…en Perú - Travel Culture History News

Written by Simon Bidwell for his new blog Andean Observer, this is the story of Eleven-year old Renzo, who left his parents home in Lima’s San Juan de Miraflores district to live with family in Arequipa.

On the sixteen-hour journey to Arequipa, he was sleepless, panicky and intermittently nauseous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shrugged. “I’d live wherever my parents were”.

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

“If my parents were in Lima, I’d prefer to live in Lima”, he affirmed. “If my parents were in Arequipa, I’d live in Arequipa”.

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The most dangerous crossings in Lima - this is a report released by the Ministry of Transport and Communication highlighting and mapping the most dangerous traffic intersections in the city, the fourth most dangerous being Surco’s Ovalo Higuereta, which I cross a couple of times each day.

The report states that there are 77,000 accidents each year, resulting in more than 3,000 deaths. The MTC has mapped the 1,029 intersections it considers as black spots, the worst one is also in Surco, the intersection of Tomas Marsano and Caminos del Inca produced 97 traffic accidents in the surveyed year. The report blames these on the lack of an adequate traffic light system. Av. Eduardo de Habich with the northern Pan-American was the second worst in the city with 79 accidents and 2 deaths.

Take a quick walk or drive through Lima and you will notice something about the majority of the cars - most of them have their backs, sides or fronts dented or even completely smashed.

Elsewhere in Lima, outside Miraflores’s municipality building, groups of school children had arrived to have a road safety lesson. Of the 3000 people who die each year, a large number are children.

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Cerro San Cristobal overlooks the historic district of Rimac, the other side of the river from the city centre. Never a very wealthy district, it’s first inhabitants were the indigenous from the region, the black population and the poor of the Spanish immigrant community. It became one of the most vibrant parts of the city and the centre for Lima’s entertainment - so much so that the rich of Lima often frequented it’s creole bars and restaurants, not forgetting its bullring. By the 18th it was the bastion of creole culture in Peru and the centre for the arts, music and food. Now with its buildings on the verge of collapse and memories of the Limeños of old fading, it was time to visit this important part of Lima’s history.

Plaza de Toros de Acho(Bullring of Acho)
The oldest bullring the the Americas and he 3rd oldest in all the world was built by Cristóbal de Bargas by order of Augustine Hipólito of Landauru during Spanish colonial times. Building started in 1760 and finished in 1768.
It was immensely popular during colonial times, and is still visited today. During October and November the Bullfighting Fair of the Señor de los Milagros takes place.
In 2001 it became the first bullring in the Americas visited by a Spanish king - Juan Carlos I.
Visiting costs S./5 and allows you to see exhibits of swords, capes and famous photos and paintings.

Cerro San Cristóbal(Saint Christopher Hill)
The cerro’s name tells of the legend of the few hundred Spanish soldiers led by Francisco Pizarro facing tens of thousands of native warriors on the other side of the river Rimac in 1536. Each time the warriors attempted to cross the river to engage the Spanish they would get caught in the strong currents and drown. After dozens of attempts and hundreds dead, the natives retreated and the Spanish declared it a miracle of Saint Christopher as he was the patron saint of that particular day.
When they were able to cross the river they organised a procession to the summit of the hill where they built a church and placed a large wooden cross. The church was destroyed by an earthquake in 1746. The cross replace by and iron one and inaugurated and blessed December 23, 1928.
The indigenous population used to carry tributes and sacrifices to the summit, the Spaniards went organised processions to the church on the summit and today people visit the summit for the views of the city. Tours can be taken from the Plaza de Armas. The Government has plans to build a cable-car to the top in the future.

Alameda de los Descalzos
Discussed here.

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The Alameda, in the heart of the northern district of Rimac, north of the river Rimac and the centre of the city, was originally built in 1611 by the Marquis de Montesclaros.
Later in 1770 Viceroy Manual de Amat refurbished it, adding donated fountains from the chief of Lima’s bullfighting ring.

Later still more additions and renovations were carried out by President of the Republic Ramon Castilla. He imported and enclosed the alamenda with cast iron railings from Victorian England in 1856. In the same year it was adorned with marble statues depicting the signs of the zodiac and 100 iron urns, again from England.

The wide alameda is surrounded by colonial churches, the one at the north, Convento de los Descalzos hosts a museum. Now run down and covered in graffiti, the municipality of Rimac does little to care for the alameda - perhaps because it can’t. Although once a wealthy district it is now one of the poorest. Millions of poor flocked to the city of Lima over the past 100 years building low quality illegal houses on the hills the surround Rimac and most of the city.

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By C.J. Schexnayder - Kephblog

On Sunday, Julio Cusurichi – a Shipiro Indian from the Madre de Dios region of Peru – was awarded the Goldman Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for environmental activism.

Cusurichi was recognized for his work with the Native Federation of Madre de Dios, known as FENAMAD, in creating a 3,000-square-mile reserve in the Southern Peruvian jungle for tribes that choose to have no contact with the outside world.

Loggers looking to harvest valuable old-growth mahogany have encroached on these peoples in recent years, and the result has been devastating to the tribes. They are vulnerable to outside disease and reports of violence against them are becoming more common.

My story on the award and the problem of illegal mahogany logging in Peru, The mahogany wars of Peru’s rain forests, is in Sunday’s edition of The San Francisco Chronicle.

But there is a lot more to this story than what I was able to fit in the confines of one newspaper article. Read more here, or read the original article.

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In the heart of the vast jungle department of Loreto, close to the river Pastaza, live an ethnic group known as the Kandozi, ancestral guardians of an immense lake called the Rimachi. A lake where floating islands form a labyrinth of channels between which shoals of fish dash perhaps avoiding the ferocious piranhas.

The Pastaza river is tributary of the Marañón, itself a tributary of the Amazon, the father of all the rivers of America; the longest, the most mighty and deepest of the planet. Rimachi lake is at the heart of the extensive territory of the Kandozi-Chaprade nation of more than 15 thousand kilometers, South between latitude 3 degrees and 5 degrees and West 76 degrees and 78 degrees of latitude, in the humid tropical forest that grows under the Andes and extends throughout amazonía until the Atlantic Ocean.

Kandozi means “more people” and these people live mostly along the rivers of Huituyacu, Chapuli and Chuhuida - lands so marshy that any dewellings and farms are built in the higher zones, but ones that also have steady high temperatures. In the zone of the Rimachi lake the high temperatures stay throughout the year and the rainy season is predictable. On the shores you can find the most exotic of amazonian animals.

The Kandozi have maintained a reputation as warriors since 1744, when the mission of Santo Tomé reported their existance and constant threat to the Andoas. Throughout the centuries they stayed hostile towards neighbouring ethnic groups, developing a reclusive isolationist society. Today there exists a very organized federation of Kandozi peoples in the high Pastaza that defends the exclusive fishing in the Rimachi lake and against oil developers and loggers.

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In the clean ordered urban streets of the Limeño district of Santiago de Surco there is a living glimpse of it's past, from a time of farms and plantations, when the urban sprawl hadn't quite reached quiet little Surco.

As recently as 100 years ago, Surco was still rural. Lima was some 30 minutes away by horse and Miraflores and Barranco a shorter 15 minutes. Newer houses were being built near to the new thoroughfares where farm houses and windmills once stood. Like this it continued until maybe around the 1970's when every available space had been built upon and the streets paved. In this short time the area surrounding old Surco town had gone from farm land to city. People had left the old urban centre and moved to this new suburb.

But one small corner has survived all this time and sits unvisited and unknown just 4 blocks from Ovalo Higuereta. Built around 100 years ago, surrounded by accompanying land, the home consists of a large balcony, a small granary with bell tower, a well - since covered up for safety and a large windmill that looms over the neighbouring modern apartments.

The family who live there are currently involved in a legal battle with developers who want to continue demolish their home and build apartments. We spoke to the mother of the family who didn't know much about the building's history but told us about her passion for taking in stray dogs in the area. She also spoke of the home being haunted - she regularly sees the ghost of a small girl who lived there before the current family.

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I mentioned the giant sand dunes north of the city of Lima, and it was commented how fascinated foreigners are with Peru’s desert coast, but is it a desert at all? Here is someone else’s experience…

My companions and I had been driving south down the stunning desert coast of Peru for nearly a day before we begin to wonder what the locals call this parched stretch of land that skirts the Pacific. We’ve all heard of the Atacama Desert in Chile, and the dry basins of Patagonia in Argentina, but none of us knew Peru was home to impressively huge sand dunes and sprawling, rocky wastelands. Curious, I inquire at a gas station south of Chiclayo.

“What is the name of this desert?” I ask the attendant as he wipes down my wind shield.

“This,” he says, happily gesturing at the barren expanse all around us, “is not a desert.”

I look sceptically out at the dry landscape. “What do you mean? Does it rain here often?”

The attendant grins. “It almost never rains here. It is like a desert.”

“But you just said this isn’t a desert.”

“That’s right,” he says. “This is not a desert.”

Perplexed, I pose the same question to a handful of Peruvians in the gas station snack shop, and they all tell me the same thing: This dry and dusty coastal strip of Peru - even with its jagged moonscape and curving sand dunes - is not a desert. It is something else. Something that, for whatever reason, does not have a name.
Few visitors to Peru know of this coastal desert, and fewer still make any effort to see it. Rather, travellers visit Peru for its legendary Andean peaks, lush Amazonian jungles, ancient Inca ruins and lake-studded highlands - and it is certainly no different.

Completely contrary to expectations, however, this road passes through sudden stretches of the most gorgeous desert I’ve seen since I travelled the Mongolian Gobi and the Egyptian Sahara. Oddly, unlike the Gobi or the Sahara, this desert had no reputation and (as far as I can tell) no name.

As we make progress into Peru, however, the coastal geography begins to make sudden changes. Just as I’m getting used to the sweeping desert surroundings, I will crest a ridge and drop down into a blindingly green river valley, studded with villages and sown with lush, irrigated fields of sugar cane, cotton and alfalfa. Then, just over another ridge, I’ll drop back down into a lifeless desert.

It takes a flurry of map research before I’m able to figure out what I’m seeing: Though this Peruvian coast receives little annual moisture beyond a dirty winter fog, more than 40 rivers roar out of the Andean highlands with enough force to cross the desert and reach the sea. Each of these river valleys creates its own riparian oasis, and - thanks to the rich highland silt contained in the waters - agriculture thrives here, supporting towns and cities all along the Peruvian coast. Unlike most rainless areas of the world, the Peruvian desert is home to a large population, including four of the nation’s five largest cities.

Travelling further south along the coast I finally get my desert epiphany from a matronly desk clerk at Nazca’s Alegria Hotel. “The coast of Peru is a dry place,” she tells me with a shrug. “But it’s too normal here to be a desert. I think it must be something else.”

The more I consider the woman’s dismissive logic, the more it makes sense. Deserts are supposed to be foreboding places, suitable only for mystics, nomads and wavering apparitions. For Marco Polo, the emptiness of the Gobi was filled by goblins; Pliny’s Sahara was haunted by phantoms. The coastal desert of Peru, on the other hand, is populated by oases full of workaday Peruvians - and it more or less has been this way for the past 6,000 years.

Perhaps, then, deserts are as much a matter of psychology as science. Regardless of the evaporation-condensation ratio along the Peruvian coast, the desert here has remained nameless because there’s too much human company to be had. What’s a desert, after all, if it isn’t deserted?

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There has been much in the news recently about protests from Peru’s coca farmers and forced eradication by the Government.

Peru is the second largest exporter of refined cocaine in the world, and due to its size probably the largest producer of the coca leaf. Peru had a serious problem in the 1980s and 1990s with cocaine production as the Shining Path terrorist group began using the drug as a means to fund their war against the Peruvian State. Since then, production levels had became less of an issue, and what coca was grown was more often used for local medicinal and cultural needs - not all, not most but a slightly larger part (Ratio 9:100). The problem had died down as funding that was provided to Peru by the United States was put to use and Peru itself stepped up its hunt for traffickers. There is at least one person caught leaving the country with bags full of cocaine every day from Lima’s international airport. Hospitals in close proximity are reportedly on the brink of financial collapse due to having to remove swallowed capsules of cocaine and provide medical care to these drug mules. Even I fit the profile and once had my bags searched for hidden drugs.

The current problems seem to have been kicked off by the Free Trade Agreement that Peru is eager to sign with the United States, and perhaps in part by the US cutting off the funding for eradication efforts - funding that was accompanied by guidance that may now not be being followed by President Alan Garcia - known for creating tension with his hard-line tactics.

In what may have been an effort to please the United States so that it may finally sign the agreement Peru hopes will bring a flood of jobs, investment and export opportunities, Alan Garcia had increased efforts to go after illegal coca farms used exclusively for making cocaine. These efforts highlighted the problems caused by coca farmers and their support of drug cartels and terrorists.

In late March the army raided a clandestine production facility in the Ayacucho jungle run by a Colombian drug cartel that produced 1 ton of cocaine each week. As they destroyed and confiscated chemicals and equipment, local villagers turned on them and attacked them.

Around the same time in San Martín and Huanuco - the source of most of Peru’s cocaine thanks to support from the remnants of the Shining Path terrorist group - eradication efforts had to be suspended due to huge protests by local people. Locals blocked roads, burned cars and attacked police and army units. In an effort to foster peace Agriculture Minister Jose Salazar agreed the temporary suspension of eradication, but Alan Garcia overruled this a few days later (some suspect Washington was displeased).

As renewed protests continued in the first days of April, Alan Garcia stated: “The Peruvian government will not give up nor budge an inch against threats versus the expansion of illicit coca plant cultivations”, at the Inter-American Forum on Security and Human Coexistence. He then declared that he has authorised the bombing of coca fields and drug-cartel landing strips. “If we don’t kill off the danger of expanding narcotics operations immediately, then Peru may very well face insurgency problems as large as what is happening in Colombia,” Garcia stated. “Use A37 attack planes, bomb and gun down airports and maceration wells. And at the same time, take out the benefactor, the drug baron,” he emphasized. He said he did not want Peru to be put on an international ‘black list’ of drug suppliers, but softened his statements by saying he was sure the distinction could easily be made between illegal cultivation and farms producing coca for cultural use.

There was wide support for Garcia’s strong words, even coming from Peruvian congresswoman and coca farmer representative Elsa Malpartida who described them as “perfect”, so long as the distinction was made between illegal and legal production. This surprised many of her supporters, some of which are involved in illicit production and were hoping for more support. She said efforts should be made too against the producers of the chemicals used in cocaine production that destroy the Amazon ecosystem and that traffickers in “suits and ties” should also be targeted.

In the coming days protests again raged in San Martín, roads were blocked and tyres were burnt. A 400 meter stretch of highway, near the district of Nuevo Progreso, was blocked with boulders, logs, and dirt. The highway is one of the few ways out of San Martín and connects the central jungle cities of Tocache with Juanjui, Tarapoto, and Tingo Maria. It was on the 12th of April that drug traffickers gave their response to Alan Garcia’s order of bombing illegal farms. Snipers working for Peruvian drug lords murdered a worker who was performing coca eradication operations in Alta Huallaga, close to Huanuco. Five Peruvian anti-drug agents who were providing security were also shot and wounded during the attack. Some 176 workers and 95 anti drug agents were conducting eradication operations when four snipers who were strategically located and camouflaged in the highland jungle vegetation killed 36 year old Edgar Ricopa Yahuarcani. Coca farmers then declared an indefinite strike and road block. Additional elite police were sent to the area to maintain order.

On the 16th of April, as protest grew in Huanuco, President Alan Garcia announced that there would be no negotiation with those he believes are being sponsored by Peru’s powerful drug traffickers, who requested talks as part of their demands. “It is evident that drug lords are orchestrating the strike. Just as in Colombia where drug lords have purchased the protection of para-military guerrilla groups to protect their illicit operations, they have done same with groups of coca farmers who run around protesting, ‘let me grow whatever I feel like growing’ and I am here to tell you that is not how it works,” stated the Peruvian leader.

The 17th of April saw the arrest of two known Shining Path terrorists Samuel Rodriquez Amasifuen and Humberto Chavez Sanchez in San Martín as they were due to meet in their home with coca farmers. In the home police found guns, a large supply of ammunition and Shining Path manuscripts and propaganda. They also discovered detailed plans which mapped out which roads to be blocked during the protests. The plans involved ordering protesters to dig trenches and build barricades on the Aucayacu-Tocache and Tingo Maria-Huanuco highways. The documents that were written by three terrorists known as ‘JL’ ‘Lee’ and ‘Piero’ also contained plans to attack and kill police at various police stations in the area.

And so now, at this stage, we wait to see what happens next.

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This may just be the most famous school in Lima. The school of Lima’s elite since 1840, it has seen the rich, powerful and influential pass through its doors. Most of today’s political, military and business leaders are graduates and were students during the later part of Lima’s heyday.

The school was named for the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico who in 1951 was declared the Patron of the students of Peru by Pope Paul VI thanks the the schools reputation. In 1855 President Mariscal Ramón Castilla converted it from a private to a national school for the best students of all of Peru so that they may have access to the best teaching and discipline.

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