Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Kernaghan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Fordham University at Lincoln Center.

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Coca's Gone

Stanford University Press

Contents

Introduction............................11 ya no hay coca ya.....................302 shooting in pacae.....................693 river and road........................1154 cement house..........................1575 esparza...............................1886 flag..................................213Afterword...............................251Acknowledgments.........................265Notes...................................271Works Cited.............................295Index...................................301

Chapter One

The knocks would start every morning by eight-thirty, if not before, and Sunday was no exception. On the steel plate doors out front, the rattle of knuckles, the rap of keys in sudden metallic bursts: sometimes timid, sometimes impatient, always insistent. It was Carito who would go to answer, whether she was helping Abuela in the kitchen, drawing water for Marusha's bath, or sweeping and picking up around the sitting room and office.

Se encuentra la doctora? was what they asked almost without fail.

Marusha would either just be getting up or be already dressed and at the breakfast table, downing a cup of instant coffee with yesterday's rice reheated, or whatever else there might be-boiled yuca or plantains, even some fish if Magno was around and between jobs. Maaaru, te buscan, Carito would call out as she pushed open the swinging door and ambled down the hall toward the kitchen. "It's the seor from Cotomonillo. He wants to know if his papers are ready." Or "It's the seora who showed up last night just as you were closing. She doesn't want to give me her name." Marusha would reply with an "Ask them to come back in an hour," or an "Open the doors to the office, I'll be out in a bit." Unless, of course, she was about to head out of town, in which case she would have them come back the next day or the following week. Marusha was always just arriving or just about to leave again, and so when she stuck around for a stretch people dropped by all day long. When the office doors were open, they would pop their heads in or take a seat on one of the benches inside-especially if it were early and a clear day, because the morning sun landed something fierce on the front side of the house and would push you in toward the shade. But if the office doors were closed, which they were at lunchtime, at the end of every day, and whenever Marusha was away, then the metallic knocks to which we were so accustomed would return to interrupt whatever was going on inside the house.

So many came looking for Marusha that it was just expected that the visits were for her. If not a client, then someone from city hall or a local journalist on his daily rounds aiming to tease out a quote. Sometimes one of the local news talk shows would phone her early in the morning to do an interview, and while Marusha sat at her desk taking the call, the rest of us would crowd around at the kitchen table to listen to her on the radio.

The kitchen table was squat and rectangular with wiggle enough to slop your coffee. Its surface stayed bare most of the time, exposing long strips of wood discolored with age, though occasionally Abuela would drape a soft yellow cloth over it and then lay a transparent plastic sheet on top. A long bench ran one length of the table, pressed up against the wall, while chairs tucked in around the other sides. Abuela always sat at the far end with her back to the patio doorway so as to be close to the stove top and her blackened aluminum pots and kettle. Marusha took her place on the bench to Abuela's right so as to make sure her grandmother didn't eat anything she wasn't supposed to or attempt to drink her soup or tea before it had cooled. Others in the household would fill in where they could: Carito, Magno, and me, sometimes Nico and rarely if ever Bianca.

The kitchen was the innermost space of the house where Marusha had moved the family following the death of her mother Herminia in 1996. It was where they took meals, and no one who was not living there was ever invited in. That went for close friends, too, with exception made, at most, for a relative or Marusha's secretary. I suspect the reason was more modesty than anything else, there being no way to receive people in the kitchen without having them promenade past the open bedrooms and their visible disorder, then through the patio past the plastic tubs of soaking laundry and the buckets of food scraps that crowded just outside the kitchen doorway. A meal of any holiday or ceremonial importance spared guests those unkempt sights and was served instead on the long dining table out front.

Such formal dinners were rare events and had none of the intimacy of the kitchen, where the family regularly met to engage in the conversations of the day. The kitchen was where the latest rumors and news would be spread out and picked through or apart, and where the old stories would come round again and show their power-especially when Marusha was home and had a moment to spare. On account of her work on the municipal council and the legal cases she attended to every day, Marusha forever had her finger to the wind of news that blew through town. And while everyone in the house would have his or her turn to bring something to the table, Marusha was the generative source of much of what was discussed.

That's not to say the atmosphere that dominated our meals was all serious. No. We could get pretty worked up, get on a roll-the good-humored air suddenly taking on a mocking tone. In those moments, jokes barbed and needling got the best of anyone perceived in the least as lowering his or her guard. True, it was pretty clean fare with none of the cutting double entendres that were staple fare on the street. Some of the jokes were bad, others stupid, and most of the time we got off on just being silly.

Magno, except where Abuela was concerned, was a quiet, never-make-the-first-move kind of guy, but once he got started he enjoyed the fight and just wouldn't let it go, sometimes not for days at a time. Nico, meanwhile, didn't open his mouth if not to make some playful gibe, and he had this way of joking that made him endearing even when he took it too far. Whereas Carito, poor Carito, she liked to tease but took more than her share of punishment. This had to do in part with her being the youngest of the family, which allowed the others to tell ridiculing stories about her that she was in no position to challenge. There was the one about the time some neighbors who were in deep with the terrucada gave her a grenade to slip past the army checkpoint at the port. She was only six or seven years old at the time, and she did their bidding-so the story went-without realizing what the object was or what she was doing. The humor turned on family knowledge that Carito sometimes did imprudent things when she should have known better, and the story pretended to prove it was a pattern that started even before she was conscious of the significance of her own acts. Carito never protested and would look up with a sheepish grin that only served to seal the truth of the tale and perpetuate a situation in which all the cards were stacked against her.

I was pretty slow and flat-footed when it came to joining in on the teasing and joking, even to my defense, and like Carito suffered the brunt of it from time to time. But there wasn't one of us who didn't manage to toss in a devilish line now and again, which did earn each one some respect. Marusha, ever the matriarch, was never the target and was good at staying out of the fray.

But no meal ever passed without someone coming to the front door and leaving one of us midsentence. Many interesting stories got put off in this way until the next time we were all together, if not completely lost in the meantime. Invariably it was Carito who went to see who was calling, just as it was her job to get up for anything that was missing from the table: to rummage through the cupboard drawers, to re-serve the plates, or to run across the street to buy last-minute items.

Once Nico was in town when Marusha was away, and we were all talking about something when the pounding started at the door. Mildly annoyed, Nico spat back as loudly as he could in good Huallaga colloquial, No hay nadies! (No ones are home!), and that just threw us all into fits of laughter, though no one more than Magno, who from that day on made it his. Anyone who knocked too much and too long would get a resounding No hay nadies! No hay nadies!-even as Magno himself went for the door and swung it open with a grumpy "Who is it?" that only seemed to mock, while acknowledging, the general sentiment that when Marusha was gone no one who was anyone was at home.

When she was there, the news Marusha would bring home often had the taste of a tabloid police beat. Like the time she returned from a council meeting to announce that the police were finally being forced to move out of the "Proyecto" (Project), a government administrative and housing compound, and into a new headquarters behind town hall. The station house had been completed for several months, and having the police force deployed to its own building in the center of town was supposed to be one more sign that things in Aucayacu were getting back to normal. Yet the police could never manage to put a date on when they would abandon the Project compound, and as they procrastinated the empty building-freshly painted in the pea and moss green colors of the PNP-had become a sanctuary for thugs and a favorite spot for derelicts and vagrants to go and relieve themselves. The municipal council was already annoyed by such unseemly activity happening right out its back-door steps, as it were, when one morning a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl was found dead inside the new headquarters, the victim of gang rape from the night before.

The municipal council generally took a "live and let live" attitude where the National Police was concerned; after all, it was outside the council's jurisdiction. But the enormity of this scandal was too much to let slide. Following much fretting over the problem, the council sent a petition to the departmental authorities in Hunuco, complaining that the empty station house had become a menace to public peace and demanding that the police be ordered to move into their new headquarters. Apparently the petition had been well received, because Marusha appeared certain that the transfer would now be imminent. At least, that was her good news. As for why the police were reticent to leave the Project compound in the first place, Marusha said that the new station house was no more than an office, whereas in the Project they had living space as well. If they moved, the police would have to find accommodations elsewhere and pay rent from their already meager paychecks. The police also grumbled that the new headquarters had not been built with the proper materials and that the clay-brick walls would provide unreliable cover in the event of an attack by Sendero or a drug gang.

Marusha had few details about the rape itself, which had happened several days before she brought it up at the kitchen table. As was her style, Marusha's news was less about the crime than about the action taken by the town council. But when a friend of Magno's dropped by later that evening, we learned that people were saying the girl had been coaxed out of one of Aucayacu's two discothques and led across the plaza into the empty headquarters-after someone had slipped a common cow tranquilizer into her soft drink. She had still been alive, so we heard, when the men-all eight of them-abandoned her, bleeding, on the station house floor. In the impossible-to-know details of the recounting, the girl tried to get help but was too dizzy to stand, and she died several hours later. What could be proved was that in the following months the police staged several late-night raids on the discothques to enforce a local ordinance banning the admission of minors. Yet they never moved into their headquarters, not while I was in Aucayacu. Nor was the rape case, as far as we knew, ever solved.

The tombos, as police are called in Peruvian lingo, were always taking a hit in the stories told around town, and those told in Marusha's kitchen were no exception. Their exploits, both of actions and inactions, were the cause of indignation and derision. Even the dominant versions of the region's recent past of violence and lawlessness were plumbed for origins in a prehistory of corrupt and treacherous cops. And it was hard to miss that in the telling of so many stories much dark enjoyment came at their expense.

Take the time Puricho, the number two of the Champa drug gang, escaped from jail in Hunuco. It was Father's Day, and big mafioso that he was, Puricho had invited all of the prison staff to celebrate the day with a big feast of chicken and wine, the whole works. They must have been hungry because not only did they accept his hospitality, they left only one guard posted outside to keep watch over the prison while the rest joined the festivities. Puricho and two others waited until the party was in full swing to make their break. But the policemen never moved; they were either too busy eating or too drowsy to even get up from the table. It seems the chicken had been laced with a powerful sedative, or that was the word we got in Aucayacu. Puricho was a native son and the town was all abuzz with how he had tricked the police or paid them into going along with the charade, which was effectively the same thing. The head of the prison was promptly arrested, Marusha told us, adding that it was no surprise that Puricho had given the police the slip when he did. His twenty-year sentence for drug trafficking had just been upheld by a court in Lima, and he was about to be transferred into one of the maximum security penitentiaries from which there would be no buying his way out.

But it was more than just the tombo stories. So many things, a whole world beyond the house, passed through that kitchen. From the chacra: that Sendero came through over the weekend, calling people to overnight meetings, handing out tasks again. From Avenida Lima: that the soldiers passed by escorting two prisoners captured on patrol near the village of Chimbote. From the cruce: to take extra care in traveling on the Marginal Highway, that armed bandits have been stopping traffic near the one-kilometer mark. And many times the knocks at the door were merely to let Marusha know about some situation in the making.

Word of something heard in the late afternoon might make its appearance at the evening meal and then build throughout the next day or even week-details and updates gathering round and nourishing it every time we came together. Outside of this stream of local news and rumors, whatever was happening in the rest of the country or carried in the national press was generally far from our discussions. No one in Marusha's house tuned in regularly to what was piped in from Lima on television or picked up by local radio stations. Nor did the family buy any of the newspapers that showed up on the late bus from Lima each afternoon. Getting the paper was a habit they considered beyond their means. Money was too tight to go blowing a couple of sols3 like that every day. Much of the town must have felt the same, judging from how few newspapers were actually sold. Never more than a handful arrived at the only two kiosks where you could buy them: in the cruce, or crossroads, where the Marginal Highway entered Aucayacu proper at the head of Avenida Lima; and on the main plaza across from the public telephones. But the papers never arrived before six in the evening, by which time the news was already beginning to make for a stale read. Whether speaking of the tabloids, with their fleshy, front-page vedettes clothespinned at eye level, or the "serious" news dailies, inevitably a copy or two were left over to send back the following afternoon.

People were most curious about what was happening elsewhere in the country when it somehow affected them. No one would think of missing the president's annual Independence Day address, for example, and townsfolk would stay pressed to their TV sets for the duration of the speech on the chance of gleaning some real intention of government aid from what were mostly only vague words of promise. But matters of importance to the day-in, day-out life of the town hardly ever found their echo in the national media, and whatever was reported-all too often catering to the taste of the wealthier store owners, radio announcers, and other self-proclaimed defenders of local pride-often took the form of unwarranted smears on the town's name. Thus all coverage was bad coverage in their eyes, and nothing could anger the townspeople more than when a journalist or television announcer got the geography wrong and reported something that had happened in an outlying hamlet as having taken place in Aucayacu. The problem was less one of geographical imprecision than the result of Aucayacu, as the district capital, appearing as the dateline for everything that occurred within its jurisdiction. And the national press was unaware of and just as likely insensitive to the gulf that the more affluent townspeople believed separated town from country. (Continues...)

Excerpted from Coca's Goneby Richard Kernaghan Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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