…en Perú – Travel Culture History News

Gary Urton. The investigator from Harvard University reveals the latest results of his investigations of the meaning of the quipu.

As I explained in this previous post, the quipu (or khipu) is a fascinating communication device used in the pre-Columbian world for everything from accounting and record keeping to, it is believed, recording detailed text… names, words, a full written language not in symbols but in lengths of string and knots tied at points along them.

The man at the forefront of their study is Gary Urton, professor of pre-Columbian studies in Harvard’s Department of Archaeology. Considered the world’s eminent authority on deciphering the quipu system, his investigations have kept him for a number of years in Andean Peru studying examples never before examined including many great finds from Chachapoyas.

Quipu discoveries have increased since the 60’s – until when examples found by famous archaeologist Julio C. Tello in the decade before, all from the Inca period, caused him to think they were invented by the Incas. Changing in 1968 when quipus were discovered from the pre-Inca Wari civilisation in 1968, we have since found examples going back to the earliest civilisations in South America, including at 5000 year old Caral.

Gary Urton spoke to El Comercio on the subject and on his recent work.

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From sacred imperial capital of the Incas to commercial centre home to American chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks, the face of Cusco is changing with the times.

Quite a stir was caused last year when McDonald’s quietly opened in Cusco’s Plaza de Armas, the historic centre of the imperial capital of the Inca Empire – the Wajaypata square.

Cusco's historic plaza

According to the South American Explorers Clubhouse, who spoke with Barbara Drake, “they sort of snuck in, there wasn’t any word about it”.

This tourist paid the same for a Big Mac and North American fries as he would have a local food in a fine seated restaurant

Some people were aghast. An American fast food franchise in what is undoubtedly one of the most historic city centres in the world, and to others somewhat of a spiritual hub. Starbucks didn’t last long in China’s Forbidden City, so should McDonald’s in Cusco?

Of those people I spoke to, or who commented on my blog, or the blogs of others, the most support McDonald’s could muster was “it’s great that the economy is expanding and a big chain wants to come here… but it should not be in the Plaza de Armas”.

Personally, I avoid the plaza most of my time in Cusco, I can’t afford to eat in many of the restaurants there. How foreigners who can afford the prices pass up all that fancy Nova Andina stuff and go to McDonald’s is beyond me.

Cafe Ayllu

Passions continued to run high when it was announced that a local legend, the Ayllu coffee house that had been a favourite with travellers and locals for years, was to be closed so that a Starbucks could be opened in its place.

Apparently Starbucks could afford to pay a higher rent that “people before profits” Ayllu just couldn’t match. Protests from locals and tourists couldn’t change the owners minds.

So, is Cusco selling its soul to the devil, and if so, who exactly is doing the selling?

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Walking along Av. Oscar R. Benavides, once called the Avenida Colonial that joined Callao with distant Lima, I happened upon this very pretty cemetery. It was Sunday and the large entrance was busy with families visiting lost relatives and flower sellers doing a brisk trade.

This public cemetery, built in 1859 is the final resting place of Chalacos (as the people from Callao are called) both rich and poor. The rich have built grand mausoleums while the poor suffice with a nook in a wall of tombs. Interestingly for such an old cemetery it is still in use, and it is a strange contrast to see much more modern mausoleums and graves alongside much older ones, or see old family plots more recently added to. It is also obvious, through the placing of fresh flowers and candles, whom among the dead are still remembered and mourned, and who have been forgotten. Photos… Read the rest of this entry »

The two Fujimoris with an interest in politics

Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the corrupt ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori who was recently sentenced for human rights abuses during the country’s fight against Maoist terrorists, is having a hard time battling the slow release of facts relating to her father’s regime.

Alberto Fujimori defeated the terrorists by arming indigenous Andean communities so that they could defend themselves, and by building secretive intelligence organisations to carry out assassinations against ultra-leftists. He completely revitalised Peru’s failed economy after its destruction by ex-President Alan Garcia and it was this economic recovery that meant he was able to use his secretive mafia to, just as past Presidents had done, slowly siphon off huge sums of public money into his family’s private foreign accounts.

Keiko Fujimori, now a congresswoman with a fancy and very expensive education who plans to run for President and pardon her father if she wins, has been under attack by opposing political groups to explain how her education in the US was paid for, as well as the education of her siblings.

Unable to do so coherently, or keep her story straight, she has resigned to not trying to explain anything, and is now dedicating her efforts to denouncing the “politically motivated witchhunt” against her. No doubt that is is politically motivated, and a witchhunt, all with the aim of ruining her chances of winning the next elections, but the facts still speak for themselves.

Inter Press Agency (IPS) goes into some detail here.

Keiko Sofía Fujimori, who is planning to run for president of Peru in 2011, is having difficulty proving that her father, who governed this country from 1990 to 2000, did not make illicit use of public funds to pay for her studies and those of her brothers and sister at universities in the United States.

The daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who acted as First Lady after her parents separated and is now a congresswoman, has given a number of different explanations for the origins of the money, which she says amounted to 556,000 dollars.

At a recent press conference in Congress, she said her father had a personal fortune of over one million dollars, plenty to cover the expenses of his children, Keiko Sofía, Hiro Alberto, Sachi Marcela and Kenji Gerardo, at the universities of Boston, Columbia and Kansas.

Keiko Fujimori, who has promised to pardon her father, currently serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations, if she becomes president, said that her family had funds from three sources, totalling just over 1.2 million dollars.

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Daniel Klopp uploaded this video to YouTube about the work of a group called GAPP.

Three professional advocates journey from Ohio to Peru, South America to experience and assess basic needs of a community outside of capital city, Lima. The journey follows them as they risk infection, danger, and communication barriers while engaging in global empowerment for change. They discover and pinpoint the basic needs of the community while befriending a high school drop-out and graffiti artist.

Peru as a country, and Peruvians as a people seem to have a poor sense of self worth. This is despite the country’s great history. It’s why when there is some kind of international recognition of a great thing Peru has achieved, has created or has in it territory, that such a huge fuss is made. Peru lives in a state of denial about its abilities, even though Peruvians show great hope for the future, are aware of the resources they have at their disposal, are fiercely patriotic and freely accept examples their greatness when told about it by the rest of the world. For example, Peruvians thought they had terrible food, food that couldn’t compete on the international stage, until the world discovered it and told them about it. You now won’t find a Peruvian who disagrees that it is among the best in the world. Perplexing.

Such is Peruvian ingenuity that this was the first nation in South America to produce high-quality automobiles. World-beating ones at that. But as great as Peruvian creativity… is a lack Peruvian self-esteem. What could have been the start of a major Peruvian industry was snuffed out by Peruvians themselves, who then, as now, see everything from abroad as better, whether it really is or not.

From the biography of Juan Alberto Grieve, the Peruvian inventor of the continent’s first car:

Grieve

(…) Excited by this new activity, and being the grandest authority in combustion engines in Peru, the engineer decided, in 1907, to build himself a car. Grieve spent all his waking hours in his work shop located on Jr. Washington 117. At 30 years old, very young for a man to start such a large enterprise, he became a pioneer of the automobile industry.

The cars that traversed Lima at the start of the century, European in the majority, had between between six and eight Horse Power. It was all that was thought necessary for a car in the city.

But the lack of good roads in the outskirts of Lima, and the difficulties this caused the circulating cars is what made Grieve want to design a motor of 20HP, powerful enough to defeat the bad roads. This meant his vehicle could also be used for tourism and could even work outside of Lima.

All the mechanical components of the automobile were designed in the workshop with plans made by Grieve: the engine, the chassis, the transmission etc. This, in Lima of 1908. The only elements that were imported were the tyres from Michelin, the Bosch starter and the carburettor.

The car had 5 seats, two in front and three at the back. Those at the back were removable, leaving a area for haulage.

The Grieve car

At the end of 1908 the first car designed and built in South America was ready, it was described as a “jewel of precision engineering”. Its performance was compared to that of a Renault, which were considered at the time to be the world’s best cars.

The cost of the car was 300 pounds, half of what a European car of equal power cost. The car was called “Grieve” after its owner, and the plans were patented. The idea was to commercialise the enterprise and build a fleet of 20 more cars.

Grieve in the Grieve

The idea was supported and encouraged from the very start by Grieve’s close friend Octavio Espinoza, a journalist and director of CINEMA magazine. In the pages of this magazine, the car made its grand appearance. It was described:

The four cilynders conform to demands of modern design. The motor gives, with this caractoristic, a power of 20HP with 1800 revolutions per minute. This is able to be reduced, thanks to the elasticity of the engine, to 200 revolutions.

The biography continues:

(…) Grieve decided to speak with Presidet Leguía to, under the sponsorship of the Government, construct three vehicles for the post office, and three more for the city council.

The answer from the President was: “We need the products of advanced countries and not experiences with Peruvian products“.

And just like that, Peru’s future as a player in the automotive industry was over.

I wrote a short time ago about the Shipibo people, an indigenous Amazonian tribe, some of whom now live on the polluted river Rímac in Lima’s desert. (Alejandro also introduced us to the River Rimac Project)

Here, Alejandro tells us more about the Shipibo people living in Rimac, and their fascinating artwork.

In the slums at the base of Cerro San Cristóbal, an arid mountain rising on the far side of the Rimac River from Lima’s historic center, there is a community called Cantagallo. It is where the Shipibo people, who have migrated from the Amazonian region of Peru to its desert capital, live.

Amidst the precarious homes and the nearby traffic belching out pollution, young Shipibo artists create beauty: paintings that reflect their unique Amazonian cosmology.

This talented collective of young indigenous artists have had numerous shows in Lima and other parts of Peru.

These are three videos of members of the Shipibo tribe, who come from the fertile valleys of the Pucallpa region in the Peruvian Amazonian, to live in the center of arid Lima.

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Under the guise of health regulations, the European Union has enforced illegal trade barriers on many developing countries for years. These restrictions blocked certain foods from being imported into the EU if they hadn’t been traditionally consumed by Europeans before 1997.

Lúcuma fruits and their delicious interiors

It also conveniently protected locally produced items from facing competition from exotic imported items with similar properties (i.e. olive oil with Peruvian sacha inchi oil) or protected Caribbean nations with western-owned fruit exporters from competition with new exotic fruits.

The excuse was, that although such foreign food stuffs have been consumed for millennia for their tastes and health properties, if a European were to eat any they might drop dead. Any food considered new or strange, including the widely enjoyed lúcuma fruit, had to undergo a usually prohibitively costly study to prove it is safe to be consumed.

Peruvian producers of the delicious lúcuma fruit were unable to pay this use tariff/study fee – as are many producers and governments of developing countries. Peru alone produces dozens of export-quality exotic products with often miraculous health properties, some that are enjoyed widely in developed countries in North America and Asia.

Europeans however are denied them all – except now for lúcuma.

According to the Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Repression at the French Economy Ministry, Europe had been unfairly banning lúcuma for years now, as it was indeed marketed in France before 1997.

Thanks to this discovery, Peruvians, for a least one of their fruits, now have access to a large and profitable market. Could Europeans now develop a taste for Peru’s famous lúcuma flavour ice cream?

Meredith Slater of Friends of the World Food Program, writes about her visit to the town of Chakiccocha as part of a wider visit to Andean Peru. You can find out more about the group’s work and time in the country here.

From 14,000 feet high in the Andes mountains, our group of nine Americans – five WFP Committee volunteers and four Friends of WFP staff – watched in awe as the Quechua people of the village of Chakiccocha shared their ancient ritual to bless and prepare their land for the next harvest season. This ritual was truly a once-in-a-lifetime insight into the indigenous Quechua culture, and we were invited with open arms to observe and participate in this beautiful tradition.

It started off with an invitation for men and women to sit, on separate sides of the land, and face two village elders, who sat in front of a blanket covered with a lovely woven basket and a variety of offerings that would play an integral role in this ritual. With the backdrop of the Andes mountains, brown rock and red clay and all shades of green, broken only by an occasional home or patch of yellow or purple flowers, the setting truly could not have been more stunning. As the village leaders began to put fruits in the offering basket two by two, followed by cotton, coca leaf (a traditional plant that is chewed or made into tea by the people of the Andes), flowers and seeds, one of the Spanish-speaking villagers (most speak only Quechua) explained to us what was going on. When all offerings were placed in the basket, a hole was dug in front of a stone, and the villagers sang a song asking that the land open up and accept their offerings. As one leader dug this hole, a sense of happiness could be felt. It was determined that the land truly did open itself to accept the offering, as the soil was soft and there were no rocks in the hole. The basket was lowered into the opening on a bed of straw and then re-covered with dirt and then stones.

The villagers then moved on to the second portion of the ritual – the preparation of the land. The men stood in line and used a tool invented by the Incas to break the land. The women faced them and, with their bare hands, pushed the freshly broken soil to one side, creating rows in which the villagers would later plant seeds. As this was taking place, a rumbling could be heard, and the skies opened up, first with rain and then with hail. Our group took shelter, groping for our ponchos and coats, but the villagers were unfazed. They explained that the rain was like a jacket for them, and they welcome it. The rain proved an important symbol to close out this ritual, guaranteeing a good harvest to come.

I can barely put into words how special it felt to be welcomed with so much love into the lives of a people practicing such a magnificent, ancient culture. I can’t wait to sleep in another such village tonight and really experience a full day in their lives.

Alejandro explains the Rimac River Project. (It was recently announced that a clean-up would cost more the $100m)

Rimac source

In the old days, they called it El Río Hablador, The River That Speaks.

During the winter rains in the Andes, the water would rush down so forcefully the sound of the constant grinding of the giant boulders that line the riverbed seemed to make a noise akin to talking.

I think that still happens at the height of the rainy season in the Andes; but, mostly when I think of the Rimac in its current state, I just imagine a polluted, uncared-for, and abandoned river.

As the Rimac approaches, and traverses Lima, it is akin to a giant garbage disposal system.

Three Peruvian artists (Jorge Luis Baca de las Casas, Alejandro Jaime Carbonel, Guillermo Palacios Pomareda) felt the same way, but decided to do something about it, creating the Proyecto Río Rimac, the Rimac River Project, which is both a love song and an accusation, a testament and denunciation.

They decided one way to raise awareness about this emblematic river was to walk, during 21 days, the entire length of the Rimac, from its genesis in the high Andean puna to the spot in the Callao Naval Base where its waters meet the ocean.

They took photographs, drew pictures, videographed, and blogged the project, from beginning to end.

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MatadorTrips.com recently posted this wonderful article by Alix Farr, about some of the ridiculous negativity facing Lima (often written by guide book authors and travel writers who have never really set more than half a foot in the city) and what its really like if you actually have a look around. (I made my defence of Lima at the start of my Weekend Getaways article)

It was on the floor of a Barnes & Noble in American suburbia when I first opened a guidebook to Peru. I was being sent to Lima for an internship program so, with bubbling excitement, I set to work dissecting every travel guide I could find.

You can imagine my discomfort when, upon flipping to page 64, I was greeted by an opening line that read something like, “Lima is the ugliest, darkest, most depressing city on Earth.”

The next book was no better. “You will have to swim through 6-foot piles of soot and dirt to make your way around Lima, all the while avoiding rabid dogs and over-stuffed pigeons.”

I left without a guide, telling myself that six months in a city where the sun doesn’t shine and I could be attacked by a band of savage street children would only make me stronger (if it didn’t kill me).

Two years later, I am still in Lima.

I’m convinced the people who wrote those reviews were tourists who stopped in Lima only as a layover to Cusco and hid in their hotel rooms watching BBC World News.

With Machu Picchu having recently won the title of one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, there has been an influx of visitors to Peru. Many, though, aren’t inclined to stop in Lima. But stay a while and you will discover how undeserving of those obituary reviews this city really is. This isn’t Paris, but Lima is a developing metropolis with culture and style.

Here are 8 reasons to spend more than a layover in Lima:

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Translated from Alberto Villar Campos’s article in El Comercio

Tonight I will have to see to believe. I will submit without prejudice to what is presumed will be an incomparable experience and to forget, even for a few hours,  that shameful fear of the unknown that I was caught up in as a child and even now I have not lost.

The route has taken us just 67 kilometres south of Lima on the afternoon of March 30, in the desert Chilca the cloudless sky is painted entirely red. Sixto Paz, the man who claims to have had his first extraterrestrial contact 35 years ago and having visited Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s moons), heads the group of 40 people, including journalists from Costa Rica, United States and Peru, members of Rama, a curious group, and Ana Maria Polo, the famous judge of the virulent “Caso Cerrado”, who tries to make her secret passion for the expedition go unnoticed.

It is the eighth time that the “guides” (as Sixto Paz calls the aliens) have agreed to a date and time for an appearance, and 12 years have elapsed since the last time the press joined him on a similar trip. If all goes well, between 30 and March 31,  the alien ships will let themselves been seen at least four times.

“You know when you know something? When you have no doubts”. Argentine Marcelo Dos Santos lived until recently off his fame as an actor, and was married to actress Aura Cristina Geithner from Colombia, but now devotes his life to his pursuit of truth… and to throw out such disconcerting phrases as we walk into the ‘Rings of Saturn’, the area chosen for the sighting. Before arriving here and assembling their tents, Sixto Paz lead a first meditation in conjunction with the attendees. All had their hands open and eyes closed as if in a trance. Everything was mixed in the dark of night.

The ritual was repeated again at 7 pm, the first hour of the agreed “road maps” for a first encounter. But in just a few seconds, any semblance of excitement fades away in the sky lights are just a few planes and under them the black outlines of the uneven hills.

Sixto then says he has received a message (he says he has done ever since he was young) from the aliens. “Sorry that we did not respect the schedule at this time, but we have our reasons that you will later understand. Remember, everything has meaning. We are closely watching, and you will feel our presence and you will see. ”

The most famous Peruvian ufologist and whom many in the world, including other ufologists but especially the scientific community, branded as insane and a con man, apologised for having spread the news of the trip on the Internet. This, he says, is what might scare off the visitors.

Maybe us journalists are the only uneasy ones here, because meditation continues and to guests it is as though nothing had happened, or simply everything was about to happen.

UFO on its second visit

Then, at 8:37 pm, a red light appears in the middle of two mountains located four kilometres from where we are. From a distance, the object appears crescent shaped, only moving for a few moments and a minute later disappears.

The excitement is multiplied among the few skeptics, while the sound of camera shutters sound like thunder in the dark. Sixto seeks more meditation, and in what appears to be a burst of media opportunism, speaks about Barack Obama, who according to the aliens, is the one who will correct the errors of the United States.

At 9:10 pm, ten minutes after the second timetabled hour, the light appears again. Now it is closer and takes the form of a disc, shines harder than before and takes a few minutes to hide.

“You saw it too, no?”, asks Dr. Ana Maria Polo. There was no way to deny it. At her side, several people share the captured images of the object.

“I have no fear, just excitement,” says Sixto. “I am not interested in going down in history, only that my life has meaning here and now.”

It is three o’clock, almost all sleep – Judge Polo has not stopped talking with her team and the leader of this visit has disappeared from the camp. Edgar Silva, a Costa Rican journalist says Sixto Paz has gone to sleep and prefers to think that it was the moon that we saw this strange night, not an unidentified object. An object which, to our misfortune, we did not to see again.

What could it be? Some say that this is natural phenomena that occurs in Chilca every now and then, and others claim that this place is the territory that the aliens have been using for thousands of years to confirm their presence on Earth. At 5 am on March 31 Sixto Paz saw us off, but the sensation of seeing something indescribable is still there. True or not, what we saw there was clearly strange. What to believe.