The Tragedy of Peruvian Indigenous Tribes

"We're physically fine."

"They took the boat and took the battery. They are friendly and respectful to us, but this is the only way they have to find solutions for their community."

"The sooner they are heard, the sooner they will let us go. Help me to share this."

Angela Ramirez, abducted Peruvian

"We have seen ourselves obliged to take this measure to summon the attention of a state that has not paid attention to us for eight years."

"[His community would allow the boat to continue its trip] in the coming hours."

Indigenous leader Wadson Trujillo, Lima, Peru

"The adults can still put up with the hunger but not the kids."

"No one has brought a single drop of water or food to our community."

Kukama chief Galo Vaszuez 

A group of tourists was travelling by boat when locals forced them to dock Credit: RPP News

 

In a remote corner of the Amazon in the first week of November a host of tourists were taken hostage to attract the attention of the Peruvian government to the plight of Indigenous Kukama communities in northeastern Peru. They were armed with spears and bows and arrows, forcing a boatload of about a hundred people  travelling through the area  to dock. The tourists were in no danger. They were being used as props in a desperate hostage-taking to publicize the fact that the Indigenous tribes were in a perilous environmental situation.

A deadly oil spill was at the centre of the protest. Those holding the tourists as hostages stated the group would be held until such time as the Peruvian government and Petroperu the oil company owned by the state, took the time and effort to see that their grievance was addressed. The oil spill was threatening enough to have been the source of poisoning killing two babies and a woman, as a result of their polluted water supply.

As the group of abductees saw their food and clean water running short, two of them warned that "conditions are starting to deteriorate". Neatly encapsulating the situation the tribes have also found themselves in. One of the tourists urged for "intervention to get us out of here", given the situation included the presence of  pregnant, diabetic elderly and ill people within the group.

Among the native Peruvians were Germans, British, Spanish and French tourists. On September 16, a 21 cm. gash in the Norperuano pipeline appeared, the pipeline used by oil company Petroperu to pump crude from its Amazon operations to the coast. According to the company, the rupture appeared to be a deliberate act of sabotage, without naming potential suspects. 

Since then, the oil seeped into a local river whose reliance as a potable water source and location of fishing stocks impoverished, isolated local communities depend on. As a result of the poisoning of the water the Kukama people became increasingly desperate following the death of three people. No action to address their concerns had been taken, despite holding talks with authorities.

The tribes feel abandoned by both their government and the oil company. Official negligence, oil spills and Indigenous communities left to their own devices is commonplace in northern Peru in the Amazon leading to some environmental groups campaigning to raise awareness. With the Left-wing populist Pedro Castillo taking office in 2021 the issue has intensified.

 

While President Castillo was campaigning he was the "president of the poor", so expectations were raised among Peruvians including among the marginalized communities in the Andes and
Amazon. Reality has raised its ugly head as corruption rages on and nothing has been done to help the poor.

In the end, although there was brief international interest aroused with the hostage-taking, highlighting the situation faced by the Amazon tribes, nothing has changed. The hostages were freed, their plight alleviated by the very people whose own misery remains outstanding. “The people have had to drink water and eat fish contaminated with petroleum without any government being concerned", said Wadson Trujillo.

The oil spills, about which nothing continues to be done, affected not only the thousand residents of his township, but another 80 communities nearby, many lacking running water, electricity or telephone services.

 

70 hostages including Brits have been freed after they were captured in the Amazon    Credit: rpp news

Devasted Economies, Evaporating Quality of Life, the Legacy of the Global Pandemic

"The developed world had the advantage of being formal economies, where if you do a lockdown, people have access to unemployment insurance or social aid."

"That didn't happen in much of the developing world. You saw a middle class move into poverty and the poor move into severe food insecurity."

Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist, UN Food Agency

 

"We thought they [family children] were just depressed, but we took them to the clinic and found out they have anemia."

"The doctor told me to feed them more. But with what money? With what food?"

"We don't have the virus, but the pandemic is killing us."

Marimar Avila, 27, Lima slum, Peru

"Many of the people facing a lack of access to food are the same ones who started having a better quality of life, some, even in the middle class, who had achieved a good status in life, maybe even a car."

"During the pandemic, they lost all their income. It became a question of survival."

America Arias, Peru director, Action Against Hunger charity

"[My 30-year-old business, small-scale manufacturer of kitchen stoves] basically died in the pandemic."

"Do you know what it's like to spend your whole life building a company, and then, to end up here [soup kitchen]?"

"What am I going to do now? My savings are gone. How am I going to rebuild?"

Juan Tarazona, 57, San Martin de Porres, Lima, Peru

Photo: FAO

 

The global pandemic has had many effects on people's lives, all of them hard and miserable, some dire. From personal bankruptcy to business collapses and national economic failures to issues of growing food scarcity in developing countries, all while governments everywhere focus on hoping to counter successive waves of COVID-19 outbreaks devastating their populations and their national treasuries. The pandemic has also had the effect of widening worldwide inequality with many nations facing serious food shortages.

The deleterious impact of the pandemic is seen through new data released by the United Nations where the unequal impact of the still-evolving situation emphasizes access to the most primary basic human necessity -- food -- has been exacerbated for many globally. A documented additional 118 million people worldwide were beset with food insecurity in 2020, leaping forward to 758 million people. Bringing the current number of people either living with food insecurity or forced to compromise on quantity or quality, to 2.38 billion people worldwide.

The formality of employment, social safety nets and availability of remote work conditions cushioned the effects of COVID isolation in North America and Europe where the percentage of people living with food insecurity rose from 7.7 percent to 8.8 percent. In the developing world where billions of informal workers and insecure government assistance prevail, the situation for populations was far more serious. More people are food insecure conventionally in Asia and Africa under normal circumstances.

Despite which, during and as a result of the global pandemic, Latin America and the Caribbean realized the largest one-year jump in food insecurity of nine percentage points to 40.9 percent, where there is also a chronic shortage of vaccines even as new waves of the virus continue to impact hugely, further contributing to unstable food access. It was Peru that saw the biggest surge in COVID infections and food scarcity.

Before the pandemic Peru had a commodities boom enabling it to cut poverty and malnutrition by 50 percent in the past two decades. That same South American nation now represents a study in deepening inequality where new national data illustrate a spike in poverty from 20 percent to 30 percent in one year. In many neighbourhoods people survive with the use of a "communal pot" representing a food station popping up in destitute quarters of the capital itself, where neighbours pool and share whatever food they have.

 

Peru has the highest Covid death rate as a proportion of population in the world, according to the latest data. Getty Images

Latin America, considered largely to be a middle-income region, is also home to some of the most COVID-impacted places on Earth, suffering the largest relative increase in food insecurity as a result of the life-degrading quality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID. Peru also happens to be the country with the highest COVID death rate per capita in the world. Despite that poverty and childhood malnutrition were halved in the past two decades. The goal was to end poverty in the nation altogether, a goal that has receded even as the pandemic has generated all manner of negative indicators. 

A marked increase in maternal mortality in childbirth; an increase in deaths attributable to HIV infections, and falling university attendance rates. The nation that financial experts fully expected would join the ranks of high-income nations now struggles to support itself and its people in an atmosphere of degraded quality of life and dissolving opportunities to advance, thanks to the pandemic.

 

Foto: Southern Voice

The Aching Vacuum

"[It's not a specific dream, but] mostly the comfort of his presence, seeing  him, hearing his voice -- just a feeling that he is with me. [Dreaming, there is a brief reprieve from] the constant aching void that I feel for him every waking minute."
"...I didn't want to be that helicopter parent, the overprotective mother."
"It's such a backward and such a corrupt country [Peru]."
"At the cemetery [for her father's funeral, late August], I scooped up a shovel full of earth and dropped it on the coffin -- and said, 'Oh, my God, this is my goal'. It hit  me like a ton of bricks: I'm  trying to bring my son home in a coffin. But it's not even that; it's that I have to know what happened."
"Because I brought them [son and daughter] up alone and because he was the older one, he was my friend. Jesse was not just my son, but he was my best friend. We took ski  trips out west alone together annually, loved spending time together, and we talked about everything."
"We were closer than the usual mother-son relationship -- even through his teens. He was an enormous emotional support to me, and a huge part of my life."
"Every single time I go back [to Peru] with hope anew -- and I am disappointed. But I have to keep going. I can't finish it until I have an ending."
Alisa Clamen, 53, Montreal

Alisa Clamen at home in Côte-St-Luc. "Jesse was not just my son, but he was my best friend." John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette

"We built a psychology profile of Jesse to figure out what he considered and what he did not consider and to figure out how he made his decisions."
"Either he was carried out of the area [Santa Cruz Trail, Peru], or hidden very carefully."
"[Alisa Clamen is] one of the strongest people [I've ever encountered in such missing persons cases.] She is very strong, very rational and she is making every effort."
"Though it takes time, we believe we will reach a solution."
Magnus International Search & Rescue CEO Guy Atzmon

"To find him now is a matter of intelligence to point you in the right direction to look. It means very deep work, getting into small villages, local people."
"...My heart is with the mother. That's what is driving me, to try to raise the mystery out of those mountains."
"We would like to provide some peace for her soul."
Hilik Magnus, founder, Magnus International Search & Rescue

Jesse Galganov, 22, (right) is seen with his mother Alisa Clamen in this undated photo. (CP24)

He was 22 years old, a young man of adventurous spirit, about to begin medical school in Philadelphia, come July. Before then, he planned to satisfy his sense of adventure on a solo trip to South America and Asia, an eight-month travel venture. His mother drove him to the airport so he could board a flight for Peru. That was a year ago. On the 28th of September Jesse texted his mother, informing her he'd be out of touch for four days while he hiked the Santa Cruz trail along the world's highest tropical mountain range.

October 2 arrived and Jesse's mother felt certainthat her son must have set out on a longer trail. By the following week she contacted the Canadian embassy to be informed that a police report was required to alert Interpol. On October 17, the single mother of two young adults, a practising lawyer, set out herself for Peru. From her experience while there, she gained the indelible impression that authorities were not all that interested in tracking her son's whereabouts. Not did she get much help elsewhere.

She found a lack of security and organization. Registration trail logs were missing or incomplete; technology companies and service providers refused to release details of last use of Jesse's electronic devices. She quickly organized searches both by local teams and through an elite Israeli-based search-and-rescue group with equipment and advanced technology inclusive of underwater robots and drones, in the search and investigation. So far all that activity has come in at a cool $2 million. Helped by community support, fundraising, and mortgaging her home, she carried on.

She no longer hopes to find her son alive, but she desperately wants to know what happened to him, and if at all possible, to discover where his body is, and to bring it home to Canada. She has been long divorced; her daughter was one year old at the time, Jesse two. She is no longer capable of practising her profession as she once did; concentration eludes her. She now lives a fairly secluded life, unwilling to socialize, seeing none but close friends and family. "I don't have the desire or energy for anything else", she points out, understandably.

She is no longer "in step" with the world at large. She goes out of her way to avoid running into people she knows: "They don't know what to say. I hate putting them in that position." She continues to pay her son's cellphone invoices: "I can't bring myself to stop", and until recently maintained his car lease. People admire her strength and perseverance. "What's the alternative? I can fall apart and just stay in bed -- or I can try to function. If I don't continue the search for Jesse, who else will?"

The Magnus crew analyzed Jesse's trek, the environment in which he found himself, how he managed to forge ahead with his plans. They contacted close to 200 other travellers from around the world they managed to identify through Facebook photos, "to build the full picture of who Jesse met, whom he spoke to". Two hikers who had shared the same campsite with Jesse on September 30 for example. They discovered that on October 1, Jesse had enquired of a group of Czech tourists where he might find water. After that there was no sign of him.

There are those who feel Jesse may have been assailed with altitude sickness causing him to wander off trail where he succumbed to the elements. Possibly, someone might have come across his body, robbed him and moved him to a remote location by donkey or horse, or even thrown his body into a body of water nearby. Not content to allow others to do the searching Alisa Clamen spent four months in the past year in Peru, 21 nights of which were spent on the Santa Cruz trail, willing herself to view what her son encountered, to walk in his footsteps.

The trail, she found, is difficult to navigate, dangerous, poorly marked with ample hazards aside from altitude sickness. There are mud fields, jagged rock fragments (scree) and slippery rock sheets to negotiate. In July she went along with a local guide-company owner she trusts and his team on a glacier search on the trail, encountering a 50-cm snowfall that impeded progress on their search. A canine team trained to sniff out human remains failed to work due to the difficulty of the terrain.

Alisa Clamen yearns, and needs her son Jesse, alive or dead, to return home to her, so her soul can be at rest just as his will be put to rest.

Jesse Galganov Fund

Missing Children's Network Canada