Development: A Magnificent Failure
International development cooperation—sounds good, works terribly. Disguised as selfless altruism, these interventionist policies aim to bring the planet’s last autonomous societies under the discipline of the market. In the process, bureaucrats and urban professionals thrive, Indigenous idiosyncrasies are dismissed, and the rainforest is laid to waste.
An engineer explains at the assembly of the Vencedor community the benefits of approving the construction of a secondary education institution.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 185 of Cáñamo magazine, May 2013.
They dropped bombs in the Pacific and Europe. Planes took off, bombs fell, Nazis and Japanese died, planes landed. Tires wore out. Rubber was lacking: communication with the plantations supplying Southeast Asia had been cut off by the war. The United States found it in the Peruvian part of its backyard and built a road to connect the coast with the mestizo village of Pucallpa: the heart of the jungle was penetrated by death. That was development. In 1943 rubber began to flow, and in 1945 Harry S. Truman gave the final order; from which trees did they get the rubber for the Enola Gay’s tires?
In the 1950s Bernardo was a boy from the small Shipibo village of San Francisco de Yarinacocha, near Pucallpa (which already wanted to be a city). He was learning to be a man in the midst of an abundant nature. Bernardo nostalgically remembers fishing back then; we talked in the kitchen (a palm leaf roof, a fire on the packed earth floor, some rough furniture), next to the table covered with a plastic tablecloth: “Sometimes we went fishing with a cast net, sometimes with arrows. There were big tucunaré [a prized fish species]… Now there aren’t any. Peru has grown. Too many Peruvians, there’s no more fish. Now tucunaré costs fifteen soles per kilo. Very expensive. The poor can’t eat fish anymore; fish is for the rich.”
Too many Peruvians came by the road financed by the gringos: to invade, to extract, to produce, to sell, to buy. Money, commerce, people, cancer, development, and the vanishing jungle.
History books say that Harry S. Truman ordered the dropping of the first atomic bomb. And they say that in 1949, when the world was competing with the Soviet rival, he wrote the speech that began the Age of Development: “More than half of the world’s population lives in conditions close to misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty constitutes an obstacle and a threat both to themselves and to the more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the capacity to alleviate the suffering of these people.” A scenario taken from a Dickens novel; and a strategy: “I believe we should make available to peace lovers the benefits of our technical knowledge to help them achieve their aspirations for a better life […] What we have in mind is a development program based on the concepts of fair and democratic treatment […]. Producing more is the key to peace and prosperity.” Harry S. Truman I, the Philanthropist, spokesman for the expansion dynamics of the United States, announced new strategies: Mister Marshall, we welcome you with joy. It was development.
Bernardo, with an arrow with which he once used to fish large fish and, nowadays, small little fish.
MORE OR LESS POVERTY
I ask Bernardo: “When you were young, was there more poverty or less poverty than now?” He doesn’t hesitate: “More poverty. More. There wasn’t even calamine, nothing, nothing…” And by calamine he means the corrugated zinc sheets that roof his house; and by “nothing, nothing” he means electricity, the sound systems blaring everywhere in the community, cell phones, motorcycles on the streets, the clothes they accumulate, the number of plastic pots and utensils coming from China at ridiculous prices…
I could say to him: “I don’t agree with you, Bernardo. You have more money than before, but money should guarantee food, housing, clothes, and medicine against illness. From that perspective, you’re much worse off now. Before, with ancestral knowledge, you got those fish that are now ‘for the rich,’ there was a lot of hunting, you had big chagras (gardens) with all the plantains you could eat, and all kinds of building materials for houses. You also knew how to spin and sew clothes; and nudity was not a sin. And medicine: hundreds of plants whose therapeutic properties were known and expanded by each generation. Now for all that, money is needed, and I think you’ve realized how hard it is to get it, and it’s never enough.”
I don’t say anything because I know my words would hit a wall built by decades of monotonous speeches: the indigenous people of the jungle live in misery, the solution is development, an omnipresent word lit up by shiny, effective products: planes, cars, radios, tools, televisions, shiny wrappers. How to resist their hypnotic power?
Bernardo reflects: “Americans know a lot about sports. But Peru is weak in sports. I saw it in a medical book: there are pills for sports. That would be good, right?” “Not so good,” I reply. “Not so good?” he asks, surprised. “Better natural. Without pills,” I insist. “Sure…” but he hesitates. He adds: “But I asked at the drugstore Inka Farma and the sports pills cost forty-three soles. They didn’t want to sell by the pill. A whole bottle.” He pauses a few seconds and then continues with his faith: “For example, medicine to be smart. Aren’t those good too?”
SPEECHES
Speeches from the politicians in power, from the aid workers, from the missionaries, from the important white people on television. Speech from the United Nations that considers extremely poor those peoples who drink water directly from the river, lack latrines, have no nearby hospitals or (Western) doctors, share a room with four or more people, lack schools, and have no access to newspapers or radios. Damn! But those are the indigenous people as they have always been! According to the UN’s verdict, Bernardo’s village is no longer extremely poor; they meet the criteria to be considered simply poor. Perhaps this slight improvement is related to the fact that the nature around the community has been devastated, and there is no fish left in the lagoon, and the beat-up trucks heading to Pucallpa raise dust, and Bernardo has fenced his small plot because he is afraid of thieves, and has divided the inside of his house to separate himself from his children and grandchildren. In San Francisco, they are less poor now; they have a TV, even though food is scarce.
The “development” initiatives of the 1980s devastated the territory of San Francisco de Yarinacocha.
VENCEDOR
Now I take you up in a little boat and we navigate for a day and a night until we reach Vencedor, a Shipibo village of about one hundred fifty inhabitants where life is very good. The people are smiling, calm, communicative, autonomous: there are no chiefs (the so-called Community Chief is a misnomer), no schedules to follow, no contractual obligations. There is plenty of food, materials for building houses, and remedies administered by three powerful shamans. Families are large, supportive, and share with neighbors. For the UN experts, these people are extremely poor: because they drink water directly from the river and more than four people sleep in the same room, and they don’t have doctors (in white coats). In what they are not extremely poor in, they are poor: because they share latrines, have no telephone or computers.
“Go there and create development projects to integrate these miserable people into the market economy, where they will find solutions to the problems (which they don’t suffer)!”
Jürg Gasché, a Swiss anthropologist who has lived in Iquitos for three decades, considers globalization “an economic and ideological bulldozer” whose goal is “to level and crush the differentiated ways of life of humanity, replacing diverse ethical and spiritual values with the single desire for material consumption and subjecting all human beings to the slavery of these desires,” resulting in “imposing on people a work discipline that reduces them to dependent laborers, at the mercy of the offers and constraints of these companies,” as he explains in his work Las sociedades bosquesinas, fundamental for understanding today’s Amazon.
Gasché illustrates the inexorable “failure” of development projects, which has given rise to a new ethnographic discipline: the “archaeology of projects.” Pigsty breeding facilities, henhouses for laying hens, fish farms, various plantations… productive initiatives intended to link locals to the market. The projects start promisingly when the well-paid engineer of the moment arrives in the communities with money and tools, promises hefty profits, supervises, orders, and commands. Months later, the assistance from urban professionals ceases (they will promote another project in another village) and everything is abandoned. Time and again the same failure, motivated by the lack of adaptation of the initiatives to Amazonian culture.
In Vencedor, the everyday protein is obtained from the lagoon.
the engineer
One afternoon in Vencedor, an engineer from a regional institute funded by the European Union arrives. More than arriving, he breaks into the peaceful evening atmosphere of Vencedor. He is tall, masculine, and speaks categorically with several villagers who, normally cheerful and outgoing, appear submissive and subdued. He laments the existence of “internal problems” within the community in which “we do not get involved.” Internal problems? After several months in the village, I have no suspicion of such internal issues.
He then explains that his work consists of helping the villagers manage a small communal sawmill that draws on the nearby secondary forest. The “problem” is that the Serrano family “dominates and commands” because they are the “majority,” keeping the profits and preventing several families from working. For this reason, “the Project wants to increase machinery so that everyone can work,” so “there won’t be a situation where you work and I don’t.” I ask, surprised, if everyone does not work. He insists: “No. Only seventeen work. There are thirty-five families; half are idle. What do they live on? Farming and fishing. It can’t be.” So, to prevent half the village from being “idle,” the Project will create another “interest group” so “if everyone works, there won’t be that conflict.” But the Engineer complains that “the friends don’t understand.” “Why?” I ask. “Well, their education… and ignorance, you know…” “But what don’t they understand?” “They don’t understand what one tells them they need, nor what we want to do. To some extent, they think one is doing it for oneself. There’s distrust.”
In this brief conversation, lasting no more than ten minutes, many of the criticisms documented time and again by Gasché are exemplified, criticisms that lead to the failure of such initiatives. To begin with, in a proverbially egalitarian society, the Engineer relates from the superiority of the urban university graduate (with that paternalistic disdain of “they don’t understand” due to their “ignorance”), and from the ingrained certainty that the indigenous are “idle” (yet in Vencedor it is frankly difficult to find an inactive villager: those who do not go to the sawmill fish, hunt, work the garden, build their canoe, repair their nets, and countless other tasks). The ignorant one is him. It is alarming that he ignores that all adults willing to work at the sawmill do so (as I have verified in my fieldwork), and that the Serrano family does not have power. No one has power; decisions are made by consensus, no one imposes nor allows imposition. I should tell him it makes no sense to create another “interest group,” and explain that even if he did, not all the men in the village will work every day at the sawmill for money, because the neighbors still produce their own food, build their houses and canoes; and they do so with great satisfaction, enjoying varied physical activity, never monotonous; applying valuable ancestral knowledge that allows them to be autonomous, independent from the Absolute Organization that the Engineer and the institutions he represents want to chain them to (and they are succeeding).
The small communal sawmill in Vencedor relies on fast-growing trees from the secondary forest, which was cleared to create garden plots (chagras).
engineer in trouble
How can the Engineer boast about having worked ten years in the region, saying “I have grown old in this,” and yet be unaware of some basic characteristics of Amazonian societies? The answer is obvious: there is no room for alternative idiosyncrasies. Truman already said it: “Producing more is the key,” other considerations are irrelevant.
At the assembly the next day, the part of the “problem” the Engineer had overlooked comes to light. Standing by a blackboard, in front of the assembly, he justifies the expenses of a trip to the city he made with Juan, the chief, to resolve some administrative matters of the sawmill. But then one of the “fearsome” Serranos interrupts and challenges him: “Engineer, one question.” The Engineer knows what’s coming and changes his confident and sure expression to that of an innocent child. “You always say expenses must be justified with receipts. And now you’re reporting expenses without receipts. People don’t believe this information. So basically, you’re cheating us.” There is a thick silence in the room, broken by the Engineer stammering excuses: he assures that on his next visit he will bring the receipts, which he forgot at his office. Accusing silence. Another community member, also a Serrano, intervenes shortly after and speaks of a “stab in the heart.” It is Eloy, who also traveled to the city with the leader and the Engineer, appointed by the assembly to assume some administrative responsibility. Upon arrival, they informed him they had delegated the procedures to a local professional because it would be cheaper. The criticisms intensify; no one in the assembly liked that their decision was ignored, and they demand Eloy be the one to hold the position, to which the Engineer has no choice but to agree.
Gasché would surely point to this scene as an example of the “social conflicts” that projects generate in communities; and it doesn’t take a keen nose to detect the stench of corruption, which Gasché considers usual.
Workers from Vencedor, returning from the sawmill. Since there are no bosses or subordinates, the work takes place in a relaxed atmosphere.
stumbling along
It also smells a bit rotten when the Engineer, after skillfully moving past that topic, presents to the villagers his proposal to create a new “interest group,” a phrase the villagers don’t understand but support because it means that “the Project” will “lend” them money to buy more machinery (engines, saws, tractors). The Engineer claims to have a buyer for thirty thousand planks per month and encourages the villagers to work hard to produce that amount. What the Engineer does not explain are the loan conditions, the source of the money, or the identity of the buyer — but he will be the intermediary.
And so, stumbling along, an indigenous village in the Amazon “develops.” Maybe the day will come when the Engineer’s goal is fulfilled and all the adults in Vencedor work nonstop to produce planks; on that day the forest will have retreated even more, fish will be scarce (but canned sardines will arrive), and with those very planks they will divide their houses, which up until now have been single open spaces, and the UN will elevate them to the category of poor in its classification. Ministers from here and there will celebrate the installation of an internet classroom (which stopped working forever after two months), cooperation bureaucrats will justify their salaries with water wells that nobody uses (people preferred to keep drinking from the river), and field professionals will set up fantastic latrines that through a complex process will produce gas for cooking (but bullshit — someone pocketed the money).
The Dark Grotesque spreads (with bombs or bribes) over any dissident expression that challenges its hegemony.
