Uh, what is Machu Picchu anyway?

It wasn't the Incan capital. It wasn't their last refuge either. What was Machu Picchu? 

If you just read my two posts (see Feb. 3 and Jan. 25) and thought to yourself, hmm, I've heard of Machu Picchu before, but what is it, really....

...well this PBS documentary, "Ghosts of Machu Picchu," is definitely for you. 

Or even if you already know about Machu Picchu, well, the video is free and online, so why not?

Matadero=Back of a Chevy?

I started noticing an interesting trend in Arequipa's hotel industry.

Why is there a strip of hotels hidden only a block away from Dolores street, where most of Arequipa's salsa clubs are? Why are there various hostels all the way up here in Miraflores, a primarily residential neighborhood? Why do so many of these places look so shady? 

I mentioned my observations to Sergio, and he explained to me about "los mataderos"--literal translation="slaughterhouse." 

The sign says hotel or hostal (hostel), but just by looking, any Peruvian can tell the difference between a real hotel and a matadero--one frequented by young, local couples. 

In Peru, it's normal to live with your parents through college and until you get married. Even then, you and your husband or wife might still find yourselves living in a part of your parent's house. 

But even though at 19, 20, 26, you still live with your parents, those hormones don't just control themselves. So where do you take your girlfriend for a romantic evening? You take her to a matadero. You can even rent these rooms by the hour. 

Sergio and his brothers mock these places a bit because they are a bit unkept. But they seem to be very popular, as indicated by the booming "hotel" business in Peru. 

In most Peruvian cities, there are at least a few decent hotels, hostels and hospedajes (communal homestays) to choose from. But you can always be sure you'll find a plethora of mataderos at all prices and locations. 

The most concentrated areas of mataderos are definitely near the main bar and club areas, where I imagine these rendezvous are less romantic and more like one-night stands.

It would be interesting to do a mini-survey: how many Peruvians were conceived in a matadero? 

Come to think of it, how many Americans were conceived in the back of a car? I bet we'd come up with similar results. 

U.S. media coverage of the Cuzco flood crisis

When 400 American citizens are stranded at Machu Picchu, people want news about what's happening to their neighbor or family member. I can understand that a U.S. paper needs to sell to that audience.

But being in Peru during Cuzco's floods gave me a different look at the U.S. media's coverage of the floods in Cusco--an embarrassingly shallow analysis of a serious crisis. 

By the way the articles framed the flooding, I would have thought that a Peruvian losing his home and a year's crop was somehow comparable to tourists being "bored" and not able to use their credit card for four days.

Here's the facts of the flood:

The rains in Cuzco left 26,000 families affected, 4,500 homes destroyed, 39,500 acres of crops decimated and $100 million+ in damages, said Peru 21.  At least 14 bridges were carried away by the raging flood waters. Two thousand tourists were stranded after the railway and roads to Machu Picchu were gutted by mudslides. The area was placed under a state of emergency. 

Machu Picchu will be closed for at least two months while they repair the roads and railways, costing the 175,000 people dependent on tourism in Cuzco an estimated $1 million per day. That's not to mention the entry fees collected by the government--2,200 people per day each paying 70-something bucks. 

While the rains have been strongest in Cuzco, flooding has caused deaths, lost homes and lost crops in seven other central/southeastern departments in Peru.  According to AFP, the death toll across southern Peru had reached 20 by Saturday, with five people were missing.

This, however, is what the U.S. media reported back:

On Monday, January 25, the AP covered the 2,000 trapped tourists at Machu Picchu. They included one sentence close to the bottom of the article about the damage and Peruvian deaths in Cuzco. At this point, a state of emergency had already been declared, but there's no mention of that. 

The next day, the AP did finally mention the Peruvian deaths due to the flooding in the context of the deaths of a tourist and his guide. Only in the last sentence of the article was it mentioned that the flooding in the region had caused $172 million in damage. 

As the last tourists were flown out of the Machu Picchu pueblo, the ruins' "base camp," the AP again focused on the poor tourists' plight, leaving one sentence about the devastating flood damage affecting average Peruvians in the area. There was nothing about the deaths. 

CNN gets the prize for the most obnoxious headline: "Stranded tourists battle flooding, boredom in Machu Picchu." Boredom, seriously? 

This bit on a Dutch tourist exemplifies the media's strikingly shallow analysis:

"The only inconvience for him is being able to use his credit card at businesses such as restaurants, but he expects to get to the capital city of Lima in time to leave for a jaunt to Africa "if everything goes well."

"We're just bored," Fredrik told CNN.

Or maybe this story wasn't shallow at all. Maybe CNN's Joe Sterling was trying to poke fun at this tourist? Because on this AP video, you can see that some foreigners weren't bored--they were actually helping out!

Anyway, CNN did mention the regional crisis a bit faster than the AP; only a third of the way into the piece, a paragraph addressed the seven deaths and houses and crops destroyed. 

I was most disappointed in The New York Times' only story on the flooding. It finally appeared on Thursday, January 28, just a day before everyone was evacuated and the "tourist crisis" was over. The article mentions briefly the 10 deaths in the region and that houses were lost, but fails to mention that the Cuzco region was under a state of emergency, thousands of crop were destroyed. Nor does it place the Machu Picchu situation in perspective by discussing it's effect on the region's tourism-dependent economy. 

U.S. media coverage wasn't an entire sham: Dow Jones' newswire had a good article that really covers the breadth of the flood's impact in southeastern Peru.

But, as I shame U.S. journalists, I should disclose that the title of my last blog post on  the issue was, "Stranded at Machu Picchu?" Yeah, that's the one where I was all sad about how this was affecting my travel plans. Touché? 

*Sigh.* I guess I thought you might actually click on it if you saw that headline. So did CNN and the AP. 

If your french fries could talk....

...why would they speak Quechua?

Where does the potato come from? 

Why is it that in Peru there are 5,000 different types of potatoes and we Americans eat only the white ones? 

This one-minute video, part of the PBS series Latinos in 60 seconds, explains a bit about the origin of the potato. 

Why you should know Mario Vargas Llosa?

Beyond the fact that he will surely win the Nobel Prize one of these years, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa also ran against Alberto Fujimori in the 1990 presidential elections. 

I just finished my third book of his, The Feast of the Goat, a narrative about the Trujillo government in the Dominican Republic.  

I also read his Death in the Andes, about terrorism in Peru during the 1980s, and The Bad Girl, a story of obsession that starts in Peru and follows the characters through Europe. They're all worth reading, but The Feast of the Goat is by far his best book in my opinion.

Vargas Llosa's page on the New York Times is pretty interesting, with articles going back to the early seventies. You can see the ups and downs of his political and literary career. 

The high (or maybe low) point of his political career was his run for president in 1990. He lost to no-name Alberto Fujimori, who would then become one of the most controversial Peruvian presidents in the last century. 

The presidential contest took place in a country torn by terrorism and rocked by economic instability. In the 1980s, inflation remained above 50% and an estimated 30,000 people had been murdered by domestic terrorists called The Shining Path. 

Vargas Llosa, running from the right, campaigned on a politically-weak but possibly economically sound argument--that the economy needed drastic (and neoliberal) reforms that would be hard on Peruvians. 

Needless to say, most Peruvians didn't see the famous novelist and world-traveler (he lived in Europe for many years) as "one of them." Nor did they see his plan for Peru as anything more than an attempt to lay the country's burdens on the poor. 

But they did see "el chino" Fujimori as "one of them," surprisingly, considering his Japanese heritage. Ironically, as soon as Fujimori won the election, he was convinced by international lenders that the only way out of Peru's economic meltdown was to take just the measures that Vargas Llosa had campaigned on. 

Fujimori's economic reforms were seen as a positive step for the country. He was credited with ridding the country of terrorism, but Peru paid the price. Fujimori suspended the constitution and dissolved the Congress. In 2000, he fled to Japan after his cohort Vladimiro Montesinos was caught on tape bribing various Congressmen. Fujimori was recently convicted of grave violations of human rights in his campaign against the Shining Path. 

But enough about Fujimori. He'll get a dedicated post of his own soon. 

Who knows what decisions Vargas Llosa would have made in his place, or if Peru would have been better off. But one thing's for sure. It would have been hard to be president and keep up this wonderful literature. Thanks for the books. 

He's coming out with one about the Congo soon, so keep your eyes open.