Amazonas | Steering the Boat Leftward

ON MY FIRST DAY OF CAMPAIGNING with Carlos Navas, candidate for the presidency of Peru’s Amazonas Region, four of us boarded a wooden motorboat and headed down the Rio Marañon. The chocolate-coloured river was swollen with April rains and full of debris from the jungle, but no one in the entourage seemed worried.

“We’ve got a sasa up ahead,” Carlos shouted over the motor’s whine. “You know what a sasa is?”

“No idea,” I replied.

He pointed to a massive submerged boulder in the middle of the river where a standing wave had spawned several whirling vortexes. “A lot of people flip their boats here,” he said, just before our pilot accelerated and aimed the boat directly into the wave, ramping off it so that we soared for a weightless heartbeat before slamming back to the surface with a jarring impact that echoed through our tailbones and sent a curtain of water over the bow. Carlos screamed, then laughed maniacally.

“Oh, sasa! My poor coccyx!” He looked back at Joel Shimpukat, the Awajun Indian who is running for district mayor on the same ticket as Navas. “We’re going to have to dynamite that boulder.” Shimpukat, quiet as ever behind a thick black moustache, only nodded. His solemn, earnest manner was the perfect foil to Navas’ boyish enthusiasm, just as his dark, angular features offset Navas’ pale and boyish face. But both men grew up in the jungle, and despite Navas’ European features, there’s no question where his loyalties lie.

The sasa was a fitting introduction to Peruvian politics: embrace conflict and hold on for the ride. It wasn’t hard to imagine Navas shouting and laughing just like this when, a year before, he’d helped organise the native protests against mining and oil development that shut down highways and river ports throughout the entire Peruvian Amazon. At the time, Navas had been mayor of Imacita, the isolated jungle town we set out from that morning. Few people in Peru had heard of either him or Imacita until 5 June 2009, when the highway blockade he was leading nearby ended in a bloody crackdown by government troops. Thirty-four people were killed, 23 of them soldiers. The disaster became a national scandal by sunset, with both sides of the conflict accusing the other of instigating murder and mayhem. Amid all the recriminations, Navas—who barely fought off charges of sedition and inciting violence—gained a regional fame that he expected would earn him votes in October’s election.

“Look at how beautiful the country here is,” he said after the momentary drama of the sasa had passed. He gestured to the emerald hills unfolding away from the banks, a carpet of jungle stretching 4,000 kilometres eastward to the Atlantic. The Peruvian Amazon is the world’s third-largest chunk of rainforest; this northwestern portion of it remains untouched by the industries that have ravaged so much of the Amazon elsewhere in Peru and beyond. (These same issues have also animated the Naxalite movement in India.) “If the businesses have their way this will all be reduced to ash,” he continued. “Oil’s on its way back up to 100 dollars a barrel, and I hear the price of gold just topped 1,200 dollars an ounce.” Oil and gold aren’t the only commodities hidden beneath the surface: Peru’s production of copper, silver, lead and zinc all rank in the world’s top six. Together with exports of precious wood, a recent oil and gas boom, and the vast hydroelectric potential of a country whose countless rivers drop two vertical kilometres from mountaintop to valley bottom, Peru has become a global treasure chest in the resource-starved 21st century.

Yet these all seemed abstract considerations as our boat wound between pristine banks lined by three-metre high elephant grass, lush mahogany trees, and the occasional village of thatch huts. We cruised in silence for about an hour before we pulled into a small cove protected from the current by a sandbank. A wooden sign nailed to a tree announced that we were in Uut: population 78.

“What is Unidad y Democracia de Amazonas?” Navas asked the audience of Awajun Indians who’d assembled to hear his pitch in the concrete cube that served as a community hall. They crowded onto rickety wood benches, women on one side and men on the other, while naked children scrambled in and out of the doorway. “Unidad y Democracia de Amazonas isn’t a party, it’s a coalition of the Left. What is the Left? It’s the opposite of the Right—the right being all those political parties who represent the rich without any thought for natives or the environment. Meanwhile, the Left asks, why are people in Amazonas so poor when we have so much land, so many resources? And we know the answer. Our leaders give it all away to foreigners and keep the royalties for themselves.”

This kind of talk carries a lot of traction around here. Across the border in Ecuador, just a few hundred kilometres from Uut, the largest lawsuit in history is being prosecuted against Chevron, an American oil company, by the Achuar nation, a native group that also has members living in Peru. On Peru’s southern border, Bolivia has embarked on a radical programme of decentralisation that will bring autonomy and resource money to the dozens of indigenous groups who live within what their Aymaran president, Evo Morales, has christened the “plurinational republic.” Peru’s own Far Left indigenous champion, Ollanta Humala, came within millimetres of winning the last federal election in 2006, thanks to universal support in Peru’s hinterland, and stands a strong chance in the 2011 elections.

Navas’ lecture can be heard in various articulations and stridencies across the length of Peru’s Amazon and throughout its rural highlands, where the benefits of a rising GDP remain invisible. No doctor, no electricity, no school—that’s life in Uut and a thousand towns like it.

On a continent known for swinging from hard Left to far Right, the outcome of October’s regional elections will be a telling forecast of what to expect in the federal poll the following year. Peru is still recovering from the communist-inspired Shining Path rebellion that claimed 70,000 lives in the 1980s and 90s. Those rebels have been reduced to a handful of drug runners operating in isolated corners of the Amazon—a toothless, apolitical version of Colombia’s FARC next door—but Peru’s middle classes retain a visceral fear of people like Navas. Indeed, a recent government report listed 126 violent and ongoing “socio-environmental” conflicts scattered throughout the country. So long as the central government keeps ignoring its rural and indigenous populations, that fear will be well placed.