Fishing and Life
The primary protein in the diet of Amazonian riverside communities comes from fish. In lakes or rivers, in the flooded forest—with poison, nets, harpoons, or hooks. Fishing is a vanishing art of a vanishing forest.
In Yarinacocha lagoon, near the city of Pucallpa, a large number of professional fishermen work, especially when the mijano phenomenon occurs, a migratory movement of fish.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 214 of Cáñamo magazine, October 2015.
The extraordinary Amazonian nature begins in the Andes, when the summer thaw gives rise to small, singing streams that become restless currents, whose anarchic flow calms as they descend, conforming to their traditional channels and beginning to be recognized as rivers. Two of them, the Apurímac and the Urubamba, merge at the foothills to form the Ucayali, which waters the Shipibo territory, perhaps the area of greatest natural wealth in all of the Amazon. The sediments gifted by the young mountain range fill the basin’s soils with nutrients, where, with unparalleled exuberance, plant life flourishes, which countless animal species take advantage of to live.
And fish—so many fish that when Bernardo, who is barely fourteen years old, takes up his arrow and goes fishing in the Yarinacocha lagoon, after a couple of hours of joyful activity, he returns home with huge and delicious fish. His mother cleans and prepares them, either roasted, wrapped in leaves, or in broth, and when the food is ready she calls everyone out loud: “¡Pihue moa!” Come eat now. All together.
Bernardo is a good fisherman but has not yet reached the level of his father, one of the experts in San Francisco at catching the paiche, the great Amazonian fish that can reach three meters and two hundred fifty kilos, with tasty meat highly valued by merchants. The man sets out in his small canoe carved from a large trunk to face the dangerous animal, armed with a harpoon and centuries of wisdom. He rows to the center of the lagoon and patiently waits for the bubbling on the surface, a sign that the giant emerges from the depths to breathe. He stands up on the canoe, draws back his arm, and plunges the harpoon into the fish’s back. The danger begins: the paiche tries to escape and drags the canoe, which slides swiftly. The man lets himself be pulled at first but gradually pulls the rope tied to the harpoon, bringing the fish closer. Once he has pulled all the rope in, he makes the animal believe it can escape, loosens the rope again, and the unfortunate fish weakens in its search for freedom. What an intelligent predator the human being is! On the third or fourth attempt, the defenseless fish receives two machete blows to the head and, dead, is lifted aboard.
The paiche’s fate is less about family consumption and more about sale. Since commercial routes were established in the Amazon in the 19th century, it has been one of the most traded products. Once the giant has been properly cut, salted, and dried, father and son head to the mestizo town of Yarina or perhaps Pucallpa, sell the meat, and with the money they buy pants, skirts, blouses, machetes, shoes, sugar, salt, pots, and other products.
What I just told you happened in the 1950s. There was so much exchange of paiche for money (“more of everything! Development!”) that in Yarinacocha lagoon there is no longer that fish or most of the species that allowed the good life of the wondrous jungle. In the Shipibo community of San Francisco de Yarinacocha, the paiche exists only in Bernardo’s memory, now a vigorous seventy-year-old. He nostalgically recalls the abundance of the past. “Sometimes we caught them with a cast net, sometimes with an arrow. There were big tucunarés… Now there aren’t any. Too many Peruvians, there’s no more fish. Now tucunaré costs fifteen soles [five dollars] per kilo. Very expensive. Sometimes tucunaré weighs two kilos: thirty soles. Sometimes big palometa costs twelve soles per kilo. It’s no longer possible. The poor can no longer eat fish; fish is for the rich.”
Grandfather Bernardo still makes the arrows he used in earlier times. Today, there is little fish left to catch in the San Francisco de Yarinacocha lagoon.
the arrival of the peruvians
Bernardo says that in summer he used to go fishing with the elders at Cashibococha, a lagoon frequented by the Cashibos, traditional enemies of the Shipibos. Bernardo’s grandfather told him that in his youth the Cashibos would come all the way to the village and attack them. “They were fierce! They would stab people with poisoned arrows. Uhhh! Very dangerous. But we made them run into the forest, because we had shotguns and they didn’t. They weren’t civilized, they didn’t want to be civilized, they just wanted to stay like that in the forest, naked.” Poor Cashibos: I fear they were more often victims than perpetrators; after all, despite the supposed danger they represented, the Shipibos would travel to Cashibococha, their territory, with the certainty of filling their canoe with large specimens of doncella, a leather-skinned fish highly valued by the Shipibos.
This happened in summer, when the seasonal drought lowered the flow of the river network, lagoons lost their connection to the river, and the fish became trapped. The water level dropped so much that only a fifty-centimeter layer of water remained over the bottom. Bernardo says the fish were so crowded that they could be caught by hand. On one occasion, they were not satisfied with just the fish. “Let’s go find the Cashibos,” proposed the grandfather with a playful sparkle in his eyes. Bernardo felt fear: he remembered the poisoned arrows and wanted to turn back. They moved toward the other end of the lagoon, carefully watching the shores, looking for any movement. They were about to give up when Bernardo’s father, pointing toward the shore, whispered: “There.” Everyone looked attentively as they cautiously approached. But when they focused their attention, they were greatly surprised. Instead of naked, heavily armed Cashibos, they saw Peruvians dressed and wielding machetes, clearing a wide strip of forest where a few months later cows and pigs, and crops of corn and rice would enter: the Peruvians had arrived at Cashibococha.
In the fifties, they were just a few thousand, but the invaders kept coming intensely and multiplied until they were more than half a million exploiters of a forest as lush as it was fragile. They devastated it. Yet even today, there are some times of the year when a faint echo of the forest’s former abundance bursts into daily life: the mijano. In February, the waters of Yarinacocha reach their highest level, which makes fishing difficult. “A lot of water, the fish hide,” goes the saying. Paradoxically, when the floodwaters reach their peak, the Ucayali connects with lagoons deep in the forest that remain isolated sometimes for years, where fish abound. Then large schools of fish emerge into the river and swim toward other lagoons, like Yarina, where they most certainly fall into the nets of people like Elvis, the grandson of old Bernardo.
Elvis and his cousin, Shipibos from the San Francisco de Yarinacocha community, check their net during the mijano, a phenomenon that returns the abundance of fish from past times for a few days each year.
The port of San Francisco is bustling with activity. In small canoes, community members gather the fish from their nets, which they then return to the greenish waters. A pale reflection: the fish have not yet reached maturity. Elvis, who looks like any typical university student, is already nineteen but his body hasn’t developed the musculature of a man of the forest. He checks his net under the intense sun, on a hot and humid afternoon. He greets me with a gesture typical of a reggaeton singer or an NBA basketball player. He says he has spent the day fishing (something he hasn’t done in the last six months) and that he caught twenty kilos. Besides the artisanal fishermen from the community, there are also boats up to ten meters long, powered by outboard motors, operated by groups using large nets. “They’re fishermen from Yarina,” Elvis explains. “They fish to sell.” In reality, Elvis and his family also sell part of their catch to cover university expenses; what Elvis means is that the others are professional fishermen. The profit, for both groups, isn’t much; since there’s so much fish, the kilo sells for two soles, less than a dollar.
The soda we drink at a small community store costs seventy cents of a sol. Elvis studies education at the National Intercultural University of the Amazon; his delicate hands, full of scratches, attest to this. He explains that fishing has stopped being practiced by most young people in the community, who focus on their studies. “If we’re in class, we don’t feel like fishing.” Very occasionally he goes fishing with university friends, although what he likes most on weekends is “going out dancing, having some fun.” I ask if other young people from San Francisco fish. “Some do, but not all. Because they don’t have canoes, or arrows. Some have nothing. No paddle, no hook.”
Back in the big family kitchen, as if the abundance of fish had transported us to another time, I find the family eating heartily. At the table, men and boys; on the floor around the fire, plump Mercedes in charge, surrounded by pots, daughters, and granddaughters, eating with their hands a meal based on boquichico, small-sized but fresh fish from the lagoon after all. They are very generous people, but it’s not so common for them to invite me to eat, because food is expensive and resources are limited. But on this occasion, when the matriarch sees me, she hurriedly shouts as in the old days: “Carlos, ¡pihue moa!” Come eat now. All together.
The Ucayali River, source of the Amazon, flows winding its way forward, creating along its course lagoons once rich in fish.
CAPRICIOUS LAGOONS
The lagoons that punctuate the course of the Ucayali River are the result of its vigorous flow. The Ucayali is a meandering river whose powerful water mass sometimes shapes its bends almost into circles.
The circle never fully forms because when both ends connect, the river flows straight ahead and the old bend remains to the side, still connected to the river but no longer part of its current.
In these lagoons, fish are usually especially abundant, and the Shipibos have always chosen to settle on their shores and obtain food with ease: a natural pantry.
The Vencedor lagoon, on the Pisqui River—a tributary of the Ucayali—is not natural but rather the result of human ability to shape nature without damaging it. In the mid-1990s, the river began, about fifty meters below this Shipibo community, a large bend whose ends would eventually meet in a few years. The villagers wanted to speed up the process to create a lagoon-market and decided to open a channel connecting both sides. First, they cleared a two-meter-wide path, uprooting any tree that stood in the way. Then they dug a trench one meter wide and one and a half meters deep. With the first rise in water in January, the river flowed in and began to carry everything away, large trees included. By the end of the first rainy season, the channel had turned into a twenty-meter-wide stream. A year later, the Pisqui had permanently changed course, and the people of Vencedor were the proud owners of a beautiful lagoon, which I now cross with Omar and Darwin to fill the bottom of the canoe with fish.
a seventeen year old adult
At seventeen, Darwin is already an adult—he has a wife, a young daughter, and the ability to provide them with essential protein: fish. While his fourteen-year-old brother Omar rows from the stern, Darwin stands at the bow, ready to cast the throw net as soon as he sees signs of fish on the surface. He throws three or four times without success, doing so with skill, strength, and balance. “Eight kilos,” Darwin estimates the net weighs. His calves are wide, hairless, and lean, and his feet are strong. He has a sculpted physique. He wears green shorts and a Bayern Munich football jersey, shielding himself from the sun with a cap.
Suddenly, a two-meter caiman splashes into the nearby shore. A turtle basks on a log. Omar points out animals for my camera as if he were the guide and I the tourist. The Pisqui, far from the cities, remains rich in wildlife. We approach the shoreline, thick with aquatic vegetation. “There’s a lot of boquichico here, in the grass beds,” says Darwin, scanning for the prized fish. Now seated at the bow, he has traded his throw net for bow and arrow. He shoots twice, successfully, but the fish are small. “Time to cast the net again,” he decides. Soon after, Darwin spots a school of fish and casts the net again. Within half an hour, the bottom of the canoe is lined with ten kilos of fish—enough to eat and to give away.
Fish is so important in the Shipibo diet that in their language, the word yápa means both fish and food. To secure this essential nourishment, they have developed countless techniques over centuries, adapted to the many species that inhabit diverse environments. It's estimated that there are over 800 fish species in the Peruvian Amazon, and nearly a hundred are considered good to eat by the Shipibo. They find them in large rivers, forest creeks, ponds, lagoons, and flooded forests. They catch them using nets, hooks, plant-based poisons, traps, arrows, or harpoons. It’s common to see five- or six-year-old children on the dock in the Vencedor community, armed with rod and hook, fishing with passion—playing and learning. As they grow, they accompany their elders on more demanding fishing expeditions.
Darwin, fishing with a bow and arrow in the Vencedor lagoon.
the "afasi" son
Ananías, who is thirteen, comes to get me on Saturday at four thirty in the morning, just before dawn. At the port, Reinón, his father, is waiting. We board the canoe and, along with another son and a neighbor known as el Chato, who propels the canoe with a long pole like a gondolier, we head upriver. On the other shore, we step into the mud (it's the rainy season), cross a mestizo neighbor's cattle pasture, and follow a path opened for logging. As we go deeper, the trail narrows and the vegetation thickens. Reinón often stops to point out the recent tracks of a peccary or a tapir, or to explain the properties of different plants. “Ajosacha,” he says as he pulls up a small plant and lets me smell the root. He recalls that when he was a boy, his father used to wake him at four in the morning, make him drink a preparation made with that plant, and send him alone into the forest without breakfast to bring back meat or fish. That discipline—known in regional Spanish as dieta—was a fundamental part of raising earlier generations.
Two hours later, the path disappears: the only clue of human passage is a faint depression in the blanket of leaves covering the forest floor. We arrive at a stream about a meter wide, with green, murky water that pools every few meters. Without ceremony, like children diving into a game, they drop their gear in a small clearing, grab a flexible branch, and tie a green nylon line and a hook to it. The bait is bits of fish they’ve brought in a backpack. Reinón challenges his neighbor and sons: “Let’s see who catches the most.” Not even a minute passes before he pulls a nearly one-kilo fasaco from the water. His neighbor, Chato, is not far behind. In an hour, Reinón has caught twenty or twenty-five large fish; then they stop biting and we move on, following the stream via barely visible footpaths—this is how the people of Vencedor interact with nature: altering it as little as possible to enjoy its long-standing gifts. The dense, layered song of birds—a true symphony—celebrates their determination.
Ananías, trying to fish.
I grow tired of just watching, so I grab a rod and, like them, throw myself into the fishing. To my surprise, the fish bite frequently, and it doesn’t take long before I catch five. Immersed in the tension of fishing, in that alert waiting, in the search for the right spot, I don’t realize that I’m standing beneath a tree infested with light red ants. When I pull out my sixth catch, the fish, jolted by a quick flick of the rod, flies over my head and strikes the anthill; enraged, the ants deliver painful, venomous bites to my scalp, face, chest, and arms.
Once I recover from the scare, I hear Reinón’s deep voice calling from afar: “Let’s go now!” Back at our starting point, I find them all ready to leave. They ask me how many fish I caught. “Six.” “More than Ananías,” notes Chato. “I don’t think so,” I reply. But Chato isn’t guessing—Ananías, Reinón’s thirteen-year-old son, only caught two. “He’s afasi,” his father says with a sigh of resignation: he’s lazy, not good at work, that is. Maybe he should go on dieta, I think, like in the old days: send him alone into the forest at four in the morning, feed him only if he brings back enough meat or fish. The problem is that Ananías goes to school—he’s learning other things.
