Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time > Status Update

(cont.) The Indians press their faces between the iron bars that protect the windows. They tap on the glass, hiss, hold up strange gimcracks for sale, plead for "monies," and generally ruin the tourist's appetite for his inevitable Pisco Sour.
It wasn't always this way. Until 1532 this city of crisp air and cold nights in the Andes Mountains served as the gold-rich capital of the Inca empire, the Indian society that South American expert Harold Osborne has called "the only civilization which has succeeded in making the Andes genuinely habitable to man." Many of Cuzco's buildings still rest on Inca foundations -- massive walls of stone that have lasted through 400 years of wars, looting, erosion, earthquakes, and general neglect.
Today, the Indian is as sad and hopeless a specimen as ever walked in misery. Sick, dirty, barefoot, wrapped in rags, and chewing narcotic coca leaves to dull the pain of reality, he limps through the narrow cobblestone streets of the city that once was the capital of his civilization.
His culture has been reduced to a pile of stones. Archeologists point out it's an interesting pile, but the Indian doesn't have much stomach for poking around in his own ruins. In fact, there's something pathetic about an Indian child leading you across a field to see what he calls ruinas. For this service he wants "monies," and then he'll be quiet unless you aim a camera at him, which will cost you about 10 cents a shot.
Probably one Indian in a thousand has any idea why people come to Cuzco to look at ruinas. The rest have other things to think about, like getting enough to eat, and this has made Cuzco one of the continent's liveliest hotbeds of Communist agitation.
Communist-inspired "peasant uprisings" are old-hat in Cuzco, dating back to the early 1940s. Indeed, they're familiar all over Peru. At one point during World War II, Communists took over Cuzco and built a giant hammer and sickle out of whitewashed stones on a hill overlooking the city.
The pattern hasn't changed too much since then. Last winter peasant leader Hugo Blanco organized an Indian militia in the Convencion Valley near here and carried out a series of hit-and- run harassments. At about the same time, there were strikes and fighting at the United States-owned Cerro de Pasco mines.
But the phenomenon is restricted neither to the cities nor to Peru alone. It's also seen in the countryside and in the other two Andean countries, Ecuador and Bolivia. Of the three nations, only Bolivia has made any attempt to bring the Indians into the national life. Peru has taken some nervous and tentative steps, and Ecuador has done almost nothing.
Yet the combined populations of the three countries total some 18,500,000, of which about 10 percent are white. About 40 per cent are pure Indian, and the rest are mixed-blood cholos, or mestizos. If the Indians and cholos join and develop their full power, the shape of northern South America may never be the same.
Communism, though, isn't the only persuasion that can rouse the normally placid Indians to violence. Another is the powerful chicha beer, the Andes' answer to home brew, which they drink in heavy amounts. In 1953 an anthropological field survey in Bolivia reported 979 bottles were consumed in one province for every adult man and woman, an average of 21⁄2 bottles a day.
Another agitating influence is extreme conservatism. One example: Last fall in Ecuador, a sanitation unit from the U.N.-sponsored Andean Indian Mission was attacked by Indians who'd been told the men were "Communist agents." A doctor and his assistant were killed, and the doctor's body was burned. The Ecuadorian press, pointing out the Communists certainly didn't tell the Indians the U.N. officials were "Communist agents," called the incident "a tragic consequence of the rivalry between the extreme left and the extreme right to win Indian support."
This incident and many others like it were blamed on conservative elements opposed to land reform or any other change in the status quo. The example of Bolivia has shown that once the Indian begins voting, he has little common cause with large landowning or industrial interests. Thus the best hope for the status quo is to keep the Indian ignorant, sick, poverty-stricken, and politically impotent.
And the Indians, living mainly on a barren plateau that ranges from 10,000 feet above sea level in Ecuador to 15,000 in Bolivia (Denver, by contrast, is 5,280 feet above), are curiously receptive to this conservatism. Ever since the Spaniards' destruction of his empire in the mid- Sixteenth Century, the Indian has viewed all change as for the worse -- except, sometimes, the changes advocated by his Communist-inspired "peasant leaders." The word "government," for him, has been synonymous with "exploitation."
A fine old Indian tradition, now on the wane, was to greet all strangers with a hail of stones, because they invariably meant trouble. Until very recently any man arriving on "official business" might have meant an entire village was being sent into the mines to labor for the rest of their lives.
Even when convinced somebody is trying to help him, the Indian is loath to change his ways. Arnaldo Sanjines, a Bolivian working for the Inter-American Agricultural Service in La Paz, tells of stopping at a tiny farm to demonstrate a steel plow to an Indian using the same primitive plow his ancestors used 500 years ago. The old man tried the new plow and was obviously convinced of its superiority, but finally handed it back.
"Ah, senor," he said, "this is a wonderful plow, but I like my old wooden one and I think I will die with it."
Mr. Sanjines shakes his head sadly as he talks of the 12 years he has spent with the service, trying to convince the Indians to give up their ancient methods of farming. One of the main stumbling blocks, he says, is that the Indian lives almost entirely outside the money economy; he exists, as he always has, on a system of barter. One Indian, after walking for miles to a village market, returned home to say he'd been cheated out of all his produce because all he got for it was money.
There is a sharp distinction, however, between "city Indians" and those who stay in the mountains. From Bogota south, the Andean cities are overrun with Indian beggars, who have no qualms about lying on a downtown sidewalk and grabbing at the legs of any passers-by who look prosperous.
One of the most effective groups now working with the Indians in Bolivia is the Maryknoll Fathers, a Catholic order based in La Paz. Says one priest: "Bolivia hasn't got a chance unless the Indians join the country. We're making some progress here -- more than the others, anyway. In Peru and Ecuador all they do is make the necessary concessions."
In 1957, Father Ryan, one of the Maryknoll veterans, started Radio Penas, which broadcasts lessons in Spanish to the millions of Indians who speak only Quechua or Aymara. With 3,000 fixed- frequency receivers, donated by Bloomingdale's in New York, the Maryknollers have taught about 7,000 Indians in the past five years to speak the language of the country. There is one class a day, but it is difficult to get the Indians to tune in at the right hour, because they tell time by the sun.
The focus of the "Indian problem" is Peru -- the golden magnet that brought the Spaniards to South America in the Sixteenth Century. (In the first six months of the conquest, Francisco Pizarro and his men looted Inca temples of over $200,000,000 in gold ornaments, which they melted and sent back to Spain.) Peru was the scene of most of the conquest's bloody battles. In Peru, Pizarro chose to build Lima, his "City of Kings" from which the Spanish Viceroys ruled the Andes until they were driven out in 1821.
Today the "wealth of the Andes" is no longer gold, but the political power lying dormant in the Indian population. This explains the long and bitter struggle for Indian support between Peru's Communists and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), the country's broadest- based political party.
Bolivia's 1952 revolution against dictatorial interests took the Indian pressure off that country; it gave the Indian land, a vote, and at least the beginnings of a say in the government. Nor does Ecuador seem immediately menacing; the boiling point there probably is still several years away.
But in Peru the pressure is on as it never has been before, and the main pressure point is here in Cuzco. And whoever consolidates Indian support in this nation will not only rule Peru but will influence events in Bolivia and Ecuador.
Today in Cuzco, though, tourists still wander about town and pay ragged Indians to pose for photos. They still take the little train to Machu Picchu to look at the fabled ruinas. They still sit in the comfortable old hotel and drink Pisco Sours while the waiters pull the blinds. But the Indians are still outside the windows, and if recent events are any indication, they are getting tired of having the blinds pulled on them.

National Observer, June 10, 1963