The Tragic Continent

...South Americans built their settlements along the coast and stayed there, precariously-perched colonizers looking to Europe for material and spiritual sustenance...

...The obstacles appear too formidable...

...Indians, Kandell reports, "are still being annihilated by white men's diseases, forced integration and outright massacres...

...There is an alternative, and to my mind more persuasive, interpretation for what Kandell witnessed...

...No doubt Wright sentimentalizes the virtues of Inca civilization, and some of his antipathies push him into a facile Leftism, but it is hard not to share his anguish at seeing an entire culture erode away with no clear spiritual substitute on the horizon...

...Guided by little more than a dotted line on a map—Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry's proposed route for a maj or highway across the continent's untamed wilderness—Kandell visited isolated oil camps in the jungles of Peru, landrush boomtowns in the backwoods of Brazil, and the world's largest hydroelectric project along the Paraguay-Brazil border...

...One need only compare our myth of the cowboy to the Latin image of the gaucho...

...The Brazilian government is assiduously intervening in the booming state of Rondonia, where thousands of land-hungry pioneers have rushed into a vacuum, to see that the new small farmers, homesteaders and squatters alike, are protected against the big ranchers and speculators...

...He comments that modern Peruvian painting, based on borrowed, undigested esthetic ideals, lacks sincerity and vitality...

...He consumed a hallucinogenic drug during an Indian medical ceremony, waded in piranha-infested waters, got stung by red ants, ate God-knows-what, and in general did the kinds of things that, recollected in tranquillity, can only be chalked up to the temporary insanity of travel...

...To be sure, Kandell points out some hopeful signs...

...Because of their efforts, Rondonia has achieved an admirable distribution of land, more egalitarian, in fact, than that of any other state in Brazil...

...Wright displays an anthropologist's predilections...

...The instances of exploitation also are plain...

...In the South, it represented barbarism, nature uncontrolled, a heart of darkness...

...For the most part, this dichotomy translates into an Hispanic/Indian split, although, as Wright teaches, Peru's complex class system permits an Indian who has acquired Western habits to raise his status to mestizo...

...He knows his flora and his fauna...

...Kandell, who as a schoolboy growing up in Mexico puzzled over the continent's mysterious frontier, chooses practically by an act of will to be optimistic...

...most were just trying to survive...

...Claude Levi-Strauss entitled his classic study of Brazilian Indians Tristes Tropiques, and Waman Puma, a 16th-century Runa chronicler of the Inca disaster who is cited by Wright, declared that'' to write is to weep...

...Writers & Writing THE TRAGIC CONTINENT BY BARRY GEWEN In 1982 Jonathan Kandell, a former correspondent for the New York Times, made a remarkable and hair-raising journey through the rugged interior of South America...

...The "two worlds" of the book's title are those of South America's fundamental division between the coast and the interior...

...A good journalist, he also talked to dozens of people who either know they are living somewhere beyond the boundaries of civilization or never had much acquaintance with civilized ways to begin with...

...His book, wholly enjoyable if a bit specialized, may remind some readers of those tours sponsored by museums and universities that send travelers to obscure places under the wing of experts who eruditely elucidate every rock and artifact along the unbeaten path...

...And this identity will almost necessarily be continental, not national, in scope...

...No one Kandell talked to possessed an appropriately consuming vision, a Latin version of the North's Manifest Destiny...

...Agents of the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform heroically straighten out the jumble of conflicting claims and face down the wealthy...

...Ronald Wright, a young Canadian anthropologist, recounts his own unorthodox South American voyage in Cut Stones and Crossroads: A Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru (Viking, 224 pp., $20.00...

...Unfortunately, simply to articulate the prospect is to raise doubts about it...

...With his keen eye for sociology, Wright can be equally enlightening about Peruvian blacks or the nation's popular music...

...In the North, Kandell observes, the frontier was a beckoning opportunity, a gaudy promise...

...When Kandell returned to him at the end of the journey, ready to play the part of disciple, a startled Belaunde, daunted by the problems of governing Peru, abashedly rejected the role of prophet...

...It carries the message that after 450 years, South America is at last undertaking to conquer and settle its enormous internal frontier...

...It might be plundered for gold or rubber or manpower...

...The exploration for oil, the proliferation of cattle ranches, the generation of hydroelectric power through the construction of the giant Itaipu Dam, and most undeniably the growth of a prosperous and powerful cocaine industry, fit a familiar pattern dating back to the Conquista-dores' search for El Dorado...

...He despises Lima—a typically Third World urban sprawl of neon airline signs surrounded by brutalizing poverty...

...But some things have hot changed very much...

...Here he is correcting himself after describing a man suffering from what seemed to be leprosy...

...In other areas visited by Kandell, one can say at least that a madcap pursuit of riches has not been marked by the same cruelty as the pillaging of the early Spaniards, or that of the turn-of-the-century rubber magnates, whose thugs attacked Indian villages, took the men away in slavery, raped the women and sold them into prostitution, and killed infants before their parents' eyes...

...it could not be inhabited...

...As Octavio Paz has noted, the arbitrary boundaries separating Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay are among the least of South America's several schizophrenias...

...All of this has been put together into a fascinating, panoramic volume entitled Passage Through El Dorado: Traveling the World's Last Great Wilderness (Morrow, 312 pp., $ 15.95), a book that does more than merely tell a good story...

...All of this knowledge allows him to write with uncommon specificity...

...but generally it is a delight...

...In any encounter with South America, it seems, one is never very far from tragedy...

...It seems too large a dream...

...The fissures between coast and interior, Hispanic and Indian, modern and primitive, technocrat and magician, will somehow be overcome through a new unitary identity that incorporates a bloody, sordid past into a coherent sense of the future...

...toward an independent, indigenous culture...

...Wright is fluent in Spanish and familiar with Runasimi, the Inca language better known as Quechua spoken by about 10 million people spread across five countries...

...South America's history and current condition caution pessimism...

...Kandell implies that a profound, epic transformation is in progress to our south, involving much more than commercial development and the movement of populations...

...The Mochica show its victims, in their usual graphic way, on their pots...

...The influential 19th-century Argentine thinker Domingo Sarmiento set the tone, describing the gau-chos, in Kandell's words, "as cruel, ignorant bedouins, ill-dressed and ill-mannered horseback marauders incapable of living a settled existence...

...John Wayne did not ride the pampas...

...Sometimes such precision impedes clarity (who except an expert in tropical diseases benefits from learning that the poor fellow's ailment was really "a kind of Leischemaniasis...

...And Sarmiento's pampa is a brutish landscape, wind-swept, barren, unbearably lonely and dehumanizing...

...The interior, including its people, is still being used, it would appear, as a resource to be plundered, and after it has yielded up its wealth, those who have enriched themselves will retreat to their havens on the coast...

...The two halves of the New World have always viewed their hinterlands differently...

...Actually, the disease is probably uta (from Runasimi for 'rot')—a kind of Leischemaniasis spread by the bite of a fly and otherwise hard to catch...

...He reports, however, that what he felt on completing his adventure was "awe and discomfiture"—and that may be as realistic a response to an almost unfathomable situation as one can hope for...

...Belaunde, with his highway connecting the countries of the region, probably comes closest to being a visionary, yet there is no grandeur in his ideas, merely blueprints for transportation: "The only way to link people and the land of South America together into an integrated whole," he told Kandell, "is the same way the Incas accomplished the task—by roads...

...Kandell himself is finally ambivalent about what he has seen, and perhaps the vast, mobile chaos he describes cannot be adequately comprehended by any single formula or attitude...

...He can expound on the three great periods of Peruvian art, explain why llama meat is disdained by city dwellers, and toss out such nuggets as the fact that Peru gave Ireland the potato...

...Natives employed by the oil companies and laborers on the Itaipu Dam, part of an army of nomads drifting from project to project, work exhausting, often debilitating schedules...

...The inevitable conclusion is that the drive inward constitutes a critical step in a process of decolonization, a philosophical turning away from Europe and the U.S...

...An ineffable sadness hangs over all of Cut Stones and Crossroads as well...

...It is that the present penetration of the frontier is one more depredation of the interior by the coast...

...His sympathies are wholly with the Indians, and he rarely passes up an opportunity to demonstrate some baleful effect of unbridled Westernization...

...He sees two men cleaning DDT tanks in a river, and notes that a woman is washing lettuce a hundred yards downstream...