From the Visual Book: Yuyanapaq, Para Recordar

I have recently been engrossed in Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Report, which was published in 2003. The report is an exhaustive, frank, and sometimes horrifying confession-of-sorts about the country’s civil war from 1980 to 2000. The paragraphs below are my translation of the final section of the report’s preface. (No translation appears to be available on the web.) The writing here is not only lyrically beautiful but also serves to remind me that the notion of democracy—even a democracy as imperfect as our own in the U.S.—is truly a privilege and not a right. As Lerner writes, “A democracy that is exercised stubbornly each day loses the loyalty of its citizens and falls without tears.”

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In a country like ours, combating oblivion is a powerful form of doing justice. We are convinced that the rescue of the truth about the past—even a truth so hard, so difficult to bear as the one we were entrusted with discovering—is a way of coming closer to that ideal of democracy that we Peruvians proclaim with such vehemence and practice with such inconsistency.

At the time of the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Committee] was established, Peru undertakes, once again, an enthusiastic attempt to recover lost democracy. And yet, so that this enthusiasm has a foundation and a horizon, we must remember that democracy was not lost on its own. Democracy was abandoned little by little by those who did not know how to defend it. A democracy that is exercised stubbornly each day loses the loyalty of its citizens and falls without tears. In the moral vacuum in which dictatorships thrive, good reason is lost and concepts invert themselves, depriving the citizen of any ethical orientation: exceptional emergency becomes normal permanency, massive abuse becomes “excess,” the innocent are taken to jail; death, in the end, is confused with peace.

Peru is on track, once more, to build a democracy. This is thanks to the courage of those who dared not to believe the official truth of a dictatorial regime; those who called a dictatorship, dictatorship; who called corruption, corruption; who called a crime, crime. Such acts of moral strength in the voices of millions of ordinary citizens demonstrate to us the efficacy of the truth. We should undertake a similar effort now. If truth served to lay bare the ephemeral nature of autocracy, truth is called now to show its power to purify our Republic.

This purification is an indispensable to achieve a society reconciled with itself, with truth, with the rights of each and every one of its members. A society at peace with its possibilities.

This report speaks of shame and of dishonor; however, on these pages also are spoken acts of courage, acts of generosity, signs that demonstrate to us that to be human is most essentially to be magnanimous. Here can be found those who did not relinquish the authority and the responsibility entrusted to them by their neighbors; here can be found those who defied abandonment to defend their families using nothing more than tools of the land; here can be found there are those who put their fate next to those who suffered unjust imprisonment; here can be found those who assumed their duty to defend their country without betraying the law; here can be found those who fought the uprooting of communities in order to defend life. Here they can be found in the heart of our memories.

We present this report in honor of those who stood up to protect us. We also present it as a mandate of the missing and the forgotten throughout whole nation. The story here speaks of us, of what we were and of what we stopped being. This story speaks of the work we have ahead of us. This story begins today.

Salomón Lerner Febres
Presidente
Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación

From the NY Daily News

Look, I’m not a big fan of Wall Street either. I think the money they make—and the bonuses they dole out—are way out of line with their true value to our nation’s economy. To turn a Street-speak expression on its head: Where’s the “value-added”? Here is what I wrote in December in my post “Solely to shuffle money around“:

When I briefly worked in investment banking, the same idea frequently popped in my head: What exactly is being produced here that is so valuable? I doubt it was our spreadsheets, however attractive in appearance they might have been (no gridlines!).

Nevertheless, I am dismayed at the SEC’s and media’s treatment of Goldman Sachs employee Fabrice Tourre. Did he commit fraud? I don’t know. Did he screw over a client? Yeah. But based on what we know, is he an “asshole“? No, I don’t think so; that’s just piling on.

Here’s Tourre’s famous email as referenced in the SEC civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs:

The famous 'Fabulous Fab' email

Make sure to read the part highlighted in gray. Tourre looks really bad there. Who would call himself “Fabulous”?

Well, it turns out Tourre didn’t either. He was paraphrasing what some guy named Mitch called him. Here’s the real context of the email:

Darling you should take a lock at this article … Very insightful … More and more leverage in the system … only potential survivor … the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous abt me, just kindness, altruism and deep love for some gorgeous and super-smart French girl in London, standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities !!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the US consumer with more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself, so there is a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job ;) amazing how good I am in convincing myself” !!!

Sweetheart, I am now going to try to get away from ABX and other ethical questions, and immediately plunge into Freakonomics … I feel blessed to be with you, to be able to learn and share special things with you, I love when you advise me on books I should be reading, I feel like we share a lot of things in common, a lot of values, topics we are interested in and intrigued by … I just love you !!!

Your chtit Fab

Let me emphasize this line again: Tourre writes to his girlfriend: “…[t]he fabulous Fab, (as Mitch would kindly call me, though there is nothing fabulous abt me, just kindness, altruisim and deep love for some gorgeous and super-smart French girl in London!)…

The SEC selectively quoted Tourre to make him emerge in the worst light possible. Actually, it was worse than just “selectively quoting”: the SEC snipped parts of Tourre’s sentences in order to damage his character and make their case stronger. “Selectively quoting” is too kind for the SEC’s actions; a better phrase would be “deceitfully quoting.” This kind of referencing would never fly in an academic paper, for example. Why should it in court? Furthermore, there’s some irony in the SEC being deceptive in a fraud case. Fraud is a synonym of deceit, according to thesaurus.com

It seems to me that Tourre was just a French guy in love with a French girl in London when he sent these emails. Not that he didn’t commit fraud—again, I don’t know—but I don’t see what this email has to do with a fraud case. He comes across as especially likeable at the end of the second paragraph, when you see he’s having doubts about the broader purpose of his contributions as a banker to society “… amazing how good I am in convincing myself [of my job's utility],” Tourre writes.

In fact, he seems like a decent guy to me. Maybe we’d be friends. From a personal perspective, although I’m not particularly fond of the industry of investment banking, I am very fond of my investment-banking friends. In general, they are nice, interesting, and thoughtful people. I would vouch for their character. In this context, and based on the above email, I will give Fabrice Tourre’s ch~aracter the benefit of the doubt. Let’s see what happens in court before we assess him and his behavior.

The more important issue here for me is a structural and systemic one. Thousands and thousands of bright, driven, and kind students every year eschew careers in development, medicine, science, engineering, teaching, etc. to work on Wall Street. This is a bigger outrage than any email Fabrice Tourre has written. Why does our society create incentives for our best young men and women to enter a field that has little discernible impact on furthering society’s broader goals? First-year investment bankers may earn $150,000 in salary and bonuses. First year PhD students live on the poverty line. Medical doctors graduate from school with an average debt of $156,456, and that doesn’t even include the opportunity cost of foregoing four years of income potential. What’s wrong with this picture?

Fabrice Tourre is one of the best and brighest as well. He graduated with a degree in mathematics from École Centrale, a famous French university, and later earned an M.S. from Stanford. Think of the potential of this guy to make valued contributions in, say, energy research or environmental policy or development work! Instead, he made millions creating exotic financial products that are “pure intellectual masterbation.” Now that seems like the real crime to me.

Jeremy crossing a bridge near hot springs in Yanque

La Casa Hacienda Shismay

This past weekend, Nora and I took a trip to Huánuco, which is the name of both a city and departamento (like a U.S. state) in central Peru. At the recommendation of our friend Roger, we visited a rural area called Shismay and stayed at a spectacular hacienda-turned-hotel, the Casa Hacienda Shismay.

The pueblo of Shismay is about a 45-minute dusty, bumpy taxi ride from the city of Huánuco. Shismay is a small Andean village consisting of about two hundred families who mostly devote themselves to farming small plots of land called chacras. These small farms fill the Esperanza Valley with varying hues of green and gold like a patchwork quilt. (Although, I must concede, this metaphor puzzled the Peruvians we spoke with; apparently, quilts don’t exist in Peru.)

Chacras in Shismay

As you can see from my photos, these farms are cultivated from the river basin thousands of feet upward on the sides of the huge cerros, or mountains. It was interesting to note that farms in Shismay are not terraced as I’d observed in other places in Peru. (See, for example, the striking balcones, or terraces, in Arequipa.) Moreover, some of the fields I saw in Shismay were steeper than I’d imagined was possible for a farm, creating perhaps as much as a 40° angle with respect to the horizontal. Somehow, these crafty Peruvians seem to have defeated erosion.

Huánuco is not a tourist mecca like Cuzco. The Lonely Planet offers only a few sparse pages on this area in contrast to perhaps 75 pages for Cuzco and its environs. The hotel we stayed at isn’t even in the Lonely Planet—partly I presume because it’s relatively new (2006), but also because Huánuco just isn’t an area that attracts lots of Gringos or even domestic tourists.

Nora and I took an 8:45 p.m. bus from Lima and arrived in the city of Huánuco at approximately 7:30 a.m. I have now had several misadventures on Latin American buses, and I say without hesitation that this experience was one of the worst. We had been led to believe that the bus would be direct, meaning that it would leave Lima, traverse the Carretera Central up the mountains without stopping, and drop its happy customers off in the Andean town of Huánuco.

Unfortunately, we paid $10 for an eight-hour bus ride, and we got what we paid for. The bus stopped continually during the trip in order to pick up passengers on the road and fill its empty seats. (“¡Este bus va recogiendo, va recogiendo, va recogiendo!” as one exasperated fellow passenger told me. This bus picks people up, picks people up, picks people up!) Whether such practice is corruption on the part of the bus drivers or a pre-mediated, profit-maximizing strategy perpetuated by the empresa (tour company), I do not know. But I do know that the practice is dangerous as it entails picking up random people on the road and allowing them on a bus next to sleeping (i.e., vulnerable) passengers. Further, it slows down the trip for all traveler (turning an eight-hour trip into over ten hours of misery) and allows the cold Andean breeze to swirl in the bus cabin.

Naturally, I forget my jacket, and, in a moment of either weakness or genius (or both), I slept all night with my arms tucked into the legs of a pair of Lucky Brand jeans, turning my turning my extra pair of pants into a makeshift jean jacket. And I’m not even complaining about the bumpy road or the constant switchback turns that made it impossible to fall asleep! Transportes Junin, it’s on!

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Tiny flowers in the countryside

In Huánuco on Saturday morning, Nora and I stopped for a delicious and cost-effective breakfast at a local market. For about two dollars—no exaggeration—we bought two delicious juices, Pachamaca-flavored yucca and potatoes, a bag of fresh bread, and a sizeable chunk of cheese. Two dollars! (I love telling people how cheap it is to travel in Peru, until they remind me that I had to pay $600 to fly there—twice.)

At the market, as we were throughout the weekend, Nora and I were struck by how shy yet curious were the huanuqueños (as people from Huánuco are called). One señora (older lady) in the market tapped Nora on the arm and, with a huge grin, told her, “We don’t get a lot of visitors here!” I overheard another woman telling her young child, “¡Mira las gringos!” (Look at the Gringos!) Later, when asking for directions in Shismay, the villagers would look away when answering our questions.

Nora and I are accustomed to the occasional Gringo bomb or “Vere are you frum?” comment directed to us by Peruvians: I’m perhaps the tallest human being in the entire country, and Nora’s long blonde hair makes her quite the novelty in a country brimming with brunettes. But this weekend was something different—less invasive, more curious.

Why the difference in attitude? My guess is that the region has simply had a dearth of foreigners. Although it is a regional capital, Huánuco is a sleepy city whose economy, like many other Peruvian cities in the sierra, is driven by serving as a market clearinghouse for local crops. Moreover, Huánuco experienced bastante terrorismo (quite a bit of terrorism) during the 1980s and early 1990s as an internal war waged throughout Peru. For all intents and purposes, the city was inaccessible for tourists for well over a decade. Now, although the violence has subsided, Huánuco lacks a Machu Picchu or Lake Titicaca to lure tourists.

After eating our economical yet delectable breakfast, Nora and I went searching for a taxi to take us the 17 kilometers to our lodging in the outskirts of Huánuco. We first looked for colectivos, which are taxis that carry groups of passengers and regularly run between two places. Were there any colectivos in Shismay? We asked no fewer than ten people and received discrepant answers each time.

Eventually, we gave up and decided to just take a taxi. “20 soles,” one taxi driver barked to us. “20?” I confirmed with him as we entered his station wagon. He nodded, and we were off. Forty-five dusty, bumpy minutes later, after winding through the river valley, we arrived in Shismay.

I handed the driver a 20-sol note. He looked at me quizzically. “No, no, no, 30, amigo,” he said to me. “No, nos dijiste veinte,” I replied sharply, “No, you told us 20!” He looked at me pleadingly, “Pero, es lejos!” But it’s far!

Well, he was right. It was pretty far for only 20 soles, so Nora gave him 5 soles more in various denominations of pocket change, and we were off.

* * *

The Esperanza Valley. Nearly 9000 acres belonged to the Hacienda.

Our hotel, the Casa Hacienda Shismay, is a beautifully renovated 19th century working hacienda. We were greeted at the entrance by Maria Elena and Andrés. Andrés is the current administrador (manager) of the place, and Maria Elena, well, her role will take more time to describe. We were the only guest this particular weekend (there are only four guest rooms available). For the rest of the morning and through mid-afternoon, Nora and I rested, ate lunch, and took a tour of the hacienda with Maria Elena.

Maria Elena is the daughter of Don Javier Rolando Tello, who owned the house and nearly 9,000 acres of accompanying farmland in the Esperanza valley until 1979. On September 9th of that year, ownership of the estate was forcibly transferred to the hacienda’s workers and their families as part of the Peruvian Reforma Agraria (agrarian reform) carried out under the military government of General Francisco Morales Bermúdez.

Maria Elena told us she was 18 years old at the time. By law, her family was not allowed to take any items from the house or estate as they left. Hacienda workers, previously laboring under a feudalism-like system, took the name of “San Sebastian of Shismay” in honor of the patron saint.

At the time of the seizure and redistribution of their land, the Tello family still owned a large house and property in the city of Huánuco. Nevertheless, they were forced into difficult times as the family’s economic base was stripped from them. Maria Elena later moved to Lima to attend university.

The members of the Shismay community looked after the hacienda for many years, but, due to the deepening economic and security troubles, the house was left to ruin. As a result of internal violence, Maria Elena told us she hadn’t returned to Shismay until 2004, an absence of more than 20 years. When I asked her what it was like to see her childhood home in ruins, she paused and answered simply, “Difícil.” (Difficult.)

In March 2004, the community of Shismay received a generous private grant for the restoration of the hacienda and conversion of the hacienda warehouses into guest rooms. I’m guessing Maria Elena and her family were behind this change in one way or another; they wanted to restore an element of their own past and also help a struggling community with whom they had such deep roots. (The hacienda is still property of the community and is run by community members.)

Interestingly, Maria Elena told us that she observed much more economic deprivation and related problems—malnutrition, for example—than had existed when her family owned the land. (“What do they eat here?” as Maria Elena answered to one of our queries. “Papa con papa, nomás.” Potatoes with potatoes, that’s about it.) She argued that her father’s extensive farming experience, his knowledge of local markets, and his leadership allowed the land to be much more productive under a single owner than it has been partitioned into more than 100 different plots. “The idea now is to unify land,” she told us.

Was Maria Elena romanticizing the past? Were community members really better off in a scenario that resembled the feudal system? I cannot say for certain. My own socialist tendencies tell me that dividing up haciendas is a good thing, that laborers deserve land, dignity, and economic freedom. But I understand my own bias here, and I’ve heard from more people than just Maria Elena that the Peruvian agrarian reform caused more harm than it did good.

In reflecting on these questions, I can appreciate the numerous complexities at work in Shismay: the balance between European (hacienda owners) and Andean (villagers), between paternalism and liberation, between economic protection and economic freedom, and, perhaps most pertinent, between bottom-up and top-down ideologies of community development.

To us, it was clear that Maria Elena viewed her work as a way to give back to the community of Shismay. However, I don’t think she considered it her community. Maria Elena has attended university in Lima, is a working professional, and now lives in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in all of Peru. Although her family may have owned a hacienda in Shismay, her experience is not in the same constellation of facts as that of peasant farmers who labored on the hacienda. As Nora pointed out, Maria Elena used a lot of “us’s” and “them’s” in describing her relationship with the community.

Allow me to paraphrase one of Nora’s question. We always think that bottom-up, grassroots community organizing is the best model. But what if communities don’t organize on their own? As a practical matter for Shismay: if a paternalistic, top-down approach achieves results, what’s so wrong with that? For all my love of a theoretical liberation of the poor, I’m not sure if I can denounce energies that make tangible differences yet are delivered as external charity.

I could not broach these themes without referencing the antecedents of the internal war in Peru that began in 1980. This conflict, which killed nearly 70,000 Peruvians, was fueled by the Shining Path’s belief that society is so tilted against the poor that society needed to be destroyed before it could be remade. As a corollary, the Maoist organization believed that community-development organizations and charities maintained the very social infrastructure that inhibited the poor’s rise. As one famous Sendero communiqué threatened to NGOs, “You give crumbs to the people to entertain them and fail to realize that the correct path is that of the people’s war.”

In defense of Maria Elena, she also told us about her efforts to catalyze the Shismay governing council, to secure better legal recognition for the community under local law, to diversify economic activities aside from farming, to send the community’s top students to elite schools in Lima and abroad, and to protect the community against nefarious outsiders aiming to exploit its resources (particularly its abundance of water). I didn’t love the way Maria Elena spoke about the people she ostensibly serves, but she sure seems to have gotten things done. What have you and I done lately?

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Lake Mancapozo

On Saturday afternoon, Nora and I went on a pleasant walk around Shismay. We had a hairy moment or two with a pack of stray dogs (note: yelling at dogs only makes them madder), but we survived. Flourished, even.

On Sunday, we woke up relatively early and went on spectacular three-hour hike to Lake Mancapozo, which lies perched up in the mountains above Shismay. For 15 soles, our guide Orial direct us through the countryside. Nora and I had a nice conversation with Orial in Spanish—we in our English accent, he in his Quechua accent.

Nora and Orial, specks in this photo, climb to Lake Mancapozo

Much of our discussion was centered on Orial giving us exciting lessons on the medicinal properties of various plants. He also painstakingly identified 20 different plants that can be used to make tea. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hated tea.) He also introduced us to one of his friends who sells fresh honey. “Puro, no es adulterado,” Orial told us more than once. It’s pure, nothing is added! He was right. We bought four gooey containers. After the tour, Orial handed us several husks of cancha, or dried corn, from which you can make the best, freshest popcorn. (We had told him previously that we were adictos, or addicts.)

On Sunday night, Nora and I braved another bus ride and headed back to Lima.

Me taking a gander at the view of Chivay

The Peruvian National TB Conference, held last week outside of Lima

The famous Pisco Sour cocktail (photo from El Comercio)

Robin Kirk has written that “it takes a stubbornness, perhaps arrogance, and a certain faith in the face of long odds to write about someone else’s country.” I could hardly agree more. And Kirk’s maxim is perhaps most true when it comes to writing about food, where the conflation of culture, history, and national pride create a veritable Gringo landmine. Undaunted (and stubborn), I ignore these important intercultural conventions and offer you my personal Pisco Sour recipe.

What is a Pisco Sour, you ask? You have come to the right place. Allow me the audacity to quote myself:

Pisco is a liquor distilled from grapes. As such, it is technically a type of brandy. The story goes that, in the 16th century, Spanish settlers along the Peruvian coast began to plant and harvest grapes for wine production. The best grapes were harvested for export, while lower quality grapes that weren’t exported were distilled and fermented to produce a liquor. Pisco was born.

Fast forward to the present day. Pisco has become one of the most important symbols of Peru. The “pisco sour” — a cocktail made from pisco, limes, sugar syrup, egg whites, and bitters — is an international sensation. I must concede that they are fantastic drinks; as one review majestically describes, a pisco sour is “like a climb in the Andes: drink it too fast and you’ll need oxygen.”

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And here we go with my personal recipe:

• 1 cup fresh jugo de limones (lime juice). Peruvian limes are the best, but, in the U.S., key limes are an acceptable if imperfect substitute.
• 1 1/2 cups pisco acholado.
• 2/3 cup jarabe de goma (simple sugar syrup). Approximately ½ cup white sugar can be substituted without problem.
• 1 cup crushed ice
• 2 egg whites
• 1 dash Angostura Bitters

Blend everything save the Angostura Bitters until the ice turns to liquid and the foam copious. Pour immediately into cocktail glasses. Serves about 8 drinks.

Tip: the colder the Pisco Sour, the better. Chill all ingredients before use. I freeze the pisco and refrigerate the eggs and sugar syrup. I also like to chill the cocktail glasses, which is a nice touch.

Also, in Peru, all of these ingredients are common, and it’s the relative proportions that are most important in creating a perfect Pisco Sour.

And remember, la perfección de Pisco Sour no es un destino sino una jornada. (Pisco Sour perfection is not a destination but rather a a journey.)

A festive party on Saturday at Majariscos

Celebrating Majariscos' 7th anniversary