by Stafford, Ed
It was now the beginning of August and Elias, Jonathan and I walked through one indigenous community after another in somewhat of a haze. In each settlement we are offered masato, a fermented drink that the women make by chewing yucca and spitting it into a bowl. Their saliva is vital to the fermentation process and the resulting product is a slightly alcoholic milky drink. It is offensive to refuse a drink and I hadn’t yet worked out that you could politely decline the refills so we drank litres of this rank fermented fluid all day long.
The indigenous communities made me nervous. For their part, the Ashaninka people were equally nervous of me. These were the most authentically unchanged tribal people I would meet during the entire length of my journey and a large part of me wished I’d had more experience at the time so that I could have relaxed and enjoyed the whole thing more. But the expedition was what it was and I just had to adapt and learn and soak up as much as I could. I tried hard to relax but I was so far out of my comfort zone that I never really managed it.
The Ashaninka men and women wore single-piece brown or blue garments called cushmas, not much more than sacks, really, that were hand-woven using a traditional method. Both men and women were short, no one over five foot six, and wore lots of beaded jewellery and red face paint, often in a thin line crossing their noses from cheek to cheek. Very few wore shoes and many walked around with a bow and arrow in one hand. Most conversation took place in the Ashaninka language and I spoke Spanish to Jonathan and Elias, trying to get the gist of what everyone was saying. A handful of missionaries had come into some of the communities in the past by boat but everyone agreed I was the first white man ever to enter their villages on foot.
Jonathan had to leave us and head home as he had heard over the HF radio that his daughter was sick. I was sorry to see him go; he’d been a feisty presence and I would miss his energy and impatience to get things done fast. A very atypical South American indeed.
On his last night I lay in my hammock writing my journal when he dragged me out of my dreaming: ‘Estafford! Estafford! Come and drink with us!’ He had bought a 10-litre bucket of masato from the nativos and wanted me to drink it with him. When I declined the kind offer from my hammock he slunk up to me and said I had to pay a hundred soles (£20) for the bucket anyway.
‘Vete la puta!’ were the last words I ever said to Jonathan. ‘Fuck off!’
The next morning as Elias and I continued everything felt very sombre and quiet without our cocky friend. Eventually we reached a community, Pamakiari, which said ‘No’. I could not pass. The locals were visibly frightened by my arrival and gathered to share their alarm and shout at me. Elias and I had buckets of water thrown over us and one woman smeared red plant dye all over my face with her hands.
One of the women at the back of the group stuck out in particular. She was much taller, about six foot, slim and white like a Westerner but wearing the same traditional face paint and Ashaninka beaded jewellery. I stared at her, unsure as to what or who she was, and she caught my gaze. She stepped forward. ‘Are you English?’ she asked in a well-spoken English accent. ‘My name is Emily.’
‘Do you know where you are?’ Emily continued accusingly. ‘Do you have any idea what these people have been through?’ I was torn between elation at having found a person that I could speak to properly and being embarrassed at my lack of knowledge about the Ashaninkas.
The villagers let us speak but Emily was initially noticeably wary about being overly friendly to me. I was later to find out that she was an Italian anthropologist, and that she had spent months working with the Ashaninkas from a nearby town before they trusted her enough to let her visit and then eventually live in one of their communities in order to study their culture.
She acted as a mediator as Elias was too young to have any influence with the men and women, all of whom were very unhappy about my presence. I was asked if I had a permit from CARE, the indigenous organisation that oversaw the Ashaninkas on the River Ene. I admitted I hadn’t even been aware there was such an organisation. I felt stupid, naive and unprepared. The Ashaninkas refused my offers of gifts and sent me down to the river to wait for a boat. I was not allowed to pass. Emily watched me pick up my pack and walk down to the river with Elias. I had no idea what to do. The place they were telling me that I needed to go was Satipo, hundreds of kilometres away, down the river by boat and then taxi. It was the town of I had sent Oz through on his way home.
As Elias sat and waited and I washed my red face in the brown river, Emily came down to the water. She told me that, coincidentally, she was going out to Satipo that day with some of the village elders and that there was space in the boat. We could accompany her.
I could have hugged Emily at that point. She had no idea how close to tears and wretched I was feeling and she was offering help. With Emily, Elias and several Ashaninka elders, I climbed into the little boat and set off back downriver to Puerto Ocopa where Elias lived and where the River Ene accesses the outside world via one dusty road.
Once on the boat, Emily relaxed. Less under the gaze of the community, we sat together in the well of the boat on the wooden floor and with a smile she handed me a menthol cigarette. I could have kissed her. She’d washed the red Indian paint from her face now, too, and her long curls hung over her confident yet feminine Mediterranean face. The normality of her presence, watching her soft lips draw on her cigarette and the kind way that she started to explain the history of the Ashaninkas made my chest start to glow from within.
There had been huge problems with horrifying violence in this area in the past and the Ashaninkas on the Ene suffered terribly at the hands of the Shining Path, communist terrorists attempting to take over Peru. The government at the time armed the Ashaninkas with modern weapons and they fought back violently. That said, whole generations of Ashaninka males were wiped out and few women over the age of twenty-five escaped being repeatedly raped and beaten during the onslaught. A new threat was petroleum companies that wanted to come and extract oil from under the Ashaninkas’ feet – this was already happening on other rivers in the area. On top of that, the coca invasions (colonial Peruvians taking over indigenous lands by force or trickery) were closely linked with illegal logging and it was no surprise that the Ashaninkas looked upon every outsider as a threat.
The water throwing, Emily told me, was a way of turning a serious subject into a light-hearted one – the people were genuinely scared of us but they were kind-hearted and didn’t want any trouble. Emily told me that the previous morning a woman had thrown water over a man who had just beaten up his wife while drunk. The message was serious without using force.
Emily said she would introduce me to CARE and help me get a permit from them to enable me to continue my walk. She was putting her reputation and trust with these people on the line for a stranger and in my exhausted, paranoid state I have to admit I was pretty taken with Emily and her long, slim legs.
I took her advice and bought 800 soles’ worth of presents for the Ashaninka villagers. The bundle consisted mostly of antibiotics, painkillers and hard-boiled sweets, and CARE were convinced of my good intentions and granted me a permit. They had originally suggested taking machetes and shovels for the communities but medication was agreed upon because it was light and we had to carry everything on our backs. They even gave me a guide to walk with from their organisation called Oscar who knew the communities and was trusted. Setting off with abundant gifts, a permit and a trusted Ashaninka guide, I felt that things were back on track. I had spent a few nights in a hotel in a town and I had enjoyed meals out with Emily eating pizza, drinking red wine and chatting about our lives at home. I felt like a new man and was ready for the River Ene once again. With everything now in place, what could possibly go wrong?
Oscar was an Ashaninka of about my age and had the mullet hairstyle of an eighties German footballer. He’d asked me for an advance on his wages the day before. As I gave it to him I thought, ‘I’m only doing this because he is part of CARE and I have to trus
t him.’ Oscar was very happy and we agreed to meet at his hostel at seven the following morning.
At 7.01 I banged on Oscar’s door in the dark hostel. No response. Had he disappeared? Damn, this was frustrating! I had already paid him and now I didn’t have a guide. I asked the hostel owner when he had left and she told me he was still in his room – sleeping. I banged again. Actually, I smashed at the door relentlessly with my fist shouting, ‘Oscar! Buenos dias, amigo!’ At about 7.20 the entire hostel was awake and pretty unhappy with me; then, finally, the door opened a crack to reveal two bloodshot eyes trying to focus on me from the gloom and the stench within. Oscar was absolutely wrecked. The fumes of cheap liquor made me step back a pace. ‘Great!’ I smiled. ‘The boat is waiting! Let’s go, my friend!’ Oscar grabbed his tiny knapsack and I bundled him into the taxi that would take us to the port. He went straight to sleep but I didn’t care. The journey back to where we wanted to resume the walking was two days away by boat; he had plenty of time to sleep off his hangover.
More than thirty hours later the boat pulled up back in Pamakiari. The woman who had thrown water over me was there as I stepped on to the shore. Oscar explained to her that he was here to guide me and that I now had written permission from CARE. Oscar was the important bit really as she couldn’t read or write so the paper was meaningless. She smiled at me from behind her harsh black fringe as if to say, ‘I’ll let you off this time then!’ and went about her business.
As it was morning we didn’t stay in the community as we could get a fair bit of walking done. The amount of time this travelling back and forth was taking had made me start to worry about my schedule and I wanted to get the River Ene behind me now. We walked through fields of yucca and then on hunters’ trails through the jungle. Where we could, Oscar would rope in the services of another man to show us the way to the next community as he didn’t know the paths and it was very easy to get disorientated in the green maze of secondary jungle.
Arriving in most communities still made me apprehensive – despite Oscar’s presence. He and I got on well enough but there was no real connection and I was aware that his loyalty was with the people rather than me and that I was very dependent on him.
After two days we arrived in a community that looked very civilised with thatched houses surrounding a well-kept football pitch. We dumped our packs under one of the huts and Oscar left to go and seek out the village chief. I sat and waited for him. And waited. I started to get uncomfortable. When Oscar finally came back he looked concerned.
‘Put the camera away and come with me,’ he said.
‘Huh?’ I stalled, hearing Oscar but not wanting to comply. If something was about to happen I wanted to film.
‘Put the camera away,’ Oscar repeated. He looked worried so I obeyed.
We walked out of the centre of the village to a site where a school was being built. Oscar led the way and pointed the chief out to me. As I walked towards him to introduce myself and shake his hand I was soaked with a bucket of dirty water. The girl who had thrown it was shouting angrily in Ashaninka. High-pitched staccato words stabbed at me along with the filthy water.
The next bucket was full of sloppy concrete, followed by two more of the same. As I looked around at all the villagers who were surrounding me none of them were laughing. I felt remarkably calm although slightly pathetic, completely covered in watery concrete. The girl then started pushing the wet concrete mixture into my mouth. The women were shrieking at me, alarmed and angry, but I was sure I could detect sympathy in the eyes of the quiet men as they looked on.
‘We should leave,’ I said to Oscar, spitting out sand and cement. I shook the hand of the village president and thanked him. We turned and headed towards the river – Oscar was clearly unsettled as we walked but he said nothing. Then, once at the river, he told me that the community downriver was waiting with what I translated as a ‘pile of spines’ to throw at me.
Oscar explained to me that this was serious because they thought that I was from an Argentine oil company, Pluspetrol. They had received a message the previous day from CARE over the HF radio to be prepared for gringos arriving to steal their oil from below their territory. Then I had turned up.
It was a perfectly understandable mistake on the part of the Ashaninkas. I was white and my timing was appalling. I couldn’t help thinking that CARE might have timed their warning message a bit better with regards to me but I wasn’t really their problem. Oscar said we could not continue because he had been thrown out of the community, too, and so there would now be distrust between CARE and this community. It was a mess and Oscar said he was not prepared to continue walking with me. I asked him if he would do so on the other side of the River Ene – the predominantly colonial side – but as an Ashaninka he was scared to walk on that side and said that the narcos were too dangerous.
We inflated the pack rafts and first paddled to the far side of the river so that I could mark the position with my GPS. Once happy that I could find the point again when I returned, we started paddling downstream. I was unsettled: I had managed only two further days’ walking with Oscar and the all-important permits and was now heading back to Puerto Ocopa again. I was questioning why I was returning with Oscar but my tiredness and the ordeal of having the community so upset with me made the draw of the town enticing. I needed to find someone else to walk with now, perhaps a non-Ashaninka so that I could continue on the narco side. The nativos were worrying me far more than the narcos now and so my thoughts were concentrated on the left (west) bank of the river. Once we were a little distance away Oscar and I sat back and just floated with the current.
That night I had a fascinating talk with a man in the port. He told me that the nativos in that part were ‘bad’ and stood in the way of progress for Peru. He was repeating verbatim the propaganda that was being pumped into the Peruvian people by President García. Television advertisements constantly reminded everyone that ‘Peru Advances’ with shiny happy people extracting oil and other natural resources. It made me feel sick as I knew the Ashaninkas had no part in this prosperous future.
The next day Oscar and I travelled back to Satipo where Emily showed me a map revealing that a whopping 100 per cent of the Peruvian Amazon (outside of the few protected areas) was now allocated for resources extraction of some kind. An astonishing law stated that Peruvians owned their land only down to five metres below the surface. The government was able to sell the drilling rights from beneath the Ashaninka territory to international companies and the indigenous people had no say at all. That is what had just happened on the River Ene. That is what the communities were defending themselves against. I couldn’t help but take sides – although the Ashaninkas had thrown me out I completely understood why and started to become quite proud of their fierce defensive spirit.
Emily spoke of other parts of Peru where the oil companies had already started extracting and where native communities had been irreversibly changed. The process was dirty and pollution (largely from spills in transportation) was high, leaving rivers filthy and void of fish. The locals were often compensated with salaries such as $1,000 a month. Enough to live like a king in the communities and to be permanently drunk – which is what often happens alongside a sharp rise in domestic violence. When beer, or, even worse, liquor is brought into communities the traditional values break down completely. Emily told me that after every party in her community about a third of the women would be beaten severely by their drunken partners. Every time.
The Ashaninkas’ reaction to me was actually good to see. They only wanted to protect their land and their lifestyle and I hoped they could do both. I wished them well and didn’t want to upset them more and so I planned to stick to the western bank for the remainder of the River Ene.
Back in Satipo I was emotionally drained. I put the word out that I was looking for a guide but those who said ‘yes’ were not quite right or wanted to charge high prices that I couldn’t afford. With some resignation I came to the conclusio
n that I would have to walk alone. I would stick to the river beaches on the left as the water level was low and I would walk with my raft permanently inflated and strapped to my rucksack so that I could make a quick escape if I ran into trouble. It was a risky plan because without a guide I felt much more vulnerable.
Just before I was due to leave, Emily said that the brother of a friend of hers was looking for work. He was a forestry worker and knew the area to the west of the River Ene well. Emily arranged for me to meet Gadiel Sanchez Rivera.
Chapter Six
Gadiel ‘Cho’ Sanchez Rivera
WE MET IN the dingy kitchen at his brother’s house in Satipo. He looked smart and intelligent, had neatly trimmed hair and had ironed his shirt and trousers. I’d brought some maps with me for us to look at. He pored over them thoughtfully, rubbing his African-looking lips, pointing out the areas he knew and the areas we should avoid. He wisely wanted to go in quickly, get the job done and get out. He said he understood bits of Ashaninka as he’d spent a lot of time living in the remote areas where Ashaninkas don’t speak any Spanish. He’d been forced to understand the basics in order to communicate with them. We made our plan and shook hands.
Gadiel – known as Cho (rhymes with Joe) to his friends – and I returned to the river via the now very familiar journey: a couple of hours from Satipo to Puerto Ocopa in a taxi then a full day from Ocopa to Quiteni in a passenger boat. We would overnight in Quiteni, on the western, colonial, side then make our way to where I had kissed the western bank in my pack raft and logged a position in my GPS with Oscar. From there the plan was to use a new logging road to head into the mountains, away from the river and avoid the fiercer, less frequently contacted tribes of the lower Ene. The route would still be unbroken but would just take us a little further away from the river than I’d been used to.
From Quiteni I wrote this diary entry: