Magnitude 6.2 Earthquake Hits Southern Peru, Northern Chile

A magnitude 6.2 earthquake rocked southern Peru and northern Chile early Monday, the United States Geological Survey, or USGS.

The epicenter of the quake was on the Chilean side of the border, about 28 miles from the Chilean town of Putre and 34 miles from the Peruvian city of Tacna, the USGS said.

The quake had a depth of 61 miles, and didn’t cause any major damage, according Read more…

Peru’s Environmental Health Office issues Precautions in Wake of Dying Pelicans and Dolphins

No beaches and no raw fish is the Environmental Health office’s precautionary warning this week, following the death of hundreds of pelicans and dolphins along the 1,000-kilometer stretch between Piura and Lima.  

Although specialists say there is no risk involved to humans, either by going to the beach or eating fish, the warning is to prevent any possible infections from the dead animals while scientists confirm the reasons for the deaths.

Around 1,000 dolphins and more than 4,000 pelicans have died on Peruvian shores since January this year. 

Tests are being carried out at the Cayetano Heredia Environmental Sustainability Read more…

Sunat Chief Says Gov’t To Implement Mechanisms In June To Combat Illegal Mining

The head of Peru’s tax agency Sunat, Tania Quispe, said the government plans to establish by June mechanisms to halt the supply of chemical inputs and machinery that are used by illegal gold miners, state news agency Andina reported.

“We are talking about May or June at the latest,” Quispe said. “We plan to pull out all the stops in the  regulation process.”

Quispe said that Sunat, which also governs the customs superintendency Sunad, plays an important role in the government’s efforts to stem illegal mining by detecting Read more…

Heavy Rains Cause More Than 50 Deaths Since November

Flooding and landslides caused by heavy rains in Peru have caused the deaths of 53 people over the past six months, according to the country’s National Civil Defense Institute, Indeci.

Since November, some 267,000 people have been affected by the rains, daily El Comercio reported.

The rains have affected all of Peru’s 25 regions, according to the report, in a rainy season that has continued beyond the usual November-March season, with losses recorded in urban and rural areas, Read more…

Consultants Hand In Review On Newmont’s Minas Conga

Three international consultants charged with reviewing Newmont Mining’s multi-billion dollar Minas Conga copper-gold project have turned over their findings to the Peruvian government.

Cabinet Chief Oscar Valdes and top government officials received the report during a press conference on Tuesday. Authorities and the consultants did not provide many details about the findings, adding that the full report will be published on government websites within 24 hours.

“It has been totally unbiased and transparent,” Valdes said, according to daily El Comercio. “The consultants have been working to evaluate all of the environmental and technical aspects of the Conga project. It has been a very intense job, they Read more…

Minas Conga Opponents Hold Protest Awaiting Environmental Review

Opponents of the huge Minas Conga copper and gold project in Cajamarca region held a 24-hour protest on Wednesday, only days ahead of when the government is expected to make public a review by three independent consultants on the project’s environmental viability.  The review was handed in to the government at the end of last week.

Premier Oscar Valdes said the government would respect the right to protest, but that acts of violence would not be tolerated. “What we aren’t going to allow are acts of violence that threaten the freedom of transit for other Peruvians who are not participating in the demonstration,” Radio Programas reported Valdes as saying.

The Minas Conga project was suspended in November amid protests against the project. Opponents, who include the regional president of Cajamarca, Gregorio Read more…

COUNTRY NOTES: Downtown in The Lost Cities of the Amazon

— By Nicholas Asheshov —

Some weeks ago two events, one of them startling, came together to pin-point the mysterious new conundrum of the Amazon.

The first was the appearance on a busy riverbank in the Madre de Dios of a few dozen members of a previously-isolated group of Indians.  They killed someone who had been trying to help them.

The naked Indians, seen on TV screens around the world, were described by anthropologists as descendants of an unbroken line of hunting and gathering savages, living fossils of our neolithic past.

This is, according to new Amazon thinking, incorrect. These Indians are the sad, socially degenerated remnants of nations and tribes that were productive, sophisticated and stable  just a few centuries ago.

The other event was an article in The New York Times that reported on the discovery in Acre, only a few hours travel from the Madre de Dios Indians, of extensive, deep straight, or sometimes circular, trenches, ridges and mounds dating back to pre-Columbian times, indicating a large, well-developed society.

This was just the latest evidence that the Amazon, or at least parts of it, was heavily populated by well-organized societies in much the same way as the high Andes were remodelled by the Tiahuanuco, the Chavin, the Chachapoyas, the Huari, and the Incas.

Over the past couple of decades the pre-history of the Americas has been revolutionized, setting off poison-tipped academic and ecological vendettas.

First of all, the Americas were populated much earlier, at least 33-35,000 years ago, double the time previously calculated.  That is back to Neanderthal epochs.

Second, there were many more people here when Columbus arrived than was earlier thought.  And, most important, the societies and nations of the Americas were much more sophisticated and structured than was previously understood.  They were agriculturalists, not the war-whoopers of the movies.  Their mode of life and agriculture had massive, long-term effects on the original pre-human forests.   Fire was a basic control mechanism.

Today the evidence of genetics, linguistics and archaeology is clear that the Amazon was not just an impenetrable green hell populated by primitive hunters and fishermen eking out an unchanging, culturally marginal existence.

The same applies to North America.  Here most of the descriptions of primitive Indians come from 18th and 19th century travelers who were seeing only the sorry leftovers of great nations that had been obliterated by smallpox, viral hepatitis, influenza and other European and African diseases.  The Conquest set off the Dark Ages in the Americas.

In the Amazon the same collapse, featuring malaria and yellow fever, was exacerbated by the rubber boom of the late-1800s and early-1900s.

You can check this out in three fine recent books.  Two of these are Charles C Mann’s easy-to-read, well-researched “1491” and a sequel, “1493“, just out; and in John Hemming’s “Tree of Rivers“, a masterly description of the Amazon.  Hemming, author of the classic “The Conquest of the Incas” has also written, earlier, three volumes on the peoples of the Amazon.

Charles Mann describes, for instance, how my old friend William Denevan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, discovered how the Beni, on the edge of the western Amazon in Bolivia, was a flourishing, well-organized center of islands and causeways on what is today a bleak, sparsely-inhabited combination of dense jungle and flood-plain, inhabited today by sad remnants of Siriono Indians.

Bill worked on the Peruvian Times just before me in the 1960s and his stories on the Beni and similar mounds and trenches around Lake Titicaca in the PT were the first indication of this revolution in South American prehistory.

“Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, this long-ago society,”  Mann writes, “created one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the planet.”

Great stuff.

Mann desribes the Amazon as one of the world’s half-dozen agricultural heartlands, where plants were domesticated, the epicenters of civilization.  Others were the tropical Andes, Central America, the Fertile Crescent, and China.

The Amazon, including the area where the savage Indians appeared the other day, just north and west of the Beni, was the source of yuca, known elsewhere as manioc or cassava, as well as tobacco, peanuts chili pepper, chocolate, Brazilian broad beans, the peach palm, and Brazil nuts.

It was also the homeland of Hevea Brasiliensis, the rubber tree, which was to be, along with steel and oil, one of the three creators of the 20th century version of civilization.

For the Amazon, including the Indians on the banks the other day of the Madre de Dios, rubber became a disaster, just as gold and silver had been for Peru and Mexico.  The malaria and yellow fever, imports from Africa, that it helped to spread turned the Amazon and its western tributaries into what Charles Mann calls “de-populated fever valleys.”  Slavery did the rest.

The Amazon as a center of civilization has become the subject of a bitter dispute between two magnificent lady academics, the archaeologists Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution and Anna Roosevelt of the University of Illinois. 

Hemming mentions the two warring camps on the issue of whether or not there were tribes with sophisticated, stable, large populations: Dr Meggers says that the Amazon basically had only hunters+gatherers; Dr. Roosevelt says that there were big lively societies all over the place.

Here is a message to me the other day from John Hemming and you will find nowhere else a more precise and appropriately colorful description of the state of play today in Amazon studies.

“Broadly, I think that Anna (and her acolytes like Michael Heckenberger) are right to say that there were large chiefdoms on some riverbanks of the main Amazon and its tributaries (although there were also very long stretches of uninhabited river).  Those chiefdoms were based on the river and its fish and turtle resources. 

“But I think that the Roosevelt school exaggerates the size and sophistication of their beloved chiefdoms, which they compare to the great civilizations of Peru.

“They also exaggerate the extent of human manipulation of forests. Remember that it was very laborious indeed for early man to fell trees (other than palms) with their stone axes.  And they had no need or desire to do so: they were very happy in pristine forests full of game. Planting the trees they liked near their villages was merely rearranging the deckchairs.  It did not alter the Amazon landscape.

“Meggers is right about the inability of Amazon terra-firma forest to support villages of more than a thousand people maximum – the surrounding game is exhausted otherwise, and the soils under mature forests are too weak to sustain large-scale farming. So, away from the rivers, early tribes were not much larger than their modern descendants at the time of first contact and before being hit by imported disease.”

For many years, John was Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, London, and we can all understand what he means by “rearranging the deckchairs.”

But not everyone agrees. Charles Mann in his just-published “1493,” calls the Amazon “the world’s richest garden,” quoting archeobiologists and looking at parts of the Amazon today that are carefully-distributed and well-tended collections of trees, plants and fish and game reserves.

Today there are tourists but it can still be a tough place.  Near the Acre ruins noted in The New York Times, settlers are still gunned down by big-money ranchers.  I remember John telling me of the day in 1961 when he carried the arrow-filled body of his friend Richard Mason back to camp.   A decade later, in 1970, I myself was searching the jungles of the Pantiacolla in the Upper Madre de Dios for my friend Robert Nichols, chief reporter of the Peruvian Times of which I was then the editor, who had set out to find Paititi, a version of El Dorado.   It transpired that he, and two French companions, had been stoned to death by the Machiguengas.

Unlike John, I am not prejudiced by knowing what I am talking about and I unreservedly plump for the Roosevelt school’s bumptious Amazonian super-civilizations and I am supported by no less than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.  Their latest movie, due out this year, is The Lost City of Z, where Brad plays Colonel Percy Fawcett, the English explorer, searching in 1925 for El Dorado in the Amazon.   Let’s hope that Brad has better luck than Percy, who never returned. 

————–

Notes.
Colonel Percy Fawcett said: “The answer to the enigma of Ancient South America – and perhaps that of the entire prehistoric world – will be found when the old South American cities are located and opened up to scientific research. These cities exist, and I will prove that they exist.”
————-
Tony Morrison, the wildlife photographer and author, on a recent trip to the Beni:
“Setting out from Trinidad in the Beni we hopped on a 35b bus in the plaza and headed to the great mound at Eviata where the entire village is built above the floodplain. I went there to see the last of the Siriono tribe, as they have a base around the old mission church. What a bedraggled lot they were and the mound is now topped by a huge ENTEL satellite dish — not a bad place to site it as it should be above the annual flood.”
——
Vera Tulyneva charlie.quispe@yahoo.com . Ms Tulyneva is completing a thesis on “Paititi” at the Universidad Catolica, Lima.  Commenting on The New York Times story on ancient remains in the Acre:

“The earth constructions of Acre have been in the news for the past five years. The first one to speak of them was Martti Pärssinen, an historian from Finland who had been working in the region for many years. In fact, they are not “geoglyphs,” i.e. earth figurative drawings of apparent religious/ritual function, but rather utilitarian earthworks, like drainage trenches. Acre, Mojos, Beni, Xingu and many other Amazonic regions are full of them.”
————–
Michael Heckenberger website on Xingu: The Xingu Ethnoarchaeological Project
————–
An article on Acre: Pre-columbian geometric earthworks
and  Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purus  

————–
The New York Times: The Nazca Lines of the Acre jungle – Land Carvings Attest to Lost World
______________________________________

 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.

Peru’s Pulgar-Vidal Proposes Greater Regional Cooperation On Illegal Mining

Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal proposed that nations in the Amazon basin share experiences on confronting illegal mining, which has been blamed for causing serious environmental damage in the world’s most bio-diverse rainforests.

“It (illegal mining) is not a problem that is exclusive to Peru, but also countries like Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil,” Pulgar-Vidal said, according to state news agency Andina.

“We are going to see how we can exchange experiences to confront this problem,” Read more…

No Peruvians Injured In Mexico Quake – Government

No Peruvians have been injured by a large earthquake that hit Mexico on Tuesday, according to Peru’s consul general in that country, Augusto Freyre.

“We have received reports from the three consulates in Mexico (Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey) and there are no reports of [Peruvians] being injured due to the quake,” Freyre said, according to state news agency Andina.

Some 6,500 Peruvians are believed to be living in Mexico. Of those, 400 live in the Read more…

South American Environment Ministers Meet On Amazon Environment

Environment Ministers from eight South American countries are meeting for a two day summit, starting Tuesday, to discuss actions to protect the Amazon rain forest, Peru’s state news agency Andina reported.

The summit, which was inaugurated by Peruvian Foreign Affairs Minister Rafael Roncagliolo, aims to create projects to ensure sustainable development in the Amazon.

The topics include monitoring deforestation, defining criteria for sustainable forest management, tackling forest fires, managing water resources, and a number of Read more…

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