Ted Conover
Page 5
But what if it did? I asked. What did he think would change? Well, you’d be able to make the trip quicker if the road were paved, he replied—maybe in just a day, instead of the two or three or more it took now. But that could mean the road could get more crowded—more vehicles, which would mean more competition, and less of the community of drivers that existed now (which I knew functioned as a lifeline, of sorts, if there was trouble).
Braulio slept a bit longer that night, though he still woke before dawn, perhaps not by choice—a passenger had decided to take his leave, and wanted to pay him. At three a.m., or whatever it was, he started banging on the door of the cab. Soon after, we were driving again. Once it was light, Natali and little Carlos got off as well. Braulio eyed her hungrily as she paid him and walked away. I took the occasion to climb up onto the back—not perfect timing since, as the morning went by, the road became both straighter and much more dusty. Like the others on top, I learned how to hold my breath for a while when we passed another vehicle and had to eat its dust.
Mostly, the passengers were young men, heading down to the jungle to work in wood. Two brothers from the mountains, Efraim and Raúl Andrade, and their cousin, Nico, got off at Laberinto, a settlement on the Los Amigos River. From there, Efraim explained, they would take a boat upstream to a lumber camp where Nico had worked previously. Such camps on the Los Amigos, I knew, were illegal—the area was protected, a park. But they abounded anyway, and were almost always involved in cutting mahogany, the region’s number-one moneymaker. It would take a week or two of travel—no mahogany was left near the road—but they assured me that, in short measure, if things worked out, they’d be hard at work with chain saws. Two other men were headed for a sawmill.
One passenger uninterested in wood was another single mother with her son. Mary Luz Guerra was a nursery school teacher in Puerto Maldonado, and her son, Alex, was fourteen. Alex had a plastic camera and seemed to be enjoying himself. But his mother was not. Alone among the passengers, she was trying to keep clean. Uncomfortable, now, in a white cowl-neck sweater (the day was growing very warm), she explained that she had never planned to come home on a truck. She and Alex had taken the plane to Cuzco to visit relatives at the beginning of a school break. But when it came time to leave, the fare for the thirty-seven-minute flight had gone up and she discovered she could not afford two seats. They’d been reduced to taking a truck back, essentially coming home through the service entrance.
With a gasp of brakes, Braulio slowed to navigate over another one-lane bridge. On top, we held our collective breath as the wave of dust that had been following the truck slowly caught up and washed over us. To everyone’s surprise, Braulio did not accelerate after crossing the bridge but pulled over, into a small roadside settlement called Libertad. It had the distinction of offering not only a swimming hole that extended into the shade under the bridge, but a small restaurant next door.
Many passengers swam—the water felt fantastic, and some washed out their clothes on the rocks at water’s edge. But few went into the restaurant: these people were poor, and even the ramshackle place, which today was serving fried bush meat (a large jungle rodent called picuro, like an agouti), was too great a luxury. I invited Mary Luz and Alex to be my guests. She hadn’t swum—too modest—but I had and, free of dust at last, I felt sorry for her in that sweater. We sipped cold sodas as we waited for our meals. Beyond the swimming hole, a toucan flew low across a small field, bobbing up and down with each stroke of its little wings—a thrilling sight. I thought about how a better road—especially a through road, spanning the continent—would lead to bigger fields, more room for soybeans and cattle. And less room for toucans.
A beer truck pulled up to the restaurant. The name of the distributor on the door logo was Transoceánica, a variant of Interoceánica, and I pointed it out to the others.
Mary Luz, cooled only slightly by the shade and the soda, dabbed at her moist forehead with a tiny, thin napkin that was not nearly up to the job.
“I can’t wait till they build that highway!” she said.
———
On the evening of the third day we pulled up to the fuel depot on the outskirts of Puerto Maldonado, and everybody climbed down from the truck. We all settled up with Braulio and went our separate ways. Mary Luz and Alex transferred to another unusual form of public transportation, a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi with a fabric roof, known locally as a motocar. It looked like fun so I flagged one down, too, and was soon putt-putting through the frontier jungle town en route to a hotel, grateful for the moving air.
Puerto Maldonado was pretty much the end of the road. With giant rivers lining it on two sides (and joining at one corner of town), the only way to keep driving was to put your vehicle—and it would have to be a small one—on the ferry. Looking overwhelmed by the task ahead of it, the rickety vessel chugged upstream across the mighty Madre de Dios River, inching crablike toward the far shore. On that other side was a dirt road that led to another ferry over another river, many hours away, this one at the border with Brazil. During the rainy season, the road was often impassable.
Puerto Maldonado itself had only four paved streets, and a distinctly frontier feel. The main streets were crowded with motorcycles, many of them taxis; if the passenger was female, she sat sideways, knees together. A helmet law had recently gone into effect, but many drivers ignored it. Others wore a construction hat or a bicycle helmet. Most side streets were empty. The buildings were low. Many were made of wood. Concrete, though, was the favored material for things monumental, including the town plaza and the clock tower at its center, a Catholic church across the street, and many of the gravestones in the “pioneers’ cemetery,” an overgrown place that few seemed to visit. The only other place I could remember a cemetery with a name like that was in Alaska.
You could understand the widespread use of concrete, in a place where organic things, like wood, tended to rot. But it had been used to fabricate even a giant obelisk in an intersection a couple of miles from the main plaza: the Monument to Biodiversity, of all things. According to a Peruvian government study, cloud forests in the mountainous western edge of Madre de Dios, the state we were in, have the greatest biodiversity of any place on Earth. The seven-or eight-story tower, with green glass sides and an elevator to the top (nonfunctional, alas, during all three of my visits), had concrete “fins” extending out from the base at four corners, to suggest a rain-forest tree, and on each of the four sides was a scene from the region’s history, set in concrete. One side showed indigenous peoples in the jungle; another showed rubber tappers (it was ironic that such a transportation-challenged part of the world had helped to usher in the automotive revolution, by providing the rubber for tires); another portrayed Brazil nut harvesters; another, gold miners; and the last, woodcutters.
In a way, the shiny glass sides mirrored Puerto Maldonado’s contradictions. It was a jungle town full of mountain people. It touted the forest’s biodiversity while inevitably, through human incursions and extractive industries, reducing it. It was the capital of a department, or state, 65 percent of whose territory had been declared parkland, and yet it wasn’t easy to find local people in favor of those protections. Its airport brought in scores of tourists every week en route to eco-lodges; but they almost all skipped the town itself, which didn’t have much “eco” to offer.
What little it had, I think I found: my hotel, the Wasai, was a thatched-roof place overlooking the huge Madre de Dios River. The open-air reception area had a jungle lodge ambience, and adjoined a breakfast platform on the river’s steep bank. Elevated walkways connected restaurant and reception area to the hotel’s dozen or so bungalows, most of them small, dark rooms on stilts. There were plenty of colorful lizards around, an abundance of birds attracted to fruit set out for them on the breakfast platform, and moths, butterflies, and frogs. (Later I returned to the Wasai with my family. We were to go from there to a jungle lodge down the Tambopata River, but my ten-year-old son, enam
ored of all the life around him, thought we were already there.) At breakfast one day, as I drank strong coffee and some fresh-squeezed orange juice, I noticed something large up in the tree canopy, maybe fifty or sixty feet above.
“Es un perezoso,” the waitress explained—a sloth. They occasionally passed through, she said, very slowly. I checked for the sloth every morning; it was never more than one tree away from the last place I’d seen it, always hanging upside down. The animals’ main predators, I learned, were eagles. Their main defense was the camouflage of their fur, which even had algae growing on it, and their incredibly subtle movement, also unlikely to attract notice.
Then one morning the sloth was gone. The hotel staff shrugged: sometimes they just go, but they always come back. As it happened, I was just returning to the Wasai two afternoons later when this one came back. I didn’t recognize it at first: the hotel’s porter and another man were walking across the street, each holding one end of a broom from which something heavy hung. It was the sloth. They were returning it to the sanctuary of the hotel. They paused so I could get a better look at its coat (which, unlike every other mammal’s, started on its stomach and went to its back, so the rain would run off properly) and then, miraculously, its face. For some reason I’d thought a sloth would look like a bear, but the face reminded me more of a human child, a little bit like one with Down syndrome—gentle, vulnerable, a being that deserved some extra consideration.
While there were few tourists, there were many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from various countries committed to helping preserve the environment. Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, ProNaturaleza, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, and the Amazon Conservation Association all had offices here, and others were arriving: so many were there, said a young couple (she from California, he from France) who had recently arrived to establish a new NGO, the Giant Otter Conservation Project, that it was hard to find a place to live. In terms of First World comfort, Puerto Maldonado was maxed out.
All of them were worried about the mahogany business, which did not respect park boundaries and brought woodcutters into conflict with indigenous peoples: the densest concentrations of the wood were far upriver, where the “uncontacted” live. Before there was something so valuable in their midst, the distances had protected the indigenous. But now, infection by a disease carried by a woodcutter—one of the last reverberations of the plagues visited on the New World by the conquistadors—could wipe out a tribe. The few people authorized by the Peruvian government to visit remote tribes had to follow a strict protocol that entailed wearing latex gloves, using breathing filters, and keeping a distance of several yards at all times.
On a more practical level, explained Antonio Iviche, the leader of a group called FENAMAD, which advocated for the indigenous, the woodcutters stole their food. In FENAMAD’s raggedy offices Iviche, whose parents were indigenous, complained bitterly about the incursions. “When the invaders arrive in these lands to harvest wood, they also hunt, because they need to eat, and they fish.” The reduction in available bush meat could be huge: a study had shown that loggers could deplete an area of edible animals in a few short weeks. The infections, encroachments, and competition for food forced tribes to move to less hospitable areas and were linked to increased mortality. The opening of a regular highway to Brazil, he added, would encourage more workers to come to the area—even Brazilians—and make matters worse.
As I sat on a small, sagging couch in FENAMAD’s tiny waiting room, I was approached by the group’s accountant. We got to chatting. He wanted me to understand that the indigenous were not going to go quietly. He told me that the day before, a woodcutter had arrived in town on a boat and been rushed to the hospital.
“Yes …,” I said.
“Oh,” he continued, realizing that I didn’t get the point. “He had an arrow lodged in his ankle bone!”
He watched as it dawned on me what this meant—the Indians are fighting back.
Another friend of the indigenous was Alfredo García Altamirano, a Peruvian anthropologist. He had partnered with an English biologist to start a small NGO called TReeS Perú, which they ran out of a small house. There was a red motorcycle in the front yard, and García wasn’t wearing shoes. There was a lot the state could do to protect the tribes, he said. It could give them title to specific parcels of land. It could provide for better enforcement of the law. It could better regulate logging companies.
But as far as working against an interoceanic highway, well, that was a non-starter. “You can’t have an anti-highway discussion here,” he said. Too many people, practically everybody local, supported it, and you would be marginalizing yourself to do it, writing “kook” on your shirt. “All you can do is to plan for its bad effects, and try to find ways to avoid them.”
Just what were the bad effects? García referred me to a paper delivered the year before at a major conference in Arequipa called Regional Integration Between Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. A forestry professor who advised the Inter-American Development Bank reviewed a long list of the drawbacks a new road would bring to the area. In fact, two lists—one of the environmental ill effects and the other of the social. On the first list, he included
deforestation of lands ill suited to agriculture
degradation of the forest from logging
increased risk of forest fires
illegal hunting, and increased traffic in live animals
abusive fishing, using dynamite and chemicals
loss of species
reduction of landscape and touristic values.
Socially, the region would suffer from
invasion of indigenous lands by farmers, woodcutters, and miners, and eventual massacre of Indians by disease or in skirmishes
displacement of tribal peoples, leading to conflict between them as they invade each other’s land
illegal expropriation of tribal lands
proliferation of illegal crops such as coca
stimulation of migration to urban areas, and the decline of social services and quality of life in towns and villages
growth of slums
growth of labor exploitation and prostitution
loss of traditional cultural values.
A scientist from the Woods Hole Research Center who was at the talk told me it was sparsely attended, in stark contrast to lectures on the business opportunities regional integration would bring, which were packed.
The five-hundred-pound gorilla in all of these scenarios, of course, was Brazil. Relative to Peru, Brazil is a highly advanced country with a powerhouse economy. And in exploiting its rain forest, Brazil is far ahead, a major global producer of soybeans and beef, most of it raised on lands from which the rain forest has been burned off. The road, of course, was the necessary precursor to such burning: until there was a road, what was the point of having a farm or ranch of any kind? You had to have a market, and to have a market, you had to have a road.
The starkest way to see this power of a road was from the air, and on my first visit to Puerto Maldonado, Maria Stenzel, a photographer from National Geographic magazine, and I hired a plane to do just that. It was not easy to do in Peru: planes were so associated with cocaine traffickers that the government had put a stop to nearly all civil aviation. And even when a pilot had permission to fly, it was dangerous: the year before, the Peruvian air force had mistakenly shot down a Cessna carrying a family of missionaries out of the rain forest. When our pilot had to put down on a semi-abandoned strip near the border with Brazil due to a sudden lowering of the visibility ceiling, the plane was quickly surrounded by soldiers, and we were given permission to take off only after considerable showing of documents and radio calls to army and aviation authorities.
But renting the plane was worthwhile. The road to Iñapari, on the border with Brazil, was a muddy strip through dense jungle that took hours to traverse in a passenger car, if you were lucky. And the bridge over the border stream was a rickety affair that could ne
ver hold a heavy truck. As we entered Brazilian airspace, the picture changed entirely. Suddenly there were fields full of crops, with shiny farm machines in them, and pastures full of cattle, who stampeded in alarm under our low-flying plane. The highway beneath us was largely paved, and on either side of the pavement the forest was cut back for hundreds of yards, even miles. In the distance were other fields, as well as the smoke from newer fields being created. It was as though the development clock had been turned ahead a generation; this was a country on the move, and the road’s role as precondition was clearly evident.
Brazil was so eager for Peru to have the same kinds of roads that by late 2004 it had completely paved its road to the border, spent $7 million to upgrade that rickety bridge over the border river, and had even offered to help finance work on the Peruvian side.
Alfredo García felt that just having a road wouldn’t bring the same kind of prosperity to Peru; it would bring a different kind of prosperity, a lesser one. Perhaps more than anything else, Peru would profit by playing host to Brazilian trucks and providing highway services to Brazilian vehicles. Peruvian gas stations are known as grifos; and in García’s words, “I’m afraid we’re going to become Brazil’s grifo.”
There were many fates worse than that, of course, from the perspective of the poor people who streamed down from the Andes to try to make a future in Peru’s jungle. To them, the restrictions on use of the nation’s jungles—the rules keeping them out—were outrageous, and the foreign NGOs were meddlers, pure and simple. The Peruvian government’s own control apparatus, however, seemed to attract most of their wrath. Not that it was tremendously effective in preventing illegal logging—its inspectors were notoriously corrupt, perhaps unsurprising given the high stakes of mahogany cutting—but INRENA, the federal natural resource agency, was perhaps the most visible symbol of this hated authority. In 2002, a mob in Puerto Maldonado burned down the INRENA headquarters there, and set fire to an impound lot that held confiscated wood. Another mob destroyed the Department of Agriculture offices. Another firebombed a car in front of ProNaturaleza, a Peruvian NGO. Hundreds of soldiers and police were sent in from across the mountains to restore order. Not long after, the apparent leader of these insurrections, Rafael Ríos López, by then a fugitive facing federal charges, was elected governor of the state.