Has God forgotten Peru?:
Schroth, Raymond A
HAS GOD FORGOTTEN PERU? POVERTY, COCAINE, & TERROR RAYMOND A. SCHROTH The first thing that hits you in Lima is the smell- industrial smog trapped in the perpetual cloud cover; exhaust fumes; the...
...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., is a professor in the communications department at Loyola University in New Orleans...
...Says Raul Carranza, outgoing president of Enaco and a friend of Garcia: We grow just enough coca for Indians to chew and to export for medicine...
...A Communist when he wrote his first, partly autobiographical, novel, The Time of the Hero, which indicts the regime of the dictator Manuel Odria through the story of the cover-up of a cadet murder in a military school, Llosa moved to the right in reaction against the Soviet Union and Castro's violations of the freedom of expression...
...then to bring back foreign investors whom Garcia has alienated...
...the urine of millions of men and dogs...
...Today his platform, insofar as he has developed one, echoes the insights of Fernando DeSoto, director of the Institute for Freedom and Democracy...
...Hide your cash and passport in a money belt...
...This is an ancient civilization but a young country...
...Margaret has heard that seventy children in the barrios die every day...
...Tom Vogel, twenty-three, first came to Peru to write a Holy Cross College undergraduate thesis on the Peruvian church, then returned in November 1988 as a staff writer for The Peru Report...
...In the summer, the trucks go first to the wealthy homes by the beach, leaving no water for the poor...
...Whenever that happens, the family rents a bus to drive with the corpse to the cemetery outside town for a burial and a picnic, combined...
...It is siesta time and the only sounds are the yapping of dogs and the honk of the water truck which roars up the hillside, pausing at box-like, cement water tanks in front of some of the homes...
...At the village church in Pisac, a little bustling market village in the Sacred Valley, an hour from Cuzco, the southern capital of the Inca Empire which once reached from Ecuador to Chile, the racket from the thousands of buyers and sellers in the town square drowns out the drone of the native priest's homily...
...The Plaza de Armas, Lima's heart, is in front of the archbishop's palace and the cathedral, where Francisco Pizarro's bones rest with his head in one box and his body in another, and a huge seventeenth-century painting depicts a royal succession of Inca kings leading up to Charles V of Spain...
...Says an unnamed UN researcher: friends of Garcia-who, constitutionally, cannot be reelected in 1990-may be stashing away cocaine profits to finance his return in 1995...
...As historian Jeffrey Klaiber, S.J., points out, the heart of the problem is the failure of the educational system, including the traditional religious cate-chesis, to provide an alternative "social glue...
...Rather, a man carries a crucifix through the congregation for all the men-not the women-to kiss...
...In the barrio of Santa Isabella on the bare, dusty mountainside southeast of Lima, Margaret Robichaud, a Sister of Charity from Nova Scotia, leads two visitors up and down the rocky streets of the slums, where nearly two million people, about a third of Lima's population, live...
...Unlike other politicians, he would never exploit religion for political gain...
...a tool of his ambitious second wife and their son...
...Some wonder, too, whether his creative, erotic imagination-The Time of the Hero concerns a cadet who writes pornography and sells it to his friends-is suited for national leadership...
...The Other Path attacks "mercantilism," the economic alliance between the state and business and social elites, which so stifles initiative with bureaucracy and corruption that it can take an entrepreneur 289 days and ten bribes just to register a new small factory...
...As the service rushes to its conclusion, there is no Communion...
...In 1985, with dazzling anti-American rhetoric, he had presented himself as a fresh spokesman for the third world...
...Sometimes they arrive late, but you do not forget us...
...At the soup kitchen, twenty families pool their rice and money and, with donations from the church, feed themselves and a few more...
...In 1987, with no previous political experience, Llosa suddenly led a rally in Plaza San Martin protesting Garcia's nationalization of the banks...
...Freely translated it means: "We thank you, God, for all the gifts that you have given us...
...the piles of garbage, mounting during a strike, smoldering, smoking in the night...
...Sendero targets, as a matter of principle, are authority figures-any source of unity and stability in a mixed culture...
...Some call Llosa an "atheist," and I point out to Bustamante in a private meeting that many of Llosa's images of religion are grotesque...
...their ability, without being "carefree," to enjoy life with what they have without becoming bitter about what they have not...
...yet he has never heard him denigrate or joke about religion...
...Based on aerial photos and a study by the United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control, the report charges that Enaco, the state-owned coca company, has covered up 40,000 hectares of illegal crops, four times the crop Enaco had ever admitted to or any foreign observer has been able to detect...
...new" conservatives, like Opus Dei "yuppies" and the Sodalitium Vitae Cris-tianae, made up of affluent families hostile to liberation theology...
...What if the military determine that Peru needs another coup...
...This night, in an exercise of violence that borders on ritual, the Sendero enters a little town in Puno and, after a mock public trial, executes the district governor, the mayor, and the justice of the peace...
...Llosa rejects the "atheist" label...
...Like many foreign observers, he came expecting the church to present a unified "liberation theology" message on behalf of the poor...
...They have fled the poverty and violence of the countryside, literally "invading" abandoned land in the middle of the night and setting up instant straw huts which, over several years, they sometimes ingeniously develop into decent, suburban-style homes...
...Rosario, who operates a small store, shows off her four little dogs...
...to apply the familiar medicines of liberal capitalism: to privatize state companies, simplify, deregulate, decentralize...
...For Luis Bustamante Belaunde, a strong Catholic, law professor at the University of the Pacific, nephew of former president Jose Luis Bustamante Rivero (1945-1948), and adviser and spokesman for Libertad (one of the three right and center-right parties united under the umbrella group, Fredemo (Democratic Front), the man to restore order is his friend, internationally acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, author of Conversations in the Cathedral, The War of the End of the World, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a story based on his first marriage, at nineteen, to his twenty-nine-year-old aunt...
...to wage war with American aid on illegal coca production in the north...
...In another part of town terrorists bomb a tour bus filled with Russian sailors and injure five...
...Hide your camera...
...Yet, there is a good chance he will be the next president of Peru...
...Sendero targets also include priests: in 1987, a conservative priest who was shot in the back while saying Mass with his back to the people, and in June a twenty-nine-year-old priest who dared to protest their murdering a mayor...
...Meanwhile, the situation is so volatile few will confidently predict that the municipal elections and/or the May 1990 presidential elections will ever take place...
...And what if a presidential candidate is killed...
...with its white-skinned Spanish elite and impoverished and despised Indian peasants, it has yet to weld itself into a modern nation...
...Critics of the book say DeSoto sugarcoats the "informal" economy, which includes cutthroat practices and sweatshop working conditions...
...As a result, Sendero recruits are young people with "no intellectual vision of the world and no vision of hope...
...the Reaganesque instrument of right-wing manipulators and Lima yuppies using him to regain the status snatched from them during the reformist regime of the military socialist president General Juan Velasco Alvarado in the early 1970s...
...He found instead a fragmented church-old-line conservatives who had Mass in Latin...
...Beyond DeSoto, Libertad'% first priority is to pacify the country by backing the army in an all-out war against the subversives and arming the civilian population to defend itself...
...The poor must take a bus for an hour and beg the trucks to come back and serve them...
...About a hundred villagers-men on the left, women and children on the right-and twenty tourists passively watch the Mass, the altar partly obscured by the white canopy over the towering Lady of Mount Carmel doll perched between the altar and the congregation...
...On the water tank in front of the Bodega Virgin Del Carmen, someone has scrawled in large, barely intelligible letters, "Gratiaspor TudDeceosDios...
...He resents sensationalized stories on the Shining Path in the American press and he is haunted by the faces of starving children, like the ten-year-old-whose mother had killed herself and whose father had abandoned him-who hauled his sleeping mat of corn husks around looking for a safe place to rest where he wouldn't be beaten by the other kids...
...In June, terrorists blew up a bus, killing six presidential guards...
...in May, terrorists killed a twenty-five-year-old British tourist...
...Perhaps it is because Russia sells Peru the helicopters that swoop down on terrorist enclaves...
...Meanwhile, the traveler has been warned...
...Don't drive on country roads...
...DeSoto's widely read book, The Other Path (Harper & Row, 1989), attempts to rechannel the frustrated energies of the Peruvian people from terrorism and street crime into a reorganized, liberated economy...
...As we speak, Llosa is still in Spain, where he fled to sulk after temporarily-and strategically-"withdrawing" his candidacy for president when his supporters could not even agree on tactics for the November municipal elections...
...The probable left candidate, the pragmatic Alphonso Barrantes, has remarked that he is reluctant to become another Salvador Allende...
...Unlike the army or police, they do not rape or steal and they do not smoke or drink...
...In the meantime the administration enters an agreement with the U.S...
...Like many foreigners who come here and stay, and who understand the extreme complexity of Peruvian society, Vogel has deep respect for the Peruvian people-their pride in their work...
...They gather the trembling populace in the town square and harangue them about the absolute corruption of the government-something these poor peasants have experienced all their lives-and about how the annihilation of the present state will lead to a Communist Utopia...
...The minister of justice, Cesar Delgado, describes this crisis as the worst since Peru's "War of the Pacific," lost to Chile and Britain, a hundred years ago...
...Then, after Mass, the priest comes to the foot of the altar where the women may kneel before him and kiss the hem of his stole...
...Inside the palace President Alan Garcia, whose dizzy four-year reign is sputtering to a close, meets with his advisers...
...Inside the palace, perhaps they are discussing the July issue of the influential economic and political monthly, The Peru Report...
...At the corner of the plaza, an army tank armed with a water cannon stands ready to break up demonstrations...
...The Peruvians, at least on the surface, seem to endure this with the same equanimity that they endure their triple national crisis: economic chaos characterized by extreme poverty and inflation headed toward 10,000 percent...
...All over the country, hundreds of mayors and village councilors are abandoning their posts in fear...
...To his critics, Llosa is a "flake," "more music than words," more European than Peruvian in vision and temperament, a man who doesn't understand his own country-with no idea how Indian peasants have organized themselves to survive...
...and an escalating, frustrating war against two terrorist armies-the small, Marxist Revolutionary Movement Tapac Amaru (MRTA), active in the jungles, and the larger, 2,000-5,000 coldblooded Maoist, mostly teenage, peasants, with 15,000 deaths to their credit, called Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path...
...This afternoon, on the other side of town, a hut catches fire and three children burn to death in fifteen minutes...
...In 1989 his failure to develop a coherent economic policy, his unexpected nationalization of the banks, and his manic-depressive mood swings have left him with very little support as his country disintegrates before his eyes...
...The smell of baking bread, to be ready at four, wafts up the street, and a tiny boy, clutching money in his fist, toddles down the hill to buy some...
...Indeed, there are four strikes going on during my visit- garbage collectors, hospital doctors, gravediggers, and construction workers...
...Jardaper non olvida...
...Only foreigners with passports are allowed to cross to the fountain in the center of the square facing the Government Palace on the other side...
...The author is most grateful to Tom Vogel;cited in the text, for his research and assistance...
...Within the week, the army has killed thirty-nine terrorists in a raid...
...In a third grade schoolroom, Margaret embraces the fourteen women who meet for their knitting club...
...Don't hike the famed Inca Trail...
...Faith is a gift which I do not have," Bustamante quotes Llosa as saying...
...Furthermore, Llosa is, says Bustamante, a profoundly "Christian" person in that he is absolutely honest and sacrifices himself for others...
...The executioner could be a sixteen-year-old girl and the hooded leader a twenty-two-year-old graduate of the University of Ayacucho, where the movement first filled an intellectual and moral vacuum in the 1960s...
...On the street, a young girl runs up to report on her exam...
...For Margaret, the most difficult thing is that conditions keep getting worse: there is so much misery and there are so few resources, she feels helpless...
...her teenage daughter wants to go to medical school...
...Carry your knapsack in front of you or thieves will slash it off your back...
...It offers as model and metaphor the "informal" economy, the black market, which, because it freely defies law and red tape, now produces 40 percent of the gross domestic product and, for example, provides 90 percent of Lima's public transportation...
...a $2.4 billion traffic in illegal cocaine...
...various other groupings, including the parishes led by foreigners, like progressive Maryknollers and the more traditional Society of Saint James, who make up the majority of the Peruvian clergy...
...Take the tourist train, not the local train, to the ruins at Machu Picchu...
Vol. 116 • September 1989 • No. 15
