Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  After turning himself in and spending six days in jail, Ríos took office at the end of 2002. But a few months later he went back underground due to the charges pending against him; eventually he was sentenced to three months in prison and removed from office. I had the good fortune to be in Puerto Maldonado during the brief window between his incarcerations, and I stopped in to see him.

  Andean huayno music was playing softly from a boom box when I walked into the governor’s office. He was not the firebrand revolutionary I had pictured but a small, balding, nondescript man of about forty. He explained to me that his popular nickname, el loro pihuicho, was the name of a small parrot that was often heard but seldom seen. That described him, he admitted, during his three months on the run from the authorities. It was illegal for an elected official in Peru to advocate disobedience of the law, and he was charged with, among other things, promulgating violence during the recent demonstrations and encouraging woodcutters to ignore park rules that kept them away from mahogany. He also maintained that there was no longer any such thing as uncontacted peoples.

  Ríos played for me a video taken on the day of his most recent release from prison, just to demonstrate his popular support. It was impressive: as he emerged from the prison gates into a crowd of scores of cheering people, he was hoisted onto the shoulders of some supporters; flower petals filled the air. His backers, he said, were poor people just like him who lived in new communities on the edges of town. He himself, he claimed, had not worn a pair of shoes until age thirteen. “I came from slavery, and it has to change.”

  But Ríos’s idealism had been compromised by alliances he made along the way. The scuttlebutt around town was that his agitation against the government was largely financed by local power brokers who stood to gain if more wood was harvested; most prominent among these was a young Peruvian named Alan Schipper Guerovitch, whose family owned one of two large lumber mills in town. Ríos did not deny the association. “I’ve had many friends over time,” he told me.

  Maria Stenzel, the National Geographic photographer, had already had an encounter with Schipper. Spotting large pieces of a mahogany tree that were about to be transported across the river to Puerto Maldonado, she followed them as they were loaded onto a truck, snapping pictures of it as it made its way around town. When the truck stopped in front of a small office building, according to Maria, a man ran out of it, screaming at her that she had no right to take photos of his wood. “Do you know who I am?” he asked heatedly. It was Schipper.

  Perhaps to bring closure to that incident, Schipper agreed to see me when I called. Every taxi driver knew the location of his lumber mill, and indeed, the outside of the compound was impressive: an imposing wall of wood, like a stockade, with a guard tower on the second floor, and gates sealed shut. I passed a business card to a guard behind a little window, and like the drivers of the several trucks lined up and idling outside the gates, awaiting loads, I waited. Presently the guard unchained the gate and let me pass.

  Down a slope to my left was a large, open-air mill, where a dozen workers sent pieces of tree through a large, noisy blade. Straight ahead was a river: that was how much of the wood arrived. To my right, some distance away, sat a house on a hill, and that’s where I met Schipper.

  The blond, slender, clean-shaven thirty-one-year-old wore blue jeans and a polo shirt. His gold watch looked expensive and his leather boots were nicer than mine. He showed me to his office, leading me through a room where three secretaries worked. The doors were all made of mahogany, he acknowledged, and yes, his large, beautiful desk was solid mahogany, as well. And yes, he did business with Bozovich, one of Peru’s largest companies and one of two principal suppliers of mahogany to the United States. But he did not, he repeated several times, mill mahogany himself—that was too controversial, too much of a headache. Rather, the mill processed mainly other red hardwoods, like cedar, and a local tree called shihuahuaco.

  Schipper put his boots on his desk. His ancestors were Eastern European, he explained to me in Spanish, and had immigrated to Peru generations before. He had no quarrel with National Geographic, he wanted to make clear; he himself had stacks of the magazine at home. He himself had a degree in forestry engineering from a university in Lima. But, he said, his business, the timber business—“the only business in Madre de Dios”—was under siege, trying to survive “a wave of environmentalism.”

  In recent years, he explained, nearly three-quarters of the state had been made officially off-limits to loggers, placed in sanctuaries for nature (65 percent) or native peoples (10 percent). “We are the least developed department in Peru, and the most isolated,” he said, and saddled with policies that left it “no way to develop, no possibility to grow.

  “I ask you: what nation in the world can sustain its people on only 25 percent of its available resources?

  “To be named the world capital of biodiversity—is that a blessing, or a curse?”

  As Schipper saw it, developed countries—as represented by the World Bank and the NGOs—wanted to put Peru’s forests in preserves, effectively freezing the country’s resources, “because the United States and Europe have no forests of their own left!”

  The interoceánica, Schipper asserted, could only be good for development. It would, among other things, lower shipping costs, and mean the wood could be brought to market much sooner, and in better shape. He talked about the government’s new plan for logging concessions, which was meant to apportion the legal mahogany among players big and small. If the system worked, he asserted, and smaller, illegal players (he called them “ants”) could be kept out of the woods, why, there was even a chance that the mahogany could be harvested sustainably.

  Schipper talked about mahogany a lot. “In a less developed country, you need to produce something the world really wants, and what the world really wants now is mahogany.” Its price on world markets now was two dollars a board foot, several times that of other woods. The law limiting the harvest of mahogany was misguided because “we have all climax forests. There are really old trees dying in them, and we can’t get at them.” But, he repeated, “we do not cut mahogany here.” The reason he kept saying that, I guessed, was that a big problem in Madre de Dios was that freelance loggers were going deep into forbidden forest, cutting mahogany, and floating it downriver, then selling it surreptitiously to a mill, which sold it on the black market. Several people had told me Schipper participated in this market.

  We left the office so he could show me the mill. It was getting dark, quitting time. A worker with a submissive demeanor approached Schipper. “Please, sir, would you mind if I took some of those mahogany scraps?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Some of that extra mahogany, that’s by the gate.”

  “What mahogany?” Schipper said sternly.

  “The mahogany we cut that’s by the gate.”

  “There is no mahogany by the gate!” his boss replied, glaring at him.

  The man paused for a moment, apparently not comprehending. “Yes, you know. That mahogany we cut.”

  “There is no mahogany. You can have some of that tornillo that’s by the gate, if that’s what you’re thinking of.”

  “The tornillo?”

  “Yes. That is all that’s by the gate.”

  The man looked confused, didn’t seem to get the message. I could see he was not bound for a management position.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  In an e-mail Schipper sent me some weeks after our interview, he revised his position. He did mill mahogany, he said, sometimes. I was glad to hear him recant, because in denying it he had seemed buffoonish.

  It had also made him seem as though he was doing something wrong. And maybe he was—buying wood that had been cut illegally and working to subvert national laws were bad things. But his argument about developing the country by exploiting natural resources deserved a serious hearing. It wasn’t merely the self-serving credo of a rapacious businessman; on a larger scale, it was
the dilemma faced by practically any country that was trying to feed its people while saving its nature at the same time—which is to say, practically every nation on earth. Peru’s great novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, has grappled with the question at various times, but nowhere more directly than in his 1989 novel, The Storyteller.

  The book’s narrator is a college student in Lima. His classmate, a student of anthropology, takes his championing of Peru’s indigenous people to an extreme, eventually going to live among them permanently. But before he leaves, the narrator questions his friend, nicknamed Mascarita:

  Occasionally, to see how far his obsession might lead him, I would provoke him. What did he suggest, when all was said and done? That, in order not to change the way of life and the beliefs of a handful of tribes still living, many of them, in the Stone Age, the rest of Peru abstain from developing the Amazon region? Should sixteen million Peruvians renounce the natural resources of three-quarters of their national territory so that seventy or eighty thousand Indians could quietly go on shooting at each other with bows and arrows, shrinking heads and worshipping boa constrictors? Should we forgo the agricultural, cattle-raising, and commercial potential of the region so that the world’s ethnologists could enjoy studying at first hand kinship ties, potlatches, the rites of puberty, marriage, and death that these human oddities had been practicing, virtually unchanged, for hundreds of years? No, Mascarita, the country had to move forward. Hadn’t Marx said that progress would come dripping blood? Sad though it was, it had to be accepted. We had no alternative. If the price to be paid for development and industrialization for the sixteen million Peruvians meant that those few thousand naked Indians would have to cut their hair, wash off their tattoos, and become mestizos—or, to use the ethnologists’ most detested word, become acculturated—well, there was no way round it.

  I’d begun Vargas Llosa’s book on a flight to Lima. I finished it in my room at the Hotel Wasai. My country’s native peoples were descendants of those who had survived the shock of contact with the European, the genocides of disease and war. Now they, though still marginalized, were part of the body politic. That made it easier to understand the vulnerability of the uncontacted indigenous peoples in Peru, whose concerns could not be considered separately from those of the natural environment. Here, the endangered species included human beings. That made the decisions—and the things that happened without decisions—all the more agonizing.

  The rainy season was coming into its own. Almost every December afternoon there were torrential downpours, which emptied the streets of traffic as they filled them with water. The Madre de Dios River, out my window and down the hill, was brown and swollen, touching the trunks of trees along the riverbank. It may have occasionally risen higher than it was right now, but not often. The American forester and environmentalist Aldo Leopold, who never saw the Amazon, was nonetheless fixated by the Madre de Dios River as seen on a map. Ever since the conquistadors, he wrote in 1924,

  some maps of South America have shown a short heavy line running eastward beyon5d the Andes, a river without a beginning and without an end, and labeled it the River of the Mother of God. That short heavy line … has always seemed the perfect symbol of the Unknown Places of the earth.

  My room had mildew, yes, and fleas, but I loved being so close to the River of the Mother of God. It was a giant, wild thing. Boats struggled noisily to cross it; I watched them from up on the breakfast floor, satisfied with their difficulty, for I knew this was the last big obstacle to a highway across South America, and I didn’t want it to fall quickly.

  Back when the River of the Mother of God got its Spanish name, there were no roads through the jungle, only the paths of animals and the paths of the first human beings to live in this place. The only way to get anywhere with any speed—and then only in one direction—was the river itself, one of the traditional roads of the region.

  To see where mahogany came from, I had to go up this road. That was the only place mahogany remained. Because a lot of the people up this road were doing something illegal, I thought it best to have a companion. I invited a young Canadian who had spent years in Peru to travel with me. Tim Currie, bespectacled, thinner and taller than I, had a good sense of humor and an easy way with people. Instead of finishing high school, he had come to the Andes to climb mountains, first in Ecuador, then in Peru. In Lima, he had run the South American Explorers Club for five years, so he knew the country well. Now he was living in Portland, Oregon, and preparing to go to college and study geography.

  Tim already knew a good boatman, Gilberto Cárdenas. His wooden craft, El Caballero del Río (The Gentleman of the River), was typical of the better riverboats of the region: long (41 feet) and narrow, with wooden benches along each side and a roof over the center section, to ward off rain and sun. Power came from a 55-horsepower Marina out-board at the stern. Like me, Gilberto had hired an assistant, a young man named Edilberto, who would work as driver, because running the rivers during rainy season was clearly a two-man job.

  Gilberto was known in Puerto Maldonado, as was Tim, and knowing people was the way you got things done here, such as arranging to visit a mahogany camp. Gilberto made inquiries. A friend of his, or maybe it was a relative, had an operation about five days up the river, off the Río Curiacu, which was a tributary of the Río de las Piedras, itself a principal branch of the Río Madre de Dios and nearly as big. Part of the Curiacu could be logged legally, if you had a permit. More of it could not. Where was this camp, exactly? It would be better not to ask, Tim suggested, after I kept asking. We shopped for food, bought rubber boots, and staked Gilberto the cost of a couple of barrels of fuel.

  I have floated wild rivers in several countries, but for wildness none come close to an Amazonian river in rainy season. The town docks consisted not of fixed jetties but of small floating platforms that could move up or down the banks depending on how high the river was running. And on the day of our departure, it was running very high, indeed—the highest all season, said Gilberto. There was no bank to speak of, no dirt visible: the water ended in some grass. Our food and fuel packed, Gilberto pulled in the plank that connected us to neighboring boats, took a seat on the bow, dipped his hand in the muddy water, and closed his eyes and crossed himself. Then he caught the eye of Edilberto in the back, and gestured to him to head out.

  Within a couple of minutes we were at the confluence of the Madre de Dios and the Río de los Amigos, which defined the other limit of Puerto Maldonado. The murky water roiled and chopped—but it was nothing like the week before, Gilberto said, when boatmen near shore had waved him away from the spot midriver where he was headed. There, he said, waves nearly the height of his boat marked the collision of the two rivers; you never knew how the river would be at any particular moment.

  On the other hand, you could sometimes predict. Where the river was wide the horizon was low, and on it you could see a concentration of dark clouds and know that somewhere, miles ahead, rain was falling. If it was a lot of rain, it would translate, three or four or six hours hence, into a higher river.

  Volume and waves weren’t the only challenges to navigating these rivers. The things they carried were another. Big rainstorms flushed the gullies and gulches of the giant basins that fed the rivers, clearing out months’ accumulation of forest flotsam, including branches and sometimes entire trees. Some of these would float. Others would drift just under the surface, with only a small branch visible. So, when the river rose (as it did several times during our journey), the swell was often accompanied by a lot of detritus. Gilberto would then move to the front and hand-signal Edilberto in the back, usually to steer port or starboard, often to slow down.

  It took me a while to realize that, in addition to watching out for dangerous wood, Gilberto was also scoping pieces that were valuable: mahogany planks. Mahogany could float, and it was brought to market as rafts—scores of thick, long boards lashed together by rope, typically with a handful of woodcutters seated near the middle with
their blankets and belongings, and a single one standing toward the back, wielding a pole for steering. Or there might be a cheaper version of Gilberto’s boat in the middle, with boards tied to either side, and sometimes a motor. Occasionally, in rapids or a collision, these rafts would break apart. This was calamitous for the woodcutters, who might see months of labor disappear before their eyes (not to mention that many of them couldn’t swim). But to boatmen like Gilberto, who might snag a random board hours or days later, it was like free money: Gilberto had sold a small board for $85 the month before. (“El dinero hace bailar el mono,” he liked to say—money makes the monkey dance.)

  We passed one mahogany raft our first afternoon; the next day we passed three. The first of these had six young men relaxing on top, dozing on rolled-up blankets. They looked friendly enough; we pulled alongside, and they said I could come on board.

  The first plank, dark chocolate in hue, submerged only slightly into the café con leche-colored river when I stepped on it, easily holding my weight. I was curious how something so dense and heavy could float. The workers were glad to be coming out, they said; they’d been working in the monte, or jungle, for three months. Though this load of wood could be expected to fetch about $16,000, the profit would not accrue to them, but to the boss who sent them. They’d made only about $16 each per day, or $450 apiece total—less charges for food and supplies. From the description of how long they’d been floating, we later concluded that, without a doubt, the wood had been harvested illegally. They even told us they’d had to pay $500 at the “line of control” three days upstream, which they should not have had to do if the wood were legal. Nevertheless, they happily showed us the paperwork, or guía, that was required to make the wood appear legal, and thus fetch a premium price. The document said they had 302 boards, more than 8,000 board feet. That would be just over a quarter of what was used in the apartment I had seen on Park Avenue, if the document was accurate (often they were not) and if the wood was properly sawn (it was still quite rough).