South America
We traveled on separate trips to Peru and Argentina. We stayed for several days in the capitol cities and hiked in the Andes on both trips.
Peru is a mestizo nation (60%) with indigenous tribes (25%) living in the Andes and Amazon region, who primarily speak Quechua or Aymara. The Spanish invaders under Pizarro wiped out the Incas; a population of 5-8 million reduced within a century to 600,000 by disease, forced labor in the gold and silver mines and massacres by the invaders. They have now regrown to 6 million. The Incas were an extraordinary civilization that built roads, temples, cities, arts, irrigation, terracing, and architecture and governed about a third of South America. They were preceded by the Nazca, Moche, Chavin and Norte Chico civilizations dating back to 3,000 BC. They fell to the Spaniards due to a civil war of succession, combined with the ravages of smallpox and other diseases spread by the Spanish coming from Europe, and the technological advantages of guns and steel armor.
In Lima we saw a strong, vibrant, growing, multi-ethnic, middle class economy with pockets of truly dire poverty. We saw signs of vibrant Transpacific trading partnerships with Asian nations. We visited museums showing the pottery, art and artifacts of native populations. We saw subsistence farming and village life in the high Andes, that may be little changed in the last 450 years. Cuzco and the tourist places of the Sacred Valley down to Machu Picchu were prosperous, while the little Quechuan villages we visited up in the mountains were inconceivably destitute. The economic growth is centered in the coastal cities and tourist meccas, while the traditional indigenous villages in the Andes and the Amazon benefit very little. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=honorscollege_theses The resultant migration to the cities of an indigenous population without an adequate education and other cultural tools to survive and prosper has been disastrous for the members of these ancient tribal societies. Indigenous rebellions to “Spanish” rule have continued to the present day in the form of a series of Tupac Amaru Revolutions and the Shining Path guerilla movement. There are still Stone Age tribes in the Amazon basin part of Peru that have had no contact with modern civilization.
I’d love to get back as there was so much of the wonderful nation we had no chance to explore.
Argentina was a nation of European immigrants where the indigenous tribes were slaughtered mercilessly to make room for “progress”; they now account for an estimated 1-2% of the population. One of our guides told us the tales of the Spanish slaughter of the Mapuche people in Patagonia. Our other guide, a young Mapuche biologist, knew very little about the history of his people; their past had become invisible.
The slaughter of Patagonia’s indigenous tribes in the 19th Century very much paralleled by our own nation’s slaughter of the Plains Indians. The Mapuche were seasonal nomads between the Atlantic Ocean and the Andes. The settlers brought sheep and cattle to graze in the nomadic territories of the Mapuche. As conflicts arose, the army came in and killed or enslaved them, putting them in concentration camps before assigning them to work in servitude on the cattle ranches of the north. In the words of a local Senator:
“We have taken families from the savages, we have brought them to this center of civilization, where every right seems to be guaranteed, and yet we have not respected for these families any of the rights that belong, not only to civilized men, but to humanity: we have enslaved the men, prostituted the women, we have torn the children away from their mothers, we have sent old men to work as slaves anywhere. In a word, we have turned our backs and broken all the laws that govern the moral actions of men.” https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1101&context=gsp
At the turn of the century, Argentina’s per capita GDP was 8th in the world. Buenos Aires is built to emulate Paris or Milan, and is a gorgeous city. Argentina’s economic growth rate has fallen far behind, many other nations, including neighboring Chile and Peru. http://www.luciensblog.com/blog/2019/3/14/reflections-on-argentina-part-three?rq=argentina Very bad political and economic decisions over the course of the last century have badly damaged their economic progress. http://www.luciensblog.com/blog/2019/3/14/reflections-on-argentina-part-three?rq=argentina I loved being in Argentina, and my heart breaks for its economic stagnation. I’d love to go back, and I’d love to figure out how to get their economic growth back on track.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/23/20