from: Dilwyn Jenkins: The
rough guide to Peru; Rough Guides, New York, London,
Delhi; 6th edition September 2006; www.roughguides.com
Independent natives in the
jungle - "Christian" colonization terror hardly possible
in the jungle
Many archaeologists think that the initial spark for the
evolution of Peru's high cultures came from the jungle.
Archaeological evidence from
Chavín, Chachapoyas and
Tantamayo cultures seems
to back up such a theory - they certainly had continuous
contact with the jungle areas - and the
Incas were unable to
dominate the tribes, their main contact being peaceful trade
in treasured items such as plumes, gold, medicinal plants
and the sacred coca leaf.
At the time of the
Spanish
Conquest, fairly permanent settlements seem to have
existed along all the major jungle rivers, the people living
in large groups to farm the rich alluvial soils, but the
arrival of the Europeans began the irreversible process of
breaking these up into smaller and scattered groups (a
process exacerbated by the nineteenth-century rubber boom,
see later).
Yet the Peruvian jungle still resisted major colonization.
Although
Alonso de
Alvarado had led the first Spanish expedition,
cutting a trail through from Chachapoyas to Moyobamba in
1537, most incursions ended in utter disaster, defeated by
the ferocity of the tribes, the danger of the rivers,
climate and wild (p.499)
animals - and perhaps by the inherent alien character of the
forest. Ultimately, apart from the white man's epidemics
(which spread faster than the men themselves), the early
Conquistadors hat relatively little impact on the population
of the Peruvian Amazon. Only
Orellana, one of the first Spaniards to lead
exploratory expeditions into the Peruvian Amazon, managed to
glimpse the reality of the rainforest, though even he seemed
to misunderstand it when he was attacked by a tribe of blond
women, one of whom managed to hit him in the eye with a
blow-gun dart. These "women" are nowadays considered to be
men of the Yagua tribe (from near Iquitos), who wear
straw-coloured, grass-like skirts and headdresses.
More "Christian" terror in
the jungle - uprising against church terror in 1742 -
"Christian" free central jungle
By the early eighteenth century the
Catholic Church had made
serious but still vulnerable inroads into the region.
Resistance to this culminated in 1742 with an indigenous
uprising in the central forest region led by an enigmatic
character from the Andes calling himself
Juan Santos Atahualpa.
Many missions were burnt, missionaries and colonists killed,
and Spanish military expeditions defeated. The result was
that the central rainforest remained under the control of
the indigenous population for the next ninety years or so;
in fact, as recently as 1919 the Ashaninka Indians were
blockading rivers and ejecting missionaries and foreigners
from their ancestral lands.
Rubber boom destroying
native cultures since 1830 - white slavery since the 1880s
- end of the rubber boom in 1891
As "white-man's" technology advanced, so too did the
possibilities of conquering Amazonia. the 1830s saw the
beginning of a century of massive and painful exploitation
of the forest and its population by
rubber barons. Many of
these wealthy men were European, eager to gain control of
the raw material, desperately needed following the discovery
of the vulcanization process, and during this era the jungle
regions of Peru were better connected to Brazil, Bolivia,
the Atlantic, and ultimately Europe, than they were to Lima
or the Pacific coast. The peak of the boom, from the 1880s
to just before World War I, had a prolonged effect. Treating
the natives as little more than slaves, men like the
notorious
Fitzcarrald
made overnight fortunes, and large sections of the forests
were explored and subdued.
In 1891, for example, the British-owned Peruvian Corporation
was granted the 500,000-hectare "Perene Colony" in the
central rainforest in payment of debts owed by the Peruvian
state. That the granted land was indigenous territory was
ignored - the Ashaninka who lived in the area were
considered a captive labour force that was part of the
concession. The process only fell into decline when the
British explorer Markham brought Peruvian rubber plants to
Malaysia, where the plants grew equally well but were far
easier to harvest (p.500).
Agricultural expansion and
the strategic colonos in the jungle - large deforestation
in the 1950s and 1960s and since 1980 under the stupid
president Belaunde - and oil and timber industry
Nineteenth-century colonialism also saw the progression of
the
extractive frontier
along the navigable rivers, which involved short-term
economic exploitation based on the extraction of other
natural materials, such as timber and animal skins; coupled
to this was the advance of the
agricultural frontier down from the Andes.
Both kinds of expansion assumed that Amazonia was a
limitless source of natural reserves and an empty wilderness
- misapprehensions that still exist today. The agricultural
colonization tended to be by poor, landless peasants from
the Andes and was concentrated in the Selva Alta, on the
eastern slopes of that range. From the 1950s, these
colonos became a
massive threat to the area's eco-system when, supported by
successive government land grants, credit and road building,
subsistence farmers and cattle ranchers inflicted
large-scale deforestation (p.500).
In the 1960s, President Fernando Belaunde put the
colonization of Amazonia central to his political agenda -
believing it to be a verdant, limitless and "unpopulated"
frontier that was ripe for development, offering land to the
landless masses. New waves of colonos ["strategic colonos"]
arrived and, once again, indigenous inhabitants were
dispossessed and yet more rainforest cleared.
Things quieted down between 1968 and 1980, during the
military regime, but when Belaunde returned to power in
1980, peasant colonization continued, by and large along
tenuous penetration roads built by the government, but also
with further state sponsorship and funding by international
banks.
Over the last few decades, the intrusion of oil and timber
companies has seen repeated exploitation of the rainforest.
Even worse, vast tracts of forest have disappeared as
successive waves of
colonos
have cleared trees to grow cash crops (p.501)
(especially coca); this large-scale, haphazard [arbitrary]
slash-and-burn agriculture has been shown by
conservationists to be unsustainable.
Economic crises after 1985:
White colonialist coca barons install their regime in the
jungle: deforestation by coca production and terrorism in
the jungle
When the Peruvian economy began to suffer in the mid-1980s,
foreign credit ended, and those with substantial private
capital fled, mainly to the US. The government, then led by
the young Alan García, was forced to abandon the jungle
region, and both its colonist and indigenous inhabitants
were left to survive by themselves.
This effectively opened the doors for the
coca barons, who had
already established themselves during the 1970s in the
Huallaga Valley, and they moved into the gap left by
government aid in the other valleys of the
ceja de selva - notably
the Pichis-Palcazu and the Apurimac-Ene. During the next ten
years, illicit coca production was responsible for some ten
percent of the deforestation that occurred in the Peruvian
Amazon during the entire twentieth century; furthermore,
trade of this lucrative crop led to significant corruption
and, more importantly, supported the rise of
terrorism. Strategic
alliances between coca growers (the colonists), smugglers
(Peruvians and Colombians) and the terrorists (mainly, but
not exclusively, Sendero Luminoso) led to a large area of
the Peruvian Amazon becoming utterly lawless.
Each party to this alliance gained strength and resources
whilst the indigenous peoples of the region suffered, stuck
seemingly powerless in the middle.
Over the last fifteen years the Peruvian authorities have
persecuted the
colonos
for their illegal crops, and their greatest successes in
this area have come largely from among the indigenous groups
themselves, like the Ashaninka tribe. Armed by the
authorities, these tribespeople were among the vanguard of
resistance to the
narco-terrorists,
whose movement, once rooted in politics and agriculture, had
become bloodthirsty, power-hungry and highly unpopular.
In the aftermath of the civil war, which began to fizzle out
with the capture of Sendero's leader in 1992, the
international financial institutions, whose earlier loans
had helped fund the disastrous colonization, started to
partly determine development policy in the Peruvian Amazon
so that those same loans could be repaid; resources such as
fossil fuels, lumber and land were privatized and sold to
the highest bidder.
New exploitation and
destruction of Peruvian jungle under dictator Fujimori
President Fujimori's neo-liberal agenda led to new
investment in this legitimate exploitation, which was
unfortunately mirrored by a huge increase in
illegal mining. Hordes
of landless peasants from the Cusco region also flocked into
the Madre de Dios to make their fortune from
gold mining. In itself
this was neither illegal nor an environmental threat, but
the introduction of front-loader machines and trucks - which
supplanted [eliminated] child labour in the mines in the
early 1990s - increased the environmental damage and rate of
territorial consumption by this unregulated industry.
By 1999, a massive desert had appeared around Huaypetue,
previously a small-time, frontier mining town, and the
neighbouring communities of Amarakeiri Indians (who have
been panning for gold in a small-scale, sustainable fashion
for some thirty years) are in serious danger of losing their
land and natural resources. Attempts by NGOs and
pro-Indian lawyers to maintain the boundaries of Indian
reserves and communities are constantly thwarted [inhibited
by intrigues] by colonists who are supported by local
governments.
As the danger from terrorism faded in the mid-1990s,
oil and gas exploration
by multinational companies began in earnest [by new Fujimori
laws which gave the foreign industry more rights as to the
Peruvians]. Initially the Peruvian government appeared to be
bending over backwards to assist them, and the (p.502)
reserves discovered - mainly in the Madre de Dios and the
Camisea - were believed to be of world-shattering
importance, with only the Amazonian indigenous organizations
and environmental conservationists active in opposition.
Momentum has slowed down for the moment; the decision to
drill in the Río de las Piedras ["Stone river"] has been
reversed, but work on the Camisea gas pipeline is well
underway.
End of 1990s: new products
for alternative crops
In the late 1990s, the price of coca continued to drop in
Peru as production shifted to Colombia, and many peasants
and jungle Indians alike were seriously looking for
alternative cash crops,
such as the traditional chocolate and coffee products or
newer options like
uña de
gato (a newly rediscovered medicinal herb) and
barbasco (a natural
pesticide).
Mining and petroleum and gas exploitation continues apace,
but with improvements to the jungle road infrastructure and
the attention of the global timber markets turning from
Southeast Asia back to the Amazon in recent years, it seems
that the illegal, and sometimes legal but unsustainable,
loggers are the major
threat to the remaining Indian cultures and their lush
tropical rainforest environment. The way things are going
it's hard to see how much longer the indigenous peoples can
maintain their traditional territories. Without the forest
the present forest-dwellers' children will be without a
means of surviving or earning a living. The present Peruvian
government, lead by President Toledo, has continued with
Fujimori's approach of privatization and engagement with
multinational companies for the exploitation of Peru's
resources, particularly those hidden beneath the rainforest
canopy [roof] (p.503).
Indigenous jungle tribes
Some tribes are
assimilating and working for the western money system - other tribes fight for their
origin culture and identity
Outside the few main towns, there are hardly any sizeable
settlements, and the jungle population remains dominated by
between 35 and 62
indigenous
tribes - the exact number depends on how you
classify tribal identity - each with its own distinct
language, customs and dress. After centuries of external
influence (missionaries, gold seekers, rubber barons,
soldiers, oil companies, anthropologists, and now tourists),
many jungle Indians speak Spanish and live pretty
conventional, westernized lives, preferring jeans, football
shirts and fizzy bottled drinks to their more traditional
clothing and
manioc
beer (the tasty, filling and nutritious
masato).
But while many are being sucked into the money-based labour
market, others, increasingly under threat, have been forced
to struggle for their cultural identities and territorial
rights, or to retreat as far as they are presently able
beyond the new frontiers of so-called civilization. In 1996,
for instance, oil workers encountered some previously
uncontacted groups while clearing tracts of forest for
seismic testing in the upper Río de las Piedras area of
Madre de Dios, northwest of Puerto Maldonado. In this region
it appears that some of the last few uncontacted tribal
communities in the Amazon - Yaminahua, Mashco Piro and
Amahuaca Indians - are keeping their distance from outside
influences.
In 2002 these same remote groups came out of the forest en
masse to prevent further intrusion by aggressive
illegal loggers in their
last remaining territory at the headwaters of the Río de las
Piedras. In August of that year some four hundred Indians
appeared on the riverbanks as a flotilla of illegal logging
launches made its way upstream from Puerto Maldonado.
Shaking and rattling their bows and arrows, the Indians
raised long vines as a barrier across the river and then
attacked the boats, badly injuring several loggers. In the
last few years there's been little information forthcoming
from this area; reports suggest that the loggers have moved
on through here to work closer to the Brazilian border and
the Indians have retreated further into the few remaining
areas of even more isolated forest, including Manu.
For most tribes, the jungle offers a
semi-nomadic existence,
and in terms of material possessions, they have, need and
want very little. Communities are scattered, with groups of
between ten and two hundred people, and their sites shift
every few years. For subsistence they depend on small,
cultivated plots, fish from the rivers and game from the
forest, including wild pigs, deer, monkeys and a great range
of edible birds. The main species of edible jungle fish are
sabalo (a kind of
oversized catfish),
carachama
(an armoured walking catfish), the feisty piranha (generally
not quite as dangerous as Hollywood depicts), and the giant
zungaro and
paiche - the latter, at
up to 200kg, being the world's largest freshwater fish. In
fact, food is so abundant that jungle dwellers generally
spend no more than three to four days a week engaged in
subsistence activities (p.501).