HOSTAGE for WATER IN PERU FIRST CLASS TO PUNO
GARY DWYER
FIRST CLASS TO PUNO
Photographs and Text By
GARY DWYER
Published by Angstrom Unit Works Text and Photographs Copyright Š 2011 Gary Dwyer. All rights reserved. No Part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. This article was composed using: Minion Pro, Gill sans light, regular Helvetica neue light, Univers LT standard Warning and Disclaimer This article is designed to provide information to the general public. Every effort has been made to make this book complete and accurate as possible, but no warranty of fitness is implied. The information is provided on an as-is basis. The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book. See also: ISBN 978-0-9819987-8-7 Cover Photograph: bus ticket Cusco to Puno 2011 Š Gary Dwyer garydwyerphotography.com http://issuu.com/rootus http://stores.lulu.com/dwyergc
Other books By Gary Dwyer are available on lulu.com, blurb.com and on amazon books
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This aritcle is dedicated to all the people of Peru and other countries who continue to fight against the privatization of water. And as always, to HAD and Qubert and that French girl with whom I am lucky enough to hang around. A strong and direct tip of the hat goes to Steven Colbert for pointing the spotlight on Dean Kamen whose water purification equipment may lead the way in getting clean water to people and eliminating water borne disease. A wag of the finger goes to the Coca-Cola Corporation for exploiting the poor and selling them something that should be theirs for free: Water.
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T
he bridge was burned before we arrived.
Charred mostly. Because the bridge was steel and the deck was wood and it was the bridge deck that had been torched.
First our bus was late in leaving, then there were the Russians.They sat in the bus anywhere they wanted until they found out they were assigned seats like everyone else. Grudgingly, they moved to where they were supposed to be and most of them were near the front of the bus. Certain people don’t like doing what they are supposed to and this group certainly fit that category. I’m not used to riding buses that have a staff, but this one had a guide as well as a driver. He informed us that because of recent protest demonstrations by campesinos who had blocked the road, we would be taking an alternative route. He said we would get to a bridge where there was a turn off and then evaluate how to proceed. Most of us on the bus were aware that the situation was precarious, but I felt assured that if the bus company was going to make the run, then everything would be all right. While waiting for the bus to depart, the Russians, all men, (there were about ten of them) decided to make an early morning run to the liquor store and returned with several quarts of scotch, brandy and vodka. Just a little eye-opener. They were really loud while the bus was still in the station and given their newly found booze, I knew we were in for some real racket.
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These guys were complete stereotypes: Tall, broad chested, thick necked, muscular. A French couple sitting in the far front seat, just in front of the clot of Russians, asked them to quiet down a little. One of the Russians looked at them a little askance and said loudly, in English, “NO!” For all I know they were simple mercenaries, ordinary thugs, out on vacation, taking a little breather from skullduggery. When the guy sitting in front of you has no neck and his shoulders are above the top of the seat, nothing is ordinary. A few miles down the road the French couple decided they had better move away from the rowdy Russians and offered to trade seats with a few straggling Russians to the rear. My wife and I soon followed suit and the alcohol-fueled cacophony was then completely concentrated in the front of the bus. Given the diesel stench and the terrible condition of the roads, no one in the rear of the bus seemed to think the Russian rowdies were too much to bear, at least for a while.
As we rolled through the outskirts of the city I was again reminded that you can tell the quality of a neighborhood and the amount of robbery by the height and the volume of steel grills and barbed wire. When you see fifteen people carrying a grid of reinforcing steel to place in a median strip, it is easy to see what is going on in the construction industry. Why would you buy an expensive crane to load reinforcing steel when you can get fifteen people to do that work for a dollar a day each?
Enormous and expensive European buses on cheap and narrow South American roads make a crummy combination. When you go up from the flat lands the mountain curves and the swerving bus smears the passengers into a cloud of nauseated sameness. All during the trip I couldn’t decide if the different nationality groupings on the bus made us closer together or further apart. No matter, we had them all. The woman next to me was born in Nicaragua and now lived in Miami. She was quiet most of the time.
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When the bus arrived at the bridge we knew immediately that things were not going well. We exited the bus and hoped we could still cross the bridge to our alternative route. At this point no one bothered to think why in the world it was so desperately urgent to get to some obscure southern town. It was just the direction we were heading and it simply had to be done. Destinations have their own inertia. Bridges have their own particularity. Mostly
for reasons of economy. They are usually perpendicular to the river. The stuff of engineers who, if left on their own, would come up with elegance in their craft. The bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel in 1862 in Trujillo is an example of how to whisper across a river valley. Our bridge was ordinary. Steel superstructure, but flimsy and not maintained since it was installed. I say installed rather than purpose-built, because this was a bridge that had been ordered from a catalogue rather than being site specific. So wide a river, so many feet of span, do the math and get the trucks rolling. Most engineers like to design extra strength into their bridges so that whenever conditions become extreme their bridges don’t fall down. Our bridge was about to be tested by the
The passengers got off the bus to reduce the weight. First, the enormous Russians, then the German couple, athletic and thin. Organized, with all the luggage zipped up tight and just the right clothes for the journey. They had come from a long and arduous trek, but had no idea what they were getting into now. Four Japanese. One handsome twenty something male and and three giggly girls of the same, yet indeterminate, age. From the rear came an elderly Englishman whose wife looked like an avocado with shoes and behaved in the same way. An Australian woman who was fluent in Spanish and a lot more helpful than her less well experienced husband who kept complaining about recent increases in departure fees in Australian airports. Seated next to my wife was an enormous black clothed blob. A psychologist from New York, coming from a conference in Santiago. Mumbling, and constantly complaining about something. Obliviousness to everyone and everything was central to her understanding as was the value of her self. I am not sure she ever got off the bus at the bridge.
tonnage of a forty-five foot Mercedes.
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that one of the things governments are supposed to do? The disturbances organized by the campesinos sprang from two serious issues. The first, and least important to the people who were attempting to impede a group of rich tourists, was that the national government was considering the option of privatizing water. Imagine! (If mineral rights can be private property and water rights as well, why not privatize water for a whole country?) This was a thought that would not have occurred to Genghis Kahn or to Caesar Augustus, but had somehow occurred to some entrepreneurs in collusion with the upper echelons of the Peruvian government. Water. Concentrate for a moment on the fact throughout this country the local water supplies are so polluted that the locals (as well as the tourists) have to buy purified water in plastic bottles that most often come from the Coca-Cola Company. Privatizing water? Shouldn’t we expect our governments to provide us with clean water? Isn’t
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The second reason we were stopped at the bridge is because the government wanted to build a hydroelectric dam and the water behind this dam would flood this valley and the corn fields along with it. Now if you owned a hotel in downtown Lima, this idea would sound pretty good, but if you were a campesino whose family had lived in this valley and farmed corn here for centuries, the dam was not merely a bad idea, it was Armageddon. And the campesinos were fighting back near the bridge we wanted to cross.
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Gilda Radner said, “It is always something.” This time it is a hydro dam project, It might be this election, or these politicians, this junta, this girlfriend, this health problem, these relatives, this war... Some psychologists ask us to just, “Get over it.” I submit that there are things we can’t just get over. And the bridge in front of the bus just might be one of them.
bling, sprinting, and scared, we rumbled across the bridge attempting valiantly to avoid falling
After more than a little coercion and the addition of some wood planks to span the charred parts, the bus made a run at crossing the bridge. This action is a testicle tightener. The faded pink superstructure rattled mightily as the bus cautiously creeps across. No one had time to breathe the traditional sigh of relief as we realized if we were going to go with the bus, we must cross the river too. Scram-
through the holes in the bridge deck. After we were all able to cross the bridge, some of us realized we were truly alone. No one knows where we are, no one knows the potential for danger and no one cares. The only thing we knew is that we and our bus were on the other side of some bridge. No one pointed out that there was another bridge up ahead.
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Mountains are not great places for locating villages and yet villages are there in profusion. Perhaps it is the huddle instinct. A most basic form of collaboration against the elements, coupled with a stubborn resistance to leaving these inhospitable places. If we rub up against each other long enough, perhaps we can survive and prosper here, if only the big boys didn’t want to flood our corn fields with water for electricity. This is in a country that has no heat. None. In a month of travel, the only chimney I saw was for a pizza oven. These people are tough. They have mud brick houses with corrugated metal roofs, no bathrooms and no heat and yet, these places are their homes. They walk down the road toward me
At the beginning I thought there would be thirty or forty campesinos who would take the trouble to walk all the way from their tiny villages in the mountains to come down to the bridge and make some noise. Most of them walked twenty kilometers or more to get there. The rationale behind them taking the trouble to come to the bridge is that if they made enough trouble, the police might show up and then the media. If the television cameras came, politicians might listen to them. That was the theory anyway and as the main road had already been blocked by dumping large stones on it, then blocking the alternative route might be a good idea too. Why not give it a try? And if foreign
to protest the coming of a hydro dam and I have no words to say to them.
tourists are inconvenienced too, would not the TV cameras get here that much quicker?
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Two other buses followed us after we crossed the bridge and we were able to go about half a kilometer before the peasants walking toward us started to pick up rocks from the side and began dumping them on the road. Big rocks. The kind that can break an axle. And you can’t drive around them because of their sheer numbers. Either you move the rocks out of the way, or you stay put. So each bus disgorged around forty foreigners encrusted in nylon and gor-tex, to display the glare of their florescent white skin to the sea of brown faces now streaming past our buses. Traditional clothing on many of the women, but the men on foot or on bicycles wore anything that was available. Tee shirts from China, baseball hats from who knows where, tennis shoes, sandals. Many of the women were barefooted. There were no cars.
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would come in handy if the bus ride turned longer. This was not some movie and I didn’t see any signs
At first the foreigners were on the side of the campesinos in their protest. We cheered them onward and applauded as they walked past us on their way to the bridge. But after a while the foreigners got tired and as the peasants seemed unimpressed with our enthusiasm we stopped being vocal in our support. Besides their long parade seemed to have no end. After a few hours, there were hundreds. By the end of the afternoon there were a thousand or more. Our first-class bus had seen fit to pack box lunches for us as the trip was going to be about nine hours. We got the lunches and ate in the shade of young cedars between corn fields and the side of the road as the peasants gathered at the bridge. I ate only half of my lunch, thinking that the second half
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of anyone showing up to rescue us. The Englishman from the back of the bus had a cell phone and engaged in a long and detailed conversation with the office of the bus company. He explained the situation, mentioned that we had noticed a police station and checkpoint only two kilometers before we got to the bridge, but no police had showed up. The bus company said the driver was responsible for the bus and that was all. They couldn’t care less what happened to the passengers. Having a cell phone doesn’t mean you have access to a solution and the game plan changes when you realize no one is coming to help you.
going to get their goods to market now? I had hoped that the Russians would have enough booze so they would just go to sleep and forget what was going on, but they surprised me by not getting drunk. Now was afternoon, the morning buzz had worn off, and they were getting upset. They used their cell phones to contact some friends and my high school Russian course allowed me to understand they were trying to arrange some form of taxi convoy to come get the bus passengers. (Or at least the Russians.) I had no idea how it would be possible for some Russian Mafiosi to arrange this feat in Spanish speaking South America, but I was willing to wait and see if it did. For their part, the campesinos had done some singing and flag waiving and decided it was now time to really burn the bridge and this time to do it properly. No police, no military, no media, OK, turn up the volume. They had planned an enormous protest demonstration and no one from the opposition showed up to notice. The sad part was that I don’t think they realized they were burning their own bridge. OK, so they didn’t own it, but it was their bridge because they used it all the time. How were they
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There are always two sides to a bridge, even if it is burning. And many of the campesinos began their long walk back away from the bridge and the valley, back up to their homes in the hill villages. With the bridge now in flames, there was no going back and a few of the bus passengers (lead by the Russians, of course) started to move the stones out of the road so the bus could continue going forward. The peasants didn’t like the idea and began throwing more stones on the road. The bus driver and the bus guide engaged as intermediaries, trying to solve the impasse, but the peasants didn’t seem to have a leader, so there was no one to give the order to stop putting stones in the road. We had to wait.
An hour passed and then we started to move the stones again. By this time most of the peasants had left and we removed the stones and proceeded on our way. After about five kilometers, we came to a line of three more tourist buses intermixed with three local busses (Collectivos) all lined up trying to cross yet another bridge and this one is filled with stones. The bridge is concrete and short, maybe only as long our bus, but the stones are big. The kind that take three strong men to roll around. We are caught between two bridges. One burned and one blocked. It is the classic traveler’s dilemma - being stopped when your entire purpose is to keep moving. It is as if we think we are sharks and if we stop moving we will die. In between two useless bridges at nightfall on a dirt road in the Andes, surrounded by hostile locals, this begins to be a possibility. The drivers of the smaller, shorter, lighter, Collectivo buses, although jammed to the brim with local passengers, decide their vehicles are nimble enough to take a narrow and dangerous alternative route over the pass. They move out of the line, turn
around and disappear in what looks like a simple driveway in a cloud of roiling dust. We are again waiting, for what, no one seems to know. I wonder about the distances in this country and I am not thinking kilometers, but centuries. Someone actually owns these electronic diesel buses that cost a quarter of a million dollars each and yet the people who are standing at the side of the road are living every day in the eighteenth century. The disparity is galactic. The rich are almost completely invisible, like in every country, but I have seen almost no middle class. Yet I see the poor everywhere I look. No wonder they are angry when their politicians don’t listen. Having tactics does not mean you will win. And it appears that the greatest good (especially for whom) is open to interpretation. This new bridge is in a narrow gorge and even though there are several tourist buses on our side of the bridge, it is nothing compared to the very long line of local trucks and busses on the other side. Everyone is waiting for some resolution, but waiting can be a dangerous and even deadly game. Even though there was a driver and a guide on each one of the tourist buses, there seemed to be no coordination among them and it didn’t even appear that they were talking to one another. As though our buses were individuals standing in line at a bank. On our bus the dynamic of the individuals was becoming more clear as the day wore on. The twenty something Japanese male had his ear buds in and with jazz loud enough to be heard two seats away, he happily snoozed against the window frame. The Japanese girls were also all plugged into their various personal audio devices and three out of the four were busily applying and adjusting their make-up. Acoustic oblivion and personal focus as a substitute for fear might have been the only tactic they had available to them. The obese New York psychologist was another matter. At first she had complained of being ill and when this elicited no response from anyone, she complained of having lost the cover for her camera. She also spent substantial time groaning and rumbling around in her seat like a black bear not ready to emerge
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from hibernation. She was not about to leave her comfortable seat for any reason, especially to go up to the front and issue a request of the driver, instead, she would occasionally shout out that she was cold and wanted the rear door to the bus to be closed. It never occurred to her that the door was left open to provide ventilation for the twenty or so people sitting behind her in the back of the bus. I had initially thought she was being an inconsiderate grump because she was older but soon realized age had nothing to do with it, rather obliviousness and retreat can be a disguise for cowardice.
Perhaps the Russians had got into their remaining stock of booze, but more likely they just had a shorter fuze. Diplomacy and waiting were giving way to anger and fatigue. As our bus was the first in line there were more of us available to start moving the stones and as twenty or thirty of us undertook a concerted effort, the campesinos began shouting and threatening to throw more stones. A band of about five Russians quickly clambered up the hillside and screamed at the campesinos in Russian. The gist of their shouted commentary was that we on the bus had had enough of their protest and if they continued to throw stones, the Russians, being about twice the size of the campesinos, would
There was now about thirty or so campesinos standing on the steep hill adjacent to our side of the bridge and when someone from our bus attempted to remove a stone from the road, another was lobbed down from above.
gladly break them in half. Almost immediately the threat from the hillside above evaporated and we began clearing the smaller stones off the road. Part of the Russian stereotype is that the men can be rough, brutish and rude, but this time, that’s exactly what we needed. Muscle coupled with threat can be very effective tools.
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At the bridge itself, the larger stones were being grappled with by several bus passengers and a few people from the far side of the bridge. Among them was a very old peasant woman whom I saw pick up a stone weighing about fifty pounds and carry it off the bridge deck. In the process of doing so, she waived off offers of assistance from nearby men. Bravery and age can be independent of each other. Our bus finally rumbled across the bridge and as there were lots of our people to be picked up who had been moving stones, we pulled to the side of the road, and as though we didn’t exist, as though we had not moved the stones for everyone, the buses behind us thundered past, burying us in enormous dust clouds and disappeared without so much as a wave. France’s king Louis the Fifteenth is supposed to have said, “Après moi le déluge,” and even though there are several interpretations, the one that came to me that evening was, “Yes, we are glad that you in front did all that work for us, now get the hell out of the way because we don’t care about you now.” Staring into the black brown dust cloud created by passing buses I thought that just because I care does not mean that someone else will. The Russians were loudly applauded and cheered for their instigation of brute force and they sang and passed their remaining brandy around. When we were finally able to cross the second bridge, among the myriad of vehicle waiting on the other side, I noticed a huge flatbed truck loaded with crates of live but thirsty chickens. They had been waiting there for at least ten hours and it meant that thousands of chickens in that load would die because after crossing the narrow little bridge, the only thing waiting for them was the bridge up ahead that had been burned. The chickens had certainly been raised by some of the peasants participating in the demonstration and now the birds were dying of dehydration because humans were fighting over water. Sometimes two birds in the truck is worth less than one bird on the other side of the bridge. Now it was dark. I don’t mean it was night, I mean it was dark. Dust dark, black night dark, knowing that whatever was guiding our bus driver was a
slippery oil-water mixture of Bravado and Zen, because our headlights could certainly not penetrate the dust in front of us. Finally, either we slacked off or the other buses got further ahead and we could finally peer a little further into the blackness. With a mixture of hope and fear, I suddenly remembered what my wife had once said: “This road doesn’t go anywhere except further.” We somehow negotiated several hairpin turns tight enough to require backing up to take a second angle at the turn and then we arrived at a point where the bus stopped completely and several people got out including the guide. After several minutes of discussions and gesticulating in several languages, the guide mounted the rear stairs of the bus and announced that everyone in the front half of the bus was to get up and move to the back half of the bus. At that particular moment I was thankful this part of the country had no electricity because everything around us was black. The yellow cones of our headlights shown off into the blackness and illuminated nothing. At that moment we were only a few hundred miles from the Bolivian Death Road and I had no illusions about what was out there off the road in the darkness. When the passengers moved to the back, the front of the bus rose just enough to clear some stones threatening to rip the engine. With that briny mixture of perfume and acrid sweat, we wobbled around the evil stones and our thirty ton behemoth trundled down the steep, the dark and the dirt. After what seemed like an interminable number of switch-backs, the road eventually flattened out, and yet our bhodisatva driver had to silently slalom his craft through thousands of stones intended to block our progress. Slowly, there were fewer and fewer stones and what could pass for a semi-normal journey could commence. We passed villages, most with one or two eighty-watt bulbs for illumination. At one of these little bright spots we stopped, and as forty hungry foreigners disgorged from the bus, the fortunes of the family owning the little roadside store changed considerably. Chips, mostly, what the British woman stubbornly referred to as crisps, even when chips was printed in big letters
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on the bag. Coca-Cola too, as in this part of the world, Pepsi has been eliminated from the market for unknown reasons. The restroom, however, was going to be a field nearby as the miniature porta-potty toilet in the bus had literally filled to overflowing. As I reentered the bus I was greeted by a stench causing me to gag. The driver was mucking out the toilet so we would have a place to go during the rest of our interminable journey. This was the same man who silently and carefully guided us over and around endless obstacles, whose guidance was able to hold true on light-less mountain passes. He was now shoveling our shit and he didn’t complain. My ability to breath through my mouth and not notice smells is a skill that has saved my life in several countries. It came in particularly handy that night as my seat was right behind the toilet. Just above the door to the toilet was a a little green LED light that said W C. Beneath it was a little red LED that said No Smoking. After the events of the day and being in a country where almost no one smokes, the signs seemed playful and a little stupid. Further forward, above a non-functioning video screen was the official twenty-four hour illuminated digital clock. It would proudly announce the time to be 10:28 and a few seconds later, it would read 17:61. A little later it would say 62:53. But sooner or later it would come back to 10:28 and it was what it read when we pulled into the station at two AM, twenty hours into our nine hour ride. We rolled into dusty, forlorn, and sleeping Puno, lit only by the yellow orange glare of low pressure sodium street lights. There was the inevitable skinny dog and hapless taxis. I realized that all this time on the bus I thought I had been sitting by a quiet Nicaraguan woman only to discover that fatigue and fear had been riding in the seat next to me. I often behave as though the world were a flat graphic window sitting in front of me and consequently tend to take the world head on and see only things themselves rather than the spaces between competing visions. I almost always forget there is a tension between ideas and places. This time, in the process of going from place to place, I had been forced to look at the edges of things rather than their center.
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The scene at the bus station was one of unbridled self-interest. Baggage moving Taxi men and hotel touts fell upon us in a feeding frenzy. We were whisked away without even looking back to see what our former companions were either doing or going. We didn’t even ask. Most astounding of all, I did not stop to shake the hand of our driver. I was so obsessed with my own needs, I didn’t even take the trouble to thank him and I am saddened by that fact. Fatigue and self-preservation will always trump gratitude and grace.
Someplace near Laguna Huacarpay, maybe near Yanaoca and then on to Quehue and Espinar. I will never know.
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“A good life for (John Stuart) Mill... is not one where you have queued before the slot machine of utility and got the candy it dispenses. It is one where you have gone out into the world to build the best self you can traveled where you wanted and seen what you could and said what you had to, sung your own songs and heard your own poems.” Adam Gopnik New Yorker Oct. 6 08
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Peru is an astonishingly vast collection of unfinished projects, gracious people and broken promises.
There is a chance that life will improve for the Peruvians. They have not quite yet separated religion from politics, but if they are not provided with their own clean drinking water nothing will change any time soon. Some resources in regard to this problem: The documentary film called ‘FLOW’ http://www.flowthefilm.com/takeaction http://www.waterforpeople.org/about/
“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.” Virginia Woolf
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