.

Implementation of the electric train is part of the Municipality of Lima's grand plan for adressing the city's transport problems, which include traffic congestion, pollution, 1200 accidental deaths per year, and time-consuming and unsafe transit for citizens.

Understandably, some locals remain sceptical about prospects for completion of the metro system. A shopkeeper asked for his opinion by aTV reporter, suggested that "maybe it will happen next century". When asked "don't you believe it?", he responded "No, I don't believe it".

Categories: Peru, Lima, Metro, Tren Eléctrico

Señor Garcia Goes to Washington

Prospects for ratification of the Peru-United States free trade agreement (FTA) inched forward last week when Peruvian president Alan Garcia met with George W Bush and Democratic and Republican legislators during a trip to Washington DC.

Democrats continue to insist on changes to strengthen the labour and environmental conditions of the agreement. But they look set to reach a compromise with Republicans that will allow the agreement - which has already been approved by Peru's congress - to be debated and passed by the US Congress before its August recess.

Garcia's meeting with Bush was full of hearty cordiality, as they discussed both the trade agreement and measures to counter narcotrafficking. Bush said that Garcia was "a good guy, and he gives good advice" ('escape to Colombia at the end of your presidential term to avoid investigation', perhaps?).

But in a later meeting, Democrat Senate leader Harry Reid continued to press for changes in environmental and labour sections of the FTA, as did congressman Bill Pascrell who said there was still much to be improved in these areas before he would be convinced to support the agreement.

On day two of his visit, Garcia met with Charles Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means committee, one of the two Senate committees charged with reviewing the trade agreement. Rangel declared that the chances of congress ratifying the agreement were "better than good" but could not specify a timeframe. He stressed the need to continue work through details with the Republicans and the executive branch.

Accompanying Rangel was fellow Democrat Sander Levin, who had previously expressed misgivings about the trade agreement after a four-day fact finding mission to Peru.

While there is general consensus that the FTA will help produce the economic growth needed for Peru's development, critics say that it will hurt small rural producers that will have to compete with imports of subsidized American corn, rice, cotton, sugar and beef. They also worry that stricter enforcement of intellectual property law under the agreement could restrict Peruvian access to modern medicines.

Levin would like to see the US use its influence to support more stable, equitable growth when negotiating trade agreements with developing countries. He has argued that countries should be held to International Labor Organization minimum standards, rather than merely enforce their own laws, which may fall short of ILO standards. He also asserted that "it's necessary to assure access to generic medicines for Peruvians".

Garcia also met with congressional majority leader Nancy Pelosi - who reiterated her conditional support for the agreement - as well as Charles Cresley and Max Baucus from the Senate Finance Committee, the other body required to review the FTA. The Peruvian leader assured the press that he was confident of a way ahead. He stated that "it's a matter of process, rather than of reopening the negotiations".

By the end of the trip, Garcia had met with 43 representatives from the Congress and Senate, and declared that he was "leaving satisfied". Later, Peruvian chancellor José Antonio García Belaunde announced that there were "rumours" in Washington that Democrat and Republican leaders would soon sign a pre-agreement that would allow the agreement to be ratified by Congress before August.

But meanwhile, nationalist members of Peru's congress were planning to travel to the US with the aim of convincing US representatives not to ratify the agreement. They claimed to represent the "98 percent of business people who have been completely excluded from the negotation of this agreement". In an open letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, they argued that the trade agreement as it stands will exacerbate rural poverty and force poor farmers to turn to the illegal cultivation of coca.

(quotes as reported on Peruvian current affairs show 90 Segundos)


Categories: free trade, Latin America, Peru, FTA, TLC

Blood of a Continent

After all this time and four visits to the relevant part of the world, I finally got around to reading Eduardo Galeano's The Open Veins of Latin America. I remember on my very first day in South America, an intense young Spanish political science student explaining to me on a hot hostel terrace in Santiago that I sould read this book if I wanted to understand the continent's tortured history, society and politics.

He was right. I regret to say that in the intervening time, I lazily inherited a view of the book as an "it's all the gringos' fault" polemic that oversimplified the issues facing Latin america. I came to associate it with some of the tub thumping nationalist politics I encountered in Peru and Bolivia, and the assumption that wealth is something static that you find or steal, rather than create.

There's certainly enough in Open Veins' outrage-flecked prose style to give succour to those who would blame it all on the foreigners. Yet it's also consistent with the view of some local writers that Latin societies are hobbled by self-inflicted woes that include fatalism, lack of a work ethic, unhealthy hero worship, corrupt politicans, weak institutions, and systematic bureaucractic obstacles to entrepreneurs.

You don't by any means have to share all of Galeano's politics to appreicate Open Veins as a compelling story of how Latin America came to be the way it is.

Galeano's thesis is simple. Systematic exploitation and underdevelopment didn't contingently happened to Latin America - they were the continent's colonial raison d'etre. He documents how it became a "source and reserve of...raw materials and food for the rich countries".

These raw materials were initially gold, silver, and copper; later coffee, bananas, sugar, cotton, rubber, nickel, tin, and oil. Their extraction was on the backs of the enforced labour of native populations, replaced or supplemented by the slave traffic from Africa as the former were exhausted.

Colonisation, in the sense of the gradual establishment and building of a new society, was never the point. Rather, the aim was plunder, and to funnel the raw materials out through "veins" that led to the ports or capital cities. Ticket-clipping local elites got rich enough, at the expense of their hinterlands, to be able to buy back some of the finished goods from Europe.

While it was the Spanish and Portuguese crowns that undertook the original conquests, by the 17th century they were weak, overstretched and indebted. It was British and Dutch capital that financed the Latin American imperiums, and it was British, Dutch, French, and later American interests that determined the course of the continent's (under) development.

So far, so Marxist, you might say. But once we get past the undeniable horror of the conquests, the encomiendas, and the slave trade, Galeano's historical diagnosis is relatively uncontroversial. The ongoing failure of Latin America is its inability to develop a strong, indigenous capitalism that adds value to raw materials and spreads wealth through the wider society by broadening and deepening the economy.

Galeano explains the systematic protectionism of the northern European countries and the United States as they built their industrial economies, and documents how attempts to follow a similar process in Latin America have been kneecapped politically, often from the outside. The sine qua nons of development - improvements in agricultural productivity, land reform, and strengthened internal markets - have rarely got past first base.

It's a moot point how much this is due to external manipulation, and at what point local weakness and incompetence shares the blame. For Galeano, the underlying causes are the same.

In any case, Galeano has enough evidence that the odds have been sufficiently stacked against Latin American producers as to make modern cries for "free trade" seem hypocritical. In just one example he cites from the 60s, Brazil agreed to tax its own exports of soluble coffee, so as not to undercut US producers (given their handicaps, is it surprising that the wannabe entrepreneurs of Latin America have conspired to develop the one industry where they do have full control of resource extraction, processing, distribution and marketing: cocaine).

In order to appreciate the problem description, you don't have to agree with the solution. Galeano's unabashed cheerleading for Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution slightly embarasses even this pinko leftist. In our world of post-Friedman orthodoxy,his favourable view of the big-government adventures of various nationalist caudillos - including Peron in Argentina - seems almost as radical. But if you factor in the diagnosis, even avowed economic liberals might concede some of his rationale. So weak were local capitalists, argues Galeano, so passively complacent the thin upper-middle classes, that if anyone was going to deepen and diversify the local economy, it had to be the state.

Part II of Open Veins deals with the post-industrial age, where Galeano accounts for the partial development of parts of Latin America. His concept of "poles of development" refers to how the subjugation of Latin America by the West is mirrored locally: through Brazil and Argentina's dominance of their smaller neighbours, and, within countries, the "exploitation by the big cities and ports of their internal sources of food and labour".

He argues that much "foreign investment" actually results in a net outflow for Latin countries. Auto assembly, for example, involves local subsidiaries of large Western companies paying arbitrary prices for parts from their head office, and then remitting most of the profits back to their home country.

There's a lot that could be critiqued by political and economic historians, and indeed I would be interested to see his empirical evidence subjected to scrutiny (rather than simply sweeping it under the carpet and calling him a Marxist).

But part of what is so compelling about the narrative of Open Veins is that it ties together much of what one experiences when getting to know Latin America.

The poor internal transport links and communications between countries and regions; the land sitting idle (parts of Peru had a more comprehensive network of roads and more agricultural land in production during the Incan empire than they do now); the upper class people more likely to have visited Miami than Cuzco. The arbitrariness of wealth, where some people work frantically hard, and other people have money, but there's no discernible connection between the two. The local and central government more likely to hinder citizens' attempts to get ahead than to help them. The prearranged deals which make it easier for politicans and bureaucrats to be corrupt than honest.

In many ways, it's remarkable that this was published in 1973. So much of what we associate with Latin America's contemporary history has happened since. Pinochet's coup in Chile; the Argentinian military dictatorship; financial crises; revolution and war in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala; Peru's Shining Path insurgency; IMF neoliberal makeovers leading up to the "Bolivian gas wars" and Argentina's 2003 financial collapse.

Reading Open Veins makes me eager to hunt down Galeano's more contemporary writings to see what he makes of all these events. In particular, I'd like to know whether he thinks the current state of affairs is an improvement on the dark days of his 1977 epilogue.

Because, perhaps with unreasonable optimism, I believe a corner may finally have been turned in Latin America's long struggle for maturity. Whether you approve more of Evo Morales' nationalisation process, or Chile's incremental social democractic reforms (and reasonable people might concede that both approaches are appropriate for the respective countries in their different situations), it seems that a majority of countries are now electing governments better equipped and prepared to tackle their underlying problems. More are insisting on the right to tackle their own unique challenges in their own way.

There are also signs that the countries of Latin America are, in an intermittent and still bitchy way, putting aside their artificially sustained national rivalries and working towards greater integration and a greater say in world affairs.

Of course, setbacks and failures are still ahead. The greatest challenge will be to empower and unleash the creativity of the masses of people who have long been nothing more than a source of cheap labour. Who knows how long it will take to shake off Latin America's historical legacy and ensure that blood flows heathily through and around its body, nourishing all its members?

Categories: Eduardo Galeano, Latin America, Peru

Renzo's Story

Eleven-year old Renzo had the cheeky grin and ready patois of a kid from Lima's barrios. He was happy enough when he said goodbye to his parents at the somewhat chaotic Enlaces station, beside the roaring traffic of the avenida Javier Prado, and boarded the bus with Hugo and I.

On the sixteen-hour journey to Arequipa, though, he was sleepless, panicky and intermittently nauseous. By the time we got off blinking in the White City's morning sunlight, Hugo, by nature sympathetic, was getting slightly impatient.

Over the next few days Renzo suffered from severe separation anxiety. He cried quietly in the room he had to share with Gerardo, and when a call was put through to his parents, sobbed down the phone to his mother.

Lizbeth was less than empathetic. "Aunt!" she shouted down the phone, in front of her nephew. "He's been blubbering all day! He misses your teats!" I told her I was taken aback by such vulgarity, and she chortled.

When he forgot his homesickness, Renzo brought out a series of anecdotes of life in the barrio of San Juan de Miraflores. This is one of the "old new" areas of Lima; once a pueblo joven, it gradually built itself up into working class respectability - though is now plagued by the crime and insecurity that spares few parts of Peru's teeming capital.

This time it was Lizbeth who was a bit shocked, as she listened to the tales. "That area's gone downhill", she said, shaking her head. "When I used to stay there as a student, it was tranquilo".

With casual relish, Renzo told us of how he had been attacked in the park where he liked to play football. "One time I was in the park with my bike, and these guys came up and robbed me at gunpoint. I resisted, and tried to get away on my bike, but they ran after me and threw me to the ground. They stole my helmet and left me there".

How old were these guys, I wanted to know. About seventeen, thought Renzo. And they had pulled a gun on him for his cycle helmet? "It was a motorbike helmet", he said, as if that explained everything.

Renzo shrugged that off plegmatically as an isolated incident and said it didn't worry him to go back to the park. "I'm not afraid of anything", he claimed. But playing and wandering on the streets, he'd been witness to at least two other violent crimes.

One time he'd seen a young guy with his girlfriend get attacked by four muggers, who stabbed the young guy in the leg before running off with his possessions. "Blood came spurting out", according to Renzo.

The people of the neighbourhood came out en masse, but the muggers were long gone. The kid was taken to hospital, where a piece of the knife was removed from his thigh.

Another time Renzo saw a man get grabbed by two guys who ordered him to "give us all your money". When the robbery produced little yield, they got angry, shouted "fuck, why don't you have any money?", and hit him in the head with a tyre iron.

Renzo also claimed to have witnessed a gunfight, just a couple of blocks up from his house.

"The U and the Alianza (Alianza Lima and Universitario de Deportes, rival groups of football hooligans) were fighting, and the police came and started to fire in the air. Then everyone started to shoot at each other", he recounted.

Renzo said he watched from a roof, about 6 or 7 metres away through a peephole in a steel wall. Had anyone been hit in the gunfight? "Sure, lots of them were hit - in the leg, in the arm, the chest, the stomach, the face".

Two of the Alianza cohort were killed, said Renzo. The police were greatly outnumbered and retired from the scene. "Later the Alianza went to look for the guys from the U, and killed seven of them. They cut their throats with big knives".

It was hard to know how much of this to believe, as when I pressed for details of the incidents in question they were supplied in exaggerated, improbable, and somewhat inconsistent fashion. But Renzo's world was was starting to sound uncomfortably like City of God.

He was fascinated with the street gangs that wandered through his barrio from even rougher areas like Villa El Slavador and San Juan de Lurigancho, home of Lima's notorious penal facility.

Like a budding social worker, Renzo deconstructed their criminality. "They're people who haven't had any education, their parents have treated them bad, that's why they're like that. It's not their fault; it's the fault of the parents".

So he wasn't afraid of the gangs, I asked a little incredulously. He shook his head.

"They don't do anything to us kids, they just fight amongst themselves. They steal the arms to defend themselves against the other gangs, or the police. Sometimes the commit a crime so they can get taken to jail, then they escape and steal weapons off the police".

So when the gangs were around, was he happy to just play football in the normal places?

Renzo paused. "Well, when they're around, I don't play. I want to watch them". He ruminated a second. "It's ok for me. But I do worry about when my parents go out. I worry that it's not safe for them. I can take a risk, but I don't want them to. I say 'no mamá, don't go out on the street'"

For all the bravado, I wondered if Renzo wouldn't prefer to live somewhere that didn't feature acts of mortal violence as part of life's daily tapestry. He'd grumped that in suburban Arequipa "there's no kids; there's no football on the street", but I asked him if he wouldn't like to be somewhere safer.

He shrugged. "I'd live wherever my parents were".

"Ok, so assuming your parents were with you, where would you prefer to live?", I queried.

"If my parents were in Lima, I'd prefer to live in Lima", he affirmed. "If my parents were in Arequipa, I'd live in Arequipa".

A la Hora Peruana

Have I ever written about "Peruvian time"? Oh yes. Here, here and here.

So it is with considerable amusement that I read in an almost Onion-like article from the Associated Press that the Peruvian government is launching a "plan to combat lateness"

According to the article, "schools, businesses and government institutions will be asked to stop tolerating 'la hora peruana', or 'Peruvian time' - which usually means an hour late". On March 1, it was intended that sirens would sound and church bells ring out, alerting 27 million Peruvians to synchronize their watches.

In part, this appears to be political points-scoring by president Alan Garcia, who likes to contrast his own punctuality with the notorious tardiness of former president Alejandro Toledo.

But to the extent that it's sincere, just synchronising watches and requesting everybody to turn up earlier for work is not going to change Peruvians' deep-seated, fatalistic attitude to time. Rather like life, it's seen as a force that is nebulous, only partly controllable, and prone to unexplained discontinuities.

Some of this perception is captured by the expression "ahorita", a word used from Mexico through Central America to Peru and Bolivia. As a dimunitive of ahora (now), you could be forgiven for accepting the dictionary translation, which defines it as "right now". But, as anyone who has lived or travelled in these countries will tell you, instead of applying more precision, the dimunitive serves to make the meaning more fuzzy or liquid, spreading out the "now" until its boundaries are no longer discernible.

When someone says that something will happen "ahorita", they are usually indicating that, though they are hopeful that the event will occur soon, they will not be held responsible for designating any specific moment.

"Ahorita vengo", for example, would be literally translated as "I'll be right back", but someone seeking to truly understand the import of the phrase should take it as meaning something like "I may be some time".

There are numerous examples of Peruvians' strange conception of time, of which I only have space to cite a couple. Among the many occasions when my Peruvian ex-girlfriend made we wait an unreasonable amount was an afternoon when had we agreed to meet at 4:00 pm to go to a movie. We decided that she would pick me up after her university classes at the office of Incaventura, where I was explaining trekking and climbing expeditions to groups of tourists.

At 4:15 I got a call to the office; it was Paola. "Hey, it looks like my lecture is going to run over time", she said in an apologetic tone. "He's already kept us here longer to explain something and it'll be another ten minutes before we get out. Sorryyy"

I was puzzled. "But what time was your class supposed to finish?", I asked. "Four o'clock", she said with a hint of impatience, as if I should have known that.

To get from the university to the tour office required her to take two minibuses and then walk several blocks. In the absolutely best combination of circumstances, it was twenty-five minutes away. Exactly which wormhole in the space-time continuum she had ever planned to crawl through to meet me at 4:00 pm, I'll never know.

Lest one take all this personally - and in the case of my ex-girlfriend it was so frequent and exaggerated that I did - it's worth observing that the same approach is routine even for esteemed individuals or for very important events

In my most recent trip to Peru, I attended a wedding in Arequipa, which was scheduled for midday Saturday. Some friends of mine from New Zealand, travelling through the Andean countries, also happened to be in Arequipa at the time, and one of them had experienced some health problems which required a specialist appointment at the local private hospital.

The appointment was for the same Saturday as the wedding, at 9:00 am, and I was to attend as a translator. I went to the hospital on Saturday morning already in my suit, thinking to be on the safe side I would plan to go straight from the hospital to the wedding.

By the time the medical issues were sorted out, it was getting late (the doctor had arrived at the hospital twenty-five minutes after our appointment time). The church where the wedding was to take place was only six blocks up the hill, so at 11:45, when everything seemed to be more or less ok, I left the hospital and hurried up to the church.

Arriving about 11:59, I was the second person there. I introduced myself to the bride's aunt, who was standing outside, and we went into the church. People started to drift in; about 12:10, the bride arrived - surprisingly early, and before the groom - and not long after, the ceremony started.

I can recall looking around and feeling a bit disappointed for Chriss that the beautiful colonial church was only one third full for her wedding. But about fifteen minutes into the ceremony, I turned around again and saw that most of the pews were full. People continued to arrive through the readings and the hymns, and eventually it was packed.

Almost last of all arrived the bridesmaids, who strolled into the church about 12:30, looking only very slightly embarassed, and took their place in one of the front pews.

So the lateness has no real rhyme or reason, and can't even be relied on to be consistent. In at least one case I found myself in an embarassing situation when someone I was relying on to be half an hour late actually arrived twenty minutes early.

It would be easy to assume that this is a result of a relaxed, straw-in-mouth approach to life by people who like to take it easy. But in fact the notable thing about Peruvians is that they often seem to be in a terrible hurry. People bump into each other rushing out of shops. Waiters and shop assistants are frequently harried and impatient. Inter-city buses speed along winding mountain roads, taking the curves with more haste than is necessary.

For people from other cultures, all this can be bewildering and frustrating. But once expectations are adjusted, "la hora peruana" begsin to grow on those of us who also tend to feel that time is a fluid and slippery beast. The amusingly passive Spanish verb constructions beloved in Latin America, like "se me hizo tarde" ("it got late on me") capture this feeling well.

I do have some sympathy with the Peruvian government's attempt to stigmatise chronic lateness, which is part of their general modernising drive to get the country to shake itself up and learn to solve its own problems. And yes, it's partly about respect for others, acknowledging that other people's time is valuable to them.

At the same time, it would be a less idiosyncratic, colorful society that gave itself entirely up to the mechanistic observances of schedules. To maintain an ambivalent, uneasy relationship with time's measures is, in part, to assert that they're not all that matters. The day Peru marches to the beat of the clock, it will have lost some of its unaccountable charm.

Fortunately, I don't think there's much chance of that happening in the near future.

Categories: Arequipa, South America, Peru