In December 1980 Lima residents awoke to find dogs hanging from the lampposts — the running dogs of capitalism.
This marked the arrival on the scene of Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path, a Maoist rebel movement that based themselves up here in the small towns and villages of the Andes. Led by a university professor the group grew at an alarming rate, feeding on the centuries-old resentment of highland Indians, descendants of the Incas, many of whom still see the lowland middle classes, descendants of the Conquistadors, as their oppressors. Sendero Luminoso was almost completely defeated by a no holds-barred army that often matched the perverse terrorism of Sendero Luminoso which, while claiming to speak on behalf of the peasantry, brutalized them.
The last few years have been quiet with most of the group’s leaders behind bars. But in the last few months two columns have restarted their activities in the coca-producing areas in the forested Amazon region. Last month eight policemen were ambushed and killed. A senior US official I spoke to in Lima seemed worried: “They have become less ideological and more criminal, forming a liaison with the drug traffickers and the coca farmers. This is how FARC began in Colombia. It has to be watched now before it mushrooms.”
Successive administrations since the leftist military government of Gen. Juan Valesco Alvarado in the 1970s have tried to battle the poverty of the Andes and the Amazon. The general introduced a land reform program, bold in its intent, but a failure in its consequences. It created big cooperatives to replace the latifundario that fell to pieces for lack of good management. Still the peasants did end up with more land, which is why in the higher altitude non-coca growing regions Shining Path was rejected by the peasantry.
But even here there is a sense of potential rebelliousness. I stayed the night in this small Indian village and my hostess, Julia Mamari, was unreservedly clear. “Revolution could happen again”, she said.
I spent a couple of days in this village and then worked myself around the altiplano, the cultivated area of the highlands that laced with the headwaters of the Amazon has spots of fertility but whose majority earn their precarious living by cultivating steep terraced slopes that appear to verge on the vertical.
Even the better-off peasants, like the ones I stayed with, and who have cleverly raised their incomes by advertising rooms for the night, live at a very basic level. One step from my bedroom took me into the courtyard with two tethered cows and a sheep. The toilet was not much more than a hole in the ground and the water supply for washing was half a bowl full.
The relative success of this backpacker-orientated initiative owes itself to the quite remarkable Corridor Project, funded by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development. For those who have doubts about aid working they should come here. All over the mountains there are separate communities engaged in new forms of old livelihoods, taking the Incan arts forms that were out of favor for centuries and boldly bringing them into the modern era. In one community there were beautiful hats and jerseys made from alpaca, in another ceramics, in another cheese making, in another tanning and rug production. The Indian women who used to dress down now have gone back to their old ways, with their flunky thick skirts, bright red jackets and broad, flat hats.
In one village I saw a group of women knitting with babies at the breast sitting under an awning on a rather rainy day, with a solitary man who was an advisor on old Indian designs. In another village I met a group of women who had started to earn money for the first time in their life after being taught the rudiments of animal husbandry.
Since I was last here eighteen years ago the state has not been inactive. Despite the turbulence of Peruvian politics and until ten years ago its total inability to run a sound economy there are many improvements — new roads, forestation on the once denuded slopes, more schools and clinics. Still expectations appear to run ahead of progress.
Peru has probably outgrown its era of turbulence. But the insouciances of the Spanish descended elite remains. So much more has to be done and quickly too if Shining Path or some other group are not to try and set the country on fire again. The presidential candidates for April’s election talk about poverty alleviation but they have no cohesive plan for institutionalizing in government programs the kind of small-scale work I visited.
