chalaco's place in the world?

Outside of the occasional drunken knife fight, I live in a very peaceful place. The local farmers spend most days in their fields of corn, wheat, beans, peas, potatoes, and other crops, and tending to their animals – cattle, donkeys, pigs, chickens, and sheep. The people in town keep shops, make bread or own run restaurants, work at the municipality or the bank, or just hang around looking for odd jobs, some harder than others. In a place like this it´s easy to take the general calm for granted, as I´ve mostly done for the last 18 months. But the longer you live in a place like this as an outsider, the more you wonder if things were always this way. And there are signs and stories all around that tell a deeper story, connecting Chalaco to the shared history of the nation.

Peace Corps pulled out of Peru during the last quarter of the 20th century due to political and economic turmoil, and many volunteers today live in places that were extremely hostile from the 70s on up through the mid-90s. Chalaco is not one of those places. This doesn´t mean that the people here were unaffected by the instability; skyrocketing inflation, price controls, and a general lack of government support to rural areas made life here tough for many years. But this far north and as isolated as we are, the area was out of the reach of the Maoist Sendero Luminoso rebels in the 80s and 90s, when they were blowing up busses in the central and southern regions of the country (including Lima), threatening to tear Peru apart at the seams.

This is not to say that Chalaco hasn´t had its hand in the history of Peru, however. Formally established in 1825, the area that Chalaco now occupies was first home to pre-Incan and then Incan tribes, long before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. Relics have been recovered from the hills to prove it, and looking out over the landscape, it´s not hard to imagine the original indigenous inhabitants farming the same land as the Spanish descendents do today. In the War of the Pacific of the late 19th century, the Chileans reportedly made it all the way up the coast and were actually turned back on the road to Chalaco. According to local legend, peasant farmers with the advantages of guerilla tactics and higher ground actually beat back the well-armed Chilean troops, using only slingshots and other simple weapons. I have even had pointed out to me, several times, the creek where the infamous battle took place. Of course, people here (like people anywhere) tend to embellish these kinds of stories, but I have to believe there´s at least some truth to it. (This would explain why so many people here hate Chileans, but don´t seem to mind Ecuadorians, who are also a bitter historical enemy and are just a short hop over the mountains away.)

Though Sendero never actually made it here itself, there are an awful lot of people in Chalaco who have had very real, intimate experiences with the violence and drugs it spawned. One of my best friends and work partners came to Chalaco with his family at the age of nine, his father having packed up and left their life behind in the jungle lowlands when the rebels began indoctrinating the schoolchildren there. My friend recalls playing terruco (“terrorist”) as a little kid with his brothers, shooting imaginary government helicopters and policemen with sticks. In the same vein there are a handful of guys in town, many of whom I consider some of my closest friends, who have worked in the selva (the jungle on the East side of the Andes) in the coca fields and even in the processing plants where coca is mixed with kerosene and other toxic chemicals to create pasta básica, the base ingredient for cocaine. I couldn´t believe how casually he said it when a friend of mine first told me; it was like he was just describing another job in a long list of them that he had held for a while. Which, to him, is exactly what it was. And then one day the DEA planes came through, and he didn´t have that job any more.

On the flipside, Peru´s until-recently enforced law of mandatory military service means that the majority of the 30-and-over men I know have served at one point or another – most of the younger ones in the conflict against Sendero, which in recent years has ditched its revolutionary ideology in favor of highly-profitable drug trafficking. They speak proudly about the years they spent in the central highlands and lowland rainforests, literally hunting their fellow countrymen. One older man I know has told me on a few occasions, helped by some local sugarcane liquor, about his years as a mercenario. I´m not sure what it means exactly to be a Peruvian mercenary, but it sounds like pretty serious stuff. Others have served in various posts around the country, some even being offered the chance to go to Iraq and fight alongside American troops. I had met a few guys from different parts of the country who had almost accepted this opportunity, declining for various reasons, and only recently met my first Peruvian Iraq vet, in Chalaco of all places.

It was a very surreal encounter. I was out in Naranjo, the rural village where I´m implementing my eco-bathroom project this year, about an hour or two´s hike from town. I was sitting on a bench in the late afternoon, talking to an old lady after having helped her son plant their vegetable garden, when a young guy about my age came walking up the path. He looked completely out of place (which is saying a lot, coming from me), sporting a dark blue jumpsuit with a US Air Force patch, clean, new-looking white sneakers, gelled hair, and iPod headphones. The dude looked almost too weird to be real, all the way out here. In any case, he sat down and we got to talking, and when I told him where I was from, he said, “Oh, so you must know this,” indicating the stripes on his windbreaker. Thinking he meant the Nike symbol or maybe even the special fabric, I muttered something vaguely affirmative, but he wasn´t convinced.

“No, I mean the Air Force.”
“Oh. Uh, well, yeah sure. Why?”

I couldn´t believe it when he told me he had just come back from a tour in Iraq, serving as part of a Peruvian company of soldiers charged with guarding the US Embassy. The contrast between this child of Naranjo and the village he had left behind couldn´t have been any clearer. Here he was telling me about everything he had seen and all the people he had met in a war zone on the other side of the world, and not twenty minutes before someone from the same town had actually asked me whether Colombia or the US was closer to Peru.