Op-Ed Contributors, Opinion

Driving with Fredy

By Shane Hunt*

When the Ford Foundation opened its Lima offices in 1965, the first person it hired was Federico Herrera. Fredy was the principal driver for the office from that time until Ford closed it in 1992, moving to the comparative safety of Santiago de Chile.

Somewhat later in the 1990s, when I was associated with a new USAID project that needed to hire staff, I was delighted to lure Fredy out of retirement. From my earlier days in the Ford office, I remembered him as thoroughly dependable, attentive to detail, always on time.

Whenever Fredy drove me somewhere, I would sit beside him, not just for idle conversation, but for something more focused than that. I wanted to hear Fredy’s story. From very early on, I realized that, taciturn though he was, Fredy had a story to tell.

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He was born and raised in a small town near Huancayo. A road reached the town only around 1990, and before that, getting there meant three days of walking.

Fortunately, Peru’s school system reached the town fifty years before the road. Fredy was ten years old when the school was constructed and classes began, and for him it was in the nick of time. He was a little old to begin school, but not so old as to have missed the chance. He learned how to read and write.

Fredy’s route from Sierra to Lima went by way of the army. His joining up was not however voluntary. He was caught in an army dragnet, the notorious “leva”, by which army trucks and personnel would suddenly surround a populous area, and pick up all young men who were elegible for the obligatory military service that was in effect at the time. The “leva” never reached into middle-class areas.

The army brought him to the coast, and gave him experience in adjusting to coastal ways. Working and living in Lima was the natural next step.

That step was made with difficulty. As his first job out of the army, Fredy chose to become a fisherman. This was the height of Peru’s spectacular fishing boom, and jobs were plentiful. One night, however, a giant wave hit Fredy’s “bolichera” and washed him overboard. Somehow he managed to hold on to a piece of the boat, and his crew mates dragged him back in. He did not know how to swim.

The following day Fredy decided that a career on land would be the wiser course. He became a driver.

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Fredy didn’t lose connections with his town. Family lands were still there, managed by his brother. His mother continued to live there, but his father was dead. He had been murdered by rustlers.

It happened at night, as his father was guarding the family’s sheep flock. He was beaten to death with a large stone. A young boy who had been with the father was witness to the crime but unseen by the killers.  He gave descriptions to the police, and a few weeks later the killers were spotted and arrested in a nearby town. They were thrown into prison pending trial, but the trial never happened. In the forbidding cold of a sierra prison, they contracted pneumonia and died.

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When the road reached Fredy’s town, it brought new opportunities for selling to outside markets and raising living standards. Better yet, the road continued past the town and down into areas of lower elevation, the “montaña.” These new lands could be planted with tropical crops. Fredy’s family obtained a “chakra,” cleared it, and planted fruit trees. These were good times.

But ten years earlier, in the 1980s during the war with Sendero Luminoso (the Maoist “Shining Path” guerrilla insurgency), Fredy’s town had gone through the darkest of times. An armed band of senderistas appeared and took control of the town for several days. This event occurred before the road had been built, and long before cell phones became ubiquitous. A town like Fredy’s lived in near-complete isolation.

The band took the town without resistance. Its first act was to call a meeting in the town’s plaza, to which all were obliged to attend. There the Sendero band called forth the mayor and several other town leaders, charged them with various crimes, tried them before a kangaroo court, convicted them, and killed them in a public execution.

The band then assumed control of various households, where they lodged themselves and demanded that the residents serve them. They obliged Fredy’s mother to kill a chicken and prepare meals for them. When he recounted the treatment of his mother, it was the only time I ever saw Fredy show anger, even some ten years after the event.

One person slipped away from the town and set off on the three-day trek to Huancayo to raise the alarm. The army responded quickly, sending a platoon toward the town. The senderistas somehow learned that they were coming and left in a hurry, but the army platoon followed them to a cave where they had taken shelter and killed them all.

At one point in telling his story, Fredy mentioned that some of the senderistas were recognized because they were townspeople. I asked if they were of some particular group or category in the town. I expected an answer along the lines of their being particularly poor, or landless, but Fredy answered quite differently. He said, “They were the first young people from the town who had a chance to go to university, in Huancayo.”

I thought, of course, it’s the age-old story repeated endlessly in Peru, in Latin America, in the entire Third World. The first child of a poor family gets to go to university, and with him, placed firmly on his shoulders, are all the hopes of the family for a better life. But when he gets to university, he finds it impossible to realize those family dreams. The courses are too difficult, the professors too mediocre, the job market after graduation too skewed in favor of those with social standing. For such a young man, the allure of radical politics would be irresistible. It offered the dream of a new society, with equal opportunity.

But it’s hard to get from here to there. The road is difficult and opaque, and along the way the young men from Fredy’s town learned how to kill, and wound up dead in a cave.

I asked Fredy if he knew what motivated the senderistas to make their specific charges against the mayor and other town leaders. He replied, “We knew where they got their ideas, because there was a dissident in town who had been making the same accusations. We took care of him later.”

I didn’t ask for details.

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I’ve often thought that Fredy’s story is the story of Peru. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Peruvians whose life stories are similar. They begin in remote rural villages, continue through a difficult transition to a national society, and end with a place in urban life that offers more comfort and broader horizons. In many phases of this journey, the support of government institutions — schools, clinics, roads, police protection— is barely visible, so the journey becomes more difficult and more dangerous. But they persevere, mostly through their own hard work.

For most, it is also a journey of upward social mobility. In Fredy’s case, both of his daughters went to university and have had secure professional lives. One is an accountant.

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One day as we were returning to the office, driving along Avenida Arequipa, we passed the studios of Canal 5, Panamericana Televisión. It was less than a year after the 1992 capture of Shining Path’s founder Abimael Guzmán and the collapse of Sendero. Lima was still on guard. As an announcement of military protection, an army half-track – wheels in front, treads in the rear – was conspicuously parked in front of the TV station.

As we drove by, Fredy pointed to the half-track and said, “I used to drive vehicles like that in the army.”

I said, “What? Half-tracks? You drove half-tracks?”

“No,” he replied. “Tanks. I drove tanks.”

I pondered this new information and finally said, “Fredy, what perfect training for becoming a driver in Lima.”

It was the only time I got a big laugh out of Fredy.

* Shane Hunt is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Boston University. He has worked on Peruvian economic problems ever since his first visit to the country in 1963, and has published on Peru in areas such as public finance, on industrial, trade, and labor policy and on economic history and statistics. He was Visiting Professor at the Banco Central de Reserva in 1969 and the Universidad del Pacifico in 1989. He later assisted the government in developing sound economic policies. He has continued to work in the area of education and health economics.

 

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