Two streams of traffic cross at the junction. Cars nose across the shared space, inches apart. They thrust themselves between slow moving vehicles and edge forward. They advance a metre, two metres and are blocked. They block others, and they are blocked themselves. The streams have become a knot. Drivers lower their windows and shout abuse. Forty cars fight each other to a standstill, whilst two empty highways stretch ahead.
And they sit in immovable traffic, pounding on their horns, adding more anxiety and anger to a city already toxic.
Drivers do not use their indicators here. “What’s in it for me?” they ask.
***************************************************
After three months in Lima, looking for a reason to escape from the poisonous grey city, I hear of an ancient engraved stone, of uncertain meaning, in a country village.
“I remember seeing it when I was a small girl, visiting an uncle outside Lima,” Mayra tells me.
She puts in front of me a plate of lomo saltado, stir-fried beef and onion.
“It was as high as me, but much longer, a broad flat rock, on a rise looking down on the village. Help yourself to tacu-tacu.”
I put two large spoonfuls of the sticky rice and beans on my plate to soak up the rich gravy. Mayra smiles.
“There were some marks at the top of the rock, a spiral and a flower, some parallel lines. But I remember more the little tombs around, like miniature houses. Do you want chicha?”
She pours me a glass of the deep purple juice made from maize kernels.
“What about the tombs?”
“Around the stone, there were buildings of loose stone, like dog kennels, just big enough to hold a curled up body. All empty of course, with the roof missing, or a hole in the wall. Inside there were only a few bones, a skull, some pieces of broken pot…”
“Can you remember where it was?”
“I was very young…”
Mayra has long dark hair, worn in pigtails. But she also has rare eyes, one brown and one grey, from a grandfather who had insisted at a family reunion that his father was an Austrian jew. And then, the next morning, sober and solemn, denied it. I help myself to more tacu-tacu whilst she cross-references. Finally she taps the table top.
“Calango I think, near Mala.”
“Could you show me? I’ve got the next two weekends off…”
Escape from the present
It is June, and I have just reached the end of my first term at a new school. The school is a friendly change to the Cult College run by smiling zombies where I spent the previous year. But with 180 students in 10 different classes, and each class needing cross-referenced lesson plans with Key Targets, Assessments, Secondary Goals, Audio-Visual Resources, Learner Profiles, and ATL skills integrated across the Continuum, entered onto a cumbersome computer database, and then picked over by a various levels of “management”, I am looking forward to a break.
And as some form of escape from that, I decide to delve a little into Peru’s recent past, to see if I can reach some understanding of the events described in the daily newspapers, which seemed to be more akin to a political “telenovella” or soap opera, with betrayals, bribery, and the constant exchange of threats, unsupported accusations and personal abuse in place of rational argument. Perhaps it isn’t a good place to be going. Nevertheless I take out my notebook and read through my first notes.
“Keiko Fujimori is just fifteen in 1990 when her father Alberto wins a surprise victory in Peru’s presidential elections.
“She is attending school at the prestigious, private, Catholic College, Sagrados Corazones Recoleta two years later when on 5th April 1992 the President stages an Army coup. Tanks drive to the front of the Congress and Senators are tear-gassed. TV and radio stations and newspapers are raided by armed soldiers.
“Making a statement on television that evening, Fujimori senior says he has “dissolved” Congress “… as the initiation of a search for an authentic transformation to assure a legitimate and effective democracy.
“After initial international shock, US President George Bush offers his support two weeks later, apparently more concerned by the growing Maoist terrorist movement in the Peruvian highlands.”
I pick up my pen and add, “As I write in 2016, it seems that Peru is still searching for the transformation. Fujimoris are still in power. There is no effective democracy. Politicians subvert and undermine legal institutions. Truth is obscured by a media dominated by private interests, and deliberately distorted by congress members and congress committees, supported by a staff of hundreds working in congress and paid from public funds to distribute slander and malicious memes on social media.”
The sleeping lion
Intrigued by Mayra’s stories of the engraved stone surrounded by pillaged tombs, I undertake a little web research about Calango.
“Drive 80 kilometres south down the Panamerica Sur and then turn to the left at the Beach of the Sleeping Lion …”
“Calango is a peaceful town set amongst fields of apple trees, at 350 metres above sea level, with a pleasant climate all year round ….”
“The town houses the famous Star Stone, engraved with magico-religious symbols ….”
“Thanks to the stone, the fields are fertile with much fruit, and the river is full of prawns … the stone performs miracles for women that wish to become pregnant”.
Mayra, hoping to catch hold of her distant childhood memories, joins me in a taxi that takes us from Miraflores, with its cafes and beauty parlours, through the tidy streets of residential Surco to La Victoria, where shirtless men sit on packing cases selling refurbished car parts, and beyond to street markets where feral dogs burrow in piles of rotting trash and pull out bones to fight over. Behind a city block dedicated to bicycles, where wheels and frames cascade from shop fronts and spill across the pavement, is the historic Colegio Jose Pardo. It was founded in 1848 by President Ramon Castilla as a School of Arts: over its walls, three metres high, stare the broken headlights of ruined cars, stacked five high, a heap of rusting skeletons being saved for a rainy day in a desert city where it never rains.
Beneath the walls a line of buses waits to fill with passengers heading south down the coast.
******************************
I went to a march through the centre of Lima a few months earlier with my landlady. Canella is a former journalist. She has fifty years of detailed and measured analysis of her country’s governing classes stored away in her head. But, to save time, she often summarises her judgement in two words.
“Sin verguenzas!”
“Without shame!”
The presidential elections are coming to a close. It is a nasty close fought race between an investment banker and the daughter of a former dictator, now in jail.
I walk with Canella through the Plaza San Martin, the open space dedicated to El Liberador, the Argentinian who helped free South America and Peru from Spanish control. We pass a speaker explaining how Marxism applies to the haciendas and shanty towns of Peru, to the indigenes, the Spanish and the criollo; the next speaker links Andean cosmovision, with its upper, middle and lower worlds of the condor, the puma, and the serpent, to the tripartite christian god; and the third is a young student with blue hair crying “Ni Una Menos“, not one more woman murdered by her partner or husband. There are two or three such murders every week, in a country of 30 million. Cardinals, court magistrates and congressmen queue to explain on TV why these killings are the woman’s fault.
Groups of marchers gather in the square, below the statue of San Martin: minor political parties, teachers unions, artist’s collectives, university students, and city districts, with banners proclaiming their allegiances. As the sky darkens the square slowly fills, whilst hawkers move amongst the crowd selling headbands saying “Keiko no Va!“, Keiko shall not pass, a resonant Lord of the Rings cry. And indeed those metaphors are recognised by the people here, a battle between the forces of good and evil, with Keiko the Dark Lord or Darth Vader, and Lima as Gotham City, in desperate need of a caped crusader.
A succession of speakers mount a podium to one side of the square to motivate the slowly swelling crowd. With his ruddy faced framed by flowing white hair, Fernando “Poppy” Olivera, who has made a flamboyant career attacking corruption, addresses an absent Keiko Fujimori on behalf of the crowd. “You personify abuse, you personify crime, you are the face of cynicism and narcotrafficking.” The crowd cheers and waves its banners.
I expect we will join the march but Canella has other ideas.
“This way!” she cries and leads me along a red carpeted entrance hall with hanging chandeliers, and up a staircase to the circular lobby of the Hotel Bolivar, with a stained glass cupola supported on eight marble columns. Up a side flight of stairs is a bar, and through the bar is a balcony looking down on the square.
We order two Cathedrals, large Pisco sours, a bitter mix of egg white, lemon juice and pisco, the rough white brandy which is the national drink. From here we can watch the marchers gather below. People are congregating on the balcony too, in ones and twos. Several nod or wave at Canella, and a few come over to give her a hug.
“She was the Minister for Women in Garcia’s second government,” explains Canella, as a tall, extravagantly red-haired woman waves to her across the room. “And that” – a ruddy faced gentleman in a dark suit and tie, with greying hair and a Grecian nose – “was Humala’s City Planning advisor.” This balcony, it appears, is the vantage point of choice for many retired activists looking to see how the next generation is faring.
Another former minister stands by me looking down on the marchers as an artists’ collective from Barranco passes by carrying giant fibreglass sculpted heads of gallinazos, black headed vultures.
“Those are the vultures who sit atop the church towers of the city and look down on the garbage, sniffing out putrefaction,” she tells me. “The artists move them around the city. They were on the top of a tower block looking down on the Ministry of Justice for six months, and now they are above the Congress building.”
The march is described the next day as the largest public demonstration in twenty years. “It is about five hundred people per minute,” Canella tells me as we watch the first marchers pass, and forty minutes later they are still passing, as we finish a second Cathedral. And it is then, as we join the back of the march, that I meet Mayra.
Toxic shock
The election is over now, but the toxic effects of the poisonous campaign are still evident on the streets of the capital. It feels good to be getting out of Lima.
After a ninety minute journey down the Pan-american Highway, the sun dropping towards the sea on our right, and dry brown foothills rising to our left, we step down at the Terminal Terrestre, or “Landport”, of Mala. Mototaxis, canopied three wheeled motorbikes with a bench seat mounted on the rear, queue in an orderly fashion in front of the station. Two or three passengers squeeze in, sharing the 2 soles fare to the town centre. There are trees and flowers and people sitting on benches around a bandstand in the main square, with a historic adobe church facing modern municipal offices. A hostal is squeezed between a restaurant and a bodega, a general store. A staircase leads up to the reception where a lady sitting on the balcony over-looking the square smiles and shows us to our clean and tidy rooms for 40 soles. There is water in the pipes. She brings us soap and towels.
The national highway down the coast once passed through Mala, but the modern three lane Panamericana lies a kilometre closer to the sea. The hairdressers, coffin shops, roasted chicken joints, opticians and bakeries that line today’s narrow central street are mostly closed on a peaceful Sunday morning.
The girl who sells newspapers by the roadside has gone to talk to her friends. They have a stack of Trome, “Peru’s most popular daily!”, which mixes football, curvaceous women (on the back page) and scandalous politics, and two or three of the more heavyweight El Comercio. I take a newspaper and leave small change on the table.
An alley leads off to the right through a covered market, busy even today, piles of mangoes and pineapples, gutted chickens hanging from hooks, bunches of huacatay and cilantro, sacks of rice and beans. We thread through shoppers with their bags, and scavenging dogs, and men with trolleys of dripping fish, to emerge into an open space where the market stalls spread around the sides of a football pitch.
Two young Venezuelan women are offering arepa wraps and hot coffee from a flask. They have clean hair freshly cut, painted nails, sharp red lipstick, as bright as their smiles.
“Those girls have probably just been here a few weeks or months, after walking two thousand kilometres,” says Mayra. “Not everybody can afford the bus. Even that takes four days.”
“They look so…positive, so hopeful!”
“They have reached the promised land. The few soles they are making on the streets in Mala, they are sending to their families back in Caracas, changing them to dollars in Western Union.”
On one side of the market we find an old man on a bench filling out a timetable. A young man sells pastries, and the bus to Calango is slowly filling with stiff backed farmers and strong armed women. We take our seats whilst sacks of fertilisers and boxes of canned food are loaded onto the roof, and the aisle between the seats is filled with iron rod, crowbars, and two-by-four.
“I downloaded some of Antonio de la Calancha’s writings this morning,” I tell Mayra, as the bus leaves the market. “I wonder if this sounds like what you remember. “There is a great rock more than twelve feet long next to the old church. It is white, smooth and polished, unlike other rocks, so that when the sun or moon shines on it, it seems to be made of silver. There is a footprint as if impressed in soft wax, and above a line of letters.”
“I remember my uncle lifted me up to look at the rock, it was bigger than me. I could look past and over it, to the town and the valley. And I remember the little tombs.”
“He mentions those too. The archbishop sent a cleric to destroy the markings on the stone. Antonio writes “When Duarte Fernandez came, he saw that all around the stone, were little underground niches housing burials, some very recent, and so he chopped at the stone and put up a cross at the head of the stone. He wanted to stop the superstition, but it was not well done. Perhaps he was inspired by heaven.”.”
“It sounds terrible today,” says Mayra, “but that’s what the Spanish did everywhere in the Americas. In Mexico Franciscan Friar Diego de Landa burnt every native book he could find. There are only three Mayan codices left.”
“For all that Antonio was writing the history of the Augustinian religious order in Peru, he seems to have had some intellectual curiosity. He copied the markings on the stones and asked people if they knew what they meant.”
“And did they?”
“Well, that’s a funny thing. He writes “I painted the marks of the letters, and sent it round the convents of Lima. All agreed that it was Greek or Hebrew, but they could not read it.” Clearly they had no idea, but they pretended to know.”
The bus threads through the back streets of town, over an irrigation canal and past the ruins of a hacienda, with an impressive stone gateway leading to a courtyard surrounded by collapsing storerooms of clay brick. Then the road rises through a fertile valley planted with herbs, sweet potato and peppers. The hills above the road are dry and stony, but the lower levels are green and watered by channels from the river contouring along the hillside. Ascending terraces fronted with cobble stones bear vines and fruit trees. The broad stony bed of the river spreads across the valley to the left with a slender stream of shallow water meandering down.
The bus is full and friendly. Everyone seems to know each other. There are nods, smiles and chatter. The driver stops at one house to put a parcel on the doorstep. At another, he calls out until a small boy comes running, and he passes him a note.
We cross the river on a modern bridge and Mayra points out the remnants of a old road traversing the hillside above.
“Qapac Ñan, the Inca Road, they always call it, but of course roads like these were there before the Inca.”
At times it is barely a worn line, a goat track, across the steep hillside, and then it disappears, only to appear again as a foundation of layered stones clinging to the steep rocky side of the valley.
“How can they build a road up there? It looks like a path across a cliff face.”
“I have walked some of those,” replies Mayra. “Its a steep drop at times, but the path is two metres wide, enough for a man and an line of pack animals, llamas or mules.”
Before she worked in a Lima bar, Mayra studied archaeology.
“Why do they climb up the cliff face like that instead of having a road along the valley?”
“Good question. Some say it is to make the roads defensible, or to avoid mosquitoes, or to stop the llamas eating the crops in the valley. Or to be safe from floods, or to preserve the farmland in the valley bottom. Its one more question to which we don’t know the answer.”
The road sweeps up the valley and as the remnants of the road appear to descend towards the river, we approach Calango. The town is laid out before us upriver as we alight on the corner. A tall wall with a locked iron door is labelled Coyllur Sayana.
“That’s it. The Star Stone.”
After the election
I meet up with Mayra again at the post-election celebrations, on broad Angamos Street in Miraflores with its central avenue of trees, in front of a little pink house with a balcony which was the campaign headquarters of the new President.
It is April 2016, when Keiko, Alberto Fujimori’s daughter and the inheritor of his party machine and rural support, is making her third attempt on the presidency. In the first round she has won 40% of the vote. Pedro Pablo Kuckzynski, PPK, who campaigns with a giant guinea pig mascot, has a little over 20%. A 77 year old career banker and financier, who has spent much of his working life in the USA, he has also served as a Government Minister in Peru in the 1980s, and again between 2002 and 2006 under President Toledo.
Veronika Mendoza, standing as the representative of a new left wing alliance, Frente Amplio, comes in third with just under 20% of the vote. Unable to go forward to the second round run-off, she asks her supporters to transfer their votes to PPK.
In the weeks leading up to the second round, PPK mysteriously disappears from campaigning. He says he has to attend his daughter’s birthday party in the USA. A few days later, information about Joaquin Ramirez, Secretary General of Keiko Fujimori’s FP Party, surfaces in the Peruvian press. It seems to have come from the US DEA, the Drugs Enforcement Administration.
An associate of the Secretary General, pilot Jesus Vasquez, has previously claimed that Joaquin Ramirez told him “Keiko asked me to launder $11 million … so I bought a chain of petrol stations.”
The new details suggest that the DEA has been investigating Ramirez for four years, and believe he is part of a network of cocaine exporters, using the University run by his uncle and brothers as a money-laundering front. The network includes private airlines and other businesses in Miami, Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru.
The DEA are said to be investigating his chain of petrol stations as well as another 18 businesses he manages, and also the businesses of his brother Osias, a Fuerza Popular Congressman.
In the lead up to the election this has an impact, and one TV station airs a tape of Jesus Vasquez saying “I was lying …”
The tape was given to the station by FP supporter and former Vice-Presidential Candidate Jose Chlimper, and aired by the station management without verification.
Vasquez explains that he had said in another interview “They say I was lying, but it is all true”. The tape, it turns out, is a cut and paste fake. Journalists resign. Not the station managers who are responsible, but the journalists who were not consulted.
Looking back, it may be that the Keiko No Va march in the Plaza San Martin, the square of the Liberator, provided a timely nudge. The day after the march, La Republica puts drone photos of the march on its front page. Estimates of the number of marchers vary from thirty thousand to seventy thousand marchers, compared to Flor’s more sober twenty thousand, despite two Pisco sours. El Comercio, the flagship newspaper of the Miro Garcia Quesada family, headlines with a story about the Venezuelan economy above a small photo and paragraph about the march.
Although El Comercio has all but erased the largest public demonstration in twenty years, on the following day it and other newspapers reveal the discovery of a mobile phone in Vladimir Montesinos’ cell, brought to him by a guard; the implication is that he has been advising the FP on its tactics. “Uncle Vlad” was the manipulative mastermind behind much of her father’s least wholesome activities. There is a feeling that in these last few days, the broadly pro-Keiko press owned by Peruvian mining and construction moguls is at least shifting to back both horses.
On June 5th 2016, PPK edges through by 50.21% versus 49.88% for Keiko Fujimori, a margin of thirty-nine thousand votes out of eighteen million cast. And that night I join Mayra with a crowd of celebrants in front of the Angamos house, and we take selfies.
Shining in the moonlight
Through the bars of the door we see a single giant stone lying dormant. It is pale grey verging towards silver, almost polished, lying in the shadow of the high wall that surrounds it. There are grooves along the upper end, and a line of markings, but we can see little through the bars of the padlocked door.
“Lets take a look around”.
Mayra follows me behind the oval compound where there is a paved square facing a crucifix mounted on a stepped stone base. The cross is decorated with symbols – a ladder, dice, a sun and a moon.
“This must be one of the crosses put up by Francisco de Avala. Antonio de la Calancha wrote that he had visited twenty years earlier, destroying 37 shrines and putting up 37 crosses.” I explain to Mayra.
“Who was Francisco de Avala?”
“He was called the Extirpador de las Idolatrias, a sort of Witchfinder General. He would arrive in the community with a team of assistants and interview the villagers one by one. Who here worships the old gods? Where are your shrines, your sacred objects? The team would stay till they got answers. Then they would destroy or take away whatever they found – musical instruments, costumes, carvings – and read them a list of new laws.”
“What sort of laws?”
“Prohibiting their local customs – harvest festivals, calling their children traditional names, using native doctors, holding christening ceremonies. Drinking and dancing in particular were disapproved of.”
“It makes me shiver to think about it. Maybe we should get a beer and dance a little?”
“Good idea. I believe the food is good here. But let’s see the stone first.”
In the municipal offices on the edge of the town square, we find a man with a key to the iron gate, and he tells us the story of the stone as we walk back up the hill.
“The stone is called Coyllur Sayana, the Stone where the Star Stopped, in Quechua, because two lovers were on the stone when a star fell and fused them together. That is why it has powers of fertility.”
“I read that the stone also had an Aymara name. Do people here speak Aymara?”
“Aymara people, they are up in the highlands and a long way to the south, Puno and Bolivia. There are no Aymara here. Not that I know, and I have lived here all my life.”
He points out the murals on the walls around the stone.
“Amerigo, the founder of the museum, painted these to tell the story. Here you see the star falling on the lovers, and the people holding ceremonies. This is the local chief who tells the story of the stone, and the priest who comes to destroy the carvings. But you can still see them.”
We touch the stone, warming under the sun, and trace the markings. A horizontal line runs across the upper face of the stone, and above and below this are lines and circles, a spiral and some crosses.
“You can see the footprint of St Thomas, here, and the keys of St Peter, and a foetus.”
All I can see is an anchor shape and a flower design. But Antonio de la Calancha had come to see the signs of St Thomas and he found them.
I take some photographs, though whatever might have been drawn on the stone is now heavily mutilated and written over with people’s initials. I feel frustrated.
“It is difficult to see anything here.”
“It is very hard. The other stones are much clearer.”
“There are more?”
“Of course there are many more, higher up the valley. I don`t know them well. But Amerigo wrote it down.”
He takes out a key and, opening a small cupboard in the back wall, he hands me a simple photocopied pamphlet.
I flick through its dozen pages, detailing the colonial narrative of the stones. An appendix repeats the text in German, Castilian, French, English, Italian and Russian.
“I don’t see anything about more stones?”
“Here, look on the back.” He turns over the pamphlet. There on the reverse cover, is a hand drawn map showing sites higher up the valley – Retama, Cochineros, Minay and Viscas.
“And it is interesting that you ask about Aymara. Of course there are no Aymara people here. But there is a village nearby called Aymaraes. You will have passed it on the way here. And some ruins.”
“Maybe we will take a look. Thanks you so much for showing us this Mr…?”
“Cahuana. Jose Cahuana. I am the Master of the Waters”.
“The Master?”
“I organise the waters. The canals. Everything you see here” – he holds out his arm to indicate the valley full of fruit trees, “depends on the waters.”
I must have looked puzzled, for he adds “take a walk in the fields, and you will see.”
The context of chaos
Back at the hotel I pull out my notebook and read through the latest entries. I am trying to summarise the last thirty years of the country, to give some kind of context to the daily news which seems a swirl of opinions and accusations without reference to facts. November 1991. Fifteen people including children are murdered at a street chicken party, a pollada, in Barrios Altos, a poor district of central Lima. Polladas are a form of street fund-raising where neighbours make a d0nation to eat fried chicken, often to support unexpected family costs such as medical care.
March 1992. Fujimori Senior’s wife Susana Higamuchi calls a press conference to claim that charitable donations of clothing from Japan for the poor of Peru are being stolen and re-sold by Alberto’s sister Rosa and brother Santiago. Many millions of dollars of contributions have been placed with two charitable foundations managed by the siblings.
Keiko’s aunt and uncle escape to Japan but remain wanted for trial in Peru, 26 years later. Peru has no extradition treaty with Japan.
Keiko’s mother, Alberto Fujimori’s wife, later alleges in court that Alberto Fujimori had paid 12.5 million dollars raised in Japan for the Peruvian poor into a private bank account. She claims that she had been tortured by the intelligence services, and then removed from the country to Chile, where she was declared insane, her children testifying against her.
It is this Keiko, nearly thirty years later, who has just lost her third bid for the Presidency of Peru.