The altiplano, the high plain of Peru and Bolivia, is one of the poorest regions in the world. It is not slum poverty, with families packed chockablock into tenements, but poverty that comes from grueling work on land that will not yield enough for a man to live decently. The worst of the terrain, twelve thousand feet high and ringed by mountains, looks like a seabed, the vegetation appearing exactly as plants appear underwater through a face mask; the bushes sway in the currents of the wind. In the state of Puno on the edge of Lake Titicaca, the Indians chew coca leaves (the derivative is cocaine), not to achieve fantasies and thereby blow their minds, but to kill hunger pangs and gather the sensation of strength. Strong on coca, they work the fields.

It is a day’s journey by train from Arequipa, the white city at the base of El Misti, a nineteen-thousand-foot volcano. The train climbs steadily up the slate-gray plateau, through Sumbay and Maravalias and the other railroad towns, to Puno. The train rocks and creaks, and the traveler fights off sleep from the great height. The train climbs and passes through villages high on the plain, the Indians coming to line the track and look at the passengers. Indian ladies wear tiny derby hats, which are comical but give to their bearing an air of great seriousness and purpose, from the neck up the appearance of a dark-brown, flat-nosed Irish pol, down and out in Puno and Sumbay. Lite ladies walk as Groucho Marx walks, hunched over, a baby or a pile of sticks fastened to their backs. The men stand in the shade, ominously still, their faces the color of polished mahogany. It is possible to stare at them for long periods of time and receive no answering nod. The jaws work the coca, the eyes stare blankly. There is only one way to describe it. The men look half dead.

The passengers are mostly tourists, Americans bound for Cuzco and Machupicchu from Chicago or Winter Park, Florida. There is one Peruvian family, the man in a rakish cowboy hat and expensive leather boots, and a Zapata mustache, his wife in a miniskirt. When the train halts to take on water, the people in the parlor car peer out, locus cameras from their seats inside the train. At Sumbay, the children come from behind the station and cluster under the windows of the green-colored coaches. An American tosses out a penny and the children, filthy, barefoot, reeling with laughter, scramble for it. The tourists are excited. Another American repeats the gesture while his wife fishes in the carry bag for the movie camera and the color film, to catch the children as they struggle tor the coins. One of the American women hurries down the aisle to disembark, to film the action from the station platform. The coins clatter on tiie cement, and the children scramble under the impassive eyes of the Indians. The tourists do not have Peruvian money, so they are throwing American money: nickels when they run out of pennies, and climes when they run out of nickels. The children naturally think that the American coins are more valuable than their own soles. Mercifully, the train starts again and resumes the long ascent to Puno.

Read disaster

The state of Puno is about the size of Ohio, population one million, mostly Aymara and Qucchua Indian. Average altitude: 12,500 feet, illiteracy rate: 68 percent. Condition: near hopeless, according to a United Nations report which called it one of two permanent emergency areas in Latin America. For emergency, read disaster.

Peru in general and the altiplano in particular have been a region of concern to ihe Mars knoll Fathers, the Roman Catholic missionary group noted for its humane ethics and liberal politics. The Maryknollers try to do what they can for the Indians, supporting a range of enterprises from radio and television schools to credit co-ops. They baptize the newborn and bury the dead, conduct Mass and hear confession; but they are no longer certain that these rituals are truly central to their mission. Can a man reach a state of grace in anything other than the eyes of Cod while living in the conditions of the altiplano? Decent men, the Fathers live on in Peru, some of them without any real conviction that the lot o the people is improving. or that there is progress of any kind. The self-analysis of priests working in the ghetto of the United States has translated itself to Peru, and win not? The priests are asking if they are relevant to the problems and the people, particularly the Indians, who live on coca, grit, superstition, and very little else. Is it not an offense to offer Mass to people obliged to live in the way these people are obliged to live? Mass is a comfort and a ceremony, but there ought to be a promise of life as well. Some of the Fathers here have accordingly become fascinated, it not obsessed, with the need to engage themselves in the economic development of the altiplano (full stomachs can precede states of grace), an activity incidentally from which they specifically exclude the practice of building great cathedrals. The problem of relevance and what one priest called “cultural imposition” is as acute here as it is anywhere in the United States. The problem of America follows Americans wherever they go.

The earth of the plateau is black, but it is not rich. Electricity does not extend beyond the towns into the adobe huts where the families care for their animals. The families sejueeze into fetid rooms, where food is cooked and where they sleep huddled together against the cold. They will nursemaid a llama for a year, caring for it better than they care for themselves, to sell it at the end for less than $.100 profit. There are children everywhere, and some schools, but the schools are only sporadically attended. No one is certain precisely what to do with the Indians, whose lives constitute a struggle against an unimaginably bleak environment. The way out, for many of them, is migration to the coast, to Lima and the grim barriodas, the sixteen-mile slum that sprawls outward from the capital. There is disagreement on whether this is a solution. In the berriadas, families splinter and the Indians become disoriented, lost; used to the atmosphere of the high plain, they often become ill. For the children, there is a marginal opportunity for advancement and for that reason, more than any of the others, the migration continues. As Father Peter Halligan, one of the Maryknoll priests, says: “Only a hyper-romantic would find anything redeeming in the life of the Indians on the altiplano.”

In the evenings, the Fathers gathered for dinner along a refectorx table at Peter llalliganh. There were about ten men. all of them involved in one way or another with the ehnreh and its clients to imptoxe the life of the region. That night there was talk of an Vrgemine promoter named Carlos, who was building a motel twentx miles bom Puno on the edge of the lake. Fhe motel would eater to the Vmerieans, who would arrive at it via electric train and bus from Cuzco. One night at the hotel—’Well have everything.”Carlos had said, “hamburgers and hot dogs for the Vmerieans. a lull bar, hunting and fishing, comfort; Americans want comfort" and then the tourists would he bundled into a hydrofoil to cross Titicaca into Bolivia. Puno could be made a tourist center, the Vvignon of Peru as the travelers made their wax south from Cuzco Tat is to La Paz Cannes. One ol the priests was excited: his mission lay across the lake from Carlos’ motel. If Carlos could route the hxdrotoil to that little town, where there was an extraordinarx church, then some industry might come. Perhaps a hotel there, and restaurants, stores in which to sell sweaters and rugs. Nothing else seemed to work. Perhaps tourism was the answer. “Carlos,”one of them laughed, “the Conrad Hilton of Puno.”

Speaking English

The talk around the refectory table was mostly amusing banter; one of the Fathers had recently returned from the United States, where life was not so hot, either, he said. Then conversation switched abruptly to “the situation,”the problems of the altiplano and, in the cities on the coast, the growing bitterness between the Peruvians and the North Americans, a relatively recent development. To a visitor recently in South Vietnam, the atmosphere at the table now xvas reminiscent of the American civilian compound (“the USAID house”) in Mythoor lianmethuot. There was no barbed wire, no Nung guards or green-tinted cans of C-rations; and there were no carbines in the clothes closets. But the place was heavy with the sensation of enclave, of a societx within a societx which was not wholly American and ceuaiulx not Peruvian. The furniture was new, and the bookshelyes held Time and the Nationol Catholic Reporter and the New Republic.There was a record player. and a new powerful radio; comfortable new couches All of it was new. in fact built not more than a year ago. They were a group of Americans away from home; all there in the exciting, all seated around the same table, all speaking English. It was a societx of them, the natives who lived in the region, and us, the Americans who came to visit, for a week or for eighteen years, but visiting nonetheless. They were; men who had come to comprehend a society which does not comprehend easilx, and then to move it and help it. and that does not come easily either. They were as alien to the culture as am colonel in Mytho, which is to sax they remained Vmeiicans. First and last.

And they were deeply troubled as they watched the slide in PeruvianNorth American relations. No one can go to Peru now and not be aware of it. It is the result of the American corporate presence, which operates independently ol Vmeriean foreign policy but has more to do with LatinAmerican attitudes than any speech by the President, or any white paper ot soothing statement bom the Department of State. Peru confiscated the Intelnational Petroleum Company; in lad, the previous government’s settlements with IPC, repre - sented as a sellout, were the pretext for the nationalist coup which toppled theBelaunde regime late last year. For this reason Ceiicral Juan Velasco Alvarado, no Che Cucvara, found the left-wing students fully behind his regime, and before long the: entire country was caught in a wave of anti-Americanism. It was a neat substitute for a policy, so Velasco— in successionissued warnings to American fishing boats (Peru claims a imo-mile limit). and established diplomatic relations and a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. It won’t be believed in Peru, but a good part of informed opinion in Washington held that the recognition of Russia was excellent politics and wise economics; Peru has alwaxs been too dependent on the United States (more of Peru’s economy is controlled In lorciguers. Americans and others, than that ol any country in the world). Peruvians are now demanding to decide their own fate, which they reckon impossible to do so long as American corporations dominate the economy, so long as the decisions are made not in Lima but in New York So it is something of a shock to discover that the right wing collection of generals who run Peru have some support not only of the stability-conscious middle class, but of the revolutionaries at San Marcos University as well. Velasco’s is a dazzling performance. a policy run on little more than opposition to the United States.

Day to day

That is all cpiite apart from the problem ol thealtiplano. The Indians are unaware who governs them (to the extent that anyone docs), except when the army needs conscripts. The idea of IPC, the spiritual, as well as the corporate, descendant of old John D Rockefeller, is a very remote idea indeed. It was sobering to understand that nothing that happened with IPC or any of the other Americ an cot potations would likely have the slightest effect on the altiplano and its people. These were matters of concern to another. political, public world whose relation to the high plain was, and is, very slight.

Perhaps it is true that only a tomantic would find the life of the Indians redeeming. It is not a culture that tanks with Athens or Rome, Ford knows; and if Inca energy ot ingenuity links in the blood, it is difficult to find. One an only say that they are independent and kind to their children, and while dt unkeimess is common, violence is not. The Indians appeal sad beyond measure, but still undaunted. They move from day to day, somehow dealing with the harshness of life and being ground down by it in the process. The Fathers move about, do what they can, try to help. It is a difficult business, with no sign that the altiplano will be anything but an “emergency area" for decades to come. The Indians, dulled by coca, will endure, from time to time leaving the adversities of the high plain for the adversities of the barriadas. one cycle of difficulty and deprivation for another.

“In touch with civilisation”

They know how to handle the tourists in the Peruvian Amazon. We are all tourists now, disembarking from a Faucett Airways DC-6 in Iquitos, conducted to the hotel in an ancient Buick with shattered windshield. The Spanish say that the difference between them and the Portuguese is that they are dry and the Portuguese are wet. It is the same difference between the people of the high plain—all of them, Americans included— and the people of the jungle. The people here are soft and wet, like the land itself. It is not a place for serious speculation, and it does not work its way into your mind as a place worth knowing. Iquitos is a throwback to the rubber boom of the nineteenth century.

The travel agents are everywhere, on the street, in the lobby of the hotel, in the bar, dispensing smiles and four-color brochures. The idea is to take a trip on the great river itself, camping fifty miles distant and living for a night or two in the jungle, fishing for piranha, filming the crocodiles, looking for snakes, and watching the Indians.

These are different Indians. A brochure tells us about them, in the caption of a photograph of three tourists in a speedboat leering at one of the bare-breasted girls. “It is time to say goodbye on the banks of the river,” the caption reads. “The Indians of the area, the ‘yaguas,’are peaceful and keep in touch with civilization. They live on the rivers and retain their primitive customs. The travel agents take efforts to protect them in order to make them stay for the tourists to see.”

Well, yes, The travel agents protect the Indians in approximately the same way that zoos protect animals, The Indians are brought down from their homes near the Ecuadorian border and settled along the banks of the Manita River, in compounds within easy striking distance of Iquitos. They are bought and paid for In the travel agents, each of whom has an Indian settlement suitable for viewing by tourists who care enough to pay $120 a day plus gin. The travel agents, having imported the Indians, then keep them in touch with civilization, and peaceful. The Indians’ entire world centers on the tourists. The only job they have is to be available and courteous when the tourists come to look at them. Their function is precisely that of animals in a zoo.

But no matter. We hired a local fisherman and Ins speedboat for thirty dollars a day and forgot about the Indians, sole property of the travel agents. We proceeded from Iquitos downriver to the Manila and the tributaries, the boat a cork in the godlike surge and heave of the Amazon. There was nothing cxceptional in the life of the people along the river. The streams where the piranha lived were small and still, black from the rot of decayed vegetation. The jungle loomed on both sides of the stream as we cut the engine and drifted, broke out the beet and the pâté de foie gras bought in Lima. The black water reflected the trees and the sky perfectly, a natural looking glass. Nothing spoke or stirred; there were no animals of any kind. After a time, the jungle and the river merged and it became difficult to tell where the banks ended and the river began. We felt it was an optical illusion and snuggled to separate the trees from their reflections. Finally it was impossible, and we sat silently in the boat as if suspended in air in a primeval place, no beginning, no end.

Ward S. Just