in various prisons for various “revolutionary actions.” When I met hirn in a small prison in Peru’s south in 1988, he was in the last week of his most recent sentence, this time for blowing up some banks. Upon his release the Peruvian magazine Caretas published an article that Javier later showed me proudly, asking why such a dangerous terrorist was roaming around free. He had given me his address and told me to look him up when I was in Lima. Two years later I did. He was surely back in the mountains or dead, I thought. But I went to the address he had given me and found that |avier, the guerrilla, was living with his mother.

The family-|avier, his mother, various brothers, favier’s niece-lives in a working-class Lima neighborhood in a house the men built themselves. Twenty-six years later, it still lackcd parts of the roof, doors, and plumbing. The walls are hung with crucifixes and pictures of Christ. His mother, Blanca, was in hcr late fifties, a widow who had worked hard all her life in thc postal scrvice. “lf you only knew how much trouble he gives nlc, sc- iiorita,” she said in her soft voice. “That boy, hc lives only frrr 1>olitics. Why don’t you take him to the United States? I,’ind hinr a job?”

“l am working, Ma,” Javicr said. Upon his releasc frour prisorr lrc had grxrc back to thc nrountains, btrt hc hacl gottcrr sick arrrl rctrrrrrcrl to l,inra. Now lrc was twcnty-thrcc, wrlrking irr a stock- lrrokcr’s oflficc tlttrirrg tlrt’tliry–it sittuttiort in wlriclr It(: sitw rro

I r/R I

1461 CHILDREN oF CetN

irony at all-studying law at night, and dedicating his free time to the People’s War.

It was going well. The People’s War marked its tenth birthday in May 1990. The Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso, is a Maois[ movement that seeks to wipe out the old order and impose

a “People’s Republic of the New Democracy,” a society modeled

afte, Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Sendero’s Mao is Abimael Guz-

m6n, a shy, paunchy philosophy professor-bachelor’s thesis: “On the Kantian Theory of Space”-who taught at the University of San Crist6bal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, one of Peru’s poorest

and most backward states. He founded Sendero with a strike over

the issue of tuition in 1969 and, using teachers and students to spread his gospel, began to build the movement. In 1976 he resigned from the university, and two years later Sendero vanished

und-ergro,rrd. Guzman began to call himself Presidente Gonzalo;

his followers proclaimed him the fourth sword of world revolu- tion: Marx; Lenin; Mao; Presidente Gonzalo. The people’s rev-

olution began in earnest in May 1980, when Sendero arrived in the highland village of Chuschi on the night before Peru’s first

elections after twelve years of military rule. The guerrillas burned

the ballot boxes. Shortly after, Lima awoke to the sight of dead

dogs hanging from lampposts in cloth slings marked ‘Teng Siao Ping son of a bitch.” The few Peruvians who noticed the exotic ander-rigmatic Sendero could not take it seriously.

Ten years later Peruvians were taking Sendero Luminoso very

seriously indeed. Among contemporary guerrilla movements, only Poi Pot’s Khmer Rouge is comparable in brutality. Sendero

women flirt with police; when the officer lets down his guard, they slit his throat and take his weapon. A Sendero chief and her

fighters stop a truckload of local government officials; after killing them, the Senderistas cut out their eyes and tongues. A ten-year-

old boy carrying lit dynamite walks to the door of a Lima bank and explodes.

In the name of erasing the old order, a company of Senderistas

entering a highland village will kill anyone associated with that order: the local mayor; the health post’s nursc; thc pcasant or- ganiz.er managing farm coopcratives; thc bank sccurity guard; thc

E.,rup.r,1 agrtln<lmist copr[ating sficcp fcvcr; tltc pcasatlt wlt<l gwns trxr largc ir plgt of lxrtittgcs; tltc sttrtlcltt wlt<l gtlcs kr tftc luirport kr pick rrlt a pxrliticirl carxlirlirtc arrivirrg frrrnr l,itttit. lrt

D r A L E C T I C | 147

April 1990 guerrillas entered two Andean villages and killed sev- enty-four peasants, many of them old people and children.

Customarily the Peruvian Army moves into a village a few days after Sendero leaves. The army’s treatment of villagers is almost indistinguishable from that of the guerrillas. It rounds up all those it suspects of sympathizing with Sendero: the housewife who cooked a meal out of fear for her life; the local government officials whom Sendero suspiciously allowed to live; Ieftist peasant organizers; neighborhood leaders; sometimes a town’s entire pop- ulation of young men. They are taken to the army base and usually not seen again.

By the war’s tenth anniversary the guerrillas and the govern- ment had killed a total of twenty thousand Peruvians. Despite the government’s repression-or, more likely, because of it- Sendero is growing. In 1990 Senderologists in Peru estimated that the group had between five thousand and seven thousand guerrillas, and many more civilians sympathized or lent political support of various kinds. Sendero controlled a small liberated terrority in Peru’s jungle. In most of the country’s mountainous highlands, or altiplano, Sendero was strong enough to have par- alyzed all government activity. And i* guerrillas could carry out sabotage and assassinations in every region of Peru.

I first met favier in Pocollay Prison, offa dirt road six kilometers from Tacna, a town on Peru’s southern border, in March 1988. A fesuit priest I knew had told me that there was a Senderista in Pocollay. I arrived on a day for women’s visits and told the guard I was favier’s friend. I was searched and sentto a central courtyard. ‘fhe guard brought favier out a minute later. He was a skinny kid missing a front tooth. We first went into the warden’s office kr talk, but the warden was sitting at his desk, shuffling papers. “l’m supposed to receive visitors in privacy,” favier said.

“Go wherever you like,” said the warden. We went to |avier’s cellblock and bought two bottles of Kolin

Kola cherry soda for a nickel apiece and sat on the cement stcps iu tl’rc sunny courtyard to drink the soda and talk about thc l’coplc’s War.

f avier first said politely that he was not interestcd in spcaking kr lnyonc fronr thc Unitcd Statcs. I said that pco;;lc in thc []rritcd Slirlcs would bc intcrcstcd in hcaring what Scndcro hlrl to say. Ilc lrcsitatcd [<rr l rriorrrcrrt, tltcrr sititl tlritt tlrcrc wcrc ir krt ol’

i4slCntlDREN oF CAtN

misconceptions about Sendero and that it might be good to talk for a while. He also seemed glad for the company. He explained Sendero’s mission to me, what the People’s War was about and why it was destined to be victorious in Peru. He went to his cell and brought me some copies of Sendero’s newspaper, El Diario, and some early tracts of Presidente Gonzalo. I read them and came back the next day, duly enlightened, and we talked more. He told me he was due to get out of prison in a week or two. Before I left, he gave me his mother’s address in Lima and invited me to look him up.

Two years later he greeted me like an old friend. He was fatter than he had been in prison-“concentration camp food will kill anyone,” he said, laughing-and had new glasses and a new front tooth. He was wore black jeans and a yellow checked shirt and carried a notebook with Donna Summer’s picture on the cover. He said he was in college to make his mother happy; he had spent many years causing her grief, and it weighed on him. The official story was that he had retired from Sendero, but Blanca seemed to suspect the truth. “My eldest son never gave me any problems,” she told me. He was a neurosurgeon. “But this one . .” She swept her arm in the direction of |avier, who was sitting at the table.

favier’s sister was a Senderista as well, Blanca said, fighting somewhere in the mountains. Blanca was taking care of the girl’s seven-year-old daughter and had started formal adoption pro- ceedings. As she described her two wayward children, she got angrier and angrier. “What kind of kid goes around killing people?” she said, standing and waving her arms. “Down with the terrorists! Death to the terrorists!” )avier had heard this before. He sat calmly eating grapes, spitting out the seeds.

“The system kills people with hunger,” he said. “Sixty thou- sand children die before their first birthday each year in Peru. What’s going to help them?”

“l pray,” said his mother. “l say prayers for them.” “That’s great, Mom,” he said. “You just keep on praying.” After a few more minutes of this )avier said we had to be going.

I was relieved; I had never intcrvicwed a gr,rcrrilla in frrtnt of his nrothcr before, arrcl I was uot conrflortablc with all thc grotutcl rulcs.

“l rkur’t kltrtw wltitt tttorc Icottltl tlo lo gllt’ltsc lrt’r.” llt: siglrc<l

D r A L E C T r C | 149

as we walked out of the house. “You think this is easy? Everyone weakens. I’m sentimental about my mother. I hate knowing I cause her pain. She wants the best for her children. But she’s ignorant. She suffers and blames it on ‘Senderista killers.’ But I’m firm. Men can be wrong, but the party is never wrong. As long as we have the party, we’ll triumph. We are condemned to victory. ”

I told favier that I was writing a book. I didn’t agree with his views, I said, but I wanted to understand Sendero. He agreed to help. He did not ask permission from his superiors to talk to me-he certainly would not have received it-and I, in turn, agreed to change his name and those of his family members in the book.

I saw him every night for a week and met most of his family. Some of them knew about his activities; some did not. Hc told only one set of cousins, clearly sympathetic to Sendero, that I was a reporter. His aunt served us coffee and crackers-possibly all the food the family had-as his cousins gathered in their tiny, shabby living room to listen to )avier talk. To the rest of his family, and to classmates and fellow Senderistas, favier intro- duced me as a primary school teacher from the States who lived in Chile, a tourist in Peru. One night we dropped in on another family of cousins who lived behind the Congress Building in central Lima. Three teenage girls were watching a Venezuelan soap opera on TV and painting one another’s nails. favier headed straight for the kitchen and left me to the girls’ affectionate torture of endless questions about TV programs and fashions in the States. “You haven’t had any trouble in Peru, have you?” one said. “You haven’t run across any terrorists?”

TerroristsT Aside from the one raiding your refrigerator? “Oh, no,” I said.

About half the time I liked )avier. He was funny, smart, and sarcastic. He agonized over his mother, spun intricate plots to win back his ex-girlfriend, requested new tennis shoes from Chile-preferably Reeboks-and nagged me to take carc of my hcad cold ar-rd get some sleep. But at times a switch would flip irr lris lrcad, ancl a tape of Pensamiento Conzalo, thc thotrghts of Prcsiclcntc Gonzalo, worrld bcgin to play.

“Prcsidctttc Mao lScrrdcro’s tcrrn [<rr Mao Zcrkngl,” )avicr wrlrrkl sity, “sairl it’s rrot crrorrglr kr siry it oncc, yoll lrlvc: kr siry

lsolCHtLDREN oF CetN

it many times, and I’m not tired of saying it to you: We are developing a growing and victorious people’s war’ ” He never seemed to tire of saying it to me. “We fight only to give power to the people,” he said. We spoke iust as the Sandinistas were preparing to leave office in Nicaragua. “Look at Nicaragua-so many deaths in that war, and for what? To turn power back to the bourgeois? That is an inconclusive revolution. They don’t understand that the purpose of fighting is to turn power over to the lower classes. A Nicaragua will not happen in Peru. Presi- dente Gonzalo won’t permit it.”

I had to learn his code. The “Fascist genocidal government” meant the government of Peru’s president, Alar-r Garcia. The political right was the “reaction”; the traditional left, as Mao put it, the “revisionism.” The “correct way” or the “way of the peo- ple” meant violence. “The bourgeoisie will let the revisionists have their congressional seats. But they’ll never give up power

except through violence,” favier said. T[re society he wanted was China under Mao or, at second

best, Russia under Stalin, but even Stalin had gone soft. “Gor-

bachev betrays the people’s interests,” he said. “True revolution- aries are still fighting. ”

What do you think of what happened in Tiananmen Square? I asked. We were walking through the menacing, dimly lit streets of Lima’s Pueblo Libre neighborhood, near his university. “A very hopeful and uplifting event,” he said. The massacre? I said, incredulous. He waved me away. “You’re focusing on the wrong

thing. The reactionary propagandists talk about that. But that was just counterrevolutionaries killing counterrevolutionaries. The important thing is that there were students in the square with Mao banners, people who still believed in the violent way. The people were present.

“To ensure that new generations don’t weaken, we must have a cultural revolution,” he continued. But Mao’s had not gonc far enough. “When Deng Xiaoping began to exhibit countet- revolutionary tendencies, he was sent to care for pigs to proletarizc

him. And look what happened. If he had been liquidatccl, hc wouldn’t have caused all these problerns. Mao wls olly tfic [ca{ of the party, while others hcadcil the statc anclthc nrilitary. Wc’vc lcanrccl frrnr tlut. ‘l’hc party has to coutr<ll cvcrytlting. Absoltrtcly cvr:rytltittg. ”

D tA L E C T I C | 1s1

“Do you want a Maoist revolution all over the world?” I asked. “ln Scandinavia?”

“Yes,” he said. He got dreamy-eyed. “l often imagine a swarm of peasants taking the city, just like in the Long March. It’s utopian, I know. Can you imagine it here in Peru?” I shook my head. “You’re such a pessimist,” he said.

“And don’t you think you’re a fanatic?” I said. “Presidente Gonzalo has never told us that we are fanatics,”

he said.

Su*r”*o BREAKS Mosr oF THE RULES oF GUERRTLLA *ARFARE. Latin America possesses a rich tradition of guerrilla activity, and Peru has a group that follows that tradition. It is not Sendero but the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), which began armed action in 1984, a much smaller group than Sendero. The MRTA reveres Che Guevara. It publishes intellectual tracts, seeks to form alliances with left-wing groups, sends its troops out to do the necessary political drudgery of organizing, and tries to ingratiate itself with the poor sectors of Peru.

To Ser-rdero, the MRTA is just one more brand of bourgeois revisionism; Che Guevara, wrote Presidente Gonzalo, was a “chorus girl.” Senderista columns have ambushed the MRTA’s guerrillas.

Sendero models its revolution after Mao’s, but China, along with Cuba and the Soviet Union, repudiates Sendero for its viciousness. Sendero receives aid from no one; its fighters make their weapons or steal them by killing police or soldiers. In the spirit of fair play, Sendero has bombed the Soviet and Chinese cmbassies in Lima as well as the U.S. Embassy. It does not try to explain its actions, and leaders seldom give interviews, even to El Diario, the group’s newspaper. It directs its principal bru- talig not against rightists-who “sharpen the contradictions,” llrus serving the revolution-but against campesino organizers rrncl labor leaders of the left, who “divert the campesinos’attention fronr the central task, which is the People’s War. ”

Although Scnclcro clairns to rcpresent the Indians, who make rrll 60 pcrccnt of Pcru’s 1>optrlation, a group that suffcrs fror-u urt:iirl disc:rinrinatiorr tarrlarrtorurt kl itltartlrcid, tlrcrc is vcry littlc

lsglcHtLDREN Ot cetN

that is native about Sendero’ The names scrawled on the walls

.iirr.””t o are not those of Peruvians but Jiang Quing and Lin ilrr’, ,.a S.r,d..o’, literature treats Peru as if it were as homo-

;;;;;;t as Denmark. It is class, not ethnicity’ that matters to”S.r,a.to. And it terrorizes the very people it seeks to win over'””;”Ih; pr;t decides everything,;’ lavier -said. Instead of trying to organi’re th. -“rr.,, a traditional task for guerrillas’ Sendero r,*ri, tells the -rrr., what to do’ “People don’t want words; ii.y ,1,r”, d..dr,” Javier said’ “You talk to the masses in simple i;;”;, ,r,d ti,”‘si*plest and clearest is with bullets and dv- ,.,rriit.]”‘The guerrillas repudiate the strikes called by Peru’s

,ri””t. A Send-ero strike is a” “a’med strike”‘ supported not out oisolidarity but out of fear, as businesses that open their

doors

,r”bo-b”d and workers who venture out on the street are shot’

Yet Sendero grows. In the late 1980s Sendero prornpted the

nor.rr*”rrt to “place

more than half of Peru under a state of

:;;;;;l *ltn urti” constitutional rights suspended’ Sendero runsclandestinepeople’scommitteesthatadmilristerschoolsand r”Ii”*”ar.y heaith ili”it’ in large sections of rural Peru’ Since 1986 the movement has developtd ‘ b”” in

Lima’ especially in

ihe city’s free universities; Sendero w-o,n the student elections in

lavier’s university, San Marcos, in I988′ ‘- i;;.;t stronghold is the five states that make up the moun- trino,r, tpin. of F.r,,, particularly its birthplace’ Ayacucho-

Qr.”t,r, for “corner’oi tht dead'” At the funeral of guerrilla

EJith i;grt in 1982, a crowd equivalent to half the population ;aih” .rf,itrl city of Ayacucho followed her casket to the cem-

;i;, to,’*r”* S*d”,oiv-“” Whel the group calls.an armed ili. i” iyr”,r.ho, .u.ry ho”t is- shuttered and locked’ After ;il”;; boycotted ihe municipal elections of 1989, Ayacucho’s ,.r,rlt, had io be annulled when three quarters of the ballots came

in blank or sPoiled. Sendero does not control the altiplano, but it is strong enough

to e.ts,rre that the government doein’t either’ There are no clc-

“.fffi.”* wo.kers”and only a handful of ,sovlrnr,ncnt

officials’

the iest having been killed or driven out by Sendcro’ Senclcro

had killerl at least ten mayors of Ayacucho bcforc thc annuhncttt

oiih” ,ru,ricipal clcctior.rs c,snrcd thcrc w<;ulcl 6c ,. ur,rc cau- ;;,ilr- O,ly^tcaclrcrs rcnrttitr, a,cl tScrr .tt thc c,,tliti.rr tltat iir.v t”u”f , lricsirlc,tc O.rrzalr’s vcrsi,tt .[ lriskrry’ ltt s’tttc statcs

D tA L E C T tC | 1s3

the only remaining representatives of the Peruvian state are soldiers-tense, skittish, guns always drawn, often too terrified to venture out of their garrisons after nighdall.

In the late 1980s Sendero consolidated its rule over the coca- growing Upper Huallaga Valley, wresting control from Colom- bian traffickers who had turned the valley into a Peruvian Wild West. Sendero came in, organized the coca growers, and put an end to the chaos of the Colombians. Now the Upper Huallaga is where the People’s Republic of the New Democracy comes to life.

Sendero quickly imposed a puritanical morality. Adulterers, alcoholics, coke addicts (aside from those who practice the in- digenous custom of chewing coca leaves), and homosexuals re- ceive preliminary warnings and, if they persist, are then shot. Landowners who mistreat their workers or businessmen who charge usurious interest are executed after perfunctory people’s trials. As unattractive as it is, many Upper Huallaga residents welcomed Sendero’s regime. When the Peruvian government attempted to eradicate the coca fields, Sendero killed the eradi- cation workers and quickly stopped the program. The peasants hate eradication, which not only wipes out their livelihood but also leaves them in the very uncomfortable position of owing the Colombians coca Ieaf they no longer possess. Sendero also forces the Colombians to pay the Peruvian campesinos better prices. For its part, Sendero exacts from the Colombians a 5 to l5 percent “tax” on leaves sold and also charges them to use local airstrips. Senderologists estimate that Sendero makes from twenty to thirty million dollars a year in the Upper Huallaga Valley.

I asked favier how Sendero reconciled its strict morality with protection of the coca farmers. “Peru’s campesinos have always lived off coca leaves,” he said. “Coca has an exalted place in Pcru’s history and religion. The drug traffickers come in and cxploit the situation. We just want to impose conditions that rlon’t take advantage of the campesinos.”

“But at least in my country, the people most hurt by cocaine lurlclicti<ln are the poor and oppressed,” I said.

“What do we care about the poor of the United States?” he siricl. “When clid the United States evcr care about the poor of l’crrr?”

A rrcw rccrrrit, stri<l favicr, takcs part in discrrssion ancl stucly

l54 lCutLDREN oF CetN

groups in which Peru’s problems and Presidente Gonzalo’s so-

iutions are analyzed. Then a compafrero might become a courier

or carry out other tasks in the network of civilian supporters’ Wfr.” he is ready to take up arms, he sometimes gets them by

killing a policeman. The aci of violence binds him to Sendero

ard iaket it hard to retreat later to “legal” Peru’- frri”, would not say if he himsclf had killed anyone’ and he

*rrfa tell me little atout his early experiences. At thirteen or fourteen he was recruited in iunior high school’ when the Peo-

pt.’rWrrwasinitsinfancy’Hismotherandbrotherssaidhe ‘had

always been a sentimental child, greatly affected by-Peru’s

fou.tty. He had, it seemed, always foined organizations: He was

fn”. , Boy Scout and a devout Catholic. “But I realized that y””-“r*.hr,-,g”thingsbyyourself,”faviersaid'”Ithastobe collective action. It *rI hrtd for me to stop believing in God’ It still is. But this is the waY.””–Jrui”.;rfrther

had been a policeman. He died in a car accident

when favier was young. Butiavier was sure he would understand’

;i” u. honest,’at fir”st t had a lot of trouble with the idea of killi,g poli”e,” he had told me in fail in 1988′ “But now I have

il”.”?a”.rted, and I understand why it is necessary. They ed-

“”r,.a ,ne *”1i. I think if my father were alive, he’d approve'”

Tru *or-, THAT sPLITS wHAT usED To BE GLepvs MENesr:s’s property in two is a solid, thick wall, eight feet high and- m-ade

ii .o.,”r.t.. It runs from the front of her yard to the track’ It is th. rrly part of her property that is well constructed; the wall ,ror.r,-,d f,., yard is o.,iy ft.,r-feet tall in parts and made of piled-

up stones. I could I’rave knocked it over with my fingers’ Thewal]wastwoweeksoldwhenlmetGladysforthefirst

timeinlg8S.GladyshadneverheardofSenderoLuminoso. She had not even heard of Peru’s president, Alan Garcia. Gladys

*r, *””ry three and lived in Tacna, seven kilometers from the p”.tffry Prirorr, where I had met |avier’ That was all she and

Jarie, liad in common. Her life was the absolute a,tithcsis of

i,,is. He was i. collcge; s5c 6acl lcft sc5o.l at clcvctt. IIc was a ngtr,”r, s6c, a victini Ilc talkc4 a l,t; slrc sp.kc vcry littlc. Iltrt it”*,,, t;tr.tys wlto lrcl,crl nrc rrrulcrstrtrrtl iltc ,rtrittloxt:s tt[ ).vicr.

D tA L E C T tC | 1s5

I began to understand how Sendero, with its worship of violence and its fanaticism, could be gaining support in Peru when I helped Gladys Meneses try to tear down the wall.

I was in a health post in Natividad, a poor neighborhood of Tacna, asking some questions about tuberculosis when Zenobia, a nurse, introduced me to Gladys, a short, dark, waif-thin woman with delicate features and black, wavy hair. “You want to hear a story?” Zenobia asked. “Why don’t you talk to her?” Gladys was sitting on a wooden school chair, grimacing from the pain of a tuberculosis shot in her Ieft hip. Ten minutes later, when the pain had subsided, we went into the next room. Her son Marco, who seemed to be three or four but I later four-rd out was six, climbed up and down a dentist’s chair while we talked.

It was the third time in two years she had started tuberculosis treatments, Gladys said. The first time the health post ran out of free medicine. The second time the whole city, including the tuberculosis ward at the hospital, ran out of medicine. In De- cember 1986, when the health post ran out, she decided to sell part of her small piece of land to be able to pay for medicine. She sold half her lot to a man I’ll call forge L6pez, who owned a chain of bars. The price was twelve thousand intis, then about six hundred dollars; at the time of my visit it was worth a hundred dollars. He had paid her in dribs and drabs, with no interest or adjustment for Peru’s tremendous infation. He still owed her two thousand intis. At the time of the purchase that was a hundred dollars; but when I met her, two years later, it was only twelve dollars, and inflation was rising so fast that in another month it would be six dollars. Now L6pez had told her he was waiting for a brother-in-law to pay him some money he owed before he could pay Gladys. But the brother-in-law, it seemed, was in no hurry.

L6pez had warned Gladys that if she told anyone about his delay in paying, he would make sure she lost the rest of the house as well. To show her he meant business, he had beaten up one of her brothers. But she had told Zenobia about it, and at Zeno- l>ia’s urging now she told me, cautioning me not to talk about it with anyone. Two weeks ago he had built the concrete wall down tlrc nricldlc of thc yard ancl told hcr that his brother intended to rrrovc in ou thc otlrcr sidc.

I askcd OLrdys iI slrc Irl<l firrrrily. “My lrrrsbancl abarrckrrrcrl

156 lcntLDREN oF cAlN

me,” she said. She had her two boys, Marco, six, and Mario’

t*o, ,.,d two older brothers-both mentally unstable- alco- holi.r-*hom she housed and cared for. Her last iob had been as a dishwasher in a restaurant, earning twenty or thirty cents a

Jry-*.tt below the minimum wage-and lunch for herself and the children. She was so hoarse she could hardly talk; the tu-

berculosis had gone to her throat’ I explained tf,at I was a reporter and asked if I could speak with

her agair,. She told me to come to her house the next morning’

a1.r”Ctrays left, Zenobia came in with a tray of medicine. She

said she had gotten Gladys some clothes for the boys from the

Mor-o, chuich she attended. “You know, I’m used to hearing stories like this from the immigrant women who came here from

tt. t igr,h”as,” she said. “But Gladys can read’ The husband who aband6ned her is a science teacher. Maybe you can help her”’

The next morning I went to Gladys’s house, three blocks from

the health post, on the one paved road in the Natividad neigh-

borhood. The door to her yard was made of a sheet of blue tin

attached to a piece of thick cardboard by nails driven through

coke bottle caps. A plank propped against the door served as a

lock. Her housi consisted of one small dark room. In it were two

s*all b”ds, a table with some pots on it, a heap of old clothes’ ,” old tricycle that was still too big for Marco, and a wooden ,.t ort chair. on the wall was a colorful poster featuring the products of Bayer herbicides, some small pictures of saints, a

;”; of a ch,rfby blond girl praying-“I pray {o1 Mommy and’Daddy,” said the ie”t-atd a large picture of a blue-eyed fesus’

fnl’airt yard contained a water pump and a fire pit for cooking and was stiung with wash. Dog excrement was everywhere’ At

if,. Ur”t of thJ yard was a smali cubicle of woven straw. One of ir.i Urottt.ts slept there, Gladys said, and one slept out in the yard. Parts of the wall around the yard had fallen in; at some

poiro you could step over it easily’ I never saw a toilet’ and I never asked.

My visit was full of the little rituals of class. To her I was misti,

, [,rl”hu, word for the highest, the fi,est, the patron’ ‘l’he gulf

bfru..n us was unbreachable. Gladys 5ad o,ly o.c c5air, at*l oll nry first visits, bcforc wc got rrsccl to sittirtg in ltcr ltottsc, Marco-,rlways wcitring thc sarnc swcatcr tlurt lrtrrrg kl lris krrccs-wOrrltl ltrrslt tlrc clririr ottt ittt0 tltc ttitrrow l)llssilgcwily

D tA L E C T I C | 157

between the house and the new concrete wall. I would not sit down-she was sick, not I-and I motioned to Gladys to sit. She would not sit. So we both stood, and Mario played with the legs of the chair. I asked her repeatedly to call me Tina, not seflorita. She nodded-the misti, of course, is always right-but always called me seflorita. I toyed with the idea of asking her to use the informal fu instead of. usted for “you” but decided that this was carrying cultural imperialism too far. So I did the next best thing. I called her usted and Seflora Gladys. She must have thought I was crazy.

Gladys’s story was not the saddest I had heard in Latin America. I had met hundreds of people in worse circumstances: street beggars; people who had no roof at all; children starving to death. At first I was tremendously affected by seeing such poverty. Then after a while I started getting numb; giving away a coin or two when people asked and not thinking about it anymore. So much poverty was overwhelming. It blocked me from focusing on the person and made me focus on the poverty, on the metaphysics of why there was so much pover$, and once my mind had made a tour of the realities of life in the third world, it seemed my hundred pesos would provide little relief. What could my hundred pesos do? It only meant that the same beggar would ask me again the next day.

But Gladys’s wall was different. It shifted the picture away from tl’re wide angle and made me focus on a detail and a person. Here was an injustice that could be rectified.

I told her that I had been thinking maybe I could help with the problem of the wall. I could find a lawyer to take the case, I said. I asked her some questions. No, she didn’t have a lawyer, but L6pez did. She said she had signed a lot of papers; but his lawyer had them all, and she had no copies. She was afraid of l,(tpez; she didn’t want to live in the street. But yes, if I helped, shc would sue him.

I was thrilled. Gladys wanted to fight the system. Here was proof; given a little support and encouragement, she would stand up for her rights. I was sure that with a good lawyer we could wirr this case. “You know he has no legal grounds for kicking you out ofyour housc,” I said. She just looked at nrc. I gavc hcr rr lug of oatrncal I lrad lxrtrglrt firr almut tcn cents in thc urarkct. llcr flrcc lit rrlt, tlrc hrst crrrolion slrc ltatl slrown sincc wc rrrct.

1s8 ICHtLDREN oF C’qtN

Tacna, where Gladys lives, is a dusty town of I70’000 on the

Chi;;; tord.r, the reiatively prosperous-capital of the wealthiest state in peru. Tacna ,ir, i” it,” middle of the driest desert in

the

world. The houses are built of concrete or white adobe brick and

blend in with the ,,*ot”tdlng sand’ The trees in the center of

;;;;;i” avenue, th. Ar””tdl Bolognesi, are the only touch of green.-

Central Tacna is small, but in the surrounding mountains new

i**igrr.tt scttle into pueblos iovene,s(“young t?*’]:’,! I:”:: est pieblos iovenes are checkerboards of straw

shcds rn tne sano’

little more than tents, with no water,or electricity’ (‘fhe pueblo

-;-.””, it which Gladys lives’ Natividad’ is one of thc most cs-

ffi;h.d ,”Jo”” of ti,e f”* that feature such ame.ities’) Seventy oercent of the ,.opi” i” ‘facna, and practically all the people ffi;;;.j; in”i”rit”t i6venes,are immigrants from the Peruvian irighir”at, the Quectrua- and Avmar6-spe’O1l* ltl,L,:’T: *fr”r. Sendero got its start’ Tacna’s immigrants are matnty

n’v-

mar6 Indians from the nearby state of Puno, a bleak, harsn nrgn-

i;il;;;;;;;a uv a.o”gl”ts and floods’ Some of the men speak’Jp^”i”ttt, but practicalli none of the women do’

‘fhey come trr

trv to work i,’t’r”,,,i’ itlriving contraband market’ selling goods H;;-* ;;”t it. u.’at’ f’o*”Chile’ A man usuallv travels down itr”i?fr” highlands in the back of a truck and stays with cousins

while he looks for work in construction or in the contraband

-rrf.1a- Wt en he fi.,ds it, h” go., back to Puno to bring his wife

and children. Accustomed to a rural life of caring for sheep and

growing

notatoes. the immigrants build their srnall shacks of woven straw’

[,”el!ffi;;;. t”,ri with stones to keep the wind from blowing them off. Although they now live in a hot’ dry’ crowd-ed

city

i”t*a of in a .Jld, ‘p”‘”ly populated highland’ they livc cs-

sentially as they did in Puno, the only way they ktrow’ sPeaKrng

ny*rri, dresring the way they alway^s dressed’ the women itt

i;Jir;;tt of skilts, sweatlts, and.bowler hats even i. 85-clegrcc afternoons. The women seli food on ttre street; thc

btlys shirrc

shoes or wash cars for a few pennies ,a clay’ Bccattsc -of its largc

immigration-lr;;; h” q*tltuPlcd in siz’c sincc 1950-tlrc ;;;;r:t short of t,.,’it’; t’crc is “i'””tglt wrttcr’

ftrr cxa,t,lc’ *r

,.irirrv i,,r, ,,u”, l,^ii tlr” 1>oPrrlatiorr. lt is t lrilKl 1ift., lrrrt i[ 1)(\11rlt’

wlrit lrlttg.’,.,.,g1,, ll,..rt, is tlrt.lltrlttlist.rrl t.lt.t’trit.ily, wltlt.r, :trrtl

D rA L E C T rC | 1s9

a job in the contraband market. As far as I could tell, no one ever goes back to Puno to live.

Gladys’s social mobility ran in the other direction. A few years before, she was healthy, with a husband and a job. When I met her, she was sick, unemploycd, and responsible for four de- pendents. After we had becn working on the lawsuit for a week ar-rd she seemed more comfortable with me, I asked her if she would be willing to tell me about her life. I told her it would help people understand how poor pcople lived. If she didn’t want to answer a question, I said, she didn’t need to. I had worried that she might feel obligated to talk to me, but she was imme- diately enthusiastic. For the first time she invitcd me into the house, and we sat on the beds. Mario sat in the school chair and listened.

She was one of the few’facnanians born in the city. Her father, a carpenter, came here from Puno twenty-five years ago, her mother from'[‘arata, a quiet village in the mountains. Her parents separated soon after Gladys, the youngest of four children, was born, and her mother, Benita, moved to the house where Gladys lives-now part of one of the city’s most established pueblos j6venes but then considered to be somewhat out in the country. Benita made a living taking in wasl-ring.

Gladys left school when she was eleven to work for a middle- class family. She lived in their house, cooking and taking carc of their babies, going home to see her own fan”rily on Sundays. When she was fourteen, her rnother sent her to work just across the border in Arica, Chile. Her salary was much higher than it had been in Peru, and she could earn even more for her farnily in contraband, bringing shirts across the border to sell in'[‘act-ra. lJut soon her mother took sick-menopause, Gladys said. Gladys car.ne home from Arica to run the shirt busir”ress and to feccl, l>athc, and attend to her rnother and take care of her two nrcntally rrnbalanced older brothers. Her older sister was already nrarriccl rrrxl had her own family to look after. When Gladys was sixtccrr, lrcr ntothcr dicd.

“Onc clay I ran into ir schoolfriend on the strcct,” Oladys saitl. “Slrc invitcd nrc to tltc movics.” Gladys hatl rtcvcr bccrt kr llrt’ rrrol,ics; slrc lrad ncvcr gonc orrt at all. I Icr fricrrtl’s l>oylricrr<l lrrorrgl rt rrlorrg rr fl.icrr<l ol-lris, rt rurrrr rutrrt’rl Mlu.r’o. Altcr s1x’rrrl irrg tlrt’r’r,t’rrirrg llrlkirrg lo ()lltrlys, Mltrto look lrcr lllr<‘k l,r:trr

160lcntLDREN OF cntN

empty room at a friend’s house. She never saw him again’ She

rtoppla “getting sick” every month after that, she said’ But she

didn’t understand whY’ she had gotten a job in a small restaurant. one day her sister

came to visit, and Gladys complained to her that she had gotten

fat. Her sister took a good look. “You’re pregnant,” she said’ She

explained how it worked. Gladys told her friend to find Marco ,ni t”ll him that she was pregnant. He sent back word that he was not interested in seeing her. She went into the hospital and

had a caesarean section. When she came out of the hospital, she and little Marco went

to live with an uncle and aunt. Then one of her brothers got

sicker, and Gladys moved back home to take care of him’ For a while he was in a mental hospital- Gladys had to provide a mattress for him, and she gave I’rim hers, sleeping at a neighbor’s

because she had no bed’ She went back to work in the restaurant, taking Marco to work

with her each day, putting him in a box while she washed dishes

and waited on customers. She earned the equivalent of about

twenty dollars a month in salary and tips, she said. In addition,

she and Marco ate for free and ate well, meat or chicken most

days. Marco learned to walk in the restaurant. She worked from

seven in the morning till nine at night, came home, washed diapers, and fell into bed.

Aftei two years of this life a man named Mario came into the

restaurant to eat. He started coming in more and more frequently

to see Gladys. He told her he wanted to marry her. He didn’t

mind that she had a baby. For the next three years Mario, a taxi

driver who lived with his younger sister and brother and was

putting them through school, came to see Gladys every day’ Althorigh Mario’s fr-ily didn’t like her and kept telling him to look foi a more educated woman, Gladys was thrilled. He was tall and handsome, she said, and educated; when his brother and

sister finished school, he went to school himself and became a

high school science teacher. what’s more, he treated her well.

HJ gaue her money, and he even built a door for her hottse, a

solii wooden door, not like the cardboard, tin, and Cokc lrcttlc

cap door to her yard. Then Glaclys becanrc prcgttantitgaitl. l”iuc,

saicl Mario, lct’s get ruarricd and lravc a bal>y. llrt tlrcn ltc wcttt

D I A L E C T r C | 161

on a weeklong trip to the mountains to visit relatives, and when he came back, he had changed his mind.

“How do I know it’s mine?” he said. “You work in a restaurant and meet a lot of men. ” When she was seven months pregnant, he stopped coming to visit. She was devastated. She had consid- ered herself married to Mario. “l will never get married again,” she said. “l’ve been tricked twice. They’re all like that.”

A month later she went to the police and asked for help. She had no money to support another child. The police were kind to her and arranged a court date. Mario came with a lawyer, and the judge said that he could not hear the case unless Gladys had a lawyer of her own. Gladys heard that the local bar association provided lawyers-usually law students-free of charge. The woman she talked to at the bar association told her to come back after the baby was born, that she’d have a better case then, but Gladys never went back.

After Mario was born, Gladys was fired. The owners of the restaurant had tolerated one baby; they would not tolerate two. From time to time an uncle gave her money for food, but it wasn’t much. “l wasn’t eating,” she said. “l worried all the time. ” She could not find a job that would allow her to bring her sons to work.

One day, as she was leaving the house, she felt sharp chest pains and began to cough up blood. She went to the hospital. [{er tuberculosis test was positive. She weighed less than eighg pounds. The doctor wanted to keep her in the hospital, but she had no place for the boys and insisted on going home. She went to the health post three blocks from her house for shots every rnorning. But after two months the post ran out of free medicine.

It was then that she decided to sell half her property. Her uncle Carlos had been working as a driver, administrator, and caretaker frrr forge L6pez, a man from Cuzco, who owned some bars. Oarlos was far from satisfied with L6pez-he owed Carlos for rnonths of back pay-but Gladys was desperate. By the time shc got the first payment weeks had gone by since she had stoppcd gctting her tuberculosis shots. She would have to start thc trcat- rrrcrrt all over. She felt better and decided to wait.

l,6pcr. hirccl Gladys to work for him at La Pirf nridc, I bar hc owrrccl ilcross thc strcct flrorrr tlrc Mcrcado Bologncsi, ‘l’acrra’s

162 1CHTLDREN oF CetN

largest contraband market’ Gladys workedAom eight at night till

eisht in the morning in the bar, leaving Marco and Mario sleep-

t.?’t”‘,r,”-rr;;;;’;1″,;t’ She kept the-cash register -and helped

i”ialrr, occasionally managingthe-pla-ce by hcrself’ She cante home in the morning, “-ft”?

U”tt’kfast for the children’ and fell

;l;;;. i” the afterno-orx she cleaned, took in some washing’ and playcd with the boys’ r…r L^ ^^:r ,^.,,.c”‘-irit,, tirne Marco was already a little man’ she said’ He was on.-( fiu”, but he sometimes had iea ready when she

came home

il’ih; -or,ling. She did not have enough monel,t: bly lll’ urliform he .,e”eded to go to school, so she taught

hrm rn -the fr””*. ifl. had ta,rgt’t fiim to read some letters of the alphabet’ C;;i;t bought him a notebook a.d some pe.cils’ and she

proudly

showed me how Mrr.o had copied letteis. “He knows songs, he

knows how to prry, ,”a t’te “”‘ mak” paper airplanes”‘ she. said’

^”Loprrpaid ‘hei *,gt’ of six hundred intis a month’ which at the end of her t”r,r,E’-ounted to under ten dollars a month’

;;;;;;.i.. of the legal minimum wage-one sixth of the min- imum that Gladys, ,iotn”‘ working a tvrelve-hour shift at night’ ;i;*rl, “”iiai.a to. At

titnes, Gladys said’ L6pez was mo.ths

late in PaYing her. AtChristmaslgSTGladysdecidedshewantedtotaketwodays

“f i” U” *lth her farnily. Sh” hrd a good Soliday, taking Marco

,”a -Mr.i.

to , Ch’i’it’-‘as fair’ When she came back to work’ i-op* iria her she was fired’ She had gotten sick again’ she was

;iblr;ii, ,”J h” dil;1 want tubercular barmaids’ She started the tieatment again and again had to stop; this time

the entire

;;;r; ;i of ,i”diti’e ‘ fopt’ also.owed her a month’s salarv’ ir’pJt*ry 1988 he put up the wall dividing the lot’…Wh..,

I met her t,vo *..k, 1,t”, she had just stopped working in another restaurant because she was too weak’ She

bought food

*itr, ,t. money h”, r.r.,cle gave her and the sums L6pcz paid-her for the lot. She was gettin[ the shots again; this time

the tuber-

culosis had sPread to her throat'”-Gi;dy; said she did “ot

feel alone. Her unclc carlos, she said,

save heruo*. *on”y for food, bought things for thc boys’ ancl

il;k;;;;fir.r*r-,”,., s5c was sick. S5c had-a-rrcig.5,r wlto was kin<l to llcr, it *.,’,.l,,.l whtl s<llcl ctltttrallrattcl frtrit irr tlrc

rrtarkct

,,,,,i-,,”.rri,rr’,ally l’rt’r’glrt Olirtlys lrcr lcft.vcrs irt ,iglrt’ “S5c’s

likc rrry rrr.llrcr,” i;i,,,l”yt ,iritl. A <lrttrrk s.tttclitttcs t’;tttlc rlr.tttttl

D r A L E C T I C I 163

to bother her, Gladys said, and her neighbor always ran over to chase the man away.

I asked her why she thought she had such a hard life. “At times I’ve sinned,” she said. “l ask God for pardon.” She said she prayed a lot, pointing to the pictures of Christ on her wall. When she was really sick, she said, she had conversations with her mother at night. “She answers me in my dreams,” she said. “l dream that she’s here in the house, cooking for me, and when I come home from work, she had food ready. ‘Come into the house,’she says in my dream. ‘Come in and eat.”‘

Gladys’s story was almost too unrelievedly grim to be true-a tale by Dickens-yet I believed her. Her doctors, her former employers, and people who knew the L6pezes or knew Mario all confirmed what Gladys told me. In the end I believed Gladys because she could have invented the story only if she had realized that it would shock or move me. But she didn’t tell it that way. It wasn’t pathetic or dramatic; it was just her life, and she had no expectation that it could have been any different. She had seldom had a relationship with anyone or any institution outside her immediate family in which she was not victimized. She had probably never met anyone before who was surprised by this.

“Did you know there’s a legal minimum wage?” I asked. She had heard the term but didn’t think it applied to her. “I

thought that’s how they pay,” she said. She was right, of course; that was how they pay. But she wouldn’t have complained in any case. “l didn’t want to lose the work,” she said.

Gladys’s concept of law was hazy at best. When I asked her if shc had asked L6pez to add interest when he stretched out the payments on the property, she just stared at me. She had no birth r:crtificate for herself or her children, no title for her house. She Iurd never gotten any help from the government. The few times slrc had tried-to get Mario to pay child support or to cure her lrrbcrculosis-she had been disappointed. She had never voted, slrc said. For a while, she said, she liked this government because priccs weren’t going up. But now they were rising again.

J,,r’,’,,,,,’ lru’l’rr<;nn Rl,:sil)r,:s rN A Iil,(x:K-sQUAlil,: I)(Jil,1)tN(; l,:NCt.os- rrll iur irrlt:rirlr c’orrrlyrrrtl, irrsl oll llrc r:crrlr:rl pllzir rrcxl kr llrc

1641 cHtLDREN OF cntN

cathedral. I went there the day after my first visit with Gladys. A friend had suggested that I go see a iudge he knew, a man who

might be able toLtt me what to expect and what Cladys needed to io. By seven-thirty in the morning the courthouse was already filled with people engaged in the national pastime of waiting in

long lines io tatt to boredlooking men sitting behind manual typewriters.

I waited in a line outside the office of the lowest court, and when my turn finally came, I told the man behind the typewriter

that I wanted to see the iudge. “He’s busy,” the man said’ The judge’s door was open. I stuck my head in and waved’ He was , yJ””g man, sitting at his desk in a suit and tie in a bare room, working on some papers. I had never seen anyone in a suit and tie in ir..,, before-not even the mayor’ I mentioned my friend’s name. The iudge told me to come in and sit down’

We talked for a whili about the Peruvian legal system’ The constitution of 1979, he said, was a document to be proud of’ poor people could be assured that their rights were protected.

Eu”rytne accused of a crime, for example, was entitled to a lawyer.

“bf course, this doesn’t function in practice,” he said’ “We aren’t really very organized or disciplined. No one wants to take

the case of an indigent. Theoretically you have access to a lawyer

if you’re accused Jf a crime, but what happens? The court.pulls

in a lawyer, and he accompanies you. But he doesn’t fight on your behalf. ”

I told him about Gladys’s case. “lt pains me to hear of it,” he said. “We almost never get such cases. Poor people don’t initiate

lawsuits. Maybe if we went into the pueblos i6venes to talk to people, we might be able to learn about cases like hers’ Then

we’i ,eally be a |ustice Ministry. But we don’t really do that type

of thing. We think only of our own pay’ Being a lawyer is very

lucrative. It’s not a service profession; it’s commerce’ Many iudges

are also corrupt. It’s good business.” “Who’s the buyeri’ he asked. When I mentioned L6pez, he

leaned back and smiled. “l know that man,” he said’ “lf that’s the mal who bought the lot, you d6n’t havc t6 tcll n]c arrything else for mc to know tftat sontct|i,g u.iust ltas g.trc .tr. I-lc’s a clclinclr.rcpt. I Ic rtttrs a cltairt of bars; solllc :lrc rcally wlrorclrtlttscs’

D I A L E C T I C | 16s

I closed one of them, and he’s making a lot of trouble. He’s got a group of lawyers, and he delays and delays and delays.”

He told me that Cladys needed to have the titlc to her property and a copy of a document stating her own evaluation of its worth. She needed a copy of the sale document sealed by a notary. If she had written L6pez letters asking him to pay her the money he owed, those would be useful, too.

Gladys I’rad none of those things, she told me a few days later. She had written no letters; she had no papers from the sale. Everything she had signed was in the possession of L6pez’s lawyer, and to ask for a copy was to alert him that she was contemplating legal action. Because the transaction had not been notarized, L6pez could easily have altered the document. She had never declared the value of her property, which was still in her mother’s name. She did not even have the title. All shc had were some light and water bills. She gave me a few. The light bill was marked “Order to cancel service. ” She answered rny questions listlessly. She seemed to have lost her enthusiasm.

I was losing mine as well. Without any of thc documents she needed, I couldn’t see how she could win. I went to her house the next moming to tell her I thought we should forget about it. She wasn’t at home, but through the crack in the door I could see Marco, in the san’re too-long sweater and bluc pants as always, sweeping the floor, valiantly struggling with a broom twice his height. I watched him for a while. ‘l’hen I called Patricia Fuentcs, a lawyer a friend had recommended, and asked her to take thc CASC.

Fuentes is a large, smiling woman, the daughter of one o[ ‘l’acna’s nost prominent lawyers. We sipped lemonade in her living room while I told her about Gladys. She seemed almost t4rtimistic. It was too bad that Gladys didn’t havc any papcrs, but she could get them, Fuentes said. It might take some tirnc, but it was probably a good thing to do cven if she didn’t want to suc lnyone . T’he best argument Gladys had, she said, was that [,r’rpcz lrad bought the propcrty in bad faith, deliberatcly paying lcss than two thirds of thc legalvalue. “‘l’hat’s illcgalunclcr Pcnrvian law,” slrc saicl. “l think shc c:ur gct hcr propcrty l>ack. I think slrc curr win.”

‘l’lrc rrcxt rlrry I wcrrt lo sct'()lrr<lys rrguirr. Slrc Irrrrlrr’t l>r’crr irl

166 lcHtLDREN oF cetN

home the day before because it was her twenty-fourth birthday,

she said. Shehad gone to talk with L6pez about the money’ “He

bought me two beers for my birthday, and he deducted the price

of fJu, beers from the account of what he owed me,” she said.

She said she saw him write it down but thought it was better to

say nothing. He was about to pay her, she said’ He had iust closed a business and would give her money when he got the

license to open a new one. I explained to her what Patricia Fuentes had said. She was

silent. “‘He’s beaten up my brothers,” Gladys said’ “l don’t want

him to throw me out of mY house.” “He can’t throw you out of your house,” I said’ “You don’t

owe him anything. Th”r.’, absolutely no way he can do it’ ” She looked at me. she didn’t believe what I was saying. I wasn’t sure

I did either. The next time I went to Gladys’s house I brought Patricia

Fuentes with me. Gladys’s uncle Carlos was there’ Carlos, who

clearly had the legal mind in the family, wanted to sue L6pez

b”.r*” he himself had worked for him for eighteen months, managing his bars and doing general errands, and had never been

paid. i0f,”, had kept saying that he- would pay everything- he fwed him next monih; but the months came and went, and he

never did. “What do you mean he didn’t pay you?” said Fuentes’ “How

could you keep working for him without getting a salary?”.He

,hruggld. “How is any iudge going to believe this?” asked Fuentes.

She asked Gladys who L6pez’s lawyer was’ His name was

Wilbur Valdivia, Gladys said. “That can’t be right,” said Fuentes’

“l know Wilbur. He’s a clerk for a iudge’ He can’t do that and be a lawyer at the same time.”

“Thati right, he works for a iudge,” Gladys said’ She said that they had al*ays done their business in a iudge’s office’

‘”That didn’t seem odd to you?” Fuentes said’ Gladys said nothing. Gladys talked to Fuentes about how they could try to gct the

sale documents without tipping off L6pez. “why clotr’t we say t|at wc lrcccl all your papcrs lrccattse yottr tu[crcttl6sis ftas wors- crrcd autl your [:rmily warrts to bc prclurcd?” littcrltcs srrggcstcd.

D r A L E C T I C | 167

Gladys thought that was a good idea. We agreed to meet in Fuentes’s office in a few days.

When we arrived for the appointment, Gladys was silent and petulant. Fuentes told Gladys and Carlos that she had been to see L6pez’s lawyer, who was still working for the iudge. He remembered Gladys and said he would turn over her papers on Monday. Gladys said nothing the whole time. She seemed to have lost interest in the lawsuit. I was about to leave Tacna and would come back in two or three months. We decided that Fuentes would get Gladys’s documents in order and, when every- thing was assembled, would proceed with the suit.

Gladys’s suit, it was becoming apparent, did not represent her abandonment of passivity. It was the essence of passivity. When- ever we talked about what she needed to do-rather, whenever I talked to her about what she needed to do-she was silent. She had simply found a powerful, white, rich person who she thought was on her side. If I could handle the suit for her, she probably thought, I could win, because a gringa rated higher on the scale of influence and power than even L6pez. Or maybe she thought that I was nuts and that the best thing to do was to humor me. She had no confidence in her power to direct her destiny but had boundless confidence in my power to do so. I was more misti than ever.

And I was beginning to believe that Gladys was right. I had stopped wondering why Carlos would work for a year and a half for L6pez without receiving his pay, why Gladys put up with wages that would not supply her family even with potatoes, why people lived twelve to a room with no water or electricity, why the poor whimpered and accepted the countless other small blows of daily life. They had no other choice.

There are people in Tacna who don’t know their own names. I,’rrentes told me that she sometimes visited a mothers’ center in a pueblo ioven where her husband worked as a doctor to help thc patients with some simple legal work. The most basic task was gctting people legally registered, with names and birth dates. T’hc

llroblcm was that few of the women knew these facts about thcnr- sclvcs. ‘l’hcir ernployers chose narnes for thern whcn tlrcy carttc kr’l’acrra frlnr Ptrno. “Wcll,” I”ttcntcs wottld say, “wltat wottltl yorr likc kr bc callctl? Wlurt worrl<l yorr likc for yrtrtr birth tlatc?”

l6slCHtLDREN oF CatN

Most of the women who didn’t know tl-reir names chose to be called Maria. For a birth date they chose December 8, the day of Purisima celebrating the Virgin Mary. Fuentes ended up with a clinic full of Marfas born on December 8.

The word “rights” is a popular word in Peru. President Alan Garcia talked about rights all the time. In 1979 a new constitution had been written. A document that is now published in cvery phone directory in the country, it provides for freedom of speech and assembly, decent wages, access to iustice, and guarantees of good working conditions and equality for women, children, and Indians. It is an excellent constitution and at times bears some resemblance to reality. Progressive, educated people like Fuentes and the judge I spoke with are very proud of it. ‘I’hey talk a lot about the rights of the poor in Peru.

But the poor in Peru don’t talk about rights. They recognize the constitution for the bit of poetry it is. If they have heard the word, they think, as Gladys thought about the minimum wage, that it doesn’t apply to them. Rights exist only for the powerful, meaning, of course, that they do not exist at all.

l* I-or” Apnn 1988, Two MoN’rHS AFI’ER wE FIRST MET IN TIIE health clinic, Gladys’s throat closed up, and she had to fight for breath. Her weight dropped to ninety-two pounds. On April 22 Zenobia, the nurse from the health post, took her to the hospital. The doctor warned her that if she didn’t stay in the hospital, complete her course of treatment, and rest, she would be dead in three months. Zenobia suggested that she put Mario and Marco into the local children’s home.

Gladys stayed in the hospital for thirty-eight days. She had iust gotten out when I returned to Tacna. The transformation was astonishing. For most people, going to the hospital is a hazardous adventure. Patients have to bring their own sutures, sheets, and bandages. The strong infections circulating often cnsure that a mother who brings in a sick child will ncver sec that child again. But for Gladys the stay in the hospital had bccn wotrdcrfttl, alnrost Iike a vacation. Shc hercl gainctl thirty poturcls, rnailtly bccitttsc hcr urtclc Carltts lrrotrght lrcr fotxl cvcry tlay-cltickclt, ltcatts, rroorllcs, lrt:arty llrings-to sttl:plctttcttl llrc lros;rilrtl rrtcttls. Sltc

D I A L E C T I C | 169

made a few friends among the nurses. She had met a twenty- eight-year-old orderly who worked there. He brought her gifts- magazines and tapes to listen to. She told him she had two children, and he said he would keep seeing her anyway. But she didn’t trust him, she said.

The children, who had visited her in the hospital every Sunday, loved living in the children’s home. They finally had other kids to play with. Mario, who had been extremely thin, was now chubby. Marco, too, had gained weight. He was noticeably more outgoing, not the grave little elf I had known. At the age of seven he was going to school for the first time.

But Gladys missed her children and her house. Carlos told her that strange men had been coming around. This worried her; she had been robbed the year before. Someone had broken in, not very difficult to do, and taken her iron, radio, and television set. The loss of the iron was particularly serious; she had been taking in washing to make money.

She went back to her house; the kids moved back, too, although Marco continued to go to school at the children’s home. She went to the hospital most days to see her new boyfriend. She especially liked to visit in the evening, when the night nurse gave her food. It was like going to a restaurant, she said. This provoked screaming matches with her uncle Carlos, who called her a whore. “Stay home and rest and take care of your boys,” Carlos said. Carlos and Gladys were barely speaking.

When the health post in Natividad, Gladys’s pueblo ioven, opened in 1968, the staff treated J cases a year of tuberculosis. In 1987 the post treated 70 cases. In the first week of fune 1988 alone it treated 17 new cases of tuberculosis, all in children. ‘l’acna’s incidence of tuberculosis, 143 cases per 100,000 people, was the third highest of the twenty-five states in Peru. Immigrants from the highlands, where it was too cold for the tuberculosis bacteria, come with no natural defenses to a hot climate, where thc bacteria thrive. They eat poorly and often have other infec- tions that weaken their defenses. They live in tiny rooms crowded with relatives and sometimes animals, facilitating the disease’s s1>rcad.

Abigail Martirrcz, a social worker at the health post, saicl that ‘il ;rcrccrrt <lf ttrl>crcrrlosis ltaticnts al>anclonccl thcir trcatmcnt l)rogriuns l>cf<rrc tlrcy wcrc t’rrrcrl, Sorrrc rprit flrrr cirsily cxplainablc

lTOlcUtLDREN oF cetN

reasons. Gladys, for example, had quit twice because there was

no free medicine. But even when there was medicine, almost

half the patients stopped their treatments. Martinez was taking a survey of why people quit’ I looked at

a few sheets on her desk. One man responded that he had stopped

his treatment because he was working in the contraband market;

his very long day did not allow time to come in to the health post for his ihots. Other people answered that they were afraid

if injections, that the pills had bad side effects, or that going to the health center took too long. A common response was “l felt better, so I stopped the treatment. ” Martinez said that most im- migrants did not understand why they had to keep taking pills

eren afte, they felt better. One man wrote in “alcoholism'” A few people said they preferred the services of curanderos, prac-

titioners of traditional medicine, some of whom make diagnoses

by passing a chicken or a guinea pig over the patient’s body, then

t itli”g the animal to read the disease. “One man said that the pills don’t do him any good but that the curandero cured him with a dead cat,” Martinez said.

“Some things a curandero can take care of perfectly well,” said

Dr. Fulgencio Llasaca, the doctor at the health post’ With his mustache and long sideburns he looked like a Miami used-car dealer. Before working in Natividad, he worked in Locumba, a small town a two-hour drive north of Tacna, where patients preferred to take their problems to the two curanderos’ “A ,kin i.rflr-mation, for example, responds well to herbs,” he said. “And some things, like l-readaches, respond if a curandero tells a patient to cut out salt or get more rest. But a kidney in-

fection . .” He said he had made friends with Locumba’s cur- anderos. when he saw a seriously ill patient who preferred the advice of the curandero, Llasaca took the curandero aside and

explained the necessary treatmenl, the curandero prescribed it,

and everyone was happy. The blst curandero in town, patients at the health post said,

was Patricio Torres, who lived a half block away’ I thought a visit might show me something about how Peru’s Indians saw

the worl-d. Besides, my back hurt. I turned the comer and askccl

three teenagers playing soccer in the strcct f<rr l)otr Patrici<l’s housc. “Which Don Patricio?” tltcy saitl.

“‘l’ltc tlocttlr,” I saitl, cvcr rcspccl[rrl of rrittivc cttstottts’

D r A L E C T r C | 171

One boy laughed. “This is it,” he said. “But he’s not a doctor. He’s a warlock.”

An old woman answered the door, and I stepped into blackness. When my eyes became accustomed to the single thin line of light that escaped the curtain, illuminating swirls of dust and cobwebs, I could see dark blue walls and a concrete floor. Two chairs covered with ancient upholstery occupied one end of the room. The old woman sat on a wooden bench at the other end next to an old man. She had only two teeth. “Are you ill?” she said.

“l came to ask the maestro some questions,” I said. “My sister suffers from headaches.”

She clasped her hands over her belly and stretched out her legs. “He’s the best,” she said. “There are three curanderos in Tacna, but none as good as Don Patricio.” She told me why they had come. The couple’s granddaughter had been scared by an animal on the beach a year and a half ago, and since then the girl cried all night. “During the day she’s fine,” she said. “But at night she doesn’t stop crying. We’ve been to a doctor, but it didn’t help. We thought since she cries at night, there might be some forces involved.” I nodded.

“Did you bring an article of clothing?” she asked. She unrolled a baby’s shirt from a newspaper. “He’ll look at this and might be able to tell what’s wrong with her. You should have brought an article of your sister’s clothing. Or hair, if she suffers from head- aches. Hair would be good.”

‘fhe curandero opened the door to show out his patient, and the old couple went in, leaving me alone. A few minutes later they came out. “He says to bring the baby tomorrow,” the woman said. I was ushered into his office. It was a small room with a white table covered with a blue-flowered fapanese cloth. Two bottles of baby powder sat on the table. The walls were hung with family photos and a picture of fesus on the cross.

Patricio Torres said he was seventy-eight years old. With his full head of curly black hair and his athletic build, he looked fifty. He wore a white undershirt and an enormous silver chain hung with keys. I asked aboui the old couple’s grandchild. “My inrprcssion is that thc baby was scared by a spirit, which has taken hcr ovcr,” hc said. “‘l'<u.nurrow I willscc thc chilcl, ancl wc’llcall thc s1>irit.” llc sitirl ltt’wlts l>rlrtt irt Sittttit, iut ltttttr’s tlrivc fr<lttt

17ql CnTLDREN oF CetN

Tacna, and had become a curandero after getting out of the army in 1915. He worked a lotwith herbs and jungle plants, sometimes finding prescriptions in a book on herbal medicine on his desk and wisdom from his uncle, who was also a curandero. He was born with the gift, he said. “l’m teaching myself telepathy now. I find I have a facility fbr it. Everyone is born with some talents. ” He said he had nothing against doctors; he occasionally visited a doctor himself. “But the doctor can’t find everything,” he said. Sometimes, he said, he cured people with cards, the forty-card Spanish deck, and sometimes with animals. “lf you have some- thing evil in your house, for example, I’ll come with a guinea pig. We’ll let the animal go, and it will go right to where the problem is.”

I asked about passing animals over the patient’s body. “l do that,” he said. “A chicken usually works. You can pass a chicken over the patient and then kill it and open it up. The sickness will show up as a red stain. If there is no stain, then the patient is well. It works just like the X ray a doctor takes.”

He leaned over the desk. “Do you know what it means,” he whispered, “if the animal dies while you are passing it over the patient?”

“Bad news?” I said. He nodded. “lt must be hard to tell the patient,” I said.

“You can’t tell the patient,” he said. “He’ll die sooner. You tell a family member to make the patient comfortable. But you have to be careful.” He showed me back into the dark waiting room.

To Tacna’s poor, especially the immigrants from Puno, the curandero’s chicken is the familiar medicine they have used all their lives. What seems like black magic is the health post’s fabulous tales of invisible bugs and magic needles to ward off disease and the goings-on inside the fortress of a hospital where people go in but never come out. The science of the rich is the magic of the poor, and vice versa. The formal institutions of society, easily understood by middle- and upper-class Peruvians, are unfathomable to the poor, who correctly do not view such institutions as courts or hospitals as useful for solving their prob- lems. And the methods chosen by the poor arc incontprcltcnsiblc to wcaltlricr I’cru.

It was in ltc that fcff’l’hiclnrarr, ir North Arrrcriclrr volrrrrlccr

D tA L E C T tC | 173

in Peru, began to understand the tragic height of the wall sep- arating the two worlds. Ite is a desert oasis of six hundred people, with no electricity and one hand-crank telephone, a two-hour drive from Tacna. |eff was working at Cristo Rey, a )esuit school in Tacna, and had gone to Ite to supervise Cristo Rey’s students in their annual construction project, this year a kindergarten. It was Sunday afternoon, and feff had taken the day off and gone swimming with a priest and two nurses working in [te. That was when Sebastidn Anquise’s baby died.

At four in the afternoon they got back to find Sebasti6n, a skinny, cross-eyed twenty-one-year-old, was waiting for them at the health post. He had been waiting for four hours, and he looked devastated. Sebastidn’s wife had given birth that morning, he told the group. He had delivered the child and cut the um- bilical cord with a tazot blade. The baby was sick. “Why didn’t you call someone when she went into labor?” the nurse asked. Sebastidn kept his head bowed.

The group went down the hill to SebastiSn’s house, a onc- room concrete box with two tiny windows and holes in the roof. There was one single bed for Sebastiiin, his nineteen-year<rlcl wife, Herenia Molloni, and their older baby. Next to it lay sornc pots crusted with food and a few pieces of clothing. Flies werc everywhere. It was the worst poverty that feff, who had just arrivecl in Peru, had ever seen. The newborn baby was lying at the foot of the bed, wrapped in a filthy piece of cloth, dead. It had livcd just eight hours. There were so many flies on the baby’s facc, feffwrote in his diary, that it looked as though its eyes were open.

feff, the nurse, and the priest put the baby in a box and buried it the next day under a metal cross and a flower in ltc’s tiny hillside cemetery. At the funeral Sebastidn passed around a lmttlc of Coke and a single glass.

The baby had been born six weeks premature, the nursc tokl fcff the next day. Herenia had been hitting hersclf in tlrc wornlr in hopes of aborting the child. The nurse had suggestccl kr I Ic- rcrria that she have this child, then begin to use sornc sort o[ birth cor-rtrol, but Hcrenia didn’t want to. Shc krld thc nursc tlrat on Scbastidn’s wagcs, they coulcl not supl>ort thc child tlrcy ll- rcady hacl, lct alonc a sccorrrl onc.

A wcck Iirtcr Jcff wcnt b:rck to Scllirstirirr’s lrorrsc. Sclxrsliiirr wrrs citrrtirrg f<rrrltccrr irrtis rr tliry llrt.rr worllr t.iglrly-[rrrrr t.i..rrls,- irr

1741cstLDREN OF cetN

his job as a farm worker for a local patr6n. The minimum wage

was twen$-three intis. Where he had come from, in rural Puno,

he had been earning only ten intis. He told feff his life was much

better here in lte, that the climate was not as harsh and the pay was better.

feff started to ask other people about salaries. Rosa, the nurse,

,rid thrt most workers were paid only fifteen intis a day, and women got only ten. )eff met a woman who lived in a metal toolshedln the back of a patron’s house. She told him she made

five intis a day. It was the same story all over. Sebastidn knew he wasn’t being paid the minimum wage’ which was twenty-three

intis, he told |eff, but there was nothing he could do’

feffthought there was something he could do. It was summer,

and he *or,ld not have to start teaching at Cristo Rey until the school year started. He had been looking for a way to spend the

intervening two months. He found it in SebastiSn’s house’ “l made the decision that day that I was going to shake the

town up,” he said. He would spend the next two months, or whatever it took, trying to get lte’s landowners to comply with the law and pay their workers the minimum wage’

He took his proiect to Fred Green, a World War II marine pilot turned fesuit priest who ran Cristo Rey. Green, who has

iived in peru since 1959, told )effnot to waste his time. But after

thinking it over, he told feff to try it. “You might learn some- thing,” Green said.

f# started the proiect when he got back to Tacna’ On Friday hs rode his bike downtown to see Oscar Galdos, the head of employment and social security in the Labor Ministry’ feff ex- plained what he had found in Ite, which fell under Tacna’s jurisdiction. Galdos told him this was a problem all over Peru, adding that he thought that they could do something about it but that transportation to Ite was difficult.

The next Tuesday feff went back to Galdos and volunteered to pay for gas for the trip. Galdos directed feff to another official, *ho *asr,’l around. feffwent to talk to a third official’ She listened to his story and said she would call him the next day’ She didn’t

call. feff went to her office a few days later. Shc was talking to anotlier woman while her officernate reacl the papcr. Shc said

she was workirrg or-r thc transpOrtation problcnt. I’br thc ttcxt six

wccks, uutil sclr<xrl l>cgan at Criskr l{cy, fcff sllcttt cvcry tlily witlr

D tA L E C T tC | 17s

a government official. They all wanted to go to Ite, they told him. But there was a meeting that day, or it was someone’s birthday, or no car was available. “What a fool I am,” feffwrote in his diary.

The school year began, and for two weeks feff did not make his daily pilgrimage to the government offices. When he went back on May 13, there was a new man in charge. “He really wants to help me,” feffwrote in his diary. “l talked to him and he said he’d talk to the mayor of lte. ” But a month later nothing had happened. In desperation, feffmade a hundred copies of the minimum wage law. Ite’s mayor had a house in Tacna. feffgave him the copies. He promised he would distribute them but as- sured |eff that all the farmers were paying minimum wage.

After twenty-eight years in Peru, Father Green had developed divine patience in the face of the absurd. Every year, he said, Cristo Rey asked the Peruvian government for construction ma- terials for its project. “lt’s a lot of work to get local food and housing for thirty boys,” Green said, “but our biggest problem is getting the government to provide us with a few bags of cement and some steel rods. There is no shortage of cement, but it takes months of visiting offices again and again to get it. It’s the same rigmarole every time, for the most part dealing with the same people. ”

A year after the death of Sebasti6n’s baby I went to Ite with )eff. Sebastidn was still not being paid the minimum wage. He and Herenia were now living in a straw shed next to a sheep corral. There was one small bed. On the bed were two children. The new baby, a boy, was born just ten months and seventeen days after Herenia had given birth to the baby feff had helped bury. He was born on Christmas Day, and the couple had named him fesfs.

O.”O* GAIDOS, THE SOCIAL SECURITY AND EMPLoYMENT CHIEI,. whom feff had pestered, was reading the paper when I cntcred his office and asked to speak to him. We talked for tlrc ncxt two hours. On thc wall bchincl hinr was a postcr frrlnr thc National l)cburcaucratizlti<ln l)r<lgraru. “l)cllrrcarrcratiz.atiorr is tlrc rc- sporrsibility of cvcry l)cIrrviirrr,” il sirirl.

1761 cHtLDREN OF cetN

I asked him if it was true that some employers did not pay the minimum wage. “The great maiority of employers,” he corre-cted

me. “lt is a disgrace, but the supply and demand for work allow this to happen.”

There *… *rny reasons the government did not carry out inspections, Galdos said. His office would not initiate an inves-

tigation without a complaint from a worker. I tried to picture Slbastidn finding a way to make the two-hour trip to Tacna to

denounce his employer. Then, said Galdos, there is the trans-

portation problem. “we don’t do many rural inspections because we have no cars,” he said.

“When was the last time you did one?” I asked’ “Well, we’ve really never done one,” he said’ When the gov-

ernment inspects the Southern Peruvian Copper Company’s mines in the area, instructors travel in Southern’s cars, accom- panied by Southern officials.’

Galdos, like Jeff, viewed himself as a fighter blocked by the

system. “This is the history of Peru,” he said’ “lt is the legacy of hundreds of years of colonial rule. The worker is always ex-

ploited. He doesn’t know the laws and usually can’t read- and

irite. There are hundreds of terrible cases in the country, thou- sands. What we need is a huge campaign on the part of the

government to improve education and health.” without these iweeping reforms, he said, there was no point in trying’

He chuckled when I asked him about the impatient gringo who had clogged him the year before. “feff came in and began

banging ot *y desk, saying, ‘l want these guys to pay minimum wage.’il said, ‘Fine, I want it, too.’ I told him, ‘You want to make a revolution?’ I said I was a revolutionary, too’

“l wanted to help him. I tried to get transportation’ But the problem is, if we arrive to investigate and the patr6n thinks his iorkers have denounced him, he will fire them’ We have ex- perience with this. We’ve gone into restaurants and questioned

th. o*rr.r, about what they pay their kids, and the next day the boys lose their jobs and are out in the street’

l’Th”r. was a man in my office this morning’ llc was fircd from his job because he has tulrcrculosis. Bccirttsc of alt crror his

ckrctor nradc in thc clatcs of his trcrtrrtcttt, social sccttrity is ttot going to covcr his illrrcss. Wltat citil I tlo? I c:<tttltl lrc ltis litwycr,

DrALECTrCllTT

but there are hundreds of cases like that. We need to solve not just one case but all of them. I’m like a doctor who sees so many deaths that one more doesn’t mean anything. ”

Galdos was part of a species of government official that seemed indigenous to Peru. Everywhere else I had been, in- cluding Washington-especially Washington-government of- ficials avoided reporters. If I did manage to land an interview with an official, he spent the interview either denying that the problem in question existed or redefining it with an avalanche of jargon and statistics. If he were really good at his job, I left his office shaking my head, unable to remember just what it was I had come to ask him about. He knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew, that his vision had nothing to do with reality, but the rules prohibited him from admitting it.

Not in Peru. Bureaucrats in Peru seem eager to talk, and they paint their work in the worst possible light. Instead of denying that problems exist, they usually maintain that things are even worse than I had thought. They may or may not be less useful and efficient than their counterparts in other countries, but they are the only ones who spend hours analyzing their own useless- ness and inefficiency. Every statement about their office, the government, or the country seems to begin with the words “la- mentably, ” “unfortunately, ” or “disgracefully. ” At first I thought this was a healthy trait-finally, a place capable of self-criticism.

But it isn’t a sign of health. The words absolve people like Galdos of the necessity to try to change the system. Bureaucrats are not defensivc only because they are completely disengaged. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it always will be, the theory goes. Peru will not change until a man on a white horse sweeps the old order aside. Nothing works, so people come to believe that nothing can work Few people try to make things work, so nothing works.

In Peru the future is a gift of the past, and it is thc rare rnan who can alter his destiny. The self-made man, object of strclr fcrvent worship in the United States, does not exist in nrost of l,atin Anterica, least of all in Peru. Here thc rich nrakc thcir nroncy tlre old-fashioncd way; they inhcrit it. Ilvcn thc ltzicst, stu;liclcst rich nran dics rich. ‘l’hc clcvcrcst, lrar<lcst-workirrg;;<xrr rrrln will alwitys l>c 1xxrr. Srrcccss is tlrc ;rr<xhrct o[ colrtircls irrrrl sociitl stittion, rrot o[ lirlcrrl or irrrlrrslry.

178 ICntLDREN oF CntN

As a result, there is not much point to hard work’ but it is

.ri*-“ty useful to cultivate friendships with as many important ;;;;i; ; possible. For people with friends in high places’ gov- 5r”,””.* rl “”” efEcieni

inieed’ The people with the power to

Uri”g ,U””a changes in Peru-those with money and influence

-;;?, ;i;”urr”,”th” very peo-ple who see no reason to change

,rvitri”g. Corruption “‘i it'”ffititncy are mutually reinforcing’

;’i”;; r?t”little change since 1959″‘said Father Green’ who has watched dozens o7 .fn”i””.y campaigns come and go’

“lf

anything, there’s -“‘” ‘ttintiency all’th”e time’ The state bu-

reaucracy grows, and there are more hands each paper has to

oass through, and more stealing'” It many government offices ffi; ** “”fv indications

of Garcia’s efficicncy campaign were

signs announcing eu’ TRANSACTIoNS ARE FREE’ LET’S Nor F0MENT

iJ*t*o”rr”. The signs, of course, meant exactly t6e opposite- ; ;i;rt signal that in this office, monev talks’-

fufuu pl”ople in P”” *”‘” clear about the need to avoid the *”;;;;;;i’entirelv if thev wished to get something

done’- Her-

ir”J, i” S”to, the ioundei of a Lima think tank’ t’e Foundation for Liberty a,-,d D”,noc””y, i”ue”ted a fake clothing

factory and

ur-rdertook th. ,-,.”.,,”y llgal t’a”’sactions to establish a formal

business. De Soto’s re'””Jh”” were told to pay g”]l]h-t bribes

;hr,;;;” absolutely r’tt”””y’ T’he operation took 289 days and .”riSi,Zlr in bribes. A computer printout of the necessary legal

,”pt ;; -ore than a hundred feet long’ Legalizing a fictitious store in which to sell the fictitious clothes took 43

days and cost

$*iq6. Cloing a license to build a house took 6 years al’d cost

$Z,tlO in br]bes. |ust gettin-g the land required -207 drfferent

administratiu” ,t”p, in {A aitrttent government offices’ Setting

;;; i;;;;;;*r.a ,,,”t”t-the ki.dlound all over Peru-would have taken tZ y”rrc ii’nyone had ever tried to do it legally’

but

no one ever had. No *ortd”‘, De Soto wrote in a controversial

book, E/ Otro Seriro (,,T5e Other p.ath”), that 48 percent of

af,” *ort lng pop.rtJo” in Peru shunned the bureacracy’ building

its houses and setting up businesses entirely in the “informal”

sector and, of course, paying no taxes’

Gladys Meneses “.rigt’i t’Jt hauc recognized ii’ .br’rt shc.was

a

,h;i;;’exa,’rple ,,iffi”‘]t]l Pcru’ She took no i,tcrcst i, thc statc, atttl it, itt tttrtr, t<lrlk tl<t irrtcrcst ilt ltcr’ Shc lutcl rlcvcr

i;;;ll, t,,,,rri”,l, lr;ttl trcvcr gotlctt il tillc to ltcr proPcrly’ ttcvcr

D r A L E C T I C | 179

paid taxes, never gotten birth certificates for her children. Her only connection to the government was in the form of electricity and water bills.

That Gladys had the opportunity to pay electricity and water bills made her part of a privileged minority in Tacna. The ma- jority of lhe pueblos i6venes enjoyed neither electricity nor run- ning water. Natividad, the pueblo ioven of about ten thousand residents where Gladys lived, was one of the most established pueblos i6venes in Tacna, with a relatively good healtli clinic, three primary schools and a secondary school, several markets, and a neighborhood center with basketball and soccer courts that were filled and noisy all day.

The neighborhood had been founded in the time-honored way, in a middle-of-the-night land invasion. One of the original set- tlers, Ruperto Luque Huanca, was now a justice of the peace, whose office, a cubicle containing a desk with a typewriter and three school chairs, was next to the basketball court in the neigh- borhood center. Over the noise of a twilight basketball game he described the original land invasion of sixty families on September 8, 1960. It was just a sandy plain, he said, but you had to start somewhere.

“We had been living in straw huts, and the government prom- ised us houses, but nothing happened,” he said. “lnstead of waiting for the bureaucracy, we iust went at night and put up tents, using wooden sticks and sheets of woven straw.” The land- owners woke the next morning io the sight of sixty tiny huts and the smell of coffee bubbling over outdoor fires. The police nevcr came to evict them, Luque said. This was part of the strategy of a land invasion; once it was done, it was hard to throw out thc settlers without a battle. “‘f’he government had been saying all along it would give us land,” Luque said. “Maybe they wcrc relieved when we iust did it ourselves.”

This was a pretty good statement of government policy in general. Natividad, like most places in Tacna, irnprovccl ouly when residents did things themselves. After waiting four ycars frrr the government to build a school, in 1964 resirlcnts built it thcrn- sclvcs. ‘l’hc governrncnt dawdled fourtecn ycars l>cfurc instirllirrg watcr pipcs. ‘l’hrcc ycars latcr Natividad’s ncighl><lrlroo<l orgirrri- zation dcciclcd it di<hr’t wlrrrt to ,’,vuit lrr<llhcr f<xrrtc:crrr yclrrs lirr clcctricity, unrl llrt’lloirrrl look orrt ir llrrnk l<xrrr lo yrrrl irr irrr

lSOlcHlLDREN OF cetN

electrical system. The government then managed to do its_part:

connect Natividad to the rest of the city and flip the switch. In

a fit of civic responsibility in 1979 the city government put sewers in Natividad.

The people in the pueblos i6venes build their own houses’ A

family “t”rtly begins by making a cube of woven straw’ Then it

acquires bricks of adobe or concrete, piling them in a corner ,rniil th.r. are enough for the beginnings of a wall’ People live for years in houses with no walls. A ceiling means you have arrived; some houses in Natividad even have two stories and are the envy of the block.

The maiority of Tacna’s workers create their own iobs; 60 or

70 percenf of ihe city’s workers sell contraband goods in one of the four huge markets or on the street. This is a relatively new

profession. In the mid-fifties and sixties a few women had earned

ih.ir liring smuggling Chilean fruit, powdered milk, and Nescaf6 across the bordei. The volume rose in 1970 with the ascent of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, whose socialist policies

subsidized basic goods; Peruvians bought cheap products in Chile

and smuggled them into Tacna. But contraband grew to mam-

moth prJfortions shortly after General Pinochet’s overthrow of the Alienie government in 1977, when he opened a duty-free zone in Iquique in chile’s north, a hundred miles south of Tacna.

Traffic in fruit and coffee became traffic in televisions, personal

stereos, and French perfume. “When Iquique first opened, about

three hundred people were trafficking,” a local businessman said.

“The authorities let it go, thinking it was a tiny problem'” Today more than a hundred thousand people in Tacna make

their living from contraband. The smugglers hike thro_ugh the

desert, which still bears mines installed during a recent chilean-

Peruvian dispute (one smuggler had his legs blown off)’ Or they

bring goods bue, from Chile by rowboat and bury them on-the

b.a”-hTo. Peruvian contacts to dig up later. The easiest smuggling

route is directly through customs officials, who are not shy about

demanding bribes’ Any product a normal human being would think of owning

may be-bought ir-r the Mercado Bolognesi, the oldcst of ‘I’acna’s

fou contrablnd markcts, organizcd iust aftcr lqtricluc opcncd. ‘l’hc rnarkct is a hugc btrilding covcrccl with a roof of cctllcttt, cilrklrrs, strirw, lirrrrirrirtcrl slccl, 1:larrks, itrrtl lllirrrkcts, a llcrfcct

D I A L E C T I C I 181

refection of the chaos inside. Some of the vendors display their merchandise in beautiful glass booths; others ur. o,riy pla.ks covered with carto,s. T’here are hundreds of different products, shoes here; clothes and handbags in the next row; electronic keyboards; dishes; perfume; phones in the slrape of coke bottles; toys; auto parts; and Chilean fruit, powdered nrilk, and Nes_ caf6. Prices for electronic goods are competitive with the cut- rate New York stores. I saw watches for thirty-one hundred intis-thirty dollars-Sony radios and tape decki for sixty-eight dollars, television sets for seveng-five dollars. chilean *in. i^ selling for less than it sold for in chile. I b,ught an arnry knife for three dollars. when I tried to use the corlscrew to open a bottle of contraband chilean wine the next day, the knife iroke in two.

To an emigrant in Puno, a journey to T’acna must seem as overwhelming as a trip to the moon. ‘l’he poor start their own small businesses, build their own houses and schools, and form their own neighborhoods. The aggressiveness, risk, sweat, a,cl initiative this life demands are the local equivalent of running a wall Street hostile take-over. what I had confused for peopi’c’s passivity was a simple distinctio, between actions that could im- prove their lives-move away, get into business, build a school

-and o,es that are a waste of time. It took nineteen years ofdetermined work for Natividad residents to make theii ncigh- borhood a decent place to live. If they had waited for the gZrv- ernment, it might have taken centuries. Thev built thc contraband markets that provide employment for most of the city without any help from the government. They trust the kind of medi-cine they can understand. T’hey depend on their familics and few others. ‘rhey krow just enough about the regal systc.r to be certain that it will never do a thing for them. TYh”y i,.,,,* w_hom and what they can trust and whom and what thcy cannot. Ilcading the latter Iist is anything to do with the gove,,re,t or with misfi.

Mn,a,r, Mt,:Nr,:sr,:s w^s rrrNAr,r,y (x)rN(; ,r() sor,.x)r,. lru t,lrr,:rr t'<^rrrtrics, g,irrg t’sclr,.l w,rrl<l l’rvc .rrirblcrl lrirrr l. irrrpr,vr, lris krt irrrrl rrriglrt lurvc lr;rirrtrl lrirrr lo rrrisr,tprt,sliorrs ;rrrrl rrr,rkt.

182 IcHtLDREN oF cAlN

changes that could benefit society as a whole’ But there was little

chance that education would do ihl’ for Marco Meneses in Peru’

;i;;;; riih. .hlld’en’s home school at seven-thirtv every morn- ;;,;;,i;;fo, ur”,u”t, in the uniform of grav slacks and sweater ii,?’r”to.f gave him, and he went home to Gladys after

dinner

,i n*. Wfr”n I stuci my head in the window of his classroom ;; ;; tour of the school, he was sitting at his desk’ clutching il;;J””ks and beaming. Later I saw-him playing on the grass

“*tiJ., *t irling his “*’ Lt’

his head like a helicopter’ running

i” , “i.f. with the other students’ flushed and smiling'”‘;r;ih;;

|ose LobatJn, tttt school’s director’ had studled phi-

lr;;1;;”iima. “But tinev don’t l:’* yt to think’ to question’ i” if,” pnif”ropf,y “ou””‘,i’

ht said’ “lt’s iust copying.whatlhe

author of the particular book thinks’ There’s no discussion’ Here

*. ,-.p f.iat i., .Ir,”*htn they say what they think’ ll,*:’bl: Educaiion here is a ritual’ It’s like going to mass’

HrstorY’ ror

.*pt., is raising the Peruvian flag and praising our heroism’ It’s good that we respect our traditions’ our folklore’

but it’s very

superficial. “”-‘prri “f

the problem, he said, was that good_ people did not

want to be teachers’ At the school in the children’s home the

new teachers made seven thousand intis a month’ then iust about

i.rty arffr”. You ctuld survive on that if you were a single man

o. *ornr., living with your parents’ -as many teachers were’

Teachers *ho ,r.,. “t’t io tur’t areas’ however’ had to pay their

transportatio.t, foodl -j-hot”i”g from that meager salary’ and

;il;;h;’, ,ot*a *” problei.bv simplv..*’\:ilL.ll: t’ *r,

“o*rrron for rural schools to have teachers only a tew oays

a month. “Why would anyone want to be a teacher when he

.Ja U. out seiling contraband?” he said’ The school’, n’lt-gt’J” class was held in what was euphe-

“rirt,.rfiv .rff.a tn. fiUt’ry, although.the shelves were bare’ The

t”..”a-Jt”a. “trr,’oo* *as a tit’y locke’ room’ Fifteen students’

;hrt t;* i;**”atogttht’, *”‘””opying phrases from tl”-Of”O- ;;;;i. M;”y “f th.:i;;”‘t’, “id

iiupirto Espinoza’ the head

i”r.t “.

at thl schJ, couldn’t really read or write but had become

expertatcopying*h’thtwroteintotheirnotcbooks'”lclictate’ ;,-.’,1 iir;y *rii.,; hc sairl’ “Whctr I tcach .istory’ I cxpl,i. t’c history of thcir.,,,,ut’f , and-thcy writc it clowtt'” I’lspiltoza’

wlttr

wits tcitcltittg rr,”,””.,,.1 gr.r.l.,r|i, t.allctl twtl tl[lris riltttlcrrts ltl tlttl

D rA L E C T rC | 183

front of the room. “Write, ‘The flag is red,’ ” he said. Neither could. “You see, they can’t write,” he said. “Only about half these people should be in second grade. The rest really should be repeating first grade. ” He didn’t bother to lower his voice, nor did he show the students how to write the sentence. I asked about discussion and group participation. “We don’t do that,” he said.

I went to a class that combined the third and fourth grades. There were twenty-eight students, ranging in age from eight to sixteen. They were reviewing their notebooks, preparing for a science test. The teacher, Maria Elena Pdrez, said they would be asked, among other things, to label the hands of a watch and to name the instrument used to measure temperature.

She said that the students who lived at the home generally did better academically than those who, like Marco, returned to their own homes every night. “Here we make them study,” she said. “At home the mother will get up early and go to work and doesn’t really know if the children do their homework. ” But there were difficulties with studying in the children’s home, she said. “Our library isn’t very complete,” she said.

“There’s not a single book in it,” I said. “That’s what I mean. It’s not very complete,” she said. According to the census of 196I, 43 percent ofPeruvians over

the age of four had completed a year of school. Attendance has improved greatly since; in 1987 the average adult Peruvian had completed almost the fifth grade. In Tacna the average was higher: almost seventh grade. But going to school is not very different from nof going to school. The vast majority of schools have no books or materials. “The majorig of kids in high school have never read a book,” said Father Green. Learning history means memorizing dates and places; learning science means identifring a thermometer, not understanding how it works. l,earning to write means copying hieroglyphics without, perhaps, cver learning to read. Education, one of society’s few ways of correcting its own mistakes, is a word without meaning in nrost <lf Peru, one that many students will never learn how to spcll.

!(/,,,,,,,, ‘r’nl,: oun,l)nr,lN ()rf l)r,:nrr’s r,u,r’l’1,:s A’l”l’r,:Nr) ‘lirr,: I, lr.rr- vcrsily o[ l,iurir or llrc Oirllurlit’ Urrivt’rsity or slrr<ly rrlrrrxul, llrosr’

lS4 lcHrLDREN OF cerN

who come from working-class families are likely to go to Peru’s largest university, the National Major University of San Marcos, the oldest university in the Americas, a fiee school in a poor barrio of Lima. favier took me to a law school class. ‘l’o get to San Marcos, we had to take two buses from his house, ending up an hour away in the neighborhood of Pueblo Libre that enveloped the walled University City. Lirna’s electricity shortage along with a lack of money for maintenance combined to make San Marcos resemble the site of a bornber attack, the whole placc littered with debris, covered with sand, and scattered with a few scrawny trees. At night the only artificial light comes from a bonfire of burning garbage.

In the classroom favier’s law professor stood under red block letters written on the wall reading “Long live Presider-rte Gonzalo, chief of the party and the revolution!” and “Long live Marxism- Leninism-Maoism, Gonzalo thought!” Two posters showed a young Mao with the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” Out- side in the hallway I waited under a “Death Io yanquis!” slogan while favier talked to a friend.

Sendero graffiti covers almost every inch of wall. As I walked by the arts building, a rare stretch of clean wall above the third- floor windows caught my eye. “Thanks for pointing it out to me,”

favier said, laughing. “l’ll have the compafleros take care of it tonight. ” Sendero murals decorate the staircase landings and building lobbies: paintings of Presidente Gonzalo, in an open- jacketed suit, with glasses and a paunch, holding a sword or a red hammer and sickle flag. Under the murals were long tracts, fifteen or so paragraphs, written in longhand in red marker on computer paper. favier read them to me in hushed tones. “Crush the New Counterrevolutionary Revisionist Movement: Gor- bachev Betraying the People’s Revolution,” was the title of one. There was a speech by Mao written in smaller letters. “Read it to me,” favier said. He needed new glasses.

“A revolution is not a dinner party:’I read, “or writing an cssay or painting a picture or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperatc, kind, c<lurteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is au insurrcction, an act of violcnce by wltich otrc class ovcrthrows itttotltcr.”

FIc noddccl, savoring caclt worcl. As wc walkctl itway, lrc t;trotcd

D tA L E C T I C I 185

more Mao: “Nothing is impossibre for him who dares to scare the heights.”

We went into the -university,s snack bar and ordered coffee,which was served in huge mugs, and sausage sandwiches. .,1,m

paying,” Javier said. “What a macho you are,’, I said, and he laughed and put his

money away. After dinner we went upstairs to a classroom whose walrs were

covered with murals of Marx and Lenin. A group of ,,ine chir- dren, some of whom looked to be around seven, wearing Andean wool caps with earfaps and- extremely serious expression”s, played flutes and drums. After each song they chanted, :.Viu, p..ria.ni. Gonzalo! Viva the People’s War!” The students grt uf f;;;;, chairs and followed the musicians, young pieipipe.s, into it e hallway to dance. “The people’s Revolutio., is a prrty,,, fauie,murmured.

Sendero had been burrowing in at San Marcos since the late 1970s but first appeared p,blicly in fune 19g7, when the ,ed flag with a hammer and sickle was raised during a ,t”d.;i;;;;;_ stration. The next year Sendero,s slate of Jandidate, *;; iir” student elections. But the movement has rost rupfori ,i;;;,’lr, strong-arm tactics-h-anging dead dogs on campus to intimidate informers, for example-alienated so”rne students.

But San Marcos is still fertire recruiting grour-rd for a movement that was born at another free universiti,”the University J S;; Crist6bal de Huamanga, in Ayacucho. Shortly after San CrirtOUrt de Huamanga reopened in 1959 after sixty_five y.rr, ;iJ”;;;;;;, it received an infusion of funds from Euiopean governments ancr the U. s. Alliance for Progress. The university’s -attractive salaries lured some of Peru’s leading scholars from other prorir””r. Among those academics was Abimael Guzmdn, who had bee. a brilliant philosophy student in the aristocratic city of Arequip*. Ayacucho’s university quickly became the most modern ortri,r” Lima. At the same time a left-wing military coup by a populist general, fuan Velasco Alvarado, raised expectations, espc,cial- Iy among the young, that great changcs were c<lnrirrg. Whcrr those expectatio,s wcre not mct, trre ulivcrsity-witrr (irzr,drr,s hclp-bccanrc a cruciblc f<rr rcvolution.

cuzra/r. bccarrrc thc trrivcrsity’s lrcrs,rrrcr rrircct,r lrrrrr,

ls6 lcHtLDREN OF cAlN

through that position, controlled-the cumiculum’ His teachers

,.Oi*?a ,.lntroductioir to Social Science” with “Historic Mate-

ri”iilJ’ ‘;Biologi”rl Science” with “Dialectic of Nature'” He .,r”J t”r.t.r, ,r”Mro used peasants and Lenin workers’ and his iltd”r;;,.,t io t.r.h ln hilh schools and colleges around Peru. V;il.; unwittingly helpeJ spread Sendero’s message by pro- ,,o6il the free ,inlu.rriii”r, tn tqOO peru ranked fourtee,th in l;,i; “A-.rica in school attendance; by 1980, thanks largely to ili;;: it ranked fourth. Access to education produces social ,”.bilt,y But it also produces guerrillas’ Though Peruvian. ed-

ucation does not teacfr young ptople to question’ it cannot kcep

theI-,-, f.o* questioning natu'”‘liy, and Peruvian society offers few

answers. “The poorui,” *llo doesn’t know he is poor will be

;;;; f”;”r.t. Ti,. poo, man who is conscious of his position is I potential revolutionary,” Guzmdn liked to say'” ffi;; il il;”rr’r irpid spread, Peru_’s security forces raided San Marcos iour times in the late 1980s’ On February

13′ 1987 ‘ i””, if,r”trnd policemen raided three Lima universities’ killing , ,tud”.,t and arresting more than five hundred in San Marcos’ treaking doors, ,-rJhi’g a statue of ,Che Guevara’

“con-

fiscating”-i’e’, stealingjcomputers and equipment and’ burn-

i;;il;”it, with special Jmphasii on ?nv book bound in red’ even ffit;i; ; copy of Peru’s’constitution’ The university’ which ;;;;;t.t.,rti.d a war zone, was reduced to rubble’

One night )avier took me to a San Marcos square d1l:t: Tl”

hali was fr””shiy painted white, decorated with balloons filled with

“onf.,ti and coiored-paper snowflakes’ As favier and I paid ad-

.nirrio.,, smiling young^p”ople were eating plates of chicken and

;;;t rq,rrr. d-rr”i.,ii” Andean-folk,style as men in ponchos ;;G ;”ilt and frites’ We had picked our wav through the i.iri, li the unlit streets outside; few places are as menacing as a Lima barrio at night. But inside was all light and laughter’

groJ, .f.r” fun, exlept that the band’s lyrics were a hymn to ih. P.opl”‘s War, “n,l

,o-t of these h’pPy dancers attached bombs tb dogs and slit policemen’s throah’–;.4r.

they lll from the Shining path?” I asked favicr, somewhat alarmed; tliere were twcl httndred pc<lplc hcrc’

..I Ctttr,t allswcr tlrat,,’lrc saicl.

..Bttt thcy all havc tlrc rlcsirc to

scrvc tltc 1lct4llc.” ,,,r,- w”1r,,,1,. irrto tlrc lirrc kl rlitttct’ ltt it sottg tlrltt lrcgitrr

“witrri<lr

D tA L E C T I C | 187

with a Red heart, nothing can stop him.” The music was a melancholy wail, like |ewish klezmer music, and as the line dance picked up, I began to feel at home; we were doing the hora. The line snaked in and out, weaving back through itself, faster and faster, and blinded by the confetti and ribbons dripping from my hair, I closed my eyes and let favier pull me along.

When I asked most Peruvians about how things were in their country, the answer was usually the same: “Terrible-a million percent inflation, garbage piling up, no jobs, no water, no elec- tricity.” At the square dance favier introduced me to one of the compafreros, an engineering student. How are things? I said. “Great,” he replied with enthusiasm. “A million percent infla- tion, garbage piling up, no jobs, no water, no electricity. The forces of history are really on our side.”

Tru uo*”u, oF HISToRv, rN TRUTH, HAVE NEvER BEEN wrrH Pnnu. Or with the rest of Latin America. Considering the way the continent was conquered and colonized, it is miraculous that violence is not more pervasive and that Latin American societies function at all. There were no democratic currents blowing in Spain at the time Columbus set sail for what turned out to be the New World. In late-fifteenth-century Spain, the monarchy held absolute power. King Ferdinand arrd Queen Isabel consulted advisory councils, but no institutions existed to challenge thc crown.

For the three centuries spanning Spain’s conquest and colo- nization of America, the single dominant fact of Spanish life was the Inquisition. The Inquisition, which began in Rome in the thirteenth century, was not, of course, limited to Spain. But it was in Spain that the Inquisition reached its greatest intensity.

Much in the Spanish Inquisition later found its echo in rnodenr Latin American antisubversive campaigns. Spain nevcr partici- pated in tl-re Crusades, preferring to reserve its fcrvor for thc Muslims, fews, Lutherans, and other hcretics within its owrr lxrrdcrs. ‘I’lrc church fought the intcnul cncnly witlr tcchrrir;ucs o[ iufi ltratiou and psychological r4rcrations that ;>rcvicwcrl trxlay’s countcrinsurgcncy tcclrrtitlrrcs. A sccrct policc o[sorrls willr ir virsl rrctwrlrk o[ splics itrosc. l)cvorrt (]irllrolit:s lurtl lo rt’;xrrl irrryorrr,

lsslCnrLDREN oF CetN

who doubted or sinned. Many people reported business rivals or family enemies. Others, through torture or religious pressure, were persuaded to turn in their children, brothers, or parents. Priests tortured small children to reveal their parents’ religious beliefs. The supposed heretics were then tortured, and thousands were burned at the stake in autos-da-f6. A heretic’s family suffered his shame for generations; his children were barred from holding positions of public trust, and their goods confiscated.

Even the Inquisition’s language reverberates in Latin America hundreds of years later: The enemy was “soulless,” his motivation part of a “worldwide godless conspiracy of evil”; his tactics “poison the minds of young children, who can only be saved in purifuing flame.” In 1599 fuan Mariani, an adviser to King Philip III, wrote of the Protestants, “lt is a glorious thing to eliminate this pestilent and pernicious race from the face of the earth. When a limb is rotten, it is cut off so it does not infect the rest of the body. In the same way, we must use the sword to separate the state from this bestial cruelty in human form.”

The death and emigration caused by the Inquisition and Spain’s political decline in Europe led Spain to look elsewhere for wealth and influence. This was the setting in which an Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus arrived at the throne of Ferdinand and Isabel with his proposition to find a direct sea route to the spice lands of Asia by sailing west. The monarchs had rejected Columbus’s proposal before. But now, with their coffers dangerously empty, they agreed to gamble. They procured financing from local bankers and gave Columbus diplomatic cre- dentials to use in China and |apan.

That Columbus had happened upon America became clear only years later; he died without realizing he had landed on an autonomous continent. Instead of the great cities and spice plan- tations of Asia, Columbus discovered a desolate island (in what is now the Bahamas) populated by “savages.” From the point of view of profit-the only point of view considered at the time- the trip was a failure.

On his second trip, the next year, he fared no better; he landed with seventeen boats and twelve hundred men in what is now the Antilles, where he found little to have made the joun-rcy wortlrwlrilc. On his third voyagc, h{rwcvcr, hc rcachccl thc c<last of wlrat is rrow Vcnczucla (lrc tlulrght it was fapitn) lncl f<rturd

D I A L E C T I C I 189

traces of gold and pearls..l.his time, when he returned to Spain,Spain took notice, and the-conqr.rt L”gm in earnest. Explorerafter explorer set forth to follow C;i;m;;s,s .rrt”, hopi.g..’il.i.aeven more riches. Those who did not find minerals turned to plantation agri_culture, introducing such New W;;id-;.ops as the potato, corn,tomato, tobacco, .o:?r, coca, and quinine t. Spri;.-i;;;.*the crops,. the_ Spanish

“nrtru.J-lniil^ on plantations calledencomiendas. In l50l.a royal decree gau” colorir..rif,” ,ig[i a,levy a tribute tax on the India,s, ;;rt-; small part going to thecrown and the rest to the encomendero. The l,rafr,”?rla”ti,”” tr_through forced labor, and in ,.tu.n ih. encomenderotaught themcatholicism. fhe forced lrbo, rastedihrle Iifetimes,;ffi irah.r,son, and grandson had worked for the patron, the family wasfree. The Spanish imported aogrlo h;;iJ;;;'”r*o”i irii,J”r,some Spanish adventurers -rd”e thei. Iiving “rptu.l,ig .ni;;;;dian villages and selling tr,. ,”ria”nt, i”‘ar,” enutmenderos.

The system troubled ma”.y i, Spai;, including a handful ofradical priests and euee, Isailel, *fr, *-” a petitio, reque.stingthat the en comienda, wh ich,t ”

.onria.rJ #;;; ;:ilii::The Spanish rulers wrote lrrr.bi,g;;;;rr. humane treatmentof Indians’ But the economic ,”arlti”s i,”r” ou..powering: with-out slave labor, the. Spanish “oro.ri”,

,lr” *n.thress. T.he rawswere simply ignored in America, giving rise to on” of ail#”operating principles of modern Lrt”l,., Ai_,e, ica, Obedezc; pr;;;”cumplo (“I obey, but I do not complf,;j -Lr*

hil;il;; ll,with reality. In 1565 the crown established the post of corregidor, to collecttaxes, to help the encomenderor, and__ostensiblyalo r;,;;;;;.ative population. The officials were pria poo.ty *ai ,n”. iir”sixteenth century, had to pay for tf,” JrJir. themselves. Thcvrccouped their losses through

“orrrption. iil;;;#;;rffi Jl,wcre not already their provin””r, *”rlthi.st men when appoiritcdkr their jobs, they lost little tirn. i; b.;;_trg ,u.’l’he viole.ce and corruption of the conquest rcacrrcrr trrcirlrcight in t.c two regions.*t”r” ,fr.pri^ was grcatcst: Mcxic,rrrr<l l)c.r’ ‘l’hc Aztccs a,d the Lr;n; ;;;.: trrc ricrrcst ar<r rrrrstrlcvclr4rcd ,f Latirr Anrcrica’s Irrdiarrs. ;ii,”y trra trrc rrirrr frrrtrrrcl’.13ffcr tlrc S,urrislr grrrr, rrigrrry ,,,1,i,irti”,,r”rr rrgri.rrrrrrrc, :rrr<rrrrilli,rrs <rI lrrrliirrrs *i,,, ,,,,,,r,i r;. .,’;i,;;;,;i,rr rrrt. <,tt<ttrttiatt<rils.

lgolcHtLDREN OF cetN

Machu Picchu, the greatest archaeological wonder of South

A*.tilr, was a shrine [o the technological command of Peru’s Incrs, t rra”ed agriculture; hydraulic systems; earthquake-proof buildings that have proved to be more solid than many structures

using tlday’s constiuction techniques’ But although the Incas

*.r.”br.rti’,taking engineers, their socie$ was not’ as the Latin

A*.ri.r., left likes to’claim, a model of equality and democracy. n r*riL ai,e controlled all the land; peasants were forced to labor

fo, the landowners. No Incan was permitted to look his emperor

i” tt. eye. The Incas were also imperialists, who’ having con- qr.r”a it.it neighbors, proceeded to other lands’ At the time of tire arrival of the Spanish, Atahualpa, the Inca emperor’ was

ruling from Quito, in what is now Ecuador’ Francisco Pizarro, an illiterate pig farmer who was the illegit-

imate son of a Spanish nobleman, landed on the Peruvian coast

;;’f3Z ;rJ pro”eeded inward, following the smell of gold’ Pi- ,rrro ,.qu.rted a meeting with Atahualpa’ At the summit Pizarro

;;;r;;aAtahualpa wit”h a Bible and asked him to accept ca-

in”ii”irr” and declare himself “servant of the pope-and vassal of

iir. fi”g of Spain.” Atahualpa, not understanding the c-oncept.of

“‘U””i.”frt” in”a, had not iiscovered the written word), let the

giUt. fril to the ground. Pizarro’s forces then attacked the Incas

and took AtahualPa Prisoner’- ft. Inca triedio tuy his release, promising two rooms filled *itt, goia and silver. Pizarro accepted;Atahualpacomplied’ Then

iir^r1o hanged him. His death established the level of trust be-

tween white-and Indian that persists to this day’

In the forty years following his arrival, Pizarro p-roceeded to

.o..q”.’thewholeofPeru.Hecoulddothiswithfewerthana hundr.d men for several reasons’ First, the Incas were divided’

*ith Rt”hrrlpa’s enemies initially supporting the Spanish ** ond, the Incas initially trusted Pizano, believing that he and his

.n”r, *.r” gods. The ir,.r, *ttt also betrayed by their own au- it o.itrtirt iim; after their leaders were killed’ the commoners

t*a.atofollowwhoeverreplacedthem.By1577the]astrrrling Inca, Tupac Amaru, had been killed, and the country fell6rmly

..Ji Spr”ish domination. When the Spanish arrived, thc In- dian population nurnbcrccl morc than 2.5 n’rillion; a ccntttry

latcr

urly’60b,ot)0 rcrnainccl, thc rcst fcllcd l>y thc Spanish.arrd thcir

iirJnr”r, pri*cipally ,rcaslcs. piz..rr’ f<rtttrtlctl l,itttrt irt I 535, arrtl

D r A L E C T r C | 191

it quickly became the most important city in South America, the maior port for trade with Spain, and the capital of the viceroyal$ of Peru, which ruled Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.

The feudalism of the Spanish crown remained until Peru’s fight for independence, which began in 1821. Peru was freed from Spain mainly by Argentine and Colombian fighters; Peru’s own elites, fat with the corruption Lima offered as the gateway to Spain, had no interest in giving up their colonial status. After independence, royal feudalism simply gave way to local feudal- ism. Government was a chaotic series of caudillos and military coups; between 1826 and 1845 Peru had more than thirty chief executives.

Moru** Penu rs rHE LEGACy oF THrs HrsroRy. PERU’s LEADERS have not been measurably better or worse than those of other Latin American countries. Good men have become president in Peru, but they have found themselves prisoners of the class dif- ferences, corruption, poverty, and lethargy of their society. Since the 1960s Peru has been dominated by three very different types of leader: Fernando Belairnde, who governed in the 1960s as a populist and again in the 1980s as a conservative; General fuan Alvarado Velasco, who led a left-wing military coup in 1968; and the social democrat Alan Garcia, who came to office in 1985. All three tried to better the lives of the poor; each went about it in a radically different way. All three failed, and each failure further shut out the poor from the political institutions of Peru.

Garcia’s collapse was the latest entry in the country’s catalog of reasons for cynicism about politics. Never in Peru’s history had a president taken office with expectations as high as in 1985. Garcia was the first president elected from the APRA party, thc Arnerican Popular Revolutionary Alliance. APRA had long lrccrr thc most important electoral force in Peru, but thc nrilitary h:rd bkrckcd its previous presidential canclidates from taking of6cc. ()arcfa was thirty-five, a lrccfu six fect four, a nran who harl llranccrl his studics at thc Sorlxrnnc by sirrging in l)aris cafis. Ilc wirs ir spcllllincling <lrltor. llis confirlcncc irr lrirrrsclf iurtl lris rrbility kr clrrrrrgc l’cnr sccrrrt’tl lirrrillcss. llc wits rrol rr Mirrxisl,

1g2 l cHtLDREN OF cRtt’t

offering the hope that he could convince the wealthy to cooperate

in realihange as a way of combating Marxism in the long term.

Garcia took office announcing that he would pay the Inter-

national Monetary Fund (lMF) no more than l0 percent of Peru’s

export earnings on the country’s $11.7 billion debt’ This was, in

truth, pure talk. That first year Garcia paid 30 percent; his pre-

d””.rror, the conservative Belarinde, had stopped paying alto- gether. but Garcia’s public defiance of the IMF rallied Peru behind him.

In his first few months carcia enjoyed a 97 percent approval

rating. The APRA slogan sprouted on walls all over the country:

“Oniy God can save your soul. Only APRA can save Peru'” For

two years it seemed true. Garcia’s unorthodox policy of stimu- lating the economy by redistributing income to the poor produced

gro*ih rates of 8.5 percent and 7 percent, thc highest in Latin lmerica. Everyone I talked to in Peru in March 1987 was still enchanted with Alan, as the Peruvians called him. what will happen, I asked a local schoolteacher on a train near Cuzco, *hen Per,, has to start living without imported goods? “It’s about

time we learned how,” he said. Peruvians got their opportunity only a few months later. The

economic boom continued as long as factories could simply put

their idle machines to work. But Peru needed new investment,

and this did not come. Garcia met with twelve leading busi-

nessmen, called the Apostles, who signed letters of intent to invest

but then did not invest. The IMF placed Peru on its blacklist, ineligible for new loans, the only Latin Amcrican country so

distiiguished. At the end of 1986 the government was losing hard

.urr.I.y at the rate of a hundred million dollars a month’ As production started to fall behind the new purchasing power,

inflation started to climb; it was to total morc than 2 million percent for Garcia’s five years in office, setting a world’s record

i’or sustained hyperinflation. In )anuary 1989 rumors circulated

that the milita;y had planned a coup and then called it off, supposedly because the generals decided they could not win a

baitle with the Peruvian economy. C)nly the illegal export of coca

paste, which by 1989 was bringing in more than a billion dollars

^ y”^,r, kcpt thl country afloat. ‘l'[c rninip*r.r w:rgc fcll lrchirrd

irrflatiirn; il-,” 1r,u,, wcrc lxx)rcr with cacS 1>assi,g day, tScir l,ryi.g

lx)wcr l,,wcr il,,r,r irt irrry tirrrc irr tltc 1:rcviorts twcrrty-livc ycitrs.

D rA L E C T r C J 193

Peruvians’ disillusion with Garcia translated into disillusion with politics in general. Previous experience seemed to become a disqualification for election. In November 1989 Ricardo Bel- mont, a radio and television personality with no political record, was elected major of Lima. That year it appeared that Mario Vargas Llosa, a novelist and political outsider, would be elected president. His appeal seemed to be that he was wealthy, white, and European and that he had wealthy, white, European friends. “lf Vargas Llosa wins, won’t people invest in Peru?” Javier’s mother asked me. Connections, as any reader of a Vargas Llosa novel knows, are how things work in Peru.

But Vargas Llosa started forming alliances with Peru’s tradi- tional right-wing politicians. He began proposing economic re- forms that scared Peruvians: firing state workers; removing subsidies. As Vargas Llosa began to be seen as a political insider, the role of outsider fell to Alberto Fujimori, the Peruvian-born son of )apanese immigrants. The people I spoke with three weeks before the presidential election in I990 knew nothing about him except that he was fapanese. But that was enough. Rumors cir- culated that fapan would pay off Peru’s foreign debt. Fujimori was a samurai in shining armor; his connections were even better than Vargas Llosa’s.

Vargas Llosa and Fujimori, however, were not the only ben- eficiaries of Peru’s antipolitical mood. As government channels became less accessible to the people, Peruvians gradually turned to other, more radical, agendas.

Jourr* wou,.D Nor rELL ME MUCH ABour Hrs owN HrsroRy w.r’H Sendero. I wanted to know how he had been recruited, what it was like in the early years, what his first tasks had been, wherc hc had fought. “We don’t want to personalize the rcvolution,” he rcplied. I sensed that he also found it painful. His girlfricnd in the movement had died. “l only regret that wc dicln’t havc a l>aby, like shc wanted,” was all he would say about hcr. And hc lracl l>ccn one of a few clozcrr survivors of thc singlc nrost lrnrlal cvcrrt in thc tcn ycars <l[ Scnrlcro’s war: thc rnassacrcs irr Lirrra’s llrisor r s.

On frtrrc ltl, l9tl(r, St’tuk’tisl:ts irr llrrcr’ prisorrs irr l,irrr:r–

‘ts4l CHTLDREN oF CetN

Lurigancho, El Front6n, and the women’s prison’ Santa 86r-

bara-staged ,r, ,rp,i’i”g tt-y took.seven police.and gu’ards h;;,rg. ,id pr.r..,i.d , ii’t of demands’ such as garbage collec- tion and one common prison for all the Senderista inmates’

i”*”a of negotiating, Piesident Garcia. called in the military’ ;-hi;h ,rrr,rlt”.d the

-prisons with bazookas’ cannons’ and.ma-

;,;**. Wh.r, th’e ‘*ok” cleared’ 244 prisoners were dead’

No one survived in Lurigancho’ )avier’ who had been sent to El

Front6n after his arrest ii Puno for blowing up somg.banks’ was or,. of a few dozen to survive there’ He lost practically

everyone

tl.1r,”* and afterward was sent to a naval base’ where he was

irr**a, then shipped off to Tacna’ where I met him’ The day i;-;;;;.-orated’ ,,t’g’a–‘ticallv in Sendero thought as the “Day of Heroicism'” J;;il; “””

night )avier started t9 ta.lk It was ,ridnight’ and

we were sitting in a’grubby roast chicken restaurant in Lima’s

center. )avier was celZbrating a perfect.score on a property law

;;;. He had finished his dinner and was now eating mine’ “We took the hostages at six in the morning”‘he said’

“And we

waited for the attac’k to begin’ At five forty-five that afternoon

helicopters began to fly ove”r the prison’ Then the attack began’

grenades and mortar,’ W” resisted for more than twenty-four

ir;;i;.uld hear an explosion and look over at where a com-

;;;;;;;d I,d see only dust. I never thought I would survive.

i *rs t”rrified. Fear is natural; one merely.has to transform it i”io .o”rrg”. I lostlll notion of time'” He interrupted himself’ :Wt o canie out ahead in that?” he asked me’

“In the short term or long termZ” I said’ “You lost two hundred

fifo of your best militants'” Wrong answer. Ht f’o*t’td and gave me the right one: The

*”‘,o”id.’,rr,*rrf.”i if ‘t Fascist dictatirship and showed the world

lhe “heroicism” of the compafleros’- i’B..rrr” the military shot the prisoners after they surren- dered?” I said.

“There was no surrender,” )avier said’ furiotll’-“There’ were

onlf *ound”d .ornp’n”‘o'”Th” compafleros still live and fight

in us; they are present at every mometlt; they showed us’ how to

givcrlurlivcsycstcrcltry,t<xlay’andtotrlorrowforthcrcvoltttion'”‘- Ii,,t.latcr hc ,”i,I l,,i”tly, ,iS.,rctirrcs I wakc rr1; irr t5c r.idcllc

oI tlrc rriglrt likc l’rrt still livirrg it'”

D rA L E C T rC | 19s

THn Srr.roeRrsrAs srILL IN pRISoN ARE Now HELD IN CeNro Grande, a sand-colored adobe fortress on the edge of a slum in Lima’s foothills. I went early one Saturday, visiting day for women. Reporters are forbidden; I had the name of a Senderista prisoner, and I told the guards I was her friend. I passed through seven different checkpoints; various guards stamped my arm and searched me and the cigarettes, oranges, and newspapers I carried. The open-air center courtyard is the hub of a wheel of various halls, each wedge-shaped with alarge, walled patio along its outer rim. The halls, or pavilions, as they are known in prison, separate women from men and political from common criminals. A guard opened the steel gate to Pavilion lA, the Senderista women’s pavilion, which swung shut behind me. The government does not enter here; the guards are afraid, and it is easier to let the prisoners run their own pavilions. This Shining Trench of Com- bat, as the Senderistas call it, is a model for life after the victory of the People’s War, a tiny liberated zone inside Peru’s maximum security prison.

Canto Grande provides immates with almost nothing: a few pieces of bread a day, if the guards don’t steal it; water, when there is water-about once a week-and cement beds. If inmates want to eat, sleep on a mattress, wear clothes, ease their days by smoking cocaine paste cigarettes (almost all the common pris- oners do), or bribe guards to get out of solitary conEnement, the goods or money must come from relatives or from such creative capitalism as selling cocaine paste, prostitution, or stealing from weaker prisoners. The cells of the common prisoners are thick with slime, garbage, and rats.

But in Pavilion lA you could eat offthe floor. The main room was hung with red ribbons and metallic streamers, like Christrnas tree ornaments, that said RPND. “People’s Republic of thc Ncw Democracy,” explained my hostess, who wore a salmon-colorccl drcss, pink shoes, and purple eye shadow. We sat clrtwtr otr a ccrncnt lrcnch at a long ccmctrt tablc covcrcd with clotlr. As I talkcd to Nuria (l lravc cltattgccl lrcr nanrc), caclt wotttatt wlto wirlkcd by snrilcd ltt<l sltook rtty ltittt<l Ircartily.’l’ltc: wotttctt wcrt’ rrot lrrtliitrrs; lltcy wcrc wlrilcs ttt krwt’r-tnitltllc-t,llrss tttt’slizits, ol”

196 ICntLDREN oF CntN

mixed blood’ They all were young: ftoT eighteen (those under

eighteen go to a i”””Jit ;;if”l)to lfout thirtv-five’ I was brought

a delicious breakfast ‘iitita pfj”tains’.onion” ‘nd

coffee’ llth'” other end of the t,bit *o*”n in visiting-day dresses

and high

heels grated carrots’ . cr,r^^ ^-l p.o”irlentc Outside on the open-air patio’- posters

of Mao and Presidente

Gonzalo murals .””;;;i’ih;ttigt”*’ttt’. A banner on one wall

oroclaimed, “Nothing ii i*p”‘rbf9 for him who dares to scale

i#i.”il,” it.,’*”t thought )avier had recited to me on my

tour of San Marcos’ ih; *;”n had gathered in a circle to greet

guests with a ,ong, “to’np*’ta by dlums and guitar: “Workers

ffi;;;, t.e.tt’tt *iit;ii “””people’ directedbv Gonzalo’

we will construct oui-state. Let’s go peruvian people, let’s go to

war, with dynamite “a f*a *” i’ill topple the old state’ I want

il u. “”itra| i,, tt. ;;t;it; fields’ tears’ iweat and blood’ That’s

ir;;*. sing; that’s how we dance'” ..That,s tr,. ,o,n,,tic part to melt hearts,’, wlrispered

Nuria.

Today *r, , ,pt”i’ia’vt O”” of the prisoners was to be released’

Her family nra “o’it iittr her smali daughter to pick her up’

and as the women d;;t;Ji;;;ircle and d'”‘ms plaved’ *: tll”u

and hugged th. *”;;;;;;6 “;t Then evervone accompanied

her to the door, ffiil;;Viy'”- to Presidente Gonzalo and singing th. “1,’tt”l”1];;;iZ”‘ which Sendero has

adopted as its

anthem. Nuria said that each morning th9 eightv-two

women in the

pavilion get up rt J;;;;; u’it’t”**t’-‘ier thev collect in bottles when there is water, do group exercises,

sing Sendero songs’

listen to n .o*p”t’dlt’* ofif’t radio news’ and iet a-bouf assigned

co,ective tasks of cooking, cleanin-g, making h_andicrafts to sell,

“r’rr”prri”g th.,t’it’l p”‘og”*’ for visitine days’ “ln contrast

with the rest of tnt’p’i’i”‘”*e have ”o d”gs here’ no alcohol’

,,ol.rbirnirm. We are living thg.new society'”

Nuria *r, , t*”‘ltv-‘i*-yt””-old journalist awaiting trial as an

apologist fo, St”it’J, an’activity declared illegal in 1988 in a

package of antiterro-r;J*t’ I asled why Sendero was so violent’

“Peaceful change;;;;”‘t work”‘ she said’ “The bourgeoisie will

never give u, ,o*-t”i”‘”””yti.ri”’g ]\e1 do without being forced

to is not ,”rffy gi”l”g”up pt’*”t]-lt’s iust ir cotrccssion to keep

powcr. ‘l’1,” ‘”ui*ltlr’itts t’f tlrc lcft tttcrcly scrvc tltc oltl orclcr’

[)r,ly vi,,l.r,(:c (:illl tttitkc lltcttt givc rtll ptlwcr'”

DTALECTTC 1′.t97

She, like Javier, employed the phrases “use violence” and “be on the side of the people” interchangeably. I asked her about Tiananmen Square. She said exactly what favier had said. “lt showed there are still people who want to use the violent way,” she said. “Still a small group, but a very hopeful sign.”

What about when Sendero kills innocent bystanders? I asked. Or ordinary campesinos whose only crime is owning a bicycle? “‘[‘hose are just stories told by the reactionary media,” she said. But then she contradicted herself. “To set up the new order, we have to erase the old. Every war has a cost.” She shrugged. “Are sixty thousand children dying of hunger each year not a cost?”

“l don’t know that I could use violence on another person, no matter how worthy the cause,” l said. I had read that most of Sendero’s military chiefs were women, that the three Senderistas in Lima’s Political-Military Bureau in the mid-1980s wcrc women, that some of Europe’s most distinguished terrorists werc women. But I had a hard time picturing myself slitting a police- man’s throat. “How do you learn to do it?”

“lt’s a process of gradual advances,” she said. “You comc iu ur-rable to do things, but through education you learn to do things y<tu couldn’t do before. ” She interrupted herself. “l’ve donc all the talking. ‘l’ell me sonrething about yourself.”

I started to tell her where I was living and what I was writing. After a few seconds she broke in. “What do you think of thc People’s War?” she said.

I said that I thought that some great changes were neccssary in Peru but that violence was not the way. “You sound allnost like a pacifist,” she said, l-rorrified.

‘fhe cassette playing in Nuria’s head was the same as favicr’s and the same I was to hear, almost word for word, fronr thc othcr women in the jail. After talking to Nuria, I asked to scc tlrc woman whose name I had been given and whom I was officially visiting, Giscllc I will call her, a European who had conrc t<r Pcru in 1978 and joined Sendero. “lt was the riglrt tlrirrg to rkr,” Cisellc said simply. Shc said that Cuba hacl not yct had u rcv- olrrtiort; tltc country was still irr tlrc hancls of thc lxrrrrgcoisic irrrrl largc landowrtcrs. l’ol Pot ha<l tlrc riglrt irlca but lrrckcrl tlrc grri<l- rrrrcc of lt Oortrrtrrrrrisl lllrlly. Alllruril wus rrrlctl by lxlru’gt’ois rcvisiorrisls. ‘l’lrc lh:r<lt’r Mcirrlrol ( )rrrrg “is wrong; llrt’y lrrrvt’ rro

198 ICHtLDREN oF CAIN

ideology, but they are brave enough to take up arms’ so deserve

credit. “- it. women had finished cooking luncS’ We had soup with

pi.”., of beef and corn and a radish and tomato salad; a carrot irk. ,”r, baking for afternoon teatime’ The show was ready to ,*,. f went out-to the patio and sat down with the other visitors’ There was a drumroll. The Sendero women marched out sol-

;;i, in perfect formation, carrying red flags 9r c.aye.d 1v9od *o”k machine guns, all wearing black high heels’ black. skirts’ .”J blorr.r, ,nJMro caps-flight attendants of the revolution’-r*

trr. next three horrrs *” *rt”h.d a Sendero ceremony cel- ebrating International Women’s Day, with speeches saluting Rosa

L,r*.*B,rrg and )iang Quing Mao, among others’ A woman read

q”””r-f-i Mao abl”t the difference between feminine liber- ation and the true emancipation of women that was possible only

*itf, tn. fall of capitalism. They sang tuneless Sendero songs and

,ho,rt.d slogans: i’Lorg live the iust, glorious, and correct Pe-

ruvian Communist prrlyt Lo’-‘g live the new offensive against the

counterrevolutionary revisionists headed principally by Gor-

bachev and Deng!”- A tittt” boy, thI son of a prisoner, read a poem called “Woman’

Moih.r, Guerrilla.” “Listen to the shouts of our people”‘he read

*t it. trr. families watched, smiling. “Today, while you suffer .*pioiar,io”, lift your head, break your chains of repression! The

people’s war advances!”‘ R long play followed, about workers who score a victory over

their capltalisi exploiters through the guidance of the heroic com-

;;.; of Sendero. The womin played multiple roles’ donning iuits and mustaches for their roles as men’

“lt’s a monastery,” Father Hubert Lanssiers had told me’ He

had been the Senderistas’ chaplain in prison, a challerrging oc-

“rfrtior, especially for a Belgian priest who was an honorary

-.*b., of the French Foreign Legion and had been confessor i. ttt. Diems. “They are nuns; their life is work and prayer’ But ,i ir,” ,r*. time they can be charming and flirtatious. ‘fhey ask yo,, to bring them hair dye, but they can stick a knife into you

and twist it. ” I left cankl Grandc as urystified about thc Scnclcrista tttincl as

whcn I cantc in. ‘l’hc slighi insiglrt irlto Scrtclcro’s growtlr that I

*,,ir”,f currrc rrot [r0rn tlri Scrrtlcristas lrrtt flrortt tllc llristtrr ilsclf’

D I A L E C T r C | 199

As I walked out of the peace and order inside the walls of the Sendero pavilion into the prison courtyard, I could imagine a sign on the pavilion door: eseNnoN HopE, ALL yE wHo ExIT HERE. The Sendero men were singing in their pavilion, but in the other pavilions the common prisoners were thrusting their arms and in some cases their heads through the bars, begging for money or food and cursing ungenerous visitors. Bowls lowered on strings from the third floor hit my head, accompanied by a rain of spittle. The courtyard stank of garbage, urine, and the sweet stench of cocaine cigarettes. It was bedlam, but it was only a slightly car- icatured version of much of the rest of Peru. And if I were forced to decide between serving out my time in the medieval hell of the common prisoners or in the spooky monastery of Pavilion lA, I knew which I would choose.

Mot, oF PERU’s HTGHLANDS rs SnNnnno couNTRy. IN rHu NErcH- boring states of Ayacucho, Apurimac, Huancavelica, funin, and Cerro de Pasco, Sendero has killed or driven out most government representatives or placed them under virtual house arrest. Whcn Sendero takes a village, it first blows up the municipal buildings and, if there are any, a couple of banks. Next, it holds instant “people’s trials” and executes members of the local power struc- ture, with special viciousness for those who belong to the Com- munist party or other parties of the legal left. Sendero reserves its most intense hatred not for Peru’s right but for the campesino organizers and labor leaders of the left. Sendero doesn’t want people to make the peasants’Iife better, but to make it worse, t<r the point of being intolerable. After the executions Sendero fincls the civil registry and lines up everyone in town. The troops tcll villagers they are now members of Sendero. They form per4rlc’s committees and designate a youth chief, a food chief, a hcaltlr chief. The prudent campesino will cooperate. He will bring frxxl to tl’re troops. He will perform a “revolutionary action,” such as rol>bing a large landowner’s sheep, if forced to. And hc will kcclr silcnt if the Scr-rderistas takc his twclvc-year-old son with thcrrr wlrcn tlrcy lcavc.

llrt rro gucrrilla nrovcnrcrrt cilrr srrrvivc orr flcar :tlorrc. Mitrry pclrsrrnts witlr tlrc o;>1;orltttrily kr irr[rrrrtr llrc ;xrlit’c itlxrttl Scrr-

sool CHTLDREN oF CelN

dero’s whereabouts without endangering themselves choose to keep silent.

The reason for their silence is twofold. On one side, Sendero’s moralistic totalitarianism appeals to many. It keeps the men home

with their families at night. It offers a crude system of iustice to which the peasant can appeal, punishing those who pay the campesino too little or take his land.

That is more than the government ever does. The second reason a campesino might support Sendero is that to him the idea of tearing down the Peruvian state is eminently reasonable. What has the government ever brought but promises and trouble?

The Ayacucho countryside is 165 miles from Lima’s upper- class neighborhood of Mirafores, where residents live in high- rise apartment towers and enioy such luxuries as banking ma- chines and Nautilus health clubs. But the difference between the highlands and Lima cannot be measured in miles, only in cen- turies. Most of the campesinos in Ayacucho live the way their families did four hundred years ago, and the government has done little to improve their lot. Only one in a hundred caurpesino families in Ayacucho has electricity and running water. For light and heat, they burn kerosene, when they can buy it, in condensed milk cans. Nearly half of Ayacucho’s adults are illiterate. Per capita income is less than a third of Peru’s meager average. The average life expectancy is fifty-one years; in Lima it is seventy. Every government, Garcia’s being no exception, takes office promising to bring development to the sierra. No one ever does.

Four hundred fifty years after Pizarro’s landing, Lima is still the viceroyalty that controls Peru. In the late 1980s Lima gobbled 98 percent of all new investment in Peru. In the sierra, even without Sendero’s influence, government exists only in theory.

What the government does provide in abundance is repression. The military’s indiscriminate cruelty in fighting Sendero has turned it into the guerrillas’ most important ally. Indeed, part of Sendero’s strategy seems to be to provoke military brutality, and the security forces seem only too glad to cooperate. The human rights policy of Garcia’s predecessor, Bela(rnde, was summed up by the statement of his war minister, General Luis Cisr-rcros Vizqucrra: ‘l’o bc successful, thc govcnrtncrtt hacl kr kill sixty 1:coplc, rttaybc thrcc of wltottt w<lttld tttrtr ottt to bc Scntlcristas.

()itrcia citttrc to <lfficc 1>roltrisittg sotttctltirrg tliffcrcrrt. “lt is rrrtt

D r A L E C T I C | 201

necessary to resort to barbarism to fight barbarism,” he said in his inaugural address. But beginning in 1987, Garcia’s security forces began to lead the world in disappearances, according to a United Nations report. The government disappeared or killed 6,000 people in Ayacucho from 1982 to 1988 alone, more than twice the number General Pinochet killed or disappeared in sev- enteen years of military rule in neighboring Chile. A new death squad, the Rodrigo Franco Command, whose links with his APRA party were “undeniable,” according to Garcfa, killed 150 people in 1989. Violence was coming from so many sides that when the offices of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and the Andean furists Commission were bombed within a few weeks of one another in early 1990, staffmembers had no idea whether Sendero, the military, or the Rodrigo Franco death squads were responsible.

In the Ayacucho village of Accomarca in August 1985 the army rounded up sixty-nine people, including women, old men, and twenty-one children under five years of age. Soldiers raped the women, forced the captives into three houses, machine- gunned the houses, set them on fire, and then lobbed in hand grenades for good measure. A group of campesinos arrived in Lima to denounce the massacre, and human rights groups flew out to Accomarca in helicopters to investigate. Second Lieutenant Telmo Hurtado, who led the attack, told investigators that the children were dangerous because “the guerrillas begin to indoc- trinate children from two, three, four years old.” He was later promoted to lieutenant and sent to work at the Peruvian Embassy in Washington.

When police or soldiers are tried for killing a campesino, thc trials almost always take place in military courts, where neither murder nor torture is considered a crime. Instead, the accused is tried for “negligence” or “insubordination,” charges that at worst result in a three-day prison term. Police have been con- victed of human rights abuses in exactly one case, in which a lieutenant and ten of his troops machine-gunned a wedding party and then set the thirty-four victims on fire with hand grcnaclcs. Ily 1990 there had not yet been a conviction of a solclicr. ‘l’hc prosccutor’s of6cc that lrad vigorously invcstigatcd thc killings in Ayacttclto, Scntlcr<l’s birthplircc, was closcd in l9fllJ “ils an ccon- orrrizirrg nlcAsrrrc. ”

2O2l cHtLDREN OF cntN

If the Accomarca massacre had occurred in neighboring chile,

it would have made headlines all over the world; the united Nations would have sent an investigating commission, and Sting

would have given a concert to benefit the widows and orphans.

But the *rrr]r”r., take place in Peru and so pass unnoticed’ This is, in part, because the victims are less visible’ They are not *iiit., articulate, middle-class, Spanish-speaking political activ- ists who live in maior cities, but poor, brown, illiterate Quechua- or Aymard-speaking campesinos in remote villages where few journalists go. Tt.ir widows do not issue press releases or march in white hlad scarves in front of the presidential palace. They

are usually too terrified even to give their accounts to a local

investigator in the unlikely event there is one. If they do try to protestl their echo does not travel far; the wall between Peru’s

indians and the typical newspaper reader is insurmountable.

The cases also ieceive scant attention because the victims have

the good fortune to be living in a democracy. General-Pinochet

wasi right-wing military dictator; Alan Garcia was a democrat- ically elJcted ,eiorm”r committed to social iustice. But according

to hlman rights groups’ statistics, of the two, it was Garcia’s security for”ei that were more brutal, and Pinochet’s that were

more likely to be tried for their crimes.

Buro*u MenIo Venc,qs Llose RAN FoR PRESIDENT, BEGAN To talk in a candidate’s simplified homilies, and forgot what he once

knew of Peru, he called his country “an incurable disease. ” Peru’,s

pathology is capable of producing such opposing mutations as

ih. uiof,r,t, fanatical favier and the passive, alienated Gladys’ But Peru is also capable of healthier responses. Sendero had for

years been trying to gain a foothold in- Puno, a highland state

,”hor. poverty, undeideuelopment, and similarity to Ayacucho

should have made it natural Sendero territory. Puno also offers a border with Bolivia, a real stratcgic asset’ But Sendero, after

controlling parts of Puno, was having no success establishing a

base; the c”ampesinos simply kept telling the policc wfiat Serrdero

was up to, arid all of Scnclcro’s tcrror ancl persuilsiotr -could not

corlviucc thcltr t() kccp quict. f avicr, wh<l was captrrrctl itr l)tttro,

wits olrc r1[ f lrc grrcrrillirs wlro firilcd tltctc. Irr llrc figllt itgairrsl

DIALECTTC 1203

Sendero, Puno was one of the few reasons for optimism in Peru, optimism being a rare enough commodity to merit a closer look.

I sat on my duffel bag in a cloud of sand and squinted into the noon sun. The bag and the blanket and parka a friend had Ient me were already covered with a thick coat of dust, and I had not yet left Tacna. The Arocutipas were late. Nelson Arocutipa, an eleven-year-old shoeshine boy I met at a center for working children |eff Thielman had founded, was going to Puno for va- cation. The Arocutipas were from Puno, as were Gladys’s father and most of the other new immigrants to Tacna. Nelson lived in Ciudad Nueva in Tacna with his parents, six brothers and sisters, and a huge white turkey. Their house was the usual open- air affair lacking electricity, with a honeycomb of rooms strung with wash. Nelson’s father had moved to Tacna seven years be- fore. Nelson, then only four, came with his mother two years later. Today, for the first time, he was going back to Puno to visit. He was going with his sister Sonia, seventeen; Sonia’s hus- band, Raril Chedda Condori, who was twenty-one and had a job as a cook and barman in a restaurant; and Raril’s fourteen-year- old brother, Dino.

Nelson was happy to have me along, but Sonia, who didn’t know me, was less pleased. My motives must have been highly suspect; most people who could afford a bus ticket or even a plane flight did not choose to go to Puno in the back of a truck. A seat on the AeroPeru flight was just under $9. A bus ticket cost about $4 for the thirteen-hour trip. But the Arocutipas would save $ l. 50 apiece by riding in the back of a truck.

The trucls left each day from Ciudad Nueva’s informal mar- keplace, where four trucks were parked on a stretch of sand. Indian women in blankets and hats sold apples, bananas, brcad, and bottles of Coke and Inca Kola, the sticky yellow Mountain Dew-like soda that Peruvians consider their national bcveragc. At about one the Arocutipas arrived. We chose a truck and put the heavier bags on the roof. I followed them into thc back of the truck, and we arranged ourselves on top of the softcr l;ags. ‘[‘he owner’s wife, an Aymard Indian in traditional drcss likc that of hcr passcngcrs, ptrshccl us into thc truck, agairrst tlrc wall ncarcst thc cab. It w:rs stcaurirrg hot. [‘)vcry flcw rttirtutcs tltc door woulcl <4rcrr, and thc owncr’s wifc worrlcl 1>trslt in a flcw rlrorc 1rcoyrlc.

‘l’lrc lrrrt:k sccnrul [rrll wlrcrr llrcrc wcrt: lwcrrly ;ro1rlc.

9O4l cstLDREN oF cetN

After three hours of waiting, the natives, including me, were growing restless. We shouted for the driver to get moving or-at

l”east tJopen the door so that we could relieve ourselves, but the

woman only opened the door to scream at us and push more people in. At fiu. *. pulled out of the marketplace with thirty- t,e people in the truck. The owner and his wife had obviously learned how to treat their passengers from watching their white

bosses. I felt like a cow. I had very suddenly ceased to be misfi. I was jammed into a corner along the wall next to the cab’ A

man next to me was carrying a cat in a small cloth bag, feeding

it bread whenever it started to yowl. A woman in Indian dress, traveling with her ten-year-old son, had a chicken in a bag’ The

man with the cat was urinating on the floor. I was almost com- pletely covered by the woman to my left, a hugely fat Indian with a white straw sombrero that kept falling in my face’ The truck smelled cloyingly sweet, the stench of urine mingling with

the smell of coca leaves, which many people were chewing’

The truck bounced along for ten minutes, then pulled into a

gas station, where it sat for thirty minutes. The next stop seemed

io be the owner’s house; it was hard to tell, because our only “window” was an opening where one of the topmost boards form-

ing the side had been removed; it was hard to see out’ Finally, at about six we began to climb into the mountains’

What little scenery I could see was as bleak as the moon: long

stretches of sand dunes that resembled ocean waves, nothing growing except here and there patches of tumbleweed’ Night feil’

So.n. p.rple slept; others talked softly in Spanish or, more often, in Aymar6. People ate from bags of bread or bananas they had bought in the marketplace. Nelson Arocutipa threw up’

At the first checkpoint-one of many instituted in Peru’s futile

effort to keep us from transporting contraband to the rest of the

country-l was sick and fainted. The owners took me into the cab of the truck with them. The woman held a two-week-old baby, her fifth, she said. The truck stopped at Tarata, the town in which Gladys’s mother had been born. It was nine-thirty’ There was no electricity that night. ‘fhe town, sand-colored adobe

and cement, was lit by candlcs a,d the stars. Pcoplc li,cd the streets, sclling skcwcrs of mcat ancl fruit to thc passcllgcrs on thc

buscs atrcl tlicks that canrc tlrrorrgh. I botrght a skcwcr of tltrcc tlrin picccs o[ lrccf ltcltrt itrttl it 1>otitto ftrr fiftcctt t’cttls’

DTALECTTC 1205

I returned to the back of the truck, opening the door into bedlam. There was not an inch of floor space, and I stepped on people’s legs as I made my way to the front wall, finally jamming back in under the fat woman who kept losing her hat. The girl next to me was vomiting. I slept fifully, nodding offand waking up as my head rolled to the side. The next time I woke it was 2:00 e.rra. The truck had stopped. The driver was apparently taking a nap. A few people yelled to get moving, but it did no good. An hour went by, then another. Finally we moved out again.

By 5:30 e.rra. it was light, and we were in the highlands. At Maso Cruz we sat at a checkpoint for forty-five minutes while police searched our belongings for contraband. A few passengers left. Outside, sheepherders in wool ponchos and dashing felt hats and women in layers of skirts and long braids drank coffee at stands along the road. Some of the women were barefooted. More passengers, most of them sheepherders, got into the truck, and it rumbled to life once more. The cat in the bag was apparently sick as well, yowling louder than seemed possible. A thick layer of dust covered us all. Outside, I could see a few stone huts and fields of bunchy, tall grass. Indian women drove herds of llamas.

Six hours later the truck came to the end of the line in the town of llave. I could barely walk; the altitude, cold, lack of sleep, and distinctive aromas of the hip had left me utterly ex- hausted. I said good-bye to the Arocutipas, who were going to Nelson’s aunt’s house in a small village nearby, and limped up to the central plaza to catch a bus for the city of Puno, the capital of the state that bore the same name. I bought a warm Coke and got in line. On the bus the Indian woman next to me was asking people to hide the tapes and clothing she had smuggled from Chile. She handed out shirts, pants, socks, and cassette tapes to her fellow passengers. I put some men’s socks in my duffel bag, but the police who came on didn’t open it. We arrived in Puno about one-thirty, twenty-five hours after I had come to the truck stop in Tacna.

The next day I began to talk to people about why Sendero had not been successful in tl-re Puno countryside. At first it seemed incxplicable. The stories I heard from the bureaucrats were the sanrc tales of incfficicucy and sloth that I had heard in the rest of Pcnr. ‘l’hcrc wirs, thc llrrcatrcr:rts agrccd, no Pcmviarn gov- cnrrrrcrrt irr rruirl l’rrrro. ‘l’lrc ;lovcrly statistics wcrc sinrihr t<r

206l cHtLDREN OF cetN

Ayacucho’s. The difference began to be clear when I went to visit the human rights office of the Puno Catholic Church.

Father Luis Zambrano showed me some church publications

about human rights in Puno. They were comic books, written to be understandable to local campesinos. One described how policemen had robbed a truck, killed a woman in the ensuing ihoot-out, and then blamed her death on a Sendero ambush. The other told the story of a campesino shot by police during a

land take-over. Zambrano also told me that the church’s radio station had been bombed and that soldiers had threatened local priests and peasant organizers. ‘fhe organizers had been threat- Lned by rural landowners, as well, and in one case the family of a federation leader had been killed.

What caught my attention about this Iist was what it left out. There were no stories of mass murders, no wedding parties ma-

chine-gunned or entire villages bumed. The police and security forces were only moderately vicious and brutal and killed only a

moderate number of people. The people of Puno, as a result, were more willing to think of Sendero, which was more vicious than the army, as the enemy.

There was a second reason, iust as important, that Pur-ro re- jected Sendero. Twenty-four years before, the Catholic Church had founded the Institute for Rural Education, a network of campesino federations that provides training and credit to the peasants and organizes rural unions’ When I visited, the IRE was organizing groups of peasants to take over and begin to farm plots of fallow land. In short, the IRE helped peasants get what they needed through community organizing and political action.

This, Bishop festis Calder6n told me as we drank tea in his office, which was as warm and light as a greenhouse and full of plants and birds, was why Puno was different. Not all of Peru’s poor, he said, were Sendero’s natural constituency. Sendero took

root among those who had no hope of improving their lives in legal Peru. I thought of Gladys and Sebastidn. As long as Peru produces people like Gladys, it will go on creating people like Javier.

Like the early settlers of Gladys’s neighborhood, the members of Puno’s peasant fcdcrations bancl togcthcr to gct what thcy nccclccl dcspitc thc ltttrcattcracy. ‘l’ltc Pcrttvian gtlvcrtrtttctrt clocs rrot providc solrrtiorrs to 1tc<l1tlc’s llroltlcrrrs, llrrt irr l)rrrro, irl lcirst,

DtALECTtC 1207

the government grudgingly allows people the freedom to try to solve their problems themselves.

When I visited, the situation was fragile. Some local land- owners, furious at the land take-overs, had begun to threaten the peasant organizers, calling them closet Senderistas. A few had been killed. But others in the local elite recognized that the organizers were keeping people away from Sendero. Strategically, Sendero was correct to aim at the left. Sendero’s most important enemies in Puno were not the soldiers but the campesino organizers-people like Ricardo Vega.

Ricardo Vega dreamed at night of the woman who was trying to kill him. In his dream he tried to picture her face, which he had never seen. What he knew about her was this: She was called La Gringa, a term Latin Americans used for anyone who is tall, white, and thin. She was possibly not a Peruvian. “People who have seen her say she is very young, with a sweet face,” he said. “l know she can’t live all year round underground. There arc times when she must come to a city and walk in the streets and buy bread and sit in a caf6 like anyone else.” The fact that Vega did not know La Gringa’s face, but that she knew his, made her almost a sexual obsession. Every new woman in the street was La Gringa. “l wonder if I’ve met her,” he said. “l know wc’ll meet someday. ”

He hoped when they met, it would not be alone. Vega, thirty- six when I met him, is a sociologist from Lima who first came to Puno while a student at San Marcos, to write his thesis on the campesino federations. He fell in love with the countrysiclc and the people, and in 1979 he moved to Ayaviri, the seconcl largest city in the state of Puno. La Gringa, age unknown, origin unknown, was the head of the local company of Sendcro Lu- minoso. On April 8, 1987, she killed one of Vega’s best fricncls, Zenobio Huarsaya, a fonner Senderista who had broken with thc movement and, against Sendero’s wishes, been electecl nrayor of his village, San fuan de Salinas. La Gringa and two othcr Scn- deristas arrived in San Juan’s central plaza on a Wednesday nlonr- ing, captured Huarsaya, and sumrnoned villagers to witucss a “people’s trial.” La Gringa madc hirn knccl on tlrc grotrrrrl.’l’lrc villagcrs tlrrcw rocks at thc Scudcristas ancl shorrtcrl al tlrr:rtr rrol kr kill Ilulrsrya. ‘l’lrc Scn<lcristas lrcsitatc(|. “Kill ltirrr,” oxk’rcrl l,l Orirrgit. Willr lris wili’irrrrl clriltlrcrr cryirrg urrrl llrt’vilLrgcrs

2o8l CHTLDREN oF CAIN

shouting, “Murderers,” the Senderistas- shot him through the

ileal. fh” year before, La Gringa had led the platoon q{ !t.” a-.rir,r” thai had ambushed , t”‘u”‘ of local APRA officials’ it. i.ra.tistas killed seven people’ La Gringa cut out their eyes and tongues.

Shetiratotamanypeopleintheregionthatshewantedto kiil V;g;. The year beftt”‘l met him, Vega, w1ro was the head

of ,n. fh,rr”h’, IRE, had organized a march of peasants to take

;;;;;”;.”rpied lands to raise their potatoes, sheep’ and-alpacas’ H; *;t ,uppor.d to arrive at a local political leader’s house at 7,OO o.r.,’lut his truck had a flat tire, and he was two hours late.Whenhearrived,thefamilytoldhimthatLaGringahad come in with a machine gun, looking for him’ She held the

family at gunpoint, then tired of waiting and left’- Afi.. trr”e a”att, of Mayor Huarsaya, local campesinos told the poii”. oi, Sendero safe touse’ The police raided the house and iitilJ,.u.” people-several after they had surrendered-cutting nff *,. testicies of on. man while he was still alive. Sendero had to leave Puno. Vega heard nothing from La Gringa for a year’

but she visited him regularly in his dreams’_ -I took the bus from the ci$ of Puno and arrived in Ayaviri,

pop,rirtiott fifteen thousand, at ten on a Friday night’ It was’dr”h, early fall. The town was cold, gaunt, and deserted. The .”rv p.”pr. in the streets were two women loading unsold skewers

;|;ffi;’h;rrts and potatoes into their carts in front of the church i; th. central pl^ri.lfound a bed for a dollar in a small hotel’ The next -orning I got up at five, a little late for Ayaviri’

and

went to find Vega. Everyone knew where he lived’

e- pi.rrrnt-lolking man with thinning hair, wearing a blue

,*.at ,rit, h” ,nr*Jr.d the door’ I introduced myself and said I wanted to talk to him, see some of the far,rs and how the people

in the area lived. He shook his head. “I’ll be happy to talk h.19,”

h. ,aid, “but I don’t know how you can get out to the countryside’

No one’s going out today that i ktto* of'” I agreed to corne back

at nine o’clock. But at seven-thirty Vega came uP to me in the strcet in the

“.n*t ftrra. This ii.n. h” was dressed in trew ieans’ a black

,*.r,., tu”. , btrllctpr<lof vcst, arrd a rccl scarf. “l lic4 tt) y{)l-t,” hc sai<I. Ilc was goirig to thc cottrttrysidc’ IIc hatl to go to tw<r

DtALECTtC 1909

campesino communities where marches were being planned. The problem was that after having withdrawn from the area for a year following Mayor Huarsaya’s death, Sendero had iust moved back in. On Wednesday, two nights before I arrived, Senderistas had killed a policeman. The night I arrived they killed a private security guard and fled into exactly the mountains where Vega now had to go. “We had agreed to travel only in caravans,” he said. “But I have to go to this meeting, and there are no other cars that can go. We’ll be alone. It’s up to you.”

At nine we left Ayaviri in Vega’s truck. In the front with us was an old man in a black suit who had buried his wife that morning. The other seven members of the funeral party rode ir-r the open back of the truck. We would give them a ride as far as the last town before the mountains. In return, their presence would give us protection.

I lit cigarette after cigarette for Vega as he drove. “You gave me a start at the door this morning,” he said. “l thought maybe La Gringa had arrived.” He said his wife was getting nervous. She thought Ayaviri was getting too dangerous and was talking about taking the two children and moving back home for some peace. She was from Medellin, Colombia.

There were few other cars on the road, a lucky thing, he saicl, because there was practically no one we could run into who would have been good news. Sendero hated him. The managers of the big farms hated him because the campesinos were taking over their land. The police were in with the big farms. The army, the antiterrorist police, and the paramilitary squads of the gov- ernment considered him a Senderista. Two years before, aftcr Sendero had attacked a local village, the army came in with a list of “Sendero leaders.” The list, curiously enough, containcd the names of all the leaders of the campesino movement. ‘I’hc soldiers forced Vega to kneel in the plaza with his hands behind his head. They arrested him and then let him go a few horrrs later. “lt’s all part of the salsa,” Vega said-part of thc mix. It was an expression he used a lot.

Vega had a phone-his phone number was two digits-but it rarely worked. His major link to thc latter half of thc twcrrticth ccntury was a stcrco, a goocl onc, and althotrgh hc slxrkc no linglislr, lrc had nrcrrrorizc<l llob l)ylarr’s rcpcrtoirc, lurl wc sirrrg

2lolCntLDREN oF CntN

several songs together’ Vega had written to Dylan, asking him

to write , iotglbo,rt the campesino movement’ Dylan never wrote back.

Occasionally we passed people driving herds of sheep, men in

sweaters and wool i<nitted caps with earflaps and women, their

ttr.t t rit in long braids, wearing bowler hats, sweate”, ltt-d layers of skirts. VJga knew everyone. We-stopped every- few kil-

ometers to ask about the situation ahead. A man told us that strangers had just moved into Alto collana, the second com-

*r,Ity *. hrd to visit. “sixteen young people’ Six with machine guns. One has a red caP,” he said’

“Any women?” asked Vega. The man didn’t know. “Be careful with the uncles,” he said,

using the local code for Sendero. we left the funeral party in town and drove out into the mountains’

vega wanted to stop and see a friend, the president of the local

camp”esino federation. It would be a condolence call. The an- titerrorist police had come through looking for Sendero the Friday

before, ,rrd it the process they had gone from store to store, robbing people. The next morning the man woke up to find his

sons dead-poisoned. There was no one at the man’s house. we stopped at the house

of another friend. “Going to see your girlfriend?” the friend said,

laughing. He was talking about La Cflgf He said Sendero was i, i-h” riountains, but we would probably be safe as far as Baio Collana, the first place we needed to go’ We drove a few more

miles. Then we heard a sharp sound. Vega smiled. This was not

where we wanted to get a flit. He got out and looked around; we had run over , ,tor., that was all’ He opened the glove compartment, found a bottle of scotch, and took a long swig’ As

*” drou” into the next valley, far off on a hill we saw a man sitting cross-legged on the ground, watching’

Aier anotheihour or so we reached Bajo Collana. I had been expecting a village, but Bajo Collana seemed to consist of one

house. Si,.ty rn”r, and women sat on the ground ouhide the

house, the women in Indian dress, many nursing babies, the ,n.n i., jeans, old sweaters, and baseball caps, wearing sandals made of tire rubber.

‘l’hc housc was largc ancl hacl a cltapcl; Vcga krlcl rltc that its

owr.lct., a fiirlpcr rralrrccl Oayctlrtg, was ollc 9f tlrc wcirltlticr cattt-

D rA L E C T tC | 211

pesinos. It had no electricity, no water, no toilet, no roof, and a dirt floor. Looking around, I saw benches covered with sheep- skin, bags of fertilizer, a heap of potatoes and some bottles of Coke, sweaters, a child’s bicycle, and a pretty sheep with long eyelashes and a pink bow tied around its head. That was all. Vega said that Cayetano, his wife, and five children led a simple Iife: up at five; have a bowl of potato soup, maybe with a bone in it; go to the fields, taking some potatoes for lunch; come home at five; have some more soup; sleep.

Vega introduced me as his cousin. We went with five men, the local leaders of the movement, into the only room with a roof to plot strategy. This group of families was a real success story. In 1986 the men had marched onto plots of fallow land and begun farming, forcing the government to stop talking about land reform and do something, just as the settlers of Natividad had done. The government had given some of the families legal titles to their new plots, but the campesinos today were planning a march in hope of getting title to all the land. We went outside, and Vega talked with the whole group, about how well the move- ment was doing, how great it was to have their own land, and how they were inspiring other campesinos in the area to do thc same.

After the meeting Cayetano gave Vega and me each a bottle of Coke. A man from Alto Collana, our next scheduled stop, told Vega that more than a dozen Senderistas had just arrived in town. Vega thought for a moment, then asked him to bring messages to the group along with his apologies. We drove back to Ayaviri.

A year later, in May 1989, twenty-four Senderistas walked into the Institute for Rural Education headquarters just outside Ayaviri and forced the three guards to destroy the building. The ncxt month Vega heeded his friends’pleas that he and his family movc out of Ayaviri into the city of Puno. In fanuary residents tolcl police about the Sendero column’s safe house, and the Senclc- ristas were killed-a repeat of what had happened after Mayor Huarsaya’s killing in 1987. In March 1990 I saw Vega in l,irna. He seemed tired. He said that La Gringa was trying to brirrg anothcr coluurn into thc zolrc. Hc hacl bccn offcrccl a job rruuring a r)cw llrrro-wirlc Irrstitrrtc [rrr l(rrral l,kltrcatiorr, kr l>c hrrrrlc<l by thc l,)rrnlpcrrrr l,lcorrorrrit'(lrrrrrrrrrnity. Ilc wirs tlrirrkirrg rrllorrl il.

ztel C H tt- DREN oF CetN

Le GnINce’s NoM DE GUERRE wes Besu |evmn roLD ME’ YES’

she was Peruvian. And she was a very good company leader’

+’;ai;;t ;x h. *o,il “v’ He had bee”-one of her troops’ He

said his work in p,”o *” organizational’ going from village to village, talking to campesino” 119.5″t*

a few words of Aymar6′

He could say, “Hor. I* youz,” “l am fine”‘ and “S”ry yp'” I;;;i, h.’rrid, thete”de’istas spent their time talking about ;irri?.;, would be like after the revolution” ‘i;tk”J

why La G;;’ was out to kill Vega’ “The people-are seething with ,euoltl;;;; energy”‘ Javiei said’ “People like V.g, iit”u that energy and legitimize-Fascists'”

And Mayor H,rr,tiv’i i’Ht”h’d infiltrated us”‘he said’ “He

beirayed ur’ t., ,””o’i”‘”t of the rules of war’ we were correct in killing him'”

“You might have been following the rules of war”‘ I said’ “but

you lost , lot of support because.:f il'” ‘ – iW. have principles,” he said’ “but we cannot escape excesses’

You can’t control tt’t’-“‘”” Sometimes we recognize people ;t ;”;;;;t, and then we don’t spare their lives'”

I mentioned that I had met some camnesinos in the area who

didn,t feel as tho,rgh l;;il ,.atv r,ra’tneir interests at heart. He said this was , qutt*” that Presidente Gonzalo had thought ;;;i and dealt with’ “Fitst of all’ not all the campesinos- are campesinos,” ha ,,id’ “ifttt” a’e ‘i”h

and poor’ ald some lend

it..”r.f””, io the “p””iut forces’ Manv times the campesino

wants only , pi.”t “”iiil ;;J iltt t”ppv’ But whether he’s hrr* o. ,rot doesrrt matter’ It’s whether he has political Power’ We tell him he t'” i’ *'”t more than having a cow- We tell him he’ll have to itifi-ftit cow when the climate

gets bad’ You

have to educate ptrlpf”‘ fttty know whose side we’re on when

we kill police, iudges, and functionaries’ “lt’s a long ,,o”!’-”,’J”t’t*g people’ You have to explain

the

class struggt”, “*pi’it’-t”* ttt”rhave been betrayed by people

who claim to ,.p”‘”nt them’ Then you have to talk about their

;i6, make tliem .-.l.rrton.l that we rcprescnt thcm’ Some- tirncs pcoplc dotr’t tttrclcrstatrcl’ ”

D rA L E C T r C | 213

***

| ,on cooD-ByE ro fevmn rN THE sTREET or Le VrcroRrA, e poor Lima neighborhood where we had gone to visit yet another group of cousins. I had kept reminding him that I disagreed with his views, but he had convinced himself that over the course of the week he had made me see things his way, the Sendero way. He began to think of possible titles for the book. “How about The Revolution Burns in the Andes?” favier mused. He walked me out to the street. “Remember to bring me tennis shoes,” he said.

He had flagged down a cab. |avier opened the door for me and gave the driver the address. “And drive carefully,” he told the cabby. “l’m writing down your license number, just in case.

“l’ll see you in the United States,” he said. I laughed. “Seri- ously,” he said. “I’d love to visit. Isn’t there an American people crying out for revolution?”

“l don’t think you’ll get a visa,” I said. “Nothing is impossible for him who dares to scale the heights,”

yelled favier as the cab pulled away.

Gror”r’a HEALTH wAS rMpRovrNG THE LAST TrME I sew unn. SHB was not skinny anymore, she had almost completed her tuber- culosis treatment, and the hospital had promised to supply her with enough pills to cure herself for good. She had heard that before, she said, but this time she knew the doctors better and thought they were serious. She proudly showed me her new possession, a pair of bedroom slippers. There was a huge mound of garbage in the yard, but she said that when she was stronger, she would move it out to the street. On one table she had arranged framed photos of Mario with Mickey Mouse, taken at a Natividad birthday party, and the photos of her, Marco, and Mario that I had taken on my last visit. Marco was still going to school ancl was still thrilled about it.

Gladys said that hcr legal transactiorrs wcrc still going on. Patricia l,’ucntcs hacl shown up onc day witl”r thc ncw titlc kr hcr propcrty aurl was aborrt to gc:t birth ccrtificatcs for thc clriklrcrr.

s14l C n rL D R E N o F C a rN

But the basic troubles remained: She was as poor as ever, she had no job at all, and the wall and her problems with the L6pezes remained. While she was in the hospital, Germdn L6pez, forge’s younger brother, had moved into the lot on the other side of the new wall: Gladys’s former property. He had cut the lights to her house and taken the line for himself. Uncle Carlos had called the police, and Germdn told them that he had been paying all along, which wasn’t true. Carlos showed me a copy of the com- plaint. Gladys had won that one; a friendly policeman had gone to talk to L6pez, and Gladys kept her elechicig.

I wanted to meet the L6pezes, but I had promised Gladys I wouldn’t bring up her suit or even mention her name. So I went to La Pirdmide, where she had worked, one evening at about five, just to see what it was like. The bar had recently reopened after being closed for a few months. It was striped with different shades of blue outside and pink inside. Plastic mermaids hung on the walls. Five Indian women were drinking from a huge bottle of Inca Kola at one table, relaxing after a day in the market. I walked outside and stood next to Germdn L6pez, whom I had seen going into his house a few times as I walked up the street to visit Gladys. I said I was waiting for a friend. We started to talk. He said he was from Cuzco but liked living in Tacna. He was thirty-two, I knew from the legal complaint, but he looked younger. He had a very sweet face. My imaginary friend never showed up, and I left after a few minutes.

Germdn L6pez,I suddenly realized, probably didn’t own more than two pairs of pants. It had never occurred to me before, but if he was living next door to Gladys, his economic situation could not have been very different from hers. I had grown accustomed to thinking of the family as direct descendants of Pizarro, part of the exploitative rich who were sucking Gladys’s blood. But Ger- m6n L6pez lived in a house that was the mirror image of Gladys’s. His bar was a dump. His brother forge’s life was a series of scams and shady businesses that probably kept him scrambling one step ahead of his own creditors. They were rich and powerful only in the eyes of Gladys Meneses.

But to Gladys, the L6pezes’ rung on the social ladder was irrelevant; what mattercd was that it was highcr than hcrs. She lracl clccidccl, shc saicl, that shc would not suc forgc L(rpcz. Nor wottltl slrc ask hirrr agairr to pay lrcr wlrirt lrc owcrl, ncithcr hcr

D tA r E C T I C I 915

back wages nor the money for the lot. It was too dangerous forher now, with Germdn and hi, fr_iiy iiui,g on the other sideof the wall. Jorge L6p”rt ih;;;u'””i*#r”d. .,t,m afraid he,llthrow me out of the htuse,,, ,h;;rid”. “”‘

. But she got along well.witha-.;;;,s wife, Gladys said. Thewoman occasionally gav.e her food, ,o_.ti*”s a cup of tea. WhenGladys got we,, she”said, ,h; ;;il;;i ,ork. She wanted toget into the contrabr:1.1r*.1, ,iitt;;!;ples and grapes. Shewould need money to start out, about-tt iny aottr^ to set up a ;:lrrr,::l

ouy merchanair., rr.,.’rltl]th”*o,ld ask the L6pezes