Peru: The Devastation Continues, The US Traditional Media Ignore It

Devastation in Peru continues. Today's La Republica reports the bad news:

Intense Rains Leave More than 100,000 Affected

The prolonged rainfall that fell on the southeastern Andes Sunday night left over 100 thousand people affected, with particular intensity in the Cusco region, regional authorities reported.

The regional president of Cusco, Hugo Gonzales, told the AP that on Sunday the rains had left "more than 60 thousand people affected, seven thousand homes destroyed, 17 thousand hectares of crops affected and so far 14 bridges that may collapse from being in poor condition.

Gonzales said that "losses translate into almost $ 250 million dollars and that tourism, the largest employer in the region is losing almost a million dollars a day, which is aggravated by the isolation of Machu Picchu from tourists.

(translation by me)

The report from Puno, to the Southeast, is particularly disturbing:

the rains left "more than 22 thousand farmers affected, 23 million acres of crops worthless, and 25 thousand dead cattle including llamas and vicunas."

But if you're not going to read Peruvian newspapers on line, you won't know much about this disaster. If you're in the US, just try a Google news search for "Peru floods" and see what it turns up. Right now the top story is from Brunei. And that's one of the very few entries from today. The rest concern rescuing tourists at the end of last week, some first person tourist stories about being rescued, and the thinnest of reports from Saturday and Sunday.

Long story short, the traditional US media just aren't reporting about this disaster. And they are apparently not going to. That makes it harder to get contributions and other aid from the US for Peru's relief. And it also continues the extremely distorted way the US traditional media cover events in this hemisphere.

If we want to end this embargo on news, if we want others in the US to know what's going on in Peru, the only thing I can think of is writing essays like this one and this one and this one. And if you, dear reader, would consider doing the same, writing an essay, we might be able eventually to overcome the enforced silence and bring US attention to the devastation in Peru. And to other events in this hemisphere as well.

Peru: The World Needs To Notice This Disaster

Yesterday, I put up an essay about a natural disaster in Peru. I wrote about the devastation caused by the rain: flooding, mudslides, loss of homes, loss of crops, deaths, displacement of families. And I urged that readers make donations to Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross.

Today on reflection I think I underestimated the situation in Peru. Today I found two videos that capture conditions in the Sacred Valley of Peru so you can see them yourself. Conditions are even worse than I thought. Please watch these videos. And please help me to bring the severity of this disaster to awareness in the U.S. Peruvians need our help.

The first video:



The second video:



I realize that the Internet can be a powerful tool in circumstances like this. Please do what you can to be of help.

Peru's Natural Disaster

The Urubamba River In Flood

This year's rains have come to Peru. And the rains have been extremely heavy. The result has been a washout of crops in the Sacred Valley, which runs from Cusco to Machu Picchu, mudslides that have destroyed houses and other buildings, and flooding. Peru Rail's tracks from Cusco to Aguascalientes have been washed out or buried under boulders. And the bridges across the Urubamba River at Pisac, Ollantaytambo, and Urubamba have all been washed out.

Tourists visiting Machu Picchu and staying in Aguascalientes, at the foot of the site, were stranded and rescued by helicopters. But the indigenous people of the area have not left, and they need assistance because many of their homes and their crops have been destroyed. What's worse is that the rainy season is just beginning. If there is more torrential rain, and there may be, there will be even more destruction, more flooding, more landslides, more disruption of the infrastruture.



AFP reports:

Heavy flooding in southern Peru, which trapped thousands of tourists visiting the Inca city of Machu Picchu, has killed 20 and left at least five missing, Peru's Civil Defense force said Saturday.

Thousands of others have been affected by heavy rains, the worst to hit the country in five years.

In the Cusco region, the downpours prompted landslides that trapped 3,500 visitors in and around the picturesque mountaintop tourist site of Machu Picchu.

Peruvian authorities used 12 helicopters and 40 pilots over four days to evacuate all the travelers trapped near the site, Latin America's top tourist destination.

The evacuation of all visitors ended late Friday.

"The good news is that Machu Picchu, along with all the ancient sites, is intact," said Carlos Millas, president of the chamber of commerce in Cusco, a region heavily dependent on the income from visiting tourists.

But the railway that ferries 90 percent of the 1,000 people that visit Machu Picchu each day to the site was damaged in the floods, and Peru Rail warned that repairs could take up to two months.

The rains are forecast to continue through Tuesday, with some heavy downpours predicted for the south, according to Peru's weather service.

I have a strong spiritual connection to this area. I've written here about Andean Shamanism. And I've spent some time in the area. The indigenous people of Peru, including virtually all of their spiritual teachers and Shamans, by and large are poor and they depend upon agriculture to survive. Crops like corn and squash can be grown in the valley next to the Urubamba River because that is warm and there is ample water for irrigation. The irrigation technique is essentially the one used centuries ago by the Incas.

Those who live higher up in the mountains (the Sacred Apus) also depend upon agriculture. It is much colder in the mountains, many of which tower at higher than 17,000 feet. Potatoes grow at the top of the arable fields, other crops lower on the mountain. The fields are divided by the community so that the division will be fair and no one will get the best fields repeatedly. But when there are landslides and the soil is saturated as it is now, no crops can be grown, and those already in the ground may rot. And the fields are not accessible because of the mud. The animals kept by those in the mountains, llamas, sheep, and other animals need to be able to graze. Flooding makes that extremely difficult.

How to help out?

Make a donation to Doors Without Borders. Also, the American Red Cross sends aid to Peru. My friends in the Shamanic World are trying to organize to fill gaps in the aid, especially to the most remote villages, but that is still a work in process.

Saving Pachamama: A Beginning

Don Mariano Quispe Flores

Pachamama, mother earth, Santa Madre Tierra, the earth, the planet is obviously in trouble. This should by now be obvious.

The Q'ero of Peru, the descendants of the Incas, live in remote villages that are above 14,000 feet above sea level. They have lived in these areas for hundreds of years. They live above the tree line. They raise llamas, alpacas, vicunas, and other similar animals, and they grow big kernal maiz ("choclo") and hundreds of species of potatoes. And until recently they kept to themselves. They stayed away from the cities. And the Government. And, of course, they kept their understandings of Shamanism and energy medicine to themselves. They certainly didn't tell North Americans about it. But then, relatively recently, they noticed the oddest thing, that the glaciers surrounding them were slowly melting. Slowly becoming smaller. Slowly disappearing. And the spiritual teachers in the lineage decided that Q'ero who were healers, who were powerful Shamans, who knew that it was necessary to heal mother earth and her children, would have to go down the mountain and bring out their teachings and carry them across the world.

I spent this past weekend with Q'ero Shaman Don Mariano Quispe Flores at The Abode in New Lebanon, New York, along with some three dozen other shamans. Don Mariano is 72 years old. He does not know how to write. Or to read. He speaks only Quechua (though he does say a very few words in English and Spanish). His village in Peru is about an 8 hour bus ride and then a 4 hour walk uphill from Cuzco. This trip to the United States (he stopped in California and Washington State and Colorado before journeying to the East) was his first trip to the US, though he has been to Europe. He is a very sweet, gentle, and humble man. And a powerful, traditional healer.

Because Don Mariano speaks Quechua, his translator sometimes translated first into Spanish, and then someone else translated into English. This was an incredible gift: I could hear what Don Mariano was saying three times. No, I didn't understand the first statements in Quechua, but I could feel and hear his tone of voice, and then it was repeated in both Spanish and English, so the content was repeated. I'm not going to try to bring you all of Don Mariano's teachings.

Instead, I bring you this very short essay to tell you something important that you probably already know only too well, just to remind you.

Pachamama, your Mother Earth, Santa Madre Tierra is in trouble and she needs our help and our caring for her. She needs us to honor her. And protect her.

This might involve traditional practices, like making offerings ("despachos") and prayers for the healing of the earth. It also might involve ceremonies, calling in the power of the Twelve Sacred Mountains (the Apus), the six directions, prayers, and healing thoughts. These are all important. But also important, perhaps even more important is our continuing awareness of Pachamama and our actions to take care of her as she takes care of us by feeding us, by giving us water, by providing shelter.

So I have a very simple request. Please pause now, look up from your screen, go outdoors if you can, and see, if you can, the unbelievable, abundant world surrounding use, the world on which we walk. Look at Pachamama. And feel, if you can, in your heart gratitude for all Pachamama provides us. This gratitude is incredibly important. It is the beginning point to help the planet.

Evo Morales On Coca Leaves

Today's New York Times has an Op-ed by Bolivian President Evo Morales calling for the legalization of coca leaves. Coca leaves are not cocaine; cocaine can be made from coca leaves. People from the Andes have for centuries chewed the leaves and made tea from them and have used them in ceremonies.

In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine — thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic — and ordered that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.” Bolivia signed the convention in 1976, during the brutal dictatorship of Col. Hugo Banzer, and the 25-year deadline expired in 2001.

So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples. ...

Why is Bolivia so concerned with the coca leaf? Because it is an important symbol of the history and identity of the indigenous cultures of the Andes.

The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness. Unlike nicotine or caffeine, it causes no harm to human health nor addiction or altered state, and it is effective in the struggle against obesity, a major problem in many modern societies.

Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.

In other words, la hoja de coca no es una droga. The coca leaf is not a drug.

Coca leaves are a vital part of the ritual of Andean Shamans and are used in despacho offerings and in divination and in other ceremonies. When Q'ero Shamans visit us in the US, we're forced to substitute bay leaves for coca leaves when we do ceremonies, because the coca leaves cannot legally be brought into the US. This, of course, makes no sense: we couldn't turn the leaves into cocaine even if we wanted to.

Significantly, the cultivation of poppies, which have no cultural or spiritual uses in Central Asia and Afghanistan, which are used to make heroin and opium, is not forbidden by the UN Convention.

Clearly, the ban on coca leaves needs to be removed.

Thank You, Pachamama, Thank You

A Ceremony Of Thanks

Moray, Peru, is in the sacred valley near Urubamba. It is high in the mountains, above where trees can grow. Some people think that these round terraces were for ancient Inca experimentation with crops: finding the species of potatoes and squash and root vegetables and maiz that would thrive at various altitudes. Others, including me, are less certain. To me, it is an architectural prayer of gratitude to Pachamama. Of course, it contained plants. The prayer says:

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Pachamama, for your fertility, for your fruit, for your nutrition. Thank you for sheltering and feeding us, for growing crops and animals, and giving us pure water to drink. Thank you for mulching everything that we leave behind so that it can be used anew. Thank you for continually restoring yourself and never being so exhausted that you give up on us, who walk on your belly. Thank you for reminding us to take good care of you. And thank you especially for sustaining the deep, dark feminine mystery inside you. Gracias, gracias, gracias.

About the Chullo

Captain Haddock (l) , person wearing chullo (r), llama in center

A chullo is an Andean hat. It seems to be in fashion this winter in New York. Confirming this, we have an article by my neighbor, Verlyn Klinkenborg, about the chullo in today's New York Times. He's critical:

If there’s a political statement in the chullo, it’s a little hard to decipher. Perhaps it signals indigenousness, international-ness. But what it mostly says is, I don’t care how I look as long as I’m warm. I’ve seen chullos that look like one cup of a knit bikini top and some that make their wearers look like mittenheads, complete with dangling strings. The other day I saw a fur-lined chullo that looked as though it had eaten the elder George Bush’s Russian hat. You can give a fedora a rakish tilt. You can wear a hoodie with sinister élan. But it’s impossible to wear a chullo stylishly. It is to the noggin what a golf club cover is to a 3-wood. It is a bag for the head.

In a way, seeing so many chullos in New York is a little like seeing so many baseball caps on Peruvians and Bolivians — a token of our global inclusiveness, like the Andean musicians you hear in the subways playing what you think is Paul Simon but is really a Peruvian classic.

Perhaps the anti-stylishness of the chullo — its simple functionality — is its politics. The fact is that really cold weather eclipses style. I see men and women wearing earmuffs that look like noseplugs. They are clearly trying to keep their hair kempt. It’s a lost cause. Your hair is not truly your own until warmer days and higher humidity return. Until then, there is no better way to get hat hair than a chullo.

Well, well, well. I've been to Peru, and yes, I have a few chullos. Don Francisco told me that a favorite green one I was wearing was more for a woman (because it wasn't red). The lined one I'm wearing as I type this, the one with the llamas on it and the mountains, isn't from Pisak or Ollantaytambo or Aguascalientes, it's from a local ski shop where I bought it about 3 years ago. It was-- I know this is hard to believe-- made in the US. It is the most comfortable head and ear covering garment I own, more comfortable than those authentic ones. It's not that I don't care if it gives me a rather permanent hat head. It's just that, bless its pointed little head, it works really well.

Peru: In Search Of Arguedas

Jose Maria Aguedas (1911-1969) (photo by Jose Gushkin)

I have to begin with Mariategui, the street in Cuzco, and then the man.

We decided to take a cab to find Don Francisco's new house in Cuzco, Peru. He is a Q'ero Shaman, and we wanted to do a shamanic ceremony with him and his wife and eat lunch with them. We wanted to visit him at his home as he had visited us at ours in the US. He gave us the address. He gave us his cell number. He gave us a land mark. We ended up calling him on the cell phone to say, "We're parked at the church. We don't know where you are." He walked down the hill and found us. Pointing, he said, that street is Mariategui. That's where the bus goes into Centro. That's where you have to walk. That's where the house is.

Did he know who Mariategui was? Probably not. I forgot to ask him. I am quite certain that he never read him.

Juan Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930), was the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party, and is most famous for his essays, "Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality," which are still being read today. The shortest Wiki summary:

[In 1928], he published his best-known work, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality, in which he examined Peru's social and economic situation from a Marxist perspective. It was considered one of the first materialist analyses of a Latin American society. Beginning with the country’s economic history, the book proceeds to a discussion of the “Indian problem", which Mariátegui locates firmly within the “land problem”. Other chapters are devoted to public education, religion, regionalism and centralism, and literature.

Also in the same work, Mariátegui blamed the latifundistas, or large land-owners, for the stilted economy of the country and the miserable conditions of the indigenous peoples in the region. He observed that Peru at the time had many characteristics of a feudal society. He argued that a transition to socialism should be based on traditional forms of collectivism as practiced by the Indians. In a famous phrase, Mariátegui stated "the communitarianism of the Incas cannot be denied or disparaged for having evolved under an autocratic regime."

In Peru in 2008 the Indians still practice collectivism. The clearest example is in the assignment of fields on the Andean mountainsides. The higher the field, the more limited the crop. The highest fields, which are far colder in temperature, are good for growing only potatoes or perhaps turnips. The lower fields, which are much warmer, are good for growing maiz, and squash, and beans. The fields are communally owned. And they are communally assigned. It would not be fair always to have a high plot, or a low one. So each year there is a shuffling of the fields. It has been like this for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And, of course, there are terraced Inca ruins in places like Marai, near Urubamba, which are thought to have been for experimentation about what will grow best at what altitude and for germinating new temperature resistant varieties of corn and potatoes. After all, potatoes and choclo, big kernal corn that looks like hominy, are Peruvian staples and they have been for centuries.

Jose Maria Arguedas was born into the world of the conflicts Mariategui described. According to a Wiki,

[A] Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist who wrote mainly in Spanish, although some of his poetry is in Quechua. Arguedas was ethnically Mestizo, being of mixed Spanish and Quechua descent himself... He was brought up in poverty amongst Quechua Indians, and learned Quechua before Spanish. He studied anthropology at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and worked as an anthropologist for the rest of his life.

Arguedas began by writing short stories about the indigenous environment in which he was brought up, in a Spanish highly influenced by Quechua syntax and vocabulary. By the time of his first novel, Yawar Fiesta (the name means "Blood Fiesta"), he had begun to explore the theme that would obsess him for the rest of his career: the clash between white "civilization" and the indigenous, "traditional" way of life. In this he was part of the Indigenista movement in South American literature. He continued to explore this theme in his next two books Los Ríos Profundos ("Deep Rivers") (1961) and Todas las Sangres (1964). His work showed the violence and exploitation of race relations in Peru's small rural towns and haciendas, while portraying Indian characters as gentle and childlike.

Arguedas was moderately optimistic about the possibility of a rapprochement between the forces of "tradition" and the forces of "modernity" until the 1960s, when he became more pessimistic. In his last (unfinished) work, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo ("The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below") (1969),... expressed his despair and conclusion that the 'primitive' ways of the Indians could not survive against the onslaught of modern technology and capitalism. At the same time that Arguedas was becoming more pessimistic about race relations in his country, younger indigenist intellectuals became increasingly militant, often criticizing his work in harsh terms for his poetic, romanticized treatment of indigenous and rural life. In a deep depression, Arguedas committed suicide in 1969.

I got a copy of Deep Rivers from Abebooks.com for $1 plus shipping. It's a coming of age novel told by the narrator about his life as a boarding student in a Catholic school in Abancay, Peru, in the Southern Andes. I'm not giving the plot away. Suffice it to say that in the middle of the book, the Indians, led by Dona Felipa, a woman who runs a chicheria (chicha is a fermented corn beer), rise up in an insurrection and seize salt from a warehouse, where it is being held by rich land owners, and they distribute it to poor people in nearby villages who need it. The army later arrives to "restore order."

The conflict between the land owners and the peasants, between the Spanish and Indian cultures, between the rich and the poor, between the capitalists and the communalists, so deeply analyzed by Maritegui stands at the center of the novel. But the novel isn't a polemic. It remains the poetic story of the coming of age of the narrator in an environment in which it is believed that a special, spinning, toy top can carry thoughts across the mountains to loved ones. And in which it's believed that water, too, can carry words. And in which the Church does not appear to conflict with these beliefs any more than the Indiginous Mass, held outside the Cathedral in Cuzco, conflicts with the later one inside the building.

It's easy to see why by the late 1960's Arguedas's description of indigenous people would be criticized. Arguedas describes the Indians as if they were simple children easily manipulated by the Church and accepting of the violence of the landowners. He does not find or describe the seeds of incipient militancy that by the 1980's would spawn Sendero Luminoso and produce in Peruvian fiction works like Mario Vagas Llosa's Death in the Andes. Regardless, the book is a remarkably beautiful work full of Quechua poetry and a memory of a world far, far away:

K'arwarasu is the Apu, the regional god of my native village. It has three snowy peaks towering above a mountain range of black rock. Around it there are many lakes, where pink-plumed cranes live. The kestrel is the symbol of K'arwarasu. The Indians say that during Lent he emerges from the highest peak in the guise of a firebird and pursues the condors, breaking their backs, making them whimper and humiliating them. Flashing like lightning, he flies over the planted fields, across the cattle ranches, and then sinks down into the snow.

The Indians invoke K'arwarasu only in times of great danger. They have only to pronounce his name, and the fear of death vanishes.

Leave The Uncontacted People Alone!!

CNN has reported that an "uncontacted tribe" has been sited in the Peruvian-Brazilian Amazon. The story isn't really surprising:

Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

Taken from a small airplane, the photos show men outside thatched communal huts, necks craned upward, pointing bows toward the air in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest.

The National Indian Foundation, a government agency in Brazil, published the photos Thursday on its Web site. It tracks "uncontacted tribes" -- indigenous groups that are thought to have had no contact with outsiders -- and seeks to protect them from encroachment.

More than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, and about half live in the remote reaches of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru or Brazil, near the recently photographed tribe, according to Survival International, a nonprofit group that advocates for the rights of indigenous people.

Look at the photo and notice the obvious harmony of the tribe with its environment. Do they need our help? Do they need our influence. Do they need us to be flying over them in our airplanes? Do they need us to be driving them from where they are?

Illegal logging in Peru is threatening several uncontacted groups, pushing them over the border with Brazil and toward potential conflicts with about 500 uncontacted Indians living on the Brazilian side, Survival International said.

Its director, Stephen Cory, said the new photographs highlight the need to protect uncontacted people from intrusion by the outside world.

I know we're all curious about these people, but would it be too much to ask that they be left alone? What, I wonder, is the huge rush to be in "contact" with these people we've "discovered"? Can't we let them continue without our impending, destructive intrusions, including our overflights, and free of our "superior" culture, technology, and diseases. Can't we protect these people from their biggest danger, which is us?

It's all sadly reminiscent of Alejo Carpentier's masterpiece The Lost Steps. As the narrator, a musicologist looking for primitive, indigenous musical instruments, progresses further and further up a South American river into the jungle, he recedes further and further into civilizations and times long past. He ends up with Carpentier's version of "uncontacted" people. But, ultimately, when an airplane arrives in the jungle to "rescue" him, Carpentier's protagonist doesn't choose to remain in paradise. He returns to civilization, leaving behind him his new, simpler, peaceful life for his former, complicated, civilized one. He's far poorer, I think, because of his choice. Why, I wondered about the book, couldn't he say to those on the plane, "Go away. Leave me alone. I like it here. I'm not coming with you?"

The "uncontacted" people here don't have the same choice. Is it to much to ask that we just leave them alone?

Mario Vargas Llosa Briefly Hospitalized

Mario Vargas Llosa

AFP reports that Vargas Llosa was discharged from the hospital yesterday:

Peruvian author and one-time presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa was discharged from hospital Saturday a day after he was admitted with heart problems, local news media reported.

Vargas Llosa, 71, was rushed to the San Pablo clinic Friday and, after undergoing a series of tests, is now out of danger, radio RPP reported. Officials at the clinic refused to confirm or deny the report to AFP.

Upon hearing the news during a cabinet meeting President Alan Garcia asked Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo to visit the writer, the president's office announced.

By then Vargas Llosa had already left the hospital in company of his family, so Garcia's office said that del Castillo would instead visit the author at home or call him by phone.

While I've always loved Vargas Llosa's books, his neo-liberal politics has always been distasteful to me. In 1990 he ran for president of Peru, the candidate of conservative parties, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori, who is now on trial for human rights abuses. In the campaign for president, according to James Cockroft, "Fujimori seemed less extremist in his economic neo-liberalism than Vargas Llosa and also spoke demagogically about helping Peru's poor. Sympathizers of the left voted for [Fujimori] as 'the lesser evil.'" But after the election Fujimori carried out IMF-type austerity policies even more extreme than those advanced by Vargas Llosa.

In 1990 Vargas Llosa described his unsuccessful campaign to the New York Times:

Alive and apparently unscathed after three years of crisscrossing his impoverished and terrorist-wracked country in pursuit of the presidency, Mr. Vargas Llosa says he is disappointed but also "a bit relieved" that the electorate rejected him in June in favor of Alberto Fujimori, a Japanese-Peruvian agronomist. The author's campaign was born of a sense of responsibility in the face of the tragedy of Peru and a conviction that the country could change and prosper with a free-market economy. But, switching from his excellent English to his perfect French, this urbane and elegant man with the swift and piercing amber eyes of a cat confesses that "le coeur n'y etait pas," that his "heart was not in it."

Machu Picchu, Part 3

The Main Street, Aguascalientes, Peru

I am sitting in the plaza in Aguascalientes, Municipalidad de Machu Picchu, 12:30 pm, 7/19/07.

A statue of Pachacutec Inka and a fountain. Music from a live band in a pizzeria. A mix of Peruvian traditional music and rock. Many tourists walk through lugging backpacks. Some sit. There is an ugly, hairless dog wearing a red vest. Shopkeepers lug the propane cannisters that arrived on the train through the square to their restaurants. Many policemen with guns and shields and vests and chevrons. Groups of local people dressed in red panchos and traditional hats, perhaps porters on the Inca trail. Groups of street cleaners in orange and green uniforms with green aprons, face masks, and brooms. Boys play wildly with a broken, plastic car. A child breaks a beer bottle on a step. A woman in a traditional, tall, white hat sits on a bench. All of this, every bit of it, is part of one of the largest, most charming tourist traps on this continent.

But there is also a real Aguascalientes, past the sprawling market the runs from the main street all the way up the hill to the modern train station. It is past the soccer field. Few tourists see it. It is dustier and quieter. And poorer. The real Aguascalientes has something to do with the recent two day, general strike. It has something to do with the policemen and their vests and riot shields and automatic weapons. The real Aguascalientes has graffiti denouncing Imperialism. To see it, you have to want to see it. Otherwise, it is a secret. It is not part of the most charming tourist trap on this continent.

Machu Picchu, Parts 1 and 2

7/19/07, Machu Picchu.

I.

I am sitting high on a wall overlooking dense clouds hiding the mountains. I sit just above the huge arched door. Many swallows. Many tourists. It is 8:30 am. I can feel the sun but mostly it is a damp breath, gentle, not enough to move the clouds or dry last night's rain.

Every so often tourists pass me, talking in many languages. Either they climb up huffing, or they descend talking. This is not a place where silence prevails. Despite its breathtaking vistas, its high altitude, its incomprehensible architecture, despite its mysterious, overwhelming, miraculous, incomprehensible existence, Machu Picchu cannot inspire silence. In fact, with its monumental size and exquisite details, Machu Picchu so dwarfs us, reveals us for all our pretense as underachieving, unimportant, without significance in the long stream of time, that we respond with the trivial, as if to prove the point, perhaps to comfort ourselves in the presence of the awe inspiring.

We respond with a thousand photographs. An avalanche of flashes. Conversations that seem far too loud, far too incessant for such an enormous cathedral, questions about the mundane. I wonder, have we lost our capacity to be struck silent?

Four llamas have arrived. One chases another past me, making wheezing noises. Tourists hug the walls. When the chase has subsided and the larger llama has mounted a terrace below and the smaller one is standing on the descending steps, the tourists resume their chatting and photographing. One calls out, "Llama, Llama," as if the animals spoke English. Then others arrive to discuss the llamas and to speculate further about them. Even these wonders, with their cushioned feet, their long necks, their fleece still wet from the rain, almost wild, inhabiting this place for millenniums, cannot quiet us. A llama releases a cascade of urine and feces on the terrace near me. Tourists gasp and then discuss this.

Two friends arrive from above and call out to me. We chat briefly. We too are too loud. They arrived at 6 am to hike above to the Inka Sun Gate, a hike I took yesterday, and they are now returning. It is now about 9:30 am. They trek away.

A huge tour group with a guide is above me on the path. He explains-- is he speaking in French, Portugese, English?-- pointing and gesturing into the wide void below him. The tourists listen attentively. His left arm waves deep into the void, floats over his head, waves at the distant mountains, toward the clouds.

Below, two women touch the sunburns they received yesterday and discuss them.

A sparrow lands near me on the wall. It hops toward me. Two people nearby speak softly in German. And at last, unbelievably, there is total silence.

Machu Picchu stands wrapped in soft cotton. Sparrows speak. The open roofs of distant buildings jut into the wet sky. And there is a moment, a precious, evanescent moment, of utter silence.

II.

I am in a small room above the Condor Temple, a great view of wide terraces below me. Wispy cotton clouds slowly rise. Voices in Italian fill the Temple below me. My small room is in an out of the way spot. It leads nowhere. But it is now surrounded by voices in Italian and Spanish inquiring where the exit is. At last, the voices wander off.

I inhale Machu Picchu, its magic, its endurance, its incredible strength, its genius. I feel that it is sacred. I inhale all of this and I exhale gratitude. There is a moment of peace.

No one has any real information about Machu Picchu. The guides always being with, "They say..." What they say is a blend of fact and fiction so thoroughly mixed and so often repeated that provable facts cannot be distilled from it.

Tourists have arrived to take photos of my small, private room and speak in Spanish. The guide says that they know 25% about this place and that the remaining 75% will have to be revealed by modern technology. Not likely. And then, they too are gone, as are their speculations, and the peace returns.

I inhale Machu Picchu and I exhale peace. I am content.