Friends of the Institute, such as Rosita Corpancho, defended it on pragmatic grounds. The work of the linguists — studying the languages and dialects of Amazonia, compiling lexicons and grammars of the various tribes — served the country, and besides, it was supervised, in theory at least, by the Ministry of Education, which had to approve of all its projects and received copies of all the material it collected. As long as that same Ministry or Peruvian universities didn’t take the trouble to pursue such research themselves, it was to Peru’s advantage that it was being undertaken by others. Moreover, the infrastructure set up by the Institute in Amazonia, with its fleet of hydroplanes and its system of radio communication between the headquarters at Yarinacocha and the network of linguists living with the tribes, was also of benefit to the country, since teachers, civil servants, and the military forces in remote jungle localities were in the habit of making use of it, and not just in cases of emergency.
The controversy has not ended, nor is it likely to end soon.
That expedition of just a few short weeks’ duration which I was lucky enough to be able to join made such a great impression on me that, twenty-seven years later, I still remember it in abundant detail and still write about it. As I am doing now, in Firenze. We went first to Yarinacocha and talked with the linguists and then, a long way from there, to the region of the Alto Marañón, visiting a series of settlements and villages of two tribes of the Jíbaro family: the Aguarunas and the Huambisas. We then went up to Lake Morona to visit the Shapras.
We traveled in a small hydroplane, and in some places in native canoes, along narrow river channels so choked with tangled vegetation overhead that in bright daylight it seemed dark as night. The strength and the solitude of Nature — the tall trees, the mirror-smooth lagoons, the immutable rivers — brought to mind a newly created world, untouched by man, a paradise of plants and animals. When we reached the tribes, by contrast, there before us was prehistory, the elemental, primeval existence of our distant ancestors: hunters, gatherers, bowmen, nomads, shamans, irrational and animistic. This, too, was Peru, and only then did I become fully aware of it: a world still untamed, the Stone Age, magico-religious cultures, polygamy, head-shrinking (in a Shapra village of Moronacocha, the cacique, Tariri, explained to us, through an interpreter, the complicated technique of steeping and stuffing with herbs required by the operation)-that is to say, the dawn of human history.
I am quite sure that throughout the entire trip I thought continually of Saúl Zuratas. I often spoke about him with his mentor, Dr. Matos Mar, who was also a member of the expedition; it was on this journey, in fact, that we became good friends. Matos Mar told me that he had invited Saúl to come with us, but that Zuratas had refused because he strongly disapproved of the work of the Institute.
Thanks to this expedition, I was better able to understand Mascarita’s fascination with this region and these people, to get some idea of the forcefulness of the impact that changed the course of his life. But, besides that, it gave me firsthand experience that enabled me to justify many of the differences of opinion which, more out of instinct than out of real knowledge, I had had with Saúl over Amazonian cultures. Why did he cling to that illusion of his: wanting to preserve these tribes just as they were, their way of life just as it was? To begin with, it wasn’t possible. All of them, some more slowly, others more rapidly, were being contaminated by Western and mestizo influences. Moreover, was this chimerical preservation desirable? Was going on living the way they were, the way purist anthropologists of Saúl’s sort wanted them to do, to the tribes’ advantage? Their primitive state made them, rather, victims of the worst exploitation and cruelty.
In an Aguaruna village, Urakusa, where we arrived one evening, we saw through the portholes of the hydroplane the scene which had become familiar each time we touched down near some tribe: the eyes of the entire population of men and women, half naked and daubed with paint, attracted by the noise of the plane, followed its maneuvers as they slapped at their faces and chests with both hands to drive away the insects. But in Urakusa, besides the copper-colored bodies, the dangling tits, the children with parasite-swollen bellies and skins striped red or black, a sight awaited us that I have never forgotten: that of a man recently tortured. It was the headman of the locality, whose name was Jum.
A party of whites and mestizos from Santa Maria de Nieva — a trading post on the banks of the Nieva River that we had also visited, put up in a Catholic mission — had arrived in Urakusa a few weeks before us. The party included the civil authorities of the settlement plus a soldier from a frontier post. Jum went out to meet them, and was greeted by a blow that split his forehead open. Then they burned down the huts of Urakusa, beat up all the Indians they could lay their hands on, and raped several women. They carried Jum off to Santa Maria de Nieva, where they submitted him to the indignity of having his hair cut off. Then they tortured him in public. They flogged him, burned his armpits with hot eggs, and finally hoisted him up a tree the way they do paiche, large river fish, to drain them off They left him there for several hours, then untied him and let him go back to his village.
The ostensible reason for this savagery was a minor incident that had taken place in Urakusa between the Aguarunas and a detachment of soldiers passing through. But the real reason was that Jum had tried to set up a cooperative among the Aguaruna villages of the Alto Marañón. The cacique was a quick-witted and determined man, and the Institute linguist working with the Aguarunas encouraged him to take a course at Yarinacocha so as to become a bilingual teacher. This was a program drawn up by the Ministry of Education with the aid of the Institute of Linguistics. Men of the tribes who, like Jum, seemed capable of setting up an educational project in their villages were sent to Yarinacocha, where they took a course — a fairly superficial one, I imagine — given by the linguists and Peruvian instructors, to enable them to teach their people to read and write in their own language. They then returned to their native villages with classroom aids and the somewhat optimistic title of bilingual teacher.
The program did not attain the goal it had set — making the Amazonian Indians literate — but, as far as Jum was concerned, it had unforeseeable consequences. His stay in Yarinacocha, his contacts with “civilization” caused the cacique of Urakusa to discover — by himself or with the help of his instructors — that he and his people were being iniquitously exploited by the bosses with whom they traded. These bosses, whites or Amazonian mestizos, periodically visited the tribes to buy rubber and animal skins. They themselves fixed the price of what they bought, and paid for it in kind — machetes, fishhooks, clothing, guns; the price of these articles was also set to suit their own whim or convenience. Jum’s stay at Yarinacocha made him realize that if, instead of trading with the bosses, the Aguarunas took the trouble to go sell their rubber and hides in the cities — at the offices of the Banco Hipotecario, for instance — they would get far better prices for what they had to sell and could buy for far less the same articles that the bosses sold them.