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War of Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon

University of California Press

Pedro Kintaro sits at home in Boca Kiatari, a small Indian village in the tropical forest of eastern Peru. His voice barely rises above the sounds of the Amazonian night. It is 1986, but Kintaro's thoughts are fixed on events that took place more than twenty years before. He shudders, remembering the sight of fighter planes screaming over the hilltop toward his settlement:

Bombs began to fall. Airplanes! Bombs! The planes were black. They sounded like whistles. They came low and dropped bombs. We'd dug holes to hide in, and we got in them. The bombs blew up, fire . . . This is what the shamans had predicted: "A Powerful One will arrive, a tasórentsi. Fire will come." That's what they said. 1

In 1965, the year shamans prophesied the arrival of a Powerful One, Peru waged war against Amazonian tribesmen and the Marxist guerrillas hiding among them. As wars go, it was small. Probably no more than two hundred people died in the jungle, though casualties related to guerrilla actions elsewhere in Peru brought the total losses significantly higher.

This encounter has virtually disappeared from history. The Area Handbook for Peru , published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, reduces it to one sentence. "Armed attacks

against police posts took place in several areas of the Andes in 1965," it says, "and these guerrilla operations were promptly suppressed by units of the armed forces."2

In the following pages, we tell some of the stories abridged by that sentence. Our aim is to bring out of the shadows the Indians who played an important part in the revolt of 1965, to let their voices reshape the history of a violent confrontation. Their words compel us to acknowledge their past and to rethink our own.

The native people who figured most prominently in these events call themselves Asháninka, though they are better known in Peru and abroad as "Campa."3 They inhabit an area of perhaps 40,000 square miles, mostly Amazon rain forest, east of Lima in Peru's geographic center. Asháninkas came into contact with Europeans in the late 1500s. Since then, missionaries of every imaginable Christian sect have tried to convert them. Until quite recently, whites routinely trafficked in Asháninka children, who served as laborers and unpaid domestics. For the last 150 years, Asháninkas have fought a holding action against settlers who see the Amazon as a source of farmland and export goods, or as a haven for the lawless.

When guerrillas of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria , or MIR) pushed down from the Andean highlands into Asháninka territory in mid-1965, scores of Asháninkas threw in their lot with the rebels. The guerrillas saw their insurgency as part of a maturing international conflict between workers and capitalists. These concepts meant little to the Asháninkas. Their interest in the revolutionaries was kindled by the prophecy of a shaman, who saw in the leader of the local MIR column the same spiritual authority that eighteenth-century Asháninkas recognized in a charismatic rebel named Juan Santos Atahualpa. To the extent that guerrillas and Indians shared aspirations, it was to end the reign of local landlords. But Asháninka hopes went beyond land reform. Those who collaborated with the MIR perceived the guerrillas as helpful spirits who

would upend the relationship between servants and masters. Indians would assume their rightful place as rulers of the forest. They would again enjoy the prosperity wrested from them centuries earlier by the Spanish. The rebellion would be an end and a beginning.

The spiritual undercurrents that surfaced in the Indians' response to the MIR had welled up at least three times before, beginning in 1742. On each occasion, a charismatic outsider crossed formidable cultural barriers to awaken Asháninka yearnings for deliverance.

A recurrent human experience that brings myth up against the flinty surface of events is the millennial dream—the hope that the present world of scarcity and suffering will give way to a glittering plenitude. As long as peoples have faced profound challenge, they have from time to time razed social orders, turned received arrangements upside down, in search of a new start. When these episodes are marked by strong religious currents, anthropologists call them millennial movements, revitalization movements, or crisis cults.4

Academic interest in crisis cults peaked during the early 1970s. Millennial currents in the American counterculture of the late 1960s focused attention on crisis cults, as did growing interest in all forms of social protest. Most scholars saw millennial movements as a spontaneous reply to the questions that vex tribal people when confronted with the injustices of colonialism. Why can't we live as we once did? Why are so many of our people dying from new diseases? Why do the whites have so many material goods and we so few? Why do our traditional institutions fail us when confronted by these powerful strangers? Even the most sympathetic commentators, however, thought of crisis cults as a passing phase in a society's development, to be eventually replaced by more rational responses, such as political mobilization.5

Today we are less confident in the inevitability of a tectonic shift to secular rationalism. Religious fundamentalists have redefined political discourse in places as different as the United States and Iran. Despite Frantz Fanon's prediction that the emerging Third World revolutionary would "discover reality" and "pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancestors," the Marxist guerrilla movement that gave birth to Zimbabwe found a way to reconcile theories of national liberation with traditional religious practices, including spirit mediumship.6 And in Peru, insurgents belonging to an extremist group called the Shining Path have, according to some observers, spliced together elements of traditional Andean millennialism and Maoist theory to justify their war against the state.

Reflecting on the growth of the Shining Path movement, the Peruvian writer and politician Mario Vargas Llosa recently observed that a search for utopia permeates Peruvian history and indeed much of the history of Latin America.7 This certainly holds true for the Amazon. For the first Christian missionaries as well as for today's Maoist guerrillas, the Amazon has been a potentially utopian space. As we pondered similarities between millennial currents in Asháninka history and those of the European peoples with whom they came into contact, we began to doubt that Asháninkas were alone in bringing a "mythical" perspective to their reading of the region's future. Revolutionaries, bureaucrats, missionaries, counterinsurgency experts, and entrepreneurs also hold deep-seated myths—notions of destiny, of world order, of being and becoming—that help to determine their actions. The Amazon, which from first contact has challenged Western ways of dealing with nature, invites utopian fantasies as well as their opposite, dystopian visions of exploitation and terror.8

In probing the persistence of millennial dreams in the Peruvian jungle, then, one of our aims is to analyze the traffic of ideas across ethnic boundaries. The discourses of natives and strangers sometimes overlap, sometimes miss each other

entirely. As people fully engaged with history, Asháninkas actively respond to the thoughts and acts of the outsiders who have hurled themselves into their midst, with good intentions and bad, since the sixteenth century. The Asháninkas' story is forever entwined with the story of these strangers.

To piece together this history, we found ourselves practicing an uncommon anthropology, one for which we were not prepared by our professional training and previous field research in different parts of the Peruvian Amazon.

Both of us had engaged in conventional fieldwork among Amazonian Indians. We lived in native settlements for long periods of time, puzzling over the intricacies of language, kinship, religious life, and world view. We watched people struggle to sustain a unique, reasonably coherent society in a setting that, for observers raised in Kansas City and Buenos Aires, seemed exceptionally challenging.

History in the orthodox sense scarcely existed where we worked. There were, of course, chronicles that commented on the Indians, most often written by missionaries who saw them as unkempt idolaters of erratic temperament. Native peoples have their own versions of history, but like most anthropologists we found ourselves drawn to the deep-history of myth, which promises access to the free play of the primordial imagination, in preference to the contingent stories of more recent events. A tale accounting for the transfer of root crops from the Earth Mother to ancestral human beings somehow seemed more important than the story of how a particular settlement obtained its land title.

This kind of village fieldwork, where it is still possible, is a valuable apprenticeship and a profoundly humanizing experience. Yet its limitations became apparent as, years later, we each immersed ourselves in practical matters related to the future of Amazonian Indians—land rights, health care,

agricultural credit, and forest protection. Engagement with the practical leads one inexorably toward the political, especially in a country such as Peru, where Indians wrestle with a rigid class system and the legacy of conquest. The romance of the pristine village eventually gave way to a more sober view of the shifting power relations between native peoples and the outsiders who so often influence their fate. We began to seek stories of near-history to account for current realities. In Asháninka communities affected by the MIR insurgency of 1965, narratives of the guerrilla war helped to decode the village and intervillage politics of today.

Ironically, the more we looked at the insurgency, the more we saw that its roots lay in historical events dating from the early contact period and, beyond that, to the deep-history of myth.9 Asháninka accounts of the events of 1965 interweave recorded events and traditional ideas of prophetic revelation, ordinary people and spirits, and contradictory thoughts about the dangerous outlanders who now control so much of Asháninka life. In other words, the rebellion was an instance of what Marshall Sahlins has called "mythopraxis"—that is, the invocation of a mythic vision to frame responses to current events.10

We have relied upon several kinds of resources to write this book. Chapters summarizing the early history of the Asháninka draw on Spanish chronicles and the work of scholars who have mined them for information. Asháninka voices are difficult to find in these accounts, but with careful study their faint echoes can still be heard. When appropriate, we have tried to reconstruct the native outlook on events through the strategic use of contemporary oral histories.

Twentieth-century history offers richer prospects. Aside from the work of professional historians and anthropologists, we make use of newspaper accounts, government docu-

ments, and interviews with those who witnessed the events about which we write. Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, we obtained U.S. government records from the Departments of State and Defense, the National Archives, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The deteriorating security situation in Peru, a country now lacerated by political and criminal violence as intense as at any time in its history, created significant obstacles to the realization of our goals. Two vignettes from our research may convey a sense of what it was like to probe the history of the 1965 conflict amid today's unrest:

• September 1987 . Eduardo Fernández searches for Antonio Meza, a possible contact in the Movement of the Revolutionary Left. Meza is one of the few guerrillas to have survived the MIR-led insurgency of 1965. Fernández has been told that Meza now works for a small leftist party called the People's Democratic Union (UDP), which has an office on Lima's Plaza Dos de Mayo. In front of the plaza's decrepit buildings, street vendors press their wares on weary travelers who hope for nothing more than a seat on a bus. The several leftist political parties with offices on the plaza use loudspeakers to launch an auditory assault on passersby.

Fernández enters the building identified as the UDP's, but the drab lobby has no directory of offices. Ringing the bells on each floor, he meets families crowded into squalid rooms, small-time lawyers down on their luck, and women who invite him in for a massage. He finds an office that seems to be his destination, for when he mentions Meza's name, the occupants shift uneasily in their chairs and hide their faces behind newspapers. He is directed to an address in La Colmena's labyrinth of alleys. The place is abandoned, a forgotten world of battered desks, dust, and rat droppings. He returns to the neighborhood several times until all trails run cold. A few days later the Lima dailies explain the vanishing act: after more than twenty

years of somnolence, the MIR has resumed the armed struggle by raiding the Miraflores office of Citibank and covering its walls with propaganda. Prospects for an interview pass from remote to nonexistent: Meza has reentered the clandestine world of revolutionaries. Two years later, the MIR announces that comrade Antonio Meza has fallen in combat.

• July 1989 . Michael Brown navigates Lima's Jirón Moquegua, one block past the area known as Ocoña, where scores of moneychangers shout exchange rates to passing drivers. Each moneychanger, or cambista , is equipped with an electronic calculator and a waist pouch stuffed with currency. Buyers lift banknotes to the gray light of the Lima sky, checking watermarks. The action on Ocoña is brisk. The weekly supply of cocaine dollars, rumored to average around 60 million, will soon arrive by jet from Tocache.

Brown has been directed to a heavily armored storefront under a Honda sign, where he hopes to interview the widow of an American who disappeared during the guerrilla war of 1965. A man with a four-day stubble takes Brown to a back room. There he's introduced to his interviewee, a cheerful and adipose woman of about forty-five. Another man enters the room. His guayabera shirt is size XL, and he fills it easily. He grips a nickel-plated revolver, probably a .44. Although the gun is angled toward the floor, the anthropologist begins to perspire.

Revolver is not friendly. He declines to identify himself and inspects Brown's passport with a hand lens. Still holding the pistol in his lap, Revolver grunts permission for the interview. As the conversation develops, the man's attention shifts to the three telephones on his desk, which have begun to ring. Two other men in business suits load a valise with thick bundles of Peruvian banknotes. In reply to Brown's puzzled look, Revolver slaps a brick of hundred-dollar bills on the desk, each packet of nine bills nearly clasped by a tenth. He is a high-stakes moneychanger—or

so he claims. When Brown finishes interviewing the woman, who is now married to this man, he is ushered through the barred entryway to the street. "At first I thought you might be police," the man says by way of apology. "Take care," he adds, "there are some nasty characters out there."

Under the circumstances, it is remarkable that people talked to us at all. When they did consent to an interview, the sensitive nature of the information we sought invited outright lies as well as more subtle forms of misrepresentation. Official sources proved scarcely more reliable: communiqués of the Peruvian armed forces, as well as official documents released to us by agencies of the United States government, gave new meaning to the term "magical realism."

In view of what in many cases turned out to be the irreconcilable contradictions in our sources, we don't claim to have written a definitive account of "what really happened." There are significant gaps in our knowledge, just as there are in the knowledge of any one participant.11 Rather, we attempt to distill the forms of discourse that various groups have used to talk about, and to interpret, the actions of others. We then weave these voices together to trace the misunderstandings and miscommunications that produced a distinctive series of events. The facts of the events we describe are sometimes contested; their significance always is. We have tried to remain as alert as possible to this struggle of alternative meanings while learning to live with a degree of indeterminacy.

One of the challenges of historical anthropology, or anthropological history, is to sketch the culture of a tribal people without commingling past and present. The Asháninkas of today are not the same as their ancestors of the six-

teenth century. Yet there are persistent qualities that mark Asháninka culture through time, providing reasonably fixed points of reference for a study of their history.

A first impression that hasn't changed in four hundred years of contact with Asháninkas: they strike visitors as tall people. Their physical bearing, the stout palm-wood bows carried by men, and their characteristic garment—a long cotton robe called a cushma that is worn by both sexes—create the appearance of height, though they are small people by North American standards.

A male visitor's first encounter with Asháninkas is an exercise in formality. A proper guest stops on the trail about fifty yards from a house and whistles through his hands to advise the residents of his imminent arrival. The senior man of the house rarely hastens to respond. He lingers, thinking things over, finishing the task at hand. The visitor, meanwhile, places his belongings, including his weapons, on the ground. Eventually the host comes forward. If the visitor is a stranger, the host may circle around him to verify that he has a back, establishing that he is not a demon merely impersonating a human being. Humanity certified, the visitor is invited inside to drink tart manioc beer, the most palpable expression of hospitality in the Upper Amazon. Members of the household go through the visitor's personal belongings; by exploring the private things of the guest, they bring him into the family's own world. As the minutes pass, host and guest edge from formality to relaxed conversation. The host's family has probed, tested, and finally assimilated the visitor into the life of the household.

The language in which these preliminaries take place belongs to the linguistic family called Arawak, which reaches across South America like a bandolier running from the continent's right shoulder to its left waist. The Asháninka are one of several Arawakan peoples in the central Amazon of Peru, including the Yanesha (Amuesha), Machiguenga, Piro, and Nomatsiguenga. Today, Asháninkas populate a region defined by the Perené, Pachitea, Ene, Tambo, and Apurímac

rivers, and by the upper reaches of the Ucayali. Estimates of their current population range from 34,000 to more than 45,000.12 Regardless of the accuracy of these figures, there is no question that they are now, and have been since the sixteenth century, one of the largest native groups of the Peruvian Amazon.13

Today most Asháninkas live in small settlements—perhaps a dozen houses clustered around a primary school. Where adequate land is available, small fields of rice, root crops, and coffee bushes surround the village.14

The family garden provides the staples of Asháninka diet, including tubers (especially manioc and sweet potatoes), bananas, plantains, various fruits, and maize. Women rule the garden. When possible, men hunt and fish as their forefathers did, though polluted rivers and diminished forests make the search for game a disappointing enterprise today. Out of necessity, Asháninkas have turned their attention to the production of cash crops, especially coffee.

Before outsiders appropriated so much of the forest, Asháninkas preferred to live in large, independent households scattered in the forest. The male head of the household was called itínkami , a term also applied to the principal support beam of the house. The itínkami oversaw the activities of his wives, children, and the husbands of married daughters. His central preoccupations included the provision of food for his family, forging links of hospitality and mutual aid with neighbors, and protecting his family from harm.

Gerald Weiss, an anthropologist who studied Asháninka communities along the Rio Tambo in the 1960s, observes that Asháninka culture has a "strong masculine bias." Based on field research among Asháninkas of the Río Pichis, another anthropologist, John Elick, reports that the ideal Asháninka woman is "submissive, faithful, and hard-working."15 Regrettably, we still lack field accounts that can build on these general observations to provide a more nuanced view of relations between the sexes in Asháninka society.

Political leadership is an elusive thing in Asháninka com-

munities. In the colonial period, Asháninka "chiefs" were mostly a figment of the Spanish imagination—or a form of wishful thinking, since the absence of formal political institutions was a constant headache for colonial administrators and missionaries. Local leaders (called pinkatsári or, beginning in the colonial period, caciques or curacas ) have always based their authority on persuasive rhetoric, the strength of their kinship ties, and proven skill in diplomacy and warfare. Nevertheless, pinkatsári have only a limited ability to coerce other household heads to act against their own wishes. Since the 1960s, new leadership roles have emerged in Asháninka communities to complement older traditions of authority. Native schoolteachers, catechists, and health workers now vie with headmen for the power to influence community decisions.

A common motif in Asháninka contact history is the explosive temperament of Asháninka men. In his reflections on the disheartening results of centuries of Franciscan missionary labor in the central Amazon, Padre Alberto Gridilla describes the Asháninka as "enamored and jealous of his liberty" and "reluctant to embrace Christianity, a religion that imposes duties on him and which curbs his disordered passions." "He does not," Gridilla concludes, "want impositions from anyone."16 As we will see, much of the violence that has shaken the Upper Amazon follows from the unsettling effects of colonization; the advance of "civilization" has been, in Peru as in so many places, a murderous process. But there is no reason to think that Asháninkas were unfamiliar with violence before the Spanish Conquest. Since their first contact with outsiders they have demonstrated their willingness to use force on scores of occasions.

Where Asháninkas have proved reticent is in the disclosure of their religious life. In the words of Isidoro Llano a Catholic missionary, the "savage . . . conceals the finer convolutions of his inner being."17 Such concealment is relatively easy, for Asháninka religion lacks obvious physical symbols. Asháninkas build no shrines or altars, nor do they perform

large-scale rituals. Their cosmology is defined not by the four cardinal directions but by the movement of rivers. Of special significance is River's End, Otsitiríko, home to kindly spirits.

For an Amazonian people, the Asháninka spiritual universe is remarkably dualistic, almost Manichaean. Spirits are either benevolent or demonic. Benevolent spirits (tasórentsi or amachénga ) have special powers over the elements, over plants and animals, and over life itself. Chief among them is the Sun (Pavá, Tasórentsi, or sometimes Diós, after the Spanish word for God). Pavá is the Father, the creator, the one who watches over all. The Moon (Kashíri) is an ambivalent figure, the giver of agriculture but also a hungry presence that swallows the dead. Sun, Moon, and other powerful beings may send spirits to help the Asháninka people. Demons (kamári ), on the other hand, appear in myriad forms to confound and kill. One must always be alert for their subterfuges.

Standing between the world of ordinary people and that of powerful beings is the shaman or sheripiári . Asháninka shamans use tobacco and a powerful hallucinogen called ayahuasca to enter healing trances.18 In trance, they dance with spirits, travel to distant places, and search the spirit world for prophetic messages.

The message that emerges most persistently is that the present world is about to make way for another. Asháninkas, Gerald Weiss writes, "anticipate a time when Tasórentsi will destroy the world or, rather, transform it into a new world." "When that occurs," he adds, "sky and earth will again be close together, the earth will speak once again, and its inhabitants will be a new race of humanity knowing nothing of sickness, death, or toil."19 John Elick found a similar belief among the Asháninkas he knew. "This world, tainted and contaminated by the intrusion of evil forces and beings," they told him, "will also pass away."20 This persistent, apocalyptic vision links the Asháninkas of today with those who received the first Spanish visitors at the end of the sixteenth century.

Excerpted from War of Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazonby Michael F. Brown and Eduardo Fernández Copyright © 1991 by Michael F. Brown and Eduardo Fernández. Excerpted by permission.
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