Two Worlds, One Alliance
In the desolate heart of the Peruvian jungle, a Shipibo healer and two Chilean entrepreneurs embody a hope: that ancestral knowledge has a place in the market economy, that the battle against deforestation can be won, and that natural medicine holds remedies for modern ailments.
Roger López (on the right), Andrés Selamé (in the background), and Santiago Correa met in 2007 and established a relationship that led to the creation of Ani Nii Shobo, a natural medicine center that welcomes visitors from all over the world.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 206 of Cáñamo magazine, February 2015.
THE ROOTS
Roger López’s great-grandparents go out to the Ucayali River and choose from among hundreds of fish. The great-grandmothers plant bananas and gather wild fruits. The men hunt today, tomorrow they build a house: the nearby forest provides. The women cook and craft pots, which they decorate with mysterious designs, obtained through visions or dreams. The Shipibo are free: there are no bosses, no police to enforce laws that do not exist. The vast land belongs to no one. They live in abundance—and I will repeat it: they live in abundance and lack nothing. Sometimes white men arrive, bringing iron and violence and disease, and they want souls or rubber or quinine or sarsaparilla or manatee fat, and they impose conditions and surnames; they are few but powerful; they are powerful and therefore wicked.
Andrés Selamé’s great-grandparents are born in Bethlehem, Palestine. They trade with Russia; I like to imagine them riding camels, wrapped in turbans. They are neither free nor powerful: the First World War breaks out and the Turks forcibly recruit cannon fodder. Andrés’s grandfather does not want to die and emigrates to Chile: he has heard that the climate is similar and the land produces the same. He farms, raises pigs and chickens, prospers, accumulates, and invests: a few commercial spaces in Santiago, where Andrés’s father attends university—and no longer speaks Arabic.
When Roger is born in 1968, white people are no longer few. Nearby Pucallpa, once a small village, has become the vigorous tumor-city of the Peruvian jungle, connected by a metastasis-road to what happens in Lima and beyond the sea. Cancerous forces destroy all life, moving or not. Oil is found and exploited. Fundamentalist American missionaries spread Christian capitalism in classrooms: they design the school curricula and train Shipibo teachers. When
Andrés is born in 1972, his father has bet on plastic: he manufactures rubber gloves for mining and rubber mats for car floors. Business is good; he accumulates and invests in a machine to produce polyethylene bags. I like to imagine the oil they use comes from wells along the Ucayali River (but that’s just a geo-poetical license). Business gets better, he accumulates, invests and reinvests, and grows.
Roger’s parents clash, bounce off each other, and lose interest in the child, who is raised by his paternal grandfather, José López, a renowned healer. A sick man arrives swollen, hanging onto life by a thread; the grandfather smokes his tobacco, touches, blows, sucks, regurgitates a spine, and the patient defecates, vomits, and urinates—and minutes later asks for his first meal in days. “The wolf bewitched him,” José diagnoses. “I went hunting at a lagoon, killed an animal, and the pain began,” the patient admits. “That lagoon had an owner.” Roger watches and learns; Roger takes interest in plant medicine; Roger drinks ayahuasca and discovers his calling.
Andrés’s parents stay together and prosper. The father has a nose for business: he chooses food packaging and succeeds—he grows, accumulates, invests, and soon his plastics company becomes one of the country's leading firms. He is a good businessman, but a better person: the employees appreciate the boss-father who listens, who stops the production line to serve watermelon, who hosts weekend barbecues for the entire staff. Andrés watches and learns: the balance sheet matters less to him than kindness and humility.
At fifteen, Roger experiences the contempt of the mestizos. He lives in Pucallpa with a prosperous merchant, a friend of his grandfather. He works hard for the boss and attends school. “Indian, dirty, lazy”: he doesn’t understand the words but knows what they carry. He gets up in the dark and goes to bed in the dark and works hard to study and to hear “Indian, dirty, lazy” until he earns respect with his fists. And he works hard. “I don’t do this to harm you, but for your own good,” says the boss. “Your culture isn’t like this. I understand work differently, and you have to understand it like I do.” And that’s why Roger gets up in the dark, studies, works hard, and goes to bed in the dark—and when he gets up, years later, he is already a teacher.
At fifteen, Andrés enjoys his family’s privileged economic position. The boy shares a desk and English classes with the children of diplomats and businesspeople from all over the world and of every religion. He goes with the family current and studies business engineering and administration. After graduation, he works independently, accumulates and invests: he travels to India, learns meditation, visits mystical centers, walks lost among sages. He returns to Chile with the dream of dedicating himself to social work.
Roger and Andrés exchange thoughts on the creation of the school textbooks that will serve as guides for the boys and girls of Nii Juinti, the school of shamans that is expected to open its doors in February 2015.
When I meet Professor Roger López in 2001, he is thirty-three years old, has a beautiful family, and a dream: to build a natural medicine retreat to receive visitors from all over the world. He has that dream, unshakable perseverance, and fourteen hectares of deforested jungle in the Shipibo community of San Francisco de Yarinacocha, near the tumor-city of Pucallpa. The territory, increasingly limited, offers only desolation. They live in scarcity, and I will repeat it: they live in scarcity and are bound to money.
Andrés is twenty-eight when his father dies, and he must abandon his spiritual search to rescue the struggling family business. He takes on the challenge with enthusiasm and determination: he wants to care for his family and the families of sixty workers. He modernizes the company’s operations but doesn’t forget the weekend barbecues. He goes further: new workers are chosen by their peers and subordinates, he offers free training, publishes the company’s results monthly, and shares a percentage of the profits. As far as possible, he turns the corporate pyramid upside down. The company grows to two hundred employees and becomes the most important in Chile.
Meanwhile, Roger makes Suipino, his natural medicine retreat, a reality. He plants thousands of medicinal plants, builds several small houses to host patients, and a maloca for ceremonies. Roger prospers, accumulates, and reinvests: he builds more houses, plants more, buys a house in the city, and pays for his children’s university education. He is a double intermediary: the vegetalista who connects with the spiritual forces of the other world to heal in this one; the entrepreneur who ventures into the stormy sea of the market economy to offer his people an alternative. Roger is a man of power and understands the rules of the game: adapt or disappear, grow or give up.
Andrés gradually steps away from the plastics company, travels to the Middle East, and explores different forms of spirituality with his close friend Santiago Correa. Together, they visit Jorge González, an ayahuasquero from Tarapoto, Peru. The experience is terrible—terrible: Andrés sees all the ugliness within himself, but he heals and glimpses the wonder that ayahuasca offers. Then Jorge González tells them about the Shipibo maestro Roger López, whom they visit in 2007 in San Francisco de Yarinacocha. They are so impressed by his power and knowledge that they decide to build themselves a small house where they can regularly return to take plants with the maestro. But the maestro and the apprentices end up becoming partners, and the small houses become the Great House of the Jungle, Ani Nii Shobo, a natural medicine center where they hope to receive “a million friends.”
A group of visitors shares the common space of Ani Nii Shobo, the great house that serves as dining room, kitchen, and living area.
the fruits
I had harbored the absurd hope that, during my five-year absence, a timid recovery of the vegetation might have taken place in the vicinity of San Francisco de Yarinacocha—but the jungle only recovers where there is jungle nearby. In the area of influence of Pucallpa, however, everything had been stripped bare. I was brooding over my disappointment when the rickety taxi, shortly after passing through the village, crested a hill and revealed, five hundred meters ahead, an oasis (in the jungle, yes). And a few minutes later I confirmed that the mass of trees rose beyond a sign that read Ani Nii Shobo – Shamanic Lodge.
Andrés wasn’t there. It was Cristina, one of the Chilean volunteers who help run the center, who welcomed me and led me to a beautiful cabin with a lovely view of the lagoon. We returned to the common space (dining room-kitchen-living room), where I met the other volunteers, all Chilean: Samuel, the architect of the complex; Anto, a refined cook; José Tomás, capable of anything. Over the course of the afternoon, the visitor-patients joined us—middle-aged professionals with a certain economic standing: two Chilean women, one Italian, and four Argentinians who enjoyed lively conversation from the comfort of the sofas, the well-stocked library, or a game of chess, with the closeness of old friends, though they had just met.
Andrés appeared shortly before dinner with his son Balta, recently arrived from Chile for a vacation. He wore simple pants and a cotton shirt, sporting a three-day beard. We had met a few years before, briefly, but he hugged me like an old friend (and I noticed his vigorous slimness, like that of a yoga teacher). He thanked me for coming and sat next to me during the delicious, light dinner. We only talked at the end, when I asked him (and I knew well what I was asking) what the experience of starting a business with Roger had been like. He shook his head, let out a loud sigh, and told me about the difficulties: Roger’s immovable stubbornness, his anxiety about money, the slow pace at which the business was taking off.
I wasn’t surprised. Years earlier, I had been in a position very similar to Andrés’s, when Roger needed money to start Suipino, and I was looking for someone to initiate me into the world of ayahuasca. At first, I didn’t understand Roger’s attitude toward money—almost obsessive—but after seven months living with his family, and several years based in another Indigenous community, I came to grasp the challenge native peoples faced: their assimilation into the market economy was inevitable; it was necessary to use the weapons of the whites, and Roger had succeeded. Among his people, he was admired for having become a prosperous entrepreneur, able to create jobs for dozens of people in his community. “Roger is a Shipibo hero,” I told Andrés. And I could have added: “But heroes are not accommodating—they are quite the opposite.”
The next morning, Roger arrived driving a brand-new SUV. He greeted me warmly. He radiated that power, that almost arrogant confidence that characterized him. He offered the visitors a demonstration of how ayahuasca was prepared. While his mother, the knowledge holder Ida, pounded the vine, he spoke for half an hour about Shipibo medicine. He lamented certain misconceptions held by Westerners: ayahuasca was not a panacea, he insisted, but a tool used by the healer for diagnosis; healing was brought about by an arsenal of plants whose knowledge was accessible to very few. “I heal with the plant, I work with the plant, I make money with the plant,” Roger told me later, as he proudly showed me the progress of Suipino, his first natural medicine center. There were already more than a dozen houses, a maloca, and a dining hall. The plants he had sown years earlier had grown into young trees. Brothers, cousins, and in-laws worked in carpentry, cooking, and reforestation. Roger picked some leaves from here, a piece of bark from there, and prepared the remedy for one of his patients. At that time, he had a dozen guests, but was expecting a group of twenty-three Italians in a few weeks. They would stay eight days, at seven hundred dollars per person.
Roger López prepares a natural remedy for one of his patients at Suipino, the natural medicine center he built on his own. Roger, who belongs to the Shipibo ethnic group, is one of the most prominent men in his community, respected for having become a successful entrepreneur through his knowledge of medicinal plants.
Prosperity was also evident in his home in San Francisco: several motorcycles, a couple of motorized carts, a venue for hosting receptions, new constructions, satellite television. There were his children visiting for the weekend: two professionals, one university student, one high school graduate, all living in the city to attend to their academic and work commitments, fulfilling the future their parents had planned for them. And paradoxically, none of them had learned the ancestral knowledge that granted them their privileged position.
Also paradoxically, Andrés had given up his privileged position in pursuit of the ancestral knowledge that Roger’s children were abandoning. It happened gradually: he would stay with Roger for one or two weeks, discovering such wonders, such master plants, healing from this fear or that anxiety. “My life made sense here; going to Chile was like going on vacation.” While helping build the center, he fasted on several master plants. “Consciousness expands. You learn to direct your thoughts, and little by little you choose who you are and align yourself with the heart. And beautiful things happen: you feel presences, moments of illumination, the heart opens, and you feel you can help someone, that you can become a channel for the healing spirits of nature.”
During my visit to Ani Nii Shobo, Andrés was finalizing his complete disengagement from his businesses in Chile. Thus, his passion for medicinal plants culminated. “This is my favorite place,” he said in the garden while transplanting several toé (Brugmansia sp.) plants, a master plant he had fasted on for several months. He proudly spoke about the reforestation work, the six thousand plants they had planted; they hoped to buy more land to expand their reach. “I am optimistic,” he confessed with a shy smile. “We want this place to gradually become a small sanctuary, with nature as the owner. We cannot renounce technological progress, but we must take care of nature, the air we breathe, the waters; only then can we perhaps aspire to have a future as humanity.”
By day, work with the plants; by night, work with their spirits. After several years of learning, Andrés felt capable of helping patients during the ceremony nights. “If people are in a dark world, I can open that world up. Nature works through me because I have devoted myself to the diet,” he told me. However, the ceremonies were led by Roger, accompanied by Ida and Leoncio. And how the three sang that night! What an extraordinary and beautiful healing display took place in the maloca: Ida, Leoncio, and Roger sliding beside each patient, singing their cure in Shipibo. The laughter of one, the cries of another, the sighs of wonder, the vomiting, the tobacco smoke, the revelations.
The jungle has been devastated in San Francisco de Yarinacocha (a Shipibo community near Pucallpa) due to various productive and extractive activities that have proliferated in the Peruvian rainforest. One of the goals of Ani Nii Shobo and Nii Juinti is to restore the forest.
the seeds
Ida and Leoncio, the grandparents who sang during the night, lament in the morning. “The culture is being lost. The young people no longer know how to plant bananas, build houses, or fish,” says Leoncio. “The girls used to go to the forest, get dirty, and catch their fish. Now they go wearing pants; they no longer wear skirts or blouses,” says Ida in her rudimentary Spanish, adding, “There are no more Shipibo.” Roger nods gravely and recounts the difficulties his people face: abuses by loggers, the spread of alcohol and prostitution in the communities, environmental problems, the forgetting of medicinal plants. “Before, around the houses, they planted piñón colorado, toé, piripiri — those were the defenses against evil spirits and diseases, and the Shipibo lived to be a hundred years old; now they don’t even reach sixty. The spirits of the plants are withdrawing, and that is why there is more illness.”
But Roger is a warrior; Andrés and Santiago are idealists. Together they try to stop the catastrophic loss of knowledge threatening the Shipibo people; their struggle has materialized in Nii Juinti, Heart of the Forest, a school of shamans that will welcome orphaned or underprivileged Shipibo children to train them in the knowledge being swept away by modernity, by progress — the very knowledge that, with cruel irony, has allowed Roger to succeed in this world. “The school will have capacity for twenty children,” explains Roger, “and hopefully, out of every twenty, three or four will become shamans, so they can return to their communities and do work like what we are doing here.” There will be natural medicine, reforestation, myths, and English. Today the school is only a promise standing in a desolate wasteland; perhaps in a few years Nii Juinti, the Heart of the Forest, will indeed be surrounded by a miraculous lushness.
