Lima’s elites had failed to integrate the Andean region into the nation, except by extending neocolonial forms of subjection through violence. During Peru’s war with Chile, when Lima’s power faltered, Andean militias rose up, and there were again intimations of native rebellion in the highlands. They then had to be put down yet again, by a government that was nearly broke. There was a long history of Peruvian elites putting down Andean social movements, and then turning in on themselves. Lima’s closed society reflected the country’s inability to integrate its native peasantry.
Perhaps the most consequential example of this dynamic is the so-called Túpac Amaru rebellion. In 1778, an Indian nobleman named José Gabriel Condorcanqui adopted the name of the last Inca emperor, Túpac Amaru, and rebelled against the colonial order, seeking British support for the reinstatement of the Inca empire. Native revolts were especially dangerous when they had powerful allies who might provide guns, and the idea that there might be an independence movement, orchestrated as a caste war and leading to the re-emergence of the long-repressed Inca empire, frightened Peruvian elites, while it became a kind of messianic referent for its revolutionaries.
Túpac Amaru led a broad-based rebellion of a scale that was unprecedented in colonial times, and it took the authorities almost two years and a large standing army to put it down. One effect of this rebellion was that it made Lima’s elite especially fearful of class warfare and Indian uprisings. Indeed, when the wars of independence began throughout Spanish America, thirty years later, Lima’s Euro-American elites cast their lot with the Spaniards and mostly remained passive. As a result, Peruvian national independence occurred by conquest, and it was claimed by an Argentine criollo, José de San Martín, who led what was essentially an invading army in order to “free” Peru.
It is true that the specter of caste war and slave rebellion made criollos anxious everywhere in Spanish America. Haiti’s 1803 slave revolt and independence in particular was mobilized as an instrument of royalist propaganda, but many criollos supported independence regardless of these fears, and worked to build alliances with sectors of their popular classes. In Peru, however, recent memory of the Túpac Amaru rebellion made native elites especially fearful and conservative.
And neither was Lima’s fear of the natives dispelled after independence, because Indian rebellion always remained a latent possibility that reared itself in moments of elite fragmentation, such as during the war against Chile, for instance. In other words, Lima’s traditionalism was at least in part a defense mechanism of a ruling class that governed a deeply fragmented, neocolonial society, where native serfs were often suspected of pining for reinstating the Inca kingdom, the Tawantinsuyu.
But in times of peace, like the 1920s, Lima’s traditionalism was more apt to be read by Americans as just a quaint and ineffectual relic. So, for instance, in Hans Otto Storm’s rather tedious novel Pity the Tyrant, which is set in Lima during the final days of Augusto Leguía’s regime, the author dwells on the romance between an American business traveler and a Chilean woman “from a good family” (de buena familia), who cedes to his sexual advances with disarming ease, only later to flare up in anger, in what for the American is an irrational show of jealousy, prompted by the fact that he has begun courting another woman.95 First the woman is loose, then she is possessive. Above all, she is nonsensical, while the eminently reasonable American guiltlessly profits from her absurdity.
To my mind, there is an interesting side to this particular instance of imperialist superiority, which is its playful instrumentality. The traveler is never really lost in his passion, never ensnared by it. He is at once earnest and self-interested, good-hearted and abusive. More than the all-consuming passions that one finds, say, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the main character’s alter ego, Kurtz, is forever lost to the “darkness” of the Congo River, American writing and reportage on Peru rarely seems to break ties with American belonging. Peru provided mementos and trophies that would all be enjoyed back at home in good time.
Richard Halliburton showing his “beautiful señorita” to the American public after enticing her to dress up as an “authentic Limeña.”
This logic of conquest was not confined to sex. Machu Picchu had been discovered by the world just recently, in 1911, by American explorer, Yale professor, and Indiana Jones prototype Hiram Bingham III. That stunningly beautiful place, the “lost city of the Incas,” gained instant fame as a beacon of the grandeur that the jungle hid away, and of all that remained to be discovered in Peru: the heights of Machu Picchu.
For the Peruvian radicals of Mariátegui’s circle the Andes were then rumbling with a new consciousness, the rumor of Indian revolt, which were also the birth pangs of a new nation. In 1915, Peruvian Sergeant Major Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas returned from exile in Argentina having embraced anarchism: he took on the Quechua nom de guerre Rumi Maqui (Hand of Stone) and led a broad-based Indian rebellion against the landowning class, with the goal of distributing land among the peasants, reinstating the Tawantinsuyu, the Inca state, and seceding from Lima’s control. The movement was brutally quashed, but not before touching the young Mariátegui and other Limeño intellectuals. In fact, Rumi Maqui’s revolt was one of the events that marked the close of Mariátegui’s bohemian moment as Juan Croniqueur, and initiated his definitive turn to revolutionary politics. Rumi Maqui also led Mariátegui to understand and defend the revolutionary power of Indian restoration, in other words, the revolutionary potential of myth, tradition, and native belief.
The first major writerly rendition of the immanence of Indian revolt was Luis Valcárcel’s Tempestad en los Andes (Tempest in the Andes), which was published around the same time as Halliburton’s entertaining but trivial book. It is a poetic account, narrated as an epic and myth, of the return of the repressed, wherein the Indians awake from the long night of colonial dominion: “It was a formless mass, ahistorical. It did not live, it seemed eternal like the mountains, like the sky. In its sphynx-like face, the empty sockets said it all: its absent eyes did not witness the procession of things. It was a people of stone.”96
Valcárcel created a poetry of native revolt, which began with such descriptions of a petrified Indian society, turned in on itself and living in the pain of conquest and oppression, and then finally awaking to a storm of revolution and collective affirmation. Machu Picchu was the most perfect image of that petrified existence: it was a secret, long-abandoned Inca city that had finally come out into the open.
The political awakening of the Peruvian countryside rang true for at least some — perhaps even many — Peruvians. But for most Americans, Peru’s greatness was thought to be lost in the past, and it could not be recovered by its own people, who were mired in endless, intractable, but also trivial and venial conflict. Thus Time magazine’s 1925 story tells of an American Episcopalian physician who was Leguía’s personal doctor, and who was rewarded for this service by the president in true banana republic fashion, with the bestowal of the mayoralty of Callao. Time then used the occasion to characterize the political situation in broad strokes: “Without becoming lurid, it may be baldly stated that no less than nine major revolutions and at least a score of minor revolts have been put down during the ten odd years in which Señor Leguía has worn the presidential sash of Peru.”
Time’s second article on Leguía, published with the fitting title “I…Eternal,” ridicules the president by quoting from an impassioned speech that he pronounced in the Chamber of Deputies while a coup against him was being set into motion: “No assassin’s bullet can destroy my work. It is eternal. Should I die, the assassin’s own hand will inscribe my name in history.” The American magazine’s naughty disdain for Peru’s president went hand in glove with its almost nonexistent coverage of Peruvian politics. It is in this respect a classic expression of the imperialist hubris that has accumulated over the years in America’s good-humored ignorance of the “Other America.”<
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Of course, there is no denying that Leguía, who characterized Peruvians as “a naive people with the mentality of a child, easy prey for the tricks of any clever or heartless person, like my detractors,” did his own bit in favor of the view that Spanish American politics was one continuous operetta. Socially, Peru was a bisected society, which meant that democratic politics could only develop with an authoritarian ingredient that relied heavily on inventing enemies and adversaries. Sadly, one of his farcical twists involved my grandparents directly. It took place on November 11, 1929.
The Jewish-communist plot
In keeping with all good farces, there were cosmic forces at work in the background of this one. The New York Stock Exchange had collapsed a few weeks prior, destabilized the Peruvian economy, and with it Leguía’s eleven-year reign. To emerge from this trouble, Leguía invented a useful distraction: a “Jewish-communist plot” that was allegedly being hatched in Mariátegui’s house.
The scandal was meant to draw public attention away from the governmental crisis long enough for Leguía to find allies who might prolong his tenure in office, such as the archbishop of Lima, Emilio Lissón. It also provided him with an excuse to arrest a couple of union leaders who were neither communists nor Jews but who were a thorn in his side, alongside a handful of Jews who might play the part of suspects in the public eye.97 There were several Jews in Mariátegui’s circle, but the closest to him were undoubtedly Misha Adler and Noemí Milstein. Both were arrested. Ironically, so was my great-grandfather Boris, who was a businessman who had fled the Russian Revolution, and could hardly be characterized as a communist.
On November 21, 1929, Mariátegui wrote a letter to his friend in Buenos Aires, the writer and editor Samuel Glusberg, telling him of the raid on his house and how the police had arrested members of his group and seized Amauta’s correspondence. He then mentioned that “among those arrested are Adler and his girlfriend, Noemí Milstein; and the persecution has a curious anti-Semitic character. It seems that all the Jewish peddlers are to be imprisoned, along with their suppliers and others. They are absurdly suspected of constituting an organization of agitators.”98
On day fifteen of the raid, Mariátegui wrote again, this time to the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who was living in Paris at the time, telling him that “many Jews remain in jail, among them Miguel Adler, director of Repertorio Hebreo, against whom there exists no other charge except for the leftist ideological tenor of his journal, his international correspondence, and his friendship with me. His girlfriend’s father has also been detained, a merchant distant from any ideological concerns.”99 And in yet another letter, Mariátegui writes to Costa Rican writer Joaquín García Monge, explaining that “the majority of those imprisoned have now been freed. Some still remain in police custody, such as Miguel Adler, director of Repertorio Hebreo and the principal victim of this first anti-Semitic gesture by the Peruvian police, and E. Saldías, a textile worker who represented different worker organizations in the Union Conference of Montevideo.”100
Leguía’s idea of stirring up an anti-Semitic demonstration may well have been inspired by an earlier experience: Lima’s 1909 anti-Chinese riots, which I brought up a couple of chapters ago. These had occurred during Leguía’s first presidency (1908–12). On that occasion, a rabble of Carlos de Piérola’s frustrated supporters against Leguía vented their frustration on Lima’s Chinese merchants, looting many businesses. Lima’s aristocratic mayor, Guillermo Billinghurst, condemned the violence, surely, but he also moved immediately to raze an alley of seedy tenements that were inhabited by as many as five hundred Chinese. The popularity of Billinghurst’s anti-Chinese one-upmanship was not lost on President Leguía, who then jumped onto the jingoistic bandwagon himself, and banned Chinese immigration from Peru altogether. Billinghurst, for his part, consolidated his popular base and later went on to be elected president. This experience with the political usefulness of xenophobia may have tempted Leguía to concoct his phony Jewish-communist plot.
There were, of course, risks that the ploy against Jewish communists might not work as well as the one against the Chinese. The Jews of Lima had not yet garnered the kind of popular animosity that was aimed at the Chinese, possibly because their numbers were more modest and they had not been in Peru as long, and because, despite the growing international influence of fascism and anti-Semitism, there was not yet much popular racism directed against them. This is probably the reason why Mariátegui was puzzled by the anti-Semitic turn that the government raid had taken. The move, in short, was more desperate and less effective than the government’s opportunistic co-optation of the 1909 anti-Chinese riots had been. Still, the specter of a Judeo-communist plot seemed like it might gain some traction in the press and in Lima’s middle classes, and in this way earn the government the one thing that it needed the most: time.
Based on chronologies that I tallied from Mariátegui’s correspondence, we know that the young Noemí perhaps spent around ten days in police custody. But Misha was cast as the principal suspect, and was sent to the island prison of El Frontón, where he spent perhaps two or three months.
El Frontón was Lima’s answer to Alcatraz. Sitting opposite the port of Callao, the island might have been seen by both Misha and Noemí from the ship when they first arrived in Peru, and then again on the occasions that took them to the baths or eateries of Callao, La Punta, or Chorrillos. Still, it was a dreaded place for all Limeños. Peruvian historian Carlos Aguirre writes that El Frontón prison was run like a slave plantation, down to the detail of having its own illegal cemetery for those who perished while working there. Prisoners were employed making pavement stones for the city of Lima, which was growing under Leguía, and Aguirre shows that the quarries turned a profit.101 But El Frontón needed at least 250 inmates at any given time to keep the business profitable, which meant that Lima’s vagrants were sometimes rounded up to provide workers for the island’s quarries.
Although the prison had only been inaugurated about a dozen years prior, by the time Misha was imprisoned the place was already a bit of a ruin. A 1932 official public health report found the jail’s buildings to be overcrowded, dilapidated, and filled with rodents and other vermin.102 One of my grandparents’ friends, the communist poet and journalist Angela Ramos, published an exposé of the living conditions in the prison just three years before Misha was sent there: prisoners ambled about like walking corpses, often bleeding because of poor working conditions in the quarries. Many inmates did not even know why they had been detained. The prison needed captives to get by, so its purpose was not limited to containing criminality.103
It seems that my grandfather was occupied there filling sacks of guano. I’m not sure whether that guano was locally mined or shipped in from other islands. In any case, this work involved breathing guano dust, so it caused a lot of illness. Misha was released from prison probably in January or February 1930, thanks to the intervention of his old friends from Nova Sulitza, several of whom had done well in the six years that had elapsed since their arrival in Lima, and were now in a position either to coax or to bribe government officials into releasing him. The condition, though, was deportation.
It is painful that the Peruvian government’s first-ever anti-Semitic intervention — an act that Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo has characterized as “Peru’s first pogrom” — affected Misha and Noemí so directly.104 It led to their expulsion from Peru, a country that they had come to love. Personal tragedy aside, the episode’s sinister nature also had its predictably farcical side. Leguía had orchestrated his little power grab by making use of the stereotypical figure of the Jewish-communist conspirator, using the Jew as a stock character, lifted in this case from the anti-Semitic literature that had begun circulating through Latin America since the days of the Dreyfus affair, in the 1880s and 1890s, and that culminated with the 1903 publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which cast Jews as a secret cabal whose miss
ion was to take over the world.
Such prefabricated images might have seemed a bit out of place in Peru, where nineteenth-century anti-Semitism was not an issue, since there were practically no Jews there, but in fact their effectiveness sprung precisely from their novelty. Starting in the mid-1890s, when the telegraph connected Europe to America via a transatlantic cable, in the daily news South America’s capitals became suffused with images of events and characters that had few or no local precedents: homosexual scandals, anarchist assassins, serial killers. Jewish plots and plotters were among such news items. So although Leguía’s claim of a Jewish-communist conspiracy seemed quite dubious, since it had no local precedent, it was credible to the extent that it was making a claim for Peru as a modern country, with all of the complicated problems of modern countries, including dealing with Jewish intrigue. The use of an image that was at once prefabricated and imported could distract and entertain the public, and thus buy the wily Augusto Leguía a little time to get out of a tight spot (yet again!).
Jorge del Prado, who was detained for two days in Lima’s El Sexto jail along with my grandparents, speaks of yet another aspect of Leguía’s operetta, namely the extortion to which the police subjected the Jewish peddlers that they had detained so that they might provide the plot with at least some vague semblance of credibility. Prado relates how Fernandez Oliva, “the shady chief of the state police during the Leguía regime, together with the Minister of Government, converted the farce into a lucrative business, particularly at the expense of Jewish merchants.”105 The police charged somewhere between one thousand and ten thousand Peruvian soles (between roughly US $5,000 and $42,000, adjusted for inflation) for each Jew to be allowed to leave jail.
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