Peru has two fundamentally distinct histories. One, found in most books, theatrical and noisy, boils down to the melodramatic romance of the instant marshals of the pronunciamentos. The other is obscure and productive. It takes place in the wilderness. It is more moving, more serious, and more complex. It prolongs in other settings the glorious tradition of the wars of independence and—despite its variable elements—has come down to our days so indivisible and seamless that it can be recapitulated in the single term generally adopted for it by the best publicists of that republic: the “eastern question.”
The designation is perfect. It denotes a rigorously positive problem in need of solution.
It has not been imposed on the Peruvian through exhaustive argument by sociologists or a statesman’s happy inclination, but by material pressures exerted by the environment itself. Restricted to a ribbon of scorched lands between the mountain range and the sea, where for three centuries it has located itself distracted by the pomp of conquistadors and viceroys, the nationality, greatest heir of the equally noteworthy virtues and vices of the knightly and decadent Spain of the seventeenth century, finally came to recognize, through the simple instinct of self-defense, the urgent necessity of abandoning the cloistered isolation that held it apart from all the rest of the earth.
And it began to cross the Andes.
It would take too long to recount its eastward flight in successive inroads along five difficult routes winding maddeningly through the twists and turns of the mountains, climbing along mountainsides thousands of meters high that unite the coastal ports from Mollendo to Paita with the desired areas of “La Montaña,” on the far upstream edge of the Amazon that stretches from the “pongo,” or gorge, of Manseriche to the surging torrents of the affluents of the Urubamba.
Suffice it to note that, after the final eastern range was crossed and the Ucayali basin reached, something in addition to the exuberance of the marvelous valley, capable of regenerating their nationality in decline, became obvious to even the most incurious of pioneers. In a physical anomaly linked to the orthographic contours that predominate in that valley, the fact is that most of their country—generally considered the most Pacific of countries—has its only true sea, capable of linking it through commerce with far-flung points of civilization, in the Atlantic Ocean, to which it is connected by the three long, unimpeded courses of the Purus, the Juruá, and the Ucayali.
No marvel of engineering could offer more than those rivers do. Neither the Oroya Railroad nor the other lines that equal it in the daring of their routes—curving along the sides of nearly vertical mountain walls, winding through tunnels choked with clouds, and running through viaducts high above the abyss—create more practical and more secure transportation systems.
Such exceptional technical requirements are disastrous for industry, making those lines permanently inappropriate for the transport of the products of the east without exorbitant cost—even in the future when the Panama Canal dispenses with the long voyage around Cape Horn.
Thus exit through the Amazon and its southwest tributaries and into the Atlantic became the first clear solution to the problem. And in the new areas set up administratively in the current Department of Loreto there began an intensive development project, which persists and accelerates into our time.
Roads were opened to the rich river valley. Despite a series of setbacks, military and agricultural settlements were continuously planned. In a revival of the apostolic missions, the admirable tradition of the Maynas Jesuits was restarted. A vast regularization of land tenancy was launched. The port of Iquitos was built. To stimulate settlement, all taxes were abolished, allowing man to act freely on that abundant land. At the same time, the geographical expeditions begun by Beltrán and Smith in 1834, in which Castelnau, Maldonado, Raimondi, Tucker, and, in our day, Stiglich have performed so admirably, have headed in every direction, persistent and uninterrupted, on the complex task that rushed to set up a new country.
Calm explorers counterbalance restive caudillos. On a coast beset with civil violence and sedition, the chronic incompetence of revolutionary governments became a way of life. The primary motives for the most recent campaign for liberty having been corrupted, the bold vanquishers of power would themselves go too far in a pernicious militarism that was the open sore on an infirm nation. In the flourishing wilderness of “La Montaña,” however, with or against the current of unknown rivers; whirling in the dizzying circles of the muyunas; piercing straight through in their canoes the lightning currents of the pongos; or running abruptly into obstacles in the rapids, geographers, prefects, and missionaries were staking out new territories for a national regeneration. Testing the noblest attributes of their race in an apprenticeship of peril, they went about reconstructing a national character that had been diminished and giving those places, defined in dry, geometric coordinates, a destiny unexpected by History.
In the last analysis the “eastern question” involved, in numerous unknown dimensions, the destiny of all Peru.1
The frenzied caudillos recognized as much. It was not unusual amid the recklessness and changeability of their actions, between the battles and the executions, for them to stop for a moment and take that persistently desired region into account. Many found themselves transformed and began demonstrating statesmanlike convictions in that regard.
Numerous cases can be cited of such binocular politics, almost exact copies one of the next. Simultaneously destructive and restorative, that politics portrays the physical contrast in the moral order of Peru between the benighted west, in which energies ebb away condemned by the epidemic emotional history of the pronunciamento, and the east, where hope dawns reborn.
Let me cite one example.
In 1841 the republic was on the brink of major catastrophe. Don Agustín Gamarra held power. In his unrestrained actions that Caesarian mestizo reflected the instability of a mixed-blood temperament beset by fears and frustrations deriving from an ascendancy put together by improvisation during the caudillo wars.
His government—one set up by the figure who, in his overthrow of the virtuous la Mar, introduced Peru to the regime of the coup d’état—was naturally extremely volatile. This restorer imposed by Chilean arms, by Bulnes, on the ruins of the ephemeral Peru-Bolivia Confederation, beleaguered by frustrated ambitions, by the demands of insatiable mercenaries and the threats of reemerging conspirators, teetered on the edge of that eminence that he had reached by separating himself from his partnership with the cholos and cultivating the aristocratic sensibilities of a land that more than any other inherited traditional Spanish haughtiness. At pressing moments his fortune depended on a woman—his wife, a nobly heroic Amazon who on occasion, taking up a sword and spurring on her horse, charged onto the field of battle, even into the hottest point of combat, in order to reanimate the waning dedication of the colonels and the vacillating troops.
Of such a life—both disturbed and hyperemotionalized in so many ways—as was this president’s one cannot expect statesmanlike administrative accomplishments. I recount Gamarra’s life merely with the artistic interest of one who follows the plot of a fanciful tale marked with dramatic, even awe-inspiring episodes until its end is reached in the glorious and useless sacrifice of the protagonist—in Gamarra’s case, before a furious charge by Bolivian lancers on the plains of Viacho.
But, when we turn one of its pages, this surprise jumps out at us:
Citizen Agustín Gamarra, Grand Marshal-Restorer of Peru, distinguished to the nation for valor, eminent, etc.
Considering that for the purpose of promoting steam navigation upon the Amazon River and its tributaries it is necessary to provide facilities and incentives to compensate entrepreneurs.
Decrees: (1) To don Antonio Marcelino Pereira Ribeiro, citizen of Brazil, is granted the exclusive privilege of navigating with steamboats upon the Amazon River, in that part belonging to Peru, and all its tributaries…
(3) The steamboats shall display the Brazilian flag… Given in the Government House in Lima on the 6th of July, 1841.2
This decree, the relevant passages of which are excerpted, manifests both the caudillo—in the presumptuous self-presentation imparted by the nouns and adjectives made to accompany his name—and also the statesman who first sketched out for his countrymen the regenerating march eastward. But it is not reproduced here merely to point up the contradictory elements in Peruvian history. It also comes to point out the Brazilian figure who would have remained unidentified had he not represented the first in the series of obscure countrymen of ours who have evaded our historical chroniclers but, by dint of their remarkable acts, advance themselves among those who have best served the neighboring country.
Indeed, as the Peruvian march creeps eastward, exposed in all its detail, elaborated in regulations, decrees, circulars, and directives—for it is the supreme political, military, and administrative preoccupation in Peru—one observes in the obligatory and incisive references to the Brazilian dimension the interactive presence of another, counterposed expansion westward, obscure but no less vigorous in its own right. With its effects glimpsed now and again, precisely in the most decisive moments of the Peruvian advance, a whole chapter in our History previously lost or fragmented beyond the limited field of vision of our chroniclers emerges only now, scattered in surprising fragments, between the lines in the History of another people.
Similar demonstrations can be made with other events, ones of which we are equally uninformed. Let me briefly point them out.
The explorations continued during the time when the austere Marshal Castillo governed. Castelnau traveled down from the headwaters of the Urubamba to the banks of the Amazon. In a daring expedition, Maldonado immortalized his name by discovering a new road to the Atlantic following the huge valley of the Madre de Dios. And Raimondi unveiled the Mesopotamian treasures of the 16,000 square leagues of rich land along the courses of the Huallga and the Ucayali. Finally, Mont-ferrir rigorously calculated the bounty of the vast Canaan at 50 million hectares, worth at minimum a half a billion pesos.
The arithmetic became almost lyrical in its relating of such marvelous figures.
The great marshal’s government policy benefited immediately from a vigorous patriotic response, as well as from adventurers’ desire for fortune.
The Peruvians, long oriented toward the sterile Pacific coast, saw the new world for the first time. And full-blown land conquest was the result.
Then, frustrating the great expectations deriving from so much thoughtful government planning—laws, regulations, and decrees all coming together in a voluminous compendium of fertile and militant administration—there began a disheartening phase of brilliant but abortive initiatives.
Settlements planned and quickly built manifested the phantasmagoria of an artificial progress in those solitary recesses—and soon flickered out completely. By 1854 the governor of Loreto—an obscure pueblo the name of which is distinguished today because it is applied to an entire region—in reporting on the status of two settlements that had been established there, centralized in Caballo-Cocha near the Brazilian border, referred to them as completely extinct. Similar setbacks were general across the region.
Those results were natural ones. Waves of humanity coming into virgin territory do not simply stop. What characterizes them in their first stages is an inevitable instability imposed by the energies inherent in the movement itself. Preceding cultural equilibrium comes the search for immediate fruits or riches, as though providing the new arrivals, in the wandering life of gathering, extraction, herding, or hunting, with the necessary reconnaissance of their new habitat before they choose a more settled lifestyle.
What is involved is the eternal social function of nomadism, which even in Peru manifested itself in the devastating activity of the quinine harvesters called cascarilleros, who opened up the previously unknown lands that run from the Carabaya hills to the remote headwaters of the Beni.
By then, however, that particular incentive had become extinct.
By that time a tenacious explorer, Marckam, commissioned by the British government, was active in the regions of calisaya quinine. He was so successful in transplanting to India that element of Peruvian fortune that by 1862 more than 4 million trees, with the incredible production of 370 tons, launched from Darjeeling a competition that triumphed on the first assault. Thus the lands so fervently desired showed themselves to their new settlers despoiled of the kinds of resources that regularly arise to keep the grandiose hopes of immigrants from being dashed.
Certainly the fibers for the hats created by the gracious industry of the Mayobamba women would not satisfy them; nor would the gold-bearing gravel of the slopes of the Pastaza, guarded by the ferocious Huambizas.
Thus all the acts, magnificent decrees, lucid regulations, and generous concessions of land issued by the second Castilla government would have ended up in the most lamentable of failures if, precisely in the last period of his presidency, and in the same year—1862—in which Indian cultivation of quinine was depriving the wilderness of its greatest allure, an anonymous man, one more humble immortal who has escaped our historiography, had not appeared and immediately eclipsed the weightiest administrative initiatives, offering Peruvians the animating antidote that would sustain them to this day in their turn to the Amazon.
A Brazilian discovered caucho, or, at least, established the industry of its extraction. I do not go alone in my reconstruction of this chapter in our History, which, if fully developed later by a historian, might be entitled: “Brazilian Expansion in the Amazon.”
A trustworthy narrator tells us:
Before the year 1862 the incalculable wealth in elastic gum had not yet been explored… After some Brazilians entered the Department, principally the industrious José Joaquim Ribeiro, this product began to figure on the ledger of those that the Department exports to Brazil. The quantity first exported was 2,088 kilograms, result of test harvesting carried out by that Brazilian, who would have contributed greatly to the development of that industry if, when he was launching it, he had not encountered problems born of the greed of some subordinate agents who practiced every sort of stratagem against him.3
I shall not remark on the Peruvian authorities’ antagonism. It was an attitude of long standing. As early as 1811 don Manuel Ijurra fumed that “the Brazilians closest to Peru have the barbarous custom of mounting military expeditions with the object of attacking the Maynas Indians, often in direct disregard of the authorities.” And he represented the Brazilians as “absolute monopolists of the import-export business.”4 Five years later, in an alarming directive, the subprefect of Maynas requested urgent preparations “against the possibility that the Brazilians residing in Caballo-Cocha might withdraw from that province, if not peaceably then by force.” And he painted them as practicing the most horrible of abuses. Finally the governor-general of Misiones (1849) declared that all Brazilians entering that department would be required to carry passports, stammering in a stiff Spanish the following extremely odd reasoning: “No value whatsoever is being derived from the presence of these Brazilian traders; nor are there bayonets enough to contain them. They do whatever they want, plying the rivers, extracting berries, butter, salt, and other foodstuffs.”5
Let us proceed no farther.
What is easily deduced from such lines, which could be multiplied, is that a formidable invasion was reaching westward in defiance of a hatred of foreigners—an invasion that spread along the valley of the great river, through Loreto, Caballo-Cocha, Moremote, Perenate, Iquitos, all the way to Nauta at the mouth of the Ucayali and up the Ucayali to beyond Pachitea. That invasion has left the indelible traces of its passing at the most varied of points, in numerous places along the winding wilderness trails, and even in the customs that have come to exist in those places.
If one were to write its history he could counterpose the official diatribes of the terrified subprefects, whose language became stronger and stronger as that mute conquest of the land progressed, to the concepts of such as Antonio Raimondi. But the remarkable Joaquim Ribeiro, whom the great Peruvian naturalist found on the banks of the Itaya in possession of the best lands in the department, concretizes the undeniable response. Such trifling hindrances did not bother him. After 1871, with the industry of extraction created, rubber became the principal export product of Loreto. And the bands of the extractors, with no official incentives, arriving spontaneously from everywhere and operating in the most unfrequented parts of the forest, put a quick end to the almost century-old initiative so often riven with setbacks.
The entire east was opened up.
But there is one negative to that picture.
The exploitation of caucho as the Peruvians practice it, with its felling of the trees and the constant movement in search of undiscovered stands of Castilloa in an endless professional nomadism, leads them to practice all manner of abuse in the inevitable confrontations with the natives, and thus brings with it the systematic disruption of society. The cauchero, eternal seeker of new locations, has no relationship to the land. In his primitive activity, he develops prioritarily the attributes of cleverness, agility, and strength. It involves, in sum, a barbarous individualism. There is a lamentable involution in a man perpetually away from society, wandering from river to river, from thicket to thicket, ever in search of virgin forest in which to hide or take refuge, like a fugitive from civilization.
His passage there has been devastating. After thirty years of population, the banks of the Ucayali, in the past so graced by the abnegation of the Sarayaco missionaries, today manifest an indescribable moral decay in their dingy little settlements.
Colonel Pedro Portillo, present-day prefect of Loreto, who visited there in 1899, indignantly denounced them for that: “there is no law there… The strongest, the one with the most rifles, owns the justice.” He also condemned the scandalous trafficking in slaves.6 And, in the same vein, many others who have passed though, a list of whom would be too long to reproduce, testify in detailed narratives to the regime of lawlessness that became the norm in those lands—and continues to grow, following the tracks of men who pass through the wilderness whose only goal is to barbarize the barbarians.
Now, in clear anticipation of the problems attendant upon that exploitation, which at the same time was the vehicle for the full development of its dominion in the east, the Peruvian government never renounced its initial intent to engage in large-scale settlement. And in order simultaneously to guarantee use of the best route to the Amazon, which runs through the Ucayali—from the terminus station at Oroya to the principal tributaries of the Pachitea—in 1857 it established on the Pozuzo River, one of those tributaries, the German settlement that more than any other monopolized its uninterrupted attention and concern.
The situation was indeed remarkable. Located on incredibly fertile lands halfway to Iquitos, near the navigable tributaries of the Ucayali, the nucleus that was established was, militarily and administratively speaking, the strongest strategic point in the struggle with the wilderness. Hence the justification for all the efforts and the extraordinary expense to encourage the rapid development that those excellent conditions naturally favored.
But the plan did not meet expectations. Much as happened in Loreto, the new settlers, albeit more tenacious, ended up in an unpredictable decline. The colony became paralyzed, stunted, there among the splendors of the forest. It was reduced to rudimentary productive practices that barely met its own consumption. And the all but negligible demographic progress could produce nothing more than a lymphatic generation in which the hardy Prussian stock degenerated to the level of the withered capacities of the Quichua. When he visited there in 1870, Colonel Vizcarra, prefect of Huanuco, was shocked and moved: the settlers presented themselves to him in tatters and starving, asking for bread and for clothing with which to cover themselves. The romantic don Manuel Pinzás, who described the trip, paints for us in long, lachrymose sentences the content of that “heart-rending scene,” suspending it between two rigid exclamation points.7
Moreover, some five years later Dr. Santiago Tavara saw it in the same tones when he described Admiral Tucker’s first trip.
Finally, thirty years later, on his passage from the Ucayali, Colonel Portillo received accurate information about the nucleus of that settlement: it had become a terrifying wasteland. There the first settlers and their degenerate offspring, victims of an irremediable fanaticism, were to be found indulging in the lethargic practices of doing penance, praying, telling rosaries over and over, and chanting interminable litanies in a scandalous parallel with the monkeys of the forest.8
To further aggravate the disappointment at that complete failure of the favored colony, that passer-through, who is one of the most lucid Peruvian politicians of our time, only days before had passed through Puerto Victoria at the confluence of the Pichis and the Palcazu where the Pachitea is formed. There he witnessed a completely different phenomenon. In fact, Puerto Victoria had come into being and developed, turning into the most active and prosperous estancia in the area, without the Peruvian government even knowing of its original existence.
It had never planned to colonize in that area.
The place had been considered ill-favored. It was surrounded by what were among the wildest of the South American savages: the Campas of Pajonal to the south and to the north the indomitable Caxibos, who, in 1866 at Conta-Isla, downstream from Puerto Victoria, had beheaded the naval officers Tavara and West. Prefect Benito Araña, who had visited there that same year, mounted a full military operation with two steamboats and an artillery launch, to avenge the bloody affront. He went ashore, invaded the forest, engaged in small skirmishes with lots of gunfire, and returned in a highly unusual triumph—one with the savages hot on his heels shooting arrows after him. He embarked amid the tumult of his people victorious—and fleeing. They bombarded the riverbanks furiously and returned downstream in flight, leaving a novelistic token of their violent and embarrassing undertaking in the toponym “Playa del Castigo” (“Retribution Beach”).
For the next three decades that sinister region remained in the isolation in which the terrified people wished to leave it.
Until, entering from the west and overcoming the strong currents of the Pachitea with the strength of powerful paddlers in narrow dugouts, a group of undaunted adventurers traversed it from one end to the other, reaching all the way to the confluence of the Pichis.
They were broad-shouldered caboclos with dull, dark skin and dry, powerful musculature. They were not caucheros. With them speech did not resonate with noisy braggadocio. Instead of a tambo they improvised the lean-to tejúpar. They did not carry the cuchillo, a cross between a dagger and a short knife. Instead they bore in their belts bush knives as long as swords.
They prepared themselves without fanfare for the undertaking, and they slowly penetrated the forest.
The specific events involved with that daring entry, doubtless highly dramatic, are unknown. The Caxibos have their ferocity inscribed in their very name. “Caxi,” “bat”; “bo,” “similar to.” Figuratively, bloodsuckers. Even in their rare moments of joviality those barbarians are frightening; their laughter reveals teeth stained with the black juice of the chonta palm. Or they stretch out face down, mouths close to the ground, howling the long notes of a savage chant.
They have borne three hundred years of catechism untouched in their savagery. They are still the wildest of the tribes in the Ucayali Valley.
As far as anyone can tell, their presence did not discourage the new pioneers.
For the bloody savage now had before him, taking his measure, a more fearsome adversary than he: the jagunço.
These recent arrivals were Brazilians from the sertão. Their leader: Pedro C. de Oliveira, yet another of the obscure fighters who sporadically appear in the productive moments that dot the events of a highly unusual history. Despite his nationality, in January 1900 he was named governor of the entire area of which his barracão was the center.9
Colonel Portillo was the recipient there of simple hospitality without the ceremonial pomp of lavish gifts so characteristic of our obscure gens. Every observation contained in his report—from the first day to his taking leave of the “very estimable family of Mr. Oliveira”—bespeaks the pleasure that he derived from seeing the vibrant estancia, at the center of rich productivity, intelligently situated with the numerous dwellings circled at the top of the bank on the left side of the river. The estancia was reached by climbing a long, sturdy stairway. What especially captivated him were the calm, vigorous men who manifested in an unpretentious way their triumph over the savage and the land. Finally, it did not escape his watchful notice that without decrees or subventions that foreigner had solved the problem that had bedeviled the government of his country by founding in the most strategic location the estancia that controlled the “central road” to Amazonia. He said so quite openly: “Puerto Victoria was the most advantageous location for the military garrison and customs house to protect imports and exports from the colony of Chanchamayo, the north of Pajonal, Tarma, and the ‘Montañas’ of Palcazu, Matro, and Pozuzo.”
Colonel Portillo concluded, “The Oliveira house should be taken by the Supreme Government as the most appropriate location for the administrative headquarters, the customs house, and the military post.”
The recommendation was accepted. A decree from President Pierola ordered the demarcation of Puerto Victoria in order to establish a police precinct that would protect the settlers of those lands. In an expression of jealousy at the advantageous situation that Oliveira had acquired, he revealed his intention to establish exclusive possession: “not permitting any settler whatsoever within the radius of one kilometer.”10
Peru had a first-class river estancia. And the Brazilians withdrew.
Five years passed.
In 1905 the Parisian tourist J. Delbecque came down the Pachitea en route to the Amazon and would not have noticed the formerly flourishing estancia if he had not been accompanied by some tame Indians who knew the area.11
At the top of the bank, which the waters were in the process of undermining, one could see only a few fallen roofs and the remnants of productive fields, now choked by wild holm.
The port was a ruin.
Like everyone who goes through that area on the journey from Iquitos, the traveler stayed there for several hours in order to dry wet clothing—in the heat of a fire made with the fallen doors and collapsed jambs of the former dwellings. He meditated, melancholically, that if matters continued that way Puerto Victoria would soon be only a memory.
Then he went on downstream rowing at full speed, fleeing that region that had been depopulated to the point of complete abandonment.
1. “It is evident that, at the bottom of this issue there lies a pressing necessity for the republic… the destinies of Peru cannot be fulfilled until that area is under our control.” Dr. Y. Capelo, Exposición histórica de la vía central (1898).
2. El peruano, vol. 8, no. 9.
3. J. Wilkens de Matos, Dicionário topográfico do Departamento de Loreto (Pará, 1874), 30-31.
4. Manuel Ijurra, Resumen de los viajes a las montañas de Maynas (1811-1815).
5. Colección de leyes, decretos, etc., referentes al Departamento de Loreto, tomo 5, p. 198; tomo 7, 5.
6. Colección de leyes, decretos, etc., referentes al Departamento de Loreto, tomo 3, p. 506.
7. M. J. Pinzás, Diario de la exploración de los ríos Palcazu, Matro y Pachitea (Huanuco, 1870).
8. Colección de leyes, decretos, etc., referentes al Departamento de Loreto, tomo 3, p. 531.
9. Registro oficial del Departamento de Loreto (1900), 10.
10. La montaña (1899), 26.
11. J. Delebecque, A Travers l’Amérique de Sud (1907).