PromPeru Expects 50 Percent Rise In Brazilian Tourists In 2012

Peru’s tourism promotion agency, PromPeru, expectes to see a 50 percent jump in Brazilian tourists this year, state news agency Andina said.

Brazil, the world’s sixth largest economy, is Latin America’s regional powerhouse and is increasingly becoming a player on the world stage.

While Brazil’s clout increases abroad, it is also seeing a growing middle class that is able to take international holidays, including trips to Peru.

In the first nine months of 2011, 92,000 tourists from Brazil visited Peru, up from Read more…

Recovering Antiquities: Golden Moche Bead Returned to Peru

A solid gold ornament in the shape of a monkey head, dating from the 100-800 AD Moche culture of Peru’s north coast, was returned to Peru yesterday by the New Mexico History Museum, at a ceremony in Washington D.C.

The gold bead, measuring 4.5cm tall by 7cm wide and most probably once on a necklace, was part of an exhibition on Art of Ancient America in the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The collection was on loan to the museum since 1998 by private collector John Read more…

CADE Innovations: Stay tuned for ‘El Nuevo Peru de Antes!’

By Nicholas Asheshov

~ Special to Peruvian Times ~

As business leaders meet in Cusco this weekend to focus on “Innovation” at the Annual Executive Conference, CADE, from the countryside of the Urubamba valley the author proposes looking back for truly radical and practical, high-tech innovation.

Ancient Peru was one of the half-dozen centers of the technological and political innovation that ushered in today’s complex world of great, interdependent cultures.

Unlike the other centers — China, the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, India, and finally the Mediterranean and Western Europe — most of Peru’s innovations, above all in social organization, were lost in the disaster of the Conquest.

Proud, sad bits and pieces of the ancient Andean and coastal cultures remain.  The potato and a half-dozen varieties of maize have been essential parts of the food chain that is feeding 7,000 million people.  China is today the world’s biggest producer of the potato, first domesticated around Lake Titicaca, and of the sweet potato, camote.

Peruvians can reflect, perhaps with mixed feelings, that it was the US$200,000,000,000, at today’s values —the figure comes from Prof. Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and The Rest, published in London earlier this year— that the conquistadors sent back to Europe between 1532 and 1780, which provided the liquidity for the creation of the global economy of the 21st century.

But the precious metals, like the guano, tomato, quinoa, cherimoya and cocaine, are secondary and are in any case not really what we mean by innovation.  The khipu, the cutting-edge strings-and-knots combination of iPad and Registros Publicos — production cost 35 cents— was lost, destroyed maliciously by the priests, the Taliban of the day.  Only 620 remain. According to Prof. Gary Urton, of Harvard, it was much more sophisticated than anything in Europe at the time but they still haven’t cracked its complex code.

Like Machu Picchu, the thousands of miles of all-weather roads, irrigation systems on the coast, tens of thousands of stone terraces and water systems in the valleys and highlands, and the networks of warehouses, these were by-products of the real value of life in Ancient Peru.  This was the lively, aggressive social and political stability that allowed the Incas and a dozen great cultures that preceded them — Chavin, Moche, Tiahuanacu, Huari — to produce societies that were in the front rank of their contemporaries worldwide.

On Lake Titicaca, in the Sacred Valley, and in 50 other valleys like the Colca and the Rimac, the stability and genius for working together of the ancient Peruvians literally remodeled one of the world’s toughest environments.  They consistently created an idealized, civilized world of good order and stability.

No one can look at the massive millimeter-fine, delicately imaginative granite blocks at Sacsayhuaman, Pisac, Rac’chi, Huanuco Viejo, Rosaspata, Sillustani and, naturally, Machu Picchu itself without understanding instantly that for two or three thousand years ancient Peruvians created a purposeful permanence.

The same applies, with obvious local variations, to the great adobe pyramids on the coast.  Perhaps in the same way that today’s costeños are more outgoing than the peoples of the highlands, the costeños produced the flamboyant artistry of the gold- and silver-working of Sipan.

These were productive, often competitive societies whose vision was not just day-to-day or year-to-year, but in some clear way, eternal.  You and your children do not spend a lifetime producing a granite masterpiece just to fill in the time between meals.

Peruvian schoolchildren are not taught about the power and range of their ancestors.

The Incas — schoolchildren in Urubamba, Huancane, Bambamarca and Ayabaca are taught today — were ‘indigenas’.   There is a puzzling political agenda here.  The teachers do not know, do not seem to want to know, about Peru’s long distinguished past.

So my proposal for a first innovation that Peru today might want to consider is to produce DVD and computer programs that will be in every school in the land, every classroom in the country, which will tell the real story of the pre-Conquista past.  They will learn, for instance, of the complex, innovative technology that went into the layered construction of the terraces and hydrological systems they see around them.  They will learn about the networks of warehouses and storage facilities.  When the Spaniards arrived, they found that there was two or three years of food and clothing stored everywhere.

The project includes the creation of computer games called “Build An Andean Empire” and “Run Your Own Coastal Civilization” and, of course, war games like “Incas vs Spaniards.”

Secondary-level kids will move on to “How to Run a Municipality/Region/Country.”

And so on.

The interactive computer programs and movies, modeled perhaps on the science and history programs produced for the NGS, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel and the BBC, will be financed and distributed by the banks and commercial and industrial companies, all of them members of CADE, which will also be in charge of distributing them.  Teachers, including members of SUTEP, will be instructed on teaching the children how to switch them on and off.

Within a few years young Peruvian voters will have a new vision of their country and its possibilities.  Unlike most other countries, including some of the neighbors, they have a history, not to mention a geography, which they can see and touch, second to none.

Population: from 1mn to 3mn to 30mn — and now on to 40mn

It is hard to blame today’s governments for not telling the young about the first-class public administrations of Peru half a millennium ago.

The most crushing blow of the Conquest was in the loss of people.  Between smallpox and piratical savagery, nine out of every 10 Peruvians died between 1530 and 1601 when a census registered only one million people, most of them in the highlands.  The coastal peoples had been exterminated.

These population losses were calculated by Noble David Cook in Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru 1520-1620 and Born to Die; Disease and New World Conquest published by the Cambridge University Press.

Peru’s population was to rise painfully slowly to three million by 1911.  All the Peruvians of a century ago would all fit easily into Lima’s Cono Norte today.   As everyone knows, today Peru’s population is 30mn, 10 times greater, in less than four generations.

Inca Peru had 10 million inhabitants, according to Prof. Cook’s best guess.   All of them lived out in what is today the countryside.  Cuzco had perhaps 40,000 inhabitants, less than Huacho today.

The next innovation will be to prepare for a Peru that within another generation will have 40 million people.  Peruvians will be much younger in a decade or two than the Chinese and other Asian tigers and, of course, the already-geriatric Europeans.

The local politicians in Cajamarca, Puno and elsewhere today who are protesting against gold and copper mines are being unusually far-sighted.   They are trying to keep the gold, silver and copper out of the hands both of international bankers and of Lima bureaucrats.  “Water for us, not gold for them,” they shout, and of course we all agree.   The government should instead borrow from the bankers and, noblesse oblige, repay them in worthless paper in 2041 et seq.

A decade or two from now the minerals will be worth ten times their present value and a generation of history-savvy, computer-literate Peruvians will be able to take full advantage of their elders’ foresight.

______________________

This article was published in Caretas magazine this week in Spanish.

Nick Asheshov is a director of The Machu Picchu Train Co., Urubamba. A veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur, he was editor of the Peruvian Times from 1969 to 1990.

Mick Jagger visits President Humala en route to Amazonian ecolodge

President Ollanta Humala welcomed British rock star Mick Jagger to the government palace Sunday,with the minister of Trade and Tourism, José Luis Silva.

The legendary Rolling Stones leader, Sir Michael Jagger arrived in Lima early Sunday on a private visit with his companion, designer L’Wren Scott, and his 12-year old son Lucas Maurice,  to travel later in the day to Puerto Maldonado to stay at an ecological reserve outside the jungle town. The reserve includes a canopy walk.

Following his brief visit to President Humala and his wife, Jagger visited the Rafael Larco museum and other sites.

HISTORY OF PERU SERIES – Part 10: The Big Picture —3500 BC – 500 AD

By Paul Goulder – Special to Peruvian Times —

During the past year the Peruvian Times (see links below) has published a series of articles on the History of Peru spanning the years, very approximately, 3500 BC to 500 AD. At the beginning of this period humans were starting to live in towns, to build monumental religious sites, to specialize in trade and to form hierarchical societies. 

Towards the end of the period political states had formed to the extent that two of them, Read more…

Culture Minister: Peru To Create Organization Aimed At Reducing Discrimination

Culture Minister Susana Baca said Friday that Peru will create a new organization that will aim at decreasing discrimination and exclusion of indigenous people and Afro-Peruvians, state news agency Andina reported.

The National Observatory for Discrimination and Cultural, Ethnic Exclusion will be ready in 90 days, Baca said.

“We have to end historic exclusion and the discrimination of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants, promoting respect for equality, rights and dignity,” Baca Read more…

Culture Minister Baca Suspends Concerts

Culture Minister Susana Baca said Tuesday that she has suspended her upcoming concerts, amid criticism that her music career and traveling was affecting her cabinet work.

On Monday, Cabinet Chief Salomon Lerner Ghitis said that Baca’s appointment to the ministry would be re-evaluated if she was unable to fully commit her time, daily El Comercio reported.

Baca had accepted President Humala’s invitation to join the cabinet on the proviso that she could wrap up a series of international concerts already scheduled for this Read more…

Susana Baca appointed Humala’s Culture Minister

Prominent Peruvian singer Susana Baca has been appointed to be the next Minister of Culture by President-elect Ollanta Humala, the incoming government announced by Twitter.

Baca, 67, was born in Lima’s Chorrillos district and is a winner of the Latin Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, for her Lamento Negro disc.

“I think I am the first black cabinet minister in Peru,” Baca said during an interview on RPP radio, adding that she was proud to be the first in the Afro-Peruvian community to hold such a high office in the government.

“I have a difficult year ahead of me, with many concerts, but I have always been interested in working for Peru,” she said.  “I will work to ensure that culture is not something that is only enjoyed by the people who can afford it, but that it be democratic, that it reach everyone and be inclusive.”   

Baca, a composer and researcher as well as a performer, has been internationally recognized at the forefront of the revival of Afro-Peruvian music, as well as a director and supporter of nonprofit cultural organizations.

Baca will replace Juan Ossio, an anthropologist who was appointed by outgoing President Alan Garcia as Peru’s first minister of culture, incorporating the former National Culture Institute (INC) as well as a number of museums and arts schools, including the National Fine Arts School.  Ossio telephoned Baca to congratulate her on the appointment.

The day after her swearing- in on July 28, she is scheduled to be in Ecuador for a disc-launching concert.

Hidden Jewels of Lima: Parque de Bellas Artes, La Victoria

By Tony Darrington

This part of the Lima district of La Victoria is known for its car accessory traders. Any spare part, anything for or connected to the motor vehicle can be obtained on or near Avenida Mexico.

What you are not expecting to find are works of art. Read more…

Gov’t awards Szyszlo the Order of the Sun

Peru’s government awarded painter Fernando de Szyszlo on Tuesday the country’s highest accolade, the Order of the Sun, in recognition of his artistic work and defense of human rights.

Foreign Affairs Minister Jose Antonio Garcia-Belaunde said during the ceremony that Szyszlo’s art presents “intense abstraction” of Peru’s culture.

“As well, the master is a fierce defender of human rights,” state news agency Andina reported Garcia-Belaunde as saying. Read more…

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