The Best American Travel Writing 2013

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Aware that to tamper with this fragile system of survival would be to undermine the poor population’s ability to subsist, the Peruvian government has been slow to outlaw child labor. Peru was one of the last Latin American countries to ratify the United Nations convention that prohibited children under the age of 14 from working (ILO/UN #138). Even so, although Peru finally signed that document in May 2001, the mining boom that immediately followed made it difficult to enforce the law. To do so would mean Peru would have to pull 50,000 children from the nation’s work force. And that is a very hard thing to do when business is booming and a country’s growth rate is among the highest in the world.

  Few places expose the dark side of the global economy more starkly than the lawless 25-acre cesspool of La Rinconada. For every gold ring that goes out into the world, 250 tons of rock must move, a toxic pound of mercury will spill into the environment, and countless lives—biological and botanical—will struggle with the consequences. It doesn’t take a social scientist or a chemist to walk through that wasteland and reckon the costs.

  For a girl like Senna, there is a further danger, very different from the toxins, vectors, and violence that plague her town. La Rinconada is a humming beehive of brothels, looking for girls precisely her age. A lawyer and social worker, Leon Quispe, who has dedicated himself to the welfare of the community, estimates that anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 girls, some as young as 14, move through La Rinconada’s cantinas in any given year. They are held captive as sexual slaves. Some come from as far away as the slums of Lima, but most hail from little villages around Puno and Cuzco—a sad cavalcade of gullible girls who arrive in La Rinconada believing they will wait on tables, sell food, and earn good tips; that they’ll be able to send their destitute families some measure of stable income. In their enthusiasm, they hand over their identity cards to a sweet-talking recruiter. What they learn when they arrive is that it isn’t food they will be selling. Their bodies will be the commodities, and the prices have been long established: sex with a bargirl costs a man a few drinks and a few extra soles; a young girl’s hymen is worth a seed of gold.

  La República, one of Peru’s major newspapers, explained the racket via a single story: Two 16-year-old girls from a tiny village outside Cuzco were approached in a public park by a woman they knew, a former neighbor. She offered them $500 a month to work at a restaurant in the airport city of Juliaca—all benefits included. Since they were virtually penniless, they readily agreed. But the only time the girls spent in Juliaca was the time it took to change buses. Four hours later, they were in a dilapidated bar in La Rinconada, in time for the miners’ change of shifts. It was then that they learned they were obliged to consort with men, offer them sex. They were told the rules: If a man touched their breasts or genitals, they were not to rebuff him. They would be given a ticket for every six bottles of beer their clients consumed. One ticket was worth 4 Peruvian soles, or $1.25. Whatever sex they might negotiate would be traded at a more favorable rate: the proprietor would only take half. The girls quickly found that they had no way to exit that nightmare: they had no papers, no means to travel; and a surly guard with a knife was at the door.

  The cantinas in La Rinconada are 24-hour-a-day operations. They do business out of slipshod edifices that climb up the road willy-nilly, alongside the gold-burning shops. During the day, miners come for a beer or to have their mercury-laden nuggets fired down to pure gold. The crude furnaces sit out where everyone can see them, spewing mercury into the open air; the fumes snake through the cantinas and float out onto the glacial snow, La Rinconada’s primary water source. Mercury levels in those public spaces are 5,000 percent higher than what is permissible in regulated factories. But here, no one is measuring. Women and children hurry through the murky haze, hawking their food and water. The sick struggle in and out of doorways, breathing the deadly air. At night, when the drinking establishments turn into brothels, La Rinconada descends through every circle of hell. A deafening music pounds; drunks reel through the open sewage; food vendors traipse through the phantasmagoria as if it were a happy carnival, and small children flit past, laughing and falling into the toxic mud. Downstairs in the brothels, the young girls are lined up against the walls, their faces resolute and grim. Upstairs, by the light of a thousand flickering strobes, sex is traded, violence runs riot, and buckets of urine are tossed from windows as the poor drink away their hard-won gold.

  It isn’t a pretty picture. But so famous has La Rinconada become for its wanton nightlife that village boys for miles around come to work in the mines, have sex with women, and drink all the beer they can. A schoolteacher from Puno explained that often the boys are never the same after their journey to the frozen mountain: they drop out, leave home, and go on to a life of profligacy and ruin.

  A life of profligacy and ruin was precisely what Juan Ochochoque did not want for his children. He had worked all his life to feed them, house them, give them what he could. Although he was illiterate—although he had never stepped foot inside a school—he began to counsel Senna, who was all of five when they began to cook together over their tiny ethyl stove, that education was her only way out of the grind of poverty. How he knew it is anyone’s guess. There was nothing in Juan Ochochoque’s past to suggest he would value an education, except for a vague perception he seemed to have about the prevailing power structure: the engineers who ran La Rinconada read and wrote; they knew mathematics, physics. A hierarchy was at work, and it involved knowledge and intelligence. He wanted his children to have that advantage. His wife, Leonor, did not necessarily agree. As far as she was concerned, the family needed to make ends meet, and that meant immediate results—not the sort of long-term, hard-won investment that education entailed.

  By the time Senna was 10, her father was dead. His bloated body—shot through with chemical toxicity—had reached the crisis point as he left a bus at the foot of Mount Ananea, trying desperately to find a cure. It gave out suddenly as Leonor helped him to struggle across the road. Juan Ochochoque’s long battle with La Rinconada’s poisons was over, but the lesson he left his daughter refused to die: it was he who had pointed out, as his little girl puttered about alongside him, telling him stories, making up ditties, that she was good at words, good at digging out the right ones, good at polishing them to a fine shine; she was a miner of a different kind.

  Which brings me to the crux of this story.

  I had gone to La Rinconada precisely because of Senna’s words. I had seen a video of her telling the story of her father’s illness and the wreckage it had left behind. Throughout her story, she summoned allusions to the heartbreaking poetry of César Vallejo, using his words to express what she felt. I had never heard, in all my years sitting at dinner tables with the Lima elite, such easy familiarity with Vallejo’s poems. I had been charged by a film company, the Documentary Group, with the task of finding a Peruvian girl in a poor community: a child whose story might be documented by the award-winning American director Richard Robbins in a movie about poverty around the world. His advance film party had shot videos of young girls in the Amazon jungle, of girls in the icy reaches of La Rinconada and Cerro Lunar. Senna was not particularly photogenic. She was shy in front of the camera. Hunched and incommunicative, she didn’t seem like a good candidate for a feature film. But when she started to speak, when she pulled Vallejo’s words from the air to describe her pain—“There are blows in life, so powerful”—a flame seemed to grow within her. I was riveted. “Blows like God’s fury—like a riptide of human suffering rammed into a single soul . . . I don’t know.”

  Social science now tells us that if we can take indigent girls between the ages of 10 and 14 and give them a basic education, we can change the fabric of an entire community. If we can capture them in that fleeting window, great social advances can be achieved. Give enough young girls an education and per capita income will go up; infant mortality will go down; the rate of economic growth will increase; the rate of HIV/AIDS infection will fall. Chi
ld marriages will be less common; child labor, too. Better farming practices will be put into place, which means better nutrition will follow, and overall family health in that community will climb. Educated girls, as former World Bank official Barbara Herz has written, tend to insist that their children be educated. And when a nation has smaller, healthier, better-educated families, economic productivity shoots up, environmental pressures ease, and everyone is better-off. As Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard University president, put it: “Educating girls may be the single highest return investment available in the developing world.” Why is that? Well, you can make all the interpretations you like; you can posit the gendered arguments; but the numbers do not lie.

  The irony in all this is that young girls like Senna are hardly valued in La Rinconada. The girls and women of that harsh, remote mining town may well be the community’s most promising resource, but the overwhelmingly male culture of the mountain leaves little choice for a young adolescent female but to follow her mother to the cliff and perpetuate a cycle of ignorance and poverty.

  All the same, there are signs that the overall business of gold mining in Peru may be facing significant corrections. In 2006, residents of villages near the largest gold-mining operation in all of South America, the U.S.-owned Newmont Mining Corporation’s Yanacocha Project, just outside the historic city of Cajamarca, blocked the roads and declared that they had had enough of the company’s toxic and predatory practices. A bloody standoff between the mine’s armed security forces and the residents of Cajamarca followed. Five protesters were killed. By the end of 2011, the mineworkers were radicalized; they called a strike against Newmont’s new Minas Conga Project. Their complaints were loud and clear: the workers were operating in wretched conditions, the environment was being ravaged, the toxicity of chemical waste was proving ruinous to public health.

  Indeed a German scientist claims that the once sparkling lakes that surround Cajamarca are dangerously tainted and the 2 million residents of that city are at risk. But there is more than environmental despoliation at issue here: once Peruvian ore is excavated, processed, and the gold shipped abroad, Peru retains a mere 15 percent of Newmont’s annual $3 to $4 billion profits. The protesters and strikers in Cajamarca became so outraged about such injustices that troops in riot gear were called out to contain what was perceived as a larger threat to the Peruvian economy. On July 4, a priest who was an outspoken leader of the protest movement was taken by force from a bench in a public park, arrested, and roughed up before he was let go. President Ollanta Humala, who had won the presidency on a socialist vote, now said with unequivocal free-market conviction that Conga would continue to mine, albeit with stricter government oversight. Peru’s boom, in other words, is sacrosanct. Gold trumps water; and world markets take precedence over people.

  In June of this year, La Rinconada followed Cajamarca’s suit. Although La Rinconada is an “informal” operation with no one but Peruvians to blame for its troubles, workers emptied the mines, shut down the schools, and put down a collective foot: they called for the Peruvian government to give them water, a sanitation system, paved roads, health clinics, heightened security, child care, a better school, and all the attendant benefits a producing economic sector deserves. The nonprofit organization CARE is willing to help ameliorate the situation and, after having abandoned La Rinconada as hopeless some years ago, has sent representatives up the mountain again. In April, the head of CARE Peru, Milo Stanojevich, made the difficult trip to see the evidence for himself. But it’s a risky business. The inhabitants of La Rinconada are all too aware of the proverbial “Beware of what you wish for.” With government gifts come government regulations, and that means federal taxes, the marginalization of cachorreo workers, and the very real possibility that the work from which women and children now make a subsistence living—the sweeping, the pallaqueo, the chichiqueo—will be outlawed.

  To Senna, the strikes in La Rinconada, which continue even as I write, have meant something more potentially harmful: school, in which she has invested all hope for a brighter future—which she had promised her dying father she would attend—has been shuttered, its doors bolted. The teachers in La Rinconada, after all, are miners who work there for extra cash; so school, for better or worse, is tied intimately to the mines. Even in this, even in education, a child’s life is contaminated by gold’s offal. But it’s not the first time Senna has faced adversity. One gets the feeling that the seed of survival, planted so carefully by her father, will take root and flourish anyway. If a girl is motivated enough to save her hard-earned pennies, buy a dog-eared pamphlet of poetry from her teacher, and memorize whole pages of verse, that girl stands poised to redirect her future, make Herculean changes—a woman warrior, indeed. She will learn; she will open that door to a better world. And, if the social scientists are right, a whole village will follow.

  CHRISTOPHER DE BALLAIGUE

  Caliph of the Tricksters

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  ON A VISIT several years ago to Afghanistan, in a Kabul restaurant of the better kind, I met a policeman named Hossein Fakhri. A laconic, handsome, tense sort of man, Fakhri had been introduced to me as a police officer whose loves were literature and the city of his birth. Speaking in Persian, Afghanistan’s literary language, we discussed Kabul and the writers and poets who live there. So much had happened to the city in its recent history, I said, that it wasn’t easy for an outsider like me, visiting at some arbitrary point in events, to arrive at a settled view of the place. My opinion seemed unduly contingent on the latest suicide bombing, or land-grab scandal, or my sense of the Taliban at the gates. “That,” Fakhri said, “is no way to look at a city.”

  Before he got up to return to work, Fakhri presented me with an edition of his short stories. It was called The Roosters of Babur’s Garden. He advised me to read the title story, adding, “I think you’ll find there is something of Kabul in that.” After he had gone, I ordered a pot of green tea and opened the book.

  “The Roosters of Babur’s Garden” is narrated by a boy whose father, a poor Kabuli, sells his patch of dry, stony land and buys a three-month-old pedigree cockerel. Cherished by his new owner, the cockerel grows into a fine adult, taut from exercise and energized by a diet of wheat seeds, worms, and almonds. The transformation extends to the owner, who seems to grow in confidence and stature along with his bird. “I’ve had black-flecked birds,” he boasts, “spotted ones, raisin-red and white birds, and bee-colored birds. I’ve had birds with up-standing combs, flat combs and floppy combs. A bird is a bird. But this one is something else. Woe betide the bird that is matched with this!”

  Cockfighting, I learned from Fakhri’s story, is not simply about pedigree and preparation. Luck is also essential, for only in the pit will a bird’s true martial abilities show themselves. Is he wild and unthinking, a “tyrant” who exhausts himself after a quarter of an hour, or a stayer, his resolve growing as the shadows lengthen and his rival starts to weaken? Does he have a particular trick, such as thrusting his head under one of his adversary’s legs and forcing him to hop around, draining him of energy? It is better to strike rarely but lethally, in those very tender “death places,” the eyes and chest, than to land blow upon blow on a rival’s feathery armor. Finally, and most important, will the cock fight until victory, no matter how valiant his opponent? In losing, the cock dishonors not only himself but his owner, too.

  So it proves in “The Roosters of Babur’s Garden.” One icy winter’s morning, father and son take their bird to the opening bout of the season. The fights take place in the ruined garden in which the 16th-century Mughal emperor Babur was buried. The rookie clucks and crows impressively, and a match is found, with a mean-looking specimen, dirty and unkempt. But the ragamuffin turns out to be deadly, and over the course of a long and terrible fight the poor Kabuli’s bird weakens and eventually takes a spur in the eye.

  The cock’s defeat is bloody, but Fakhri is equally interested in the demise of his own
er. The crowd rains derision on the stricken bird, and the boy wishes his father were “safe inside the four walls of home, under his bedclothes, where no one but God could see him.” His sympathy does not last, however, for suddenly the enraged father seizes the dying cock and slits his throat. “Stony-hearted!” someone exclaims. “Mad!” someone else calls out, and the boy runs home in shame.

  Reading the story, and rereading it after returning home to England, I found myself drawn to the idea of a literary sensibility engaging in so savage a pursuit. Cockfighting is a blood sport par excellence. There is no ulterior motive, no equivocating about killing in order to eat, as there is with shooting game or fishing, or about killing vermin, as is the case with fox hunting. Cockfighting is pure vicarious violence, and the sport has been marginalized to the point of extinction. Although illegal, it endures in pockets of America, and in one or two parts of Europe it has been preserved by local laws as a relic of the old decadence. Not so in Afghanistan, where civil war of one kind or another has been waged for the past three decades and combat is for many the most salient fact of life. Cockfighting is outlawed in Afghanistan, but not for the reason it is outlawed in virtually all American states and most of Europe—that it is cruel. It is illegal in Afghanistan because its association with gambling brings it into conflict with Islamic law.