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  • Machetes in Our Hands, Blood on Our Faces: Reflections on Violence and Advocacy in the Peruvian Amazon
  • Bartholomew Dean

“States feel they cannot modernize effectively if they tolerate indigenous cultures in their midst”

(Maybury-Lewis 2002a:32).

As a public intellectual, David Maybury-Lewis was a steadfast advocate for those whose worldviews, cultural practices, or perceived differences make them targets for the violence of state institutions and their agents who are simply unwilling to live with diversity and calls for cultural autonomy. The case I recount here is but one of innumerable examples where David not only embraced the theory of cultural survival, but acted without hesitation in support of the struggles of marginalized indigenous peoples.

Perched aloft a dusty filing cabinet in my office is a photograph of a Kukama1 woman—Doña Luz—covered in blood from machete wounds she received during a horrific attack that occurred in her community in the [End Page 1069] Peruvian Amazon some years ago. The photo is a painful yet poignant reminder to me of a lesson my teacher articulated many times: “states that make war on marginalized minorities are… states in which pluralism has either failed or has not been given a chance” (Maybury-Lewis 2002b:52). Sadly, the country I have studied, come to love, and at times despise— Peru—is no exception to this dictum.

While a single anthropologist is surely impotent in the face of gross human rights violations, David Maybury-Lewis taught me to seek kindred spirits, to bear witness to injustice, and to speak truth to power. David’s message was a potent motivator in my own involvement with an on-going human rights case in the Bajo Huallaga area of the Peruvian Amazon—a region that has been convulsed for decades by extractive shadow economies and the concomitant violence associated with grinding poverty, racism, state abuse, and cultural marginalization.

In 2004, while conducting ethnographic research in the Alto Amazonas province, I found myself entangled in a violent showdown between crooked Peruvian officials and indigenous peoples residing in the historically important community of Lagunas. The vicious assault occurred April 20, 2004, after a group of Kukama-Kukamiria took control of the Municipal offices to protest the local mayor, Rider Padilla Sinarahua, who they suspected was pocketing funds from the central government that were intended to be used for infrastructure and community well-being. In response, a group of Kukama-Kukmiria was attacked at night by approximately 50 hooded adults who had been imbibing moonshine mixed with gunpowder to enable them to dislodge the peaceful protesters with clubs, axes, nail-studded sticks, and metal rods. As a result of the sanguineous melee, more than 30 people were injured, some severely: people had their skulls cracked, limbs hacked, and one protester had his eye gouged out.

When I first arrived in Lagunas, a tense, fearful atmosphere was regnant; wounds were still healing, the maimed cried out for assistance, and the remnants of burned homes were eerily obvious. Reminded of the lessons of my adviser, the founder of Cultural Survival, how could I refuse requests to help from the indigenous Kukama-Kukamiria Federation (FEDECOCA, Federacón de Communidades Cocama-Cocamilla del Bajo Huallaga)? I soon found myself reviewing video footage of public marches and other documents indicating the Mayor’s ties to Sendero Luminoso, the leftist rebel movement responsible—along with the Armed Forces—for some of the worst atrocities committed in the 1980s and 1990s during the height of the country’s civil [End Page 1070] war. Convinced of the dire need for external assistance, community representatives and I traveled by boat to the nearby town of Yurimaguas. But the local prosecutor and judge refused to intervene in what they portrayed was a simple conflict marked by local “tribal” feuding.

Disheartened by the local authorities’ total failure to intercede, the aggrieved victims began preparing to fight back. Having long been a center of coca production and processing, indigenous villagers had access to stockpiles of heavy armaments that they were now willing to use. With the assistance of the respected elders (apus), tempers were assuaged after it was decided in a community meeting that an indigenous representative of...

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