by Joe Kane
That night the sun hung in the sky long after we had expected it to set, and though we were still a mile above sea level we dried quickly in the desert heat. We made camp on a stretch of fine white sand, and Chmielinski and Bzdak built a roaring driftwood fire.
In the morning we heard what sounded like small explosions or rockfall coming from somewhere across the river. Not for several days would we understand that this was small-arms fire, and that we were under attack.
10 • The Lower Apurimac (The Red Zone)
When we entered the lower canyon that first day below Triunfo it felt as if we had finally escaped the dark, constricted underworld of the middle Apurimac, but by the following day we knew better. There was more light in the broader canyon, but it revealed only hot, steep, yellow-red dirt walls, barren of vegetation, that appeared poised to tumble into the river at any moment. The canyon’s right-hand rim towered two miles above the river, the left almost that.
It was a ghostly, intimidating place, and the river herself seemed hell-bent to be somewhere else. The Pampas swells the Apurimac’s volume by about 25 percent, and while the corrosive power of this added mass widens the river, it also increases its gradient. The roller coaster gets wider and steeper and longer and faster, until the river appears to be a single unbroken chain of white water. The noise of these rapids drowns out every other sound in the canyon. Down on the water, paddling the raft, we had to shout to be heard more than a few feet apart.
That second afternoon in the lower canyon we took a break near a thick wire cable that ran from a boulder high on the left bank to one high on the right bank, a distance of perhaps seventy-five yards. In the hundred and fifty miles of river between Cunyac bridge and the marine garrison of Lechemayo, just below the river’s last major rapids, there are three such cables, or oroyas. Other than raft, they are the only means of crossing the river. There had been an oroya at the Cachora camp, and I had watched, amazed, as a Quechua man negotiated it hand over hand, his feet dangling high above the thrashing river, then hauled across behind him his wife, his child, and a bewildered cow affixed to the cable by ropes and two hand-carved wooden yokes.
According to what we had learned in Karquique, from the right-bank terminus of the oroya under which we were stopped a vague trail climbed to a pass at about twelve thousand feet, and from there descended into a region known as Vilcabamba. It was here, in a rugged, isolated land of snow peaks, swamps, and steep gorges—and not, as is so often claimed, in Machu Picchu—that the legendary “last refuge” of the Incas once flourished.
The story, briefly: Shortly after they occupied Cuzco in 1533, the Spanish installed a compliant young Inca prince, Manco, as a puppet ruler. Three years later, after the conquistadores had chained him up, called him a dog, pissed on him, raped his wives, and stolen his gold and jewelry, Manco rebelled. He laid siege to Cuzco for eight months before being forced to retreat. He fled north and west, and in 1539 settled in the remote Concevidayoc valley, near the eastern lip of the Apurimac canyon. There, he turned the sleepy village of Espíritu Pampa into a capital worthy of an Inca, building palaces and temples, fountains and bridges, canals and plazas. He called his city-state Vilcabamba.
It took the Spanish thirty-five years to conquer Vilcabamba. By then, Manco was dead, and his son Felipe Tupac Amaru ruled. The Spanish led Felipe from Vilcabamba at the end of a gold chain. The final chapter of the Inca empire closed in Cuzco’s main plaza, where Felipe was hanged and his body mutilated. After his execution the Spanish settled in Vilcabamba and profited from its sugar, coca, and silver for almost two hundred years. When those resources were gone they abandoned the valley.
Hiram Bingham, the American archeologist who in 1911 discovered what has become South America’s most famous ruin, Machu Picchu, also passed through Vilcabamba several times, but missed the city buried there. He went to his grave believing that Machu Picchu was the fabled lost city of the Incas. Not until another American, Gene Savoy, led expeditions to the region in 1964 and 1965 was Vilcabamba correctly identified. The ruins have largely been ignored since Savoy’s discovery, and the region itself is nearly uninhabited, a ghostly adjunct to the ghostly lower Apurimac canyon. According to Gregory Deyermenjian, an American who visited the site in 1986, only one thatch hut stands at Espíritu Pampa, and the nearby ruins are so overgrown that he, too, would have missed them had not a local man pointed them out.
As we departed the oroya we heard three sharp reports. We dismissed these as rockfall set off by the northwesterly headwind, which now blew so fiercely we were forced to kneel in the raft and paddle with heads lowered while Chmielinski counted stroke. After half an hour of this penance I glanced up and saw the canyon walls moving slowly past us in the wrong direction. The wind was blowing us upstream. When Bzdak and Durrant came to the same realization and collapsed in laughter, Chmielinski had no choice but to call it a day. The kayakers agreed, we pitched camp, and Chmielinski announced that we would wake at three-thirty the next morning and be on the water by dawn.
Which, bleary-eyed, we seemed to be. Light was just beginning to filter into the canyon as we loaded the raft and prepared to put it into the river at the top of a good-sized rapid. Chmielinski and I heard several whizzing sounds, followed by a series of the now-familiar reports. Suddenly Biggs shouted and pointed across the river, toward the canyon’s right wall. A few hundred yards above us six men were descending the wall. One of them knelt and put a rifle to his shoulder. A bullet zipped into the river two feet from where Truran sat in his kayak adjusting his spray skirt.
“Go!” Chmielinski yelled.
Never had I been so grateful to enter a rapid. At first I wasn’t so much frightened as overwhelmed. I had never been shot at, never watched a person try to kill me. It took a few moments to digest that idea. Then I was frightened, but at that point we were hidden in the rapid and hurtling away.
We ran the rapid, found fast, smooth water below it, and glided swiftly down the right side of the river. Half an hour later, we heard a deep rumbling directly opposite us, and turned to the left bank to see dozens of boulders and small rocks plummeting into the water. A plume of golden dust arched skyward. Had it been a natural avalanche? Or one deliberately set off?
Now the brown, barren canyon walls had eyes. Now they teemed with a life unseen but vividly imagined. As we paddled down the river we surveyed the walls for a trail, for any sign of man. We found none, but, distracted from the discipline of rafting the river, we shot a rapid without scouting it and vaulted sideways into a hole. The raft flipped and threw all four of us into the river.
As I reeled through the underwater turbulence I thought, “Hold on to the paddle,” for we were down to two spares. However, when my tumbling ceased and I began to rise to the surface, I thought something else altogether: Was I about to come up to a bullet in the head?
A shadow loomed above me. I reached up, grabbed the upturned raft’s center net, and pulled myself into the black, cavelike air pocket between river and floor. The raft dragged me along swiftly, my legs colliding with submerged rocks. I heard coughing and hacking, some of it my own, some Bzdak’s. The sounds caromed eerily off the raft’s rubber skin, and at first I didn’t realize that he was right next to me.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yah, yah,” he sputtered. He hacked twice to clear water from his air passages. Then, in a hoarse, urgent voice, he asked, “Where is Kate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have to get out.”
I reached under the tube and groped for the safety line on the outside of the raft. When I found it I went underwater, reluctantly, crossed under the tube, and popped out into daylight, the roar of the rapid, and canyon walls rushing past.
“Quickly up!” Chmielinski yelled from the top of the raft and extended a hand over to grab me.
Bzdak surfaced next to me. “Where is Kate?” he yelled.
“Up!” Chmielinski yelled back. He hauled me aboard, then Bzdak. When we had climbed onto t
he raft Bzdak asked again, more urgently than before, “Where is Kate?”
“There!” Chmielinski said. He pointed upstream, to the heart of the rapid, where a small round object was spinning around in the hole. Durrant’s head. Truran, who had worked his way upstream in the slower water along the right bank, kayaked into the froth, grabbed her, turned, and raced down to us. We paddled the raft behind a boulder and then, nerves jangling, yanked and tugged with our remaining rope until we righted it.
Biggs and Odendaal caught up with us a few minutes later. “Everyone all right?” Biggs asked. Our murmurs of assent were hardly emphatic. “Then we best move as quickly as we can,” he said. Odendaal said nothing, but he was smirking.
At the next rapid he spilled out of his boat and took a bad swim, and Truran, Chmielinski, Durrant, Bzdak, and I did a little smirking of our own.
Though the river was thick with fourth- and fifth-class rapids, that day we ran more of them than we usually did, and the few we lined we lined as quickly as we could. We ate lunch furtively, in a hidden, rock-walled nook, wondering if we had outrun our attackers, if we were safe. “I know I risk my life in my kayak,” Truran said, eating quickly from a can of tuna, “but at least I have some control over the situation. The river’s not an aggressor.”
Having entered the Red Zone, we assumed that the men who had attacked us that morning were members of the Sendero Luminoso. Over beers in Cuzco we had joked about the war between the government and the Senderistas, as the movement’s members are called, but none of us had taken it very seriously. In my notes I had commented only on the “poetic symmetry” to be found in the political history of the Apurimac canyon, whose rugged natural boundaries had protected the fledgling Inca state, formed one critical flank of Vilcabamba, spawned Tupac Amaru II, and now nurtured Peru’s bloodiest uprising since she won her independence from Spain in 1824.
We were not alone in our ignorance. In the nearly six years since the morning in 1980 when the guerrillas had announced their war of revolution by hanging dead dogs from lampposts in Lima (to protest China’s treatment of the Gang of Four), Peruvian authorities had failed to penetrate the group. The guerrillas had volunteered almost nothing about themselves, publishing in that time only three pithy communiqués. They were regarded as the fiercest and most uncompromising of the myriad guerrilla factions then operating in South America. The movement is the brainchild of Abimael Guzman Reynoso, who came to the National University of San Cristobal in Ayacucho (as it happens, Quechua for “corner of corpses”) in 1962 as an assistant professor of philosophy and founded the Sendero Luminoso a few years later. He is believed to have spent time in China in the mid-sixties and to have returned to Ayacucho convinced that Mao’s revolution could be replicated in Peru. Considered a brilliant, scholarly man, he built a strong following at the university, and by 1968 Senderistas were running the administration. Guzman, the director of personnel, instructed his supporters to learn Quechua and to spread the Maoist doctrine in the rural highlands. He went underground in 1978 and has not been seen since.
By 1985 Peruvian intelligence estimated the guerrillas’ numbers at two to four thousand armed soldiers and as many as fifteen thousand sympathizers, mostly rural Quechua in the highland departments of Ayacucho and Apurimac. At least six thousand people had died as a direct consequence of the war.
The Red Zone, which was under martial law, included most of the Apurimac canyon below the Pampas confluence. In late 1985, shortly before we began our navigation of the river, Peru’s minister of war announced that 80 percent of the Red Zone had been pacified and that the Senderistas had been isolated. Almost no one we spoke with in Peru believed this. The popular belief was that the conflict was intensifying, and that support for the guerrillas had spread nationwide. It appeared to be particularly strong in Lima, which in the year before we arrived had suffered over a thousand bombings. (Government figures would later show the hostilities claimed more than three thousand lives over the next year.)
As could be expected, the government maintained that the guerrillas were thugs and that they recruited mainly through intimidation and terror. According to the New York Times, however, a confidential national police report said that while one third of the conflict’s victims could be described as “communist terrorists” and two thirds as “civilians,” few were soldiers or police. This was a strong suggestion that many of the war’s atrocities were perpetrated not by the guerrillas but by agents of the state. Indeed, according to the report, most relatives who had witnessed abductions attributed them to national security forces. Several mass graves found in the Andes in 1984 held bodies later identified as those of people who had last been seen being detained by the police or military. According to a United Nations report, there were more “disappearances” in Peru in 1983 and 1984 than in Chile during the first six years of the Pinochet government. The worst abuses occurred in those rural areas controlled by the Peruvian marines, including the Red Zone.
For their part, in a rare public statement released in 1986, the Senderistas claimed responsibility for “more than thirty thousand actions in six years of popular war, five thousand actions each year, more than thirteen military actions daily. Every two hours, somewhere in Peru, there is a military attack.”
After lunch we resumed our travels at a furious pace, until, in mid-afternoon, we encountered a rapid that Chmielinski thought imprudent to run without scouting. We stopped the raft at a small beach on the right bank. While Bzdak and Durrant stayed with the boat, Chmielinski and I scurried through the cactus along the bank. We climbed a boulder and spotted the kayakers waiting in the calm water below the rapid, gesturing frantically for us to come ahead. Something was wrong.
I turned and ran for the raft.
As I leapt past Durrant and Bzdak, into the boat, two men charged from the bush. One of them held a submachine gun, the other what to my untrained eye looked like an ancient carbine.
Machine Gun was dead silent, but Rifleman screamed wildly, put his gun to Bzdak’s head, and demanded the raft’s lead line. Chmielinski stepped out from behind a boulder, hand outstretched as if to shake, but Machine Gun trained his weapon on him and Rifleman confiscated his watch and hunting knife.
“We are the Shining Path,” Rifleman yelled, as if challenging us to do something about it. Barefoot, wearing camouflage baseball hats, torn khaki fatigues, and holey soccer jerseys rolled up over hairless bellies, both men looked far more like working campesinos than a crack military cadre.
A dozen men emerged from the bush, several armed, all wearing the same sort of patchwork rags.
Machine Gun spoke for the first time. “Have you heard of us?” he asked.
“Yes,” Chmielinski said.
Machine Gun smiled and nodded to Rifleman. Then he turned back to Chmielinski and said, “Our captain attacked your camp this morning.”
Speaking Spanish in a low, easy voice, Chmielinski said, “We are not soldiers. We are not here to harm you.” He said that we were of more use to them as propaganda than as corpses, and that they should let us go.
Machine Gun, to whom the other men clearly deferred, appeared willing to be persuaded. He, Rifleman, and Chmielinski climbed the bank and sat down, out of earshot of the raft.
Durrant, Bzdak, and I remained on the raft, its nose drawn up on the beach. I sat in the back left corner, Durrant in front of me, Bzdak in the right front. Another guerrilla held the lead line. Bzdak asked him if he had heard the score of the Peru-Chile World Cup soccer game that was to have been held that day.
“Soccer [fútbol] is an American capitalist plot,” he said.
Three young women and six small children emerged from the bush. Giggling and blushing, the women approached the raft. Unlike the men, they wore traditional Quechua clothing—woven skirts and blouses—accented by gaudy plastic earrings. One carried a transistor radio tuned to a Cuzco station playing Andean folk music. Shyly, she offered the radio to Durrant. After Durrant indicated that she enjoyed the music,
they negotiated an exchange of earrings. Emboldened by the trade, two of the women reached down and felt Durrant’s breasts. (“To see if I were made from the same model,” she said later.)
A solemn boy of perhaps ten surveyed all this from shore while fondling a haftless shiv and staring at me with what I could not help but regard as a warrior’s eyes. After a few minutes, several very old women walked out of the bush. And then the whole scene seemed cockeyed. On the one hand, it was hard to believe these men would butcher us in front of their mothers, wives, and children. On the other hand, by what could I gauge the ridiculous? The entire history of this region was drenched with senseless bloodshed.
Then I heard someone yell, in rough Spanish, “I am a communist! I am a communist!” I turned to see Odendaal standing twenty yards down the bank with his hands over his head. Nervously, Rifleman signaled him to sit down across from Chmielinski.
Minutes later Chmielinski hurried down the bank, into the raft, and dug for papers that identified him and Bzdak as Polish citizens.
“What’s up?” I whispered.
“Stay on the raft,” he said under his breath. “If they find out we have an American with us I think we are in big trouble.”
Chmielinski returned to his negotiations. The boy with the knife climbed aboard the raft. I handed him a paddle. He maneuvered the tethered raft up and down the bank, his eyes wide and pinned to mine, his mouth firm and serious. Satisfied, he thanked me. He walked away with the grim pride of a man who had confronted the enemy on the enemy’s turf.
Suddenly Rifleman jumped up and started shouting at Chmielinski and waving his gun.
Durrant whispered, “I feel like I’m reading a novel about myself.”
As Chmielinski later explained it, when he had handed Machine Gun his and Bzdak’s papers, he had delivered a line that usually worked magic in Peru. He had said that he was from the same country as the Pope. Big mistake. Rifleman had been on a team that had attempted to assassinate El Papa when he had visited Peru.