Double Handshake

The Tiananmen anniversary stories are just about wrapping up by this time. Medias around the world filed stories about Beijing’s efforts (some involving umbrellas) to hush up foreign correspondents and shoo Beijingers from the square. I sent a favorite China blog, The China Beat a couple of paragraphs about the minimal media response from Lima, Peru. Today, though, I wanted to add one more note to that brief dispatch in light of a new Tiananmen reference from Peru that came across my desk today.

First, a quick bit of background. In the past few days, violence has erupted between police and indigenous groups in Peru’s Amazon jungle over land use rights of the rainforest. Local people are rioting over the government’s plan to open the region for oil, gas and mineral exploration. Possibly up to 100 people have been killed in and around Bagua, the deadliest instance of social unrest since the mid-1990s clashes between police and the Shining Path.

Given the timing, Survival International, a London-based NGO that advocates for tribal peoples’ rights and its director Stephen Corry, has come up with an analogy for the protests in the Amazon:

Their protests signal that the colonial era has finally drawn to a close. No longer are Amazon Indians prepared to put up with the illegal and brutal treatment which has been routine. That’s finished. This is the Amazon’s Tiananmen. If it finishes the same way, it will also end Peru’s international reputation.

Corry goes on to call for oil companies operating in the region to suspend their operations until calm has been restored and indigenous groups are given a fair listen.

It’s fascinating to me how Tiananmen is invoked here. On the most basic level, “Amazon’s Tiananmen” is similar to the original in that it, at first blush, involves an oppressive government cracking down on its people. Never mind that the circumstances around “Amazon’s Tiananmen” have almost nothing in common with the original besides this fact. This week’s “Tiananmen” has nothing to do with political corruption and fundamental government reform, nothing near the international visibility, nor are the protesters largely non-violent as they were in the original.

But notice the second part: If it finishes the same way, it will also end Peru’s international reputation. This week’s protesters in the rain forest will likely not be able to fundamentally change the course of Lima’s business plans in the region anymore than Beijing students were able to twenty years ago. Nevertheless, the blood being shed may serve to damage Lima’s international reputation as it did for Beijing. Here, invoking the Tiananmen analogy does not ask Amazonians to expect to “win” in their struggle anymore than student protesters “won” twenty years ago. Take heart martyrs, Survival International seems to be arguing, this is the price you pay for favorable media coverage.

Will the foreign response to this week’s violence in Peru rival that in Tiananmen two decades ago? I doubt it, for a couple of reasons.

First, Beijing’s Tiananmen became such a huge event internationally partly because foreign medias were already in the capital covering Gorbachev’s highly publicized visit to China. The large amount of coverage that Tiananmen received in 1989 was partly due to the fact that a number of world-wide media outlets happened to find themselves in the right place at the right time. Contrast that with the isolation of Bagua, Peru and the limited amount of information available. I’m not expecting an iconic “tank man” photo to emerge from this week’s unrest.

Second, despite indigenous peoples’ rights being an utterly worthy cause in my view, it does not have the sex appeal of protesters for “democracy.” Indeed, part of the foreign fascination with Beijing’s Tiananmen was in how easily the media was able to pit the sides: Evil Communist government vs. Good Democratic protesters. Of course the reality was much more complicated, but how easily a news story can be consumed becomes a major factor in how well-known it can become with the public.

Finally, foreign conglomerates are at the heart of this week’s protests, unlike Tiananmen, which was largely an internal affair. Survival International’s article urges foreign oil firms – Anglo-French’s Perenco, Argentina’s PlusPetrol, Canada’s Petrolifera, Spain’s Repsol, Brazil’s Petrobras – to suspend business until calm has been restored. The foreign interests at play in Peru, I think, will weaken the potential for a unified international denouncement of Peru’s government the same way there was in the wake of Tiananmen. Simply put, huge foreign companies (their lobbyists, their employees, their crisis-inflicted governments) have something to gain in Lima eventually having its way in the jungle. In the end, these powerful players, and their money and influence may find a way to ensure that the Amazonians’ plight doesn’t too closely resemble the students’ and workers’ who took to the streets twenty years ago last week.

Image: BBC

I came across something that brought out my inner Hoosier some days ago over Pisco Sours at the beautiful Hotel Bolivar in central Lima. Next to our table on the restaurant’s terrace, I discovered the words “George Cutter Co. South Bend Ind” stamped on the ornamental lamps along the ledge.

A bit of internet sleuthing revealed that George Cutter, a friend of Thomas Edison, produced street lamps and other fixtures from his factory in South Bend, Indiana from 1906 until 1915. His company in South Bend was later absorbed by Westinghouse after his death. Interestingly, the George Cutter light fixtures at the hotel actually predate the historic hotel itself, which was built in 1924.

Note for Hoosier readers: Please do not go looking for the Hotel Bolivar the city of Peru (“Circus Capital of the World,” birthplace of Cole Porter). You will not find it.

There are islands off the coast of Peru that owe their color to bird guano. I saw some of them this past weekend, after a thirty minute boat ride from the small coastal town Paracas, south of Lima. Once we made it out to the Islas Ballestas, our boat guide pointed out the species – Inca Terns, Guanay Cormorants, Humbolt Penguins – and told us that in five years’ time, workers would scrape 60-70 centimeters of guano off the rocks to sell as fertilizer. The islands smelled like old, sour fish.

There were two workers who lived on the islands, both guano harvesters. Our boat cruised by the old wooden docks that, a hundred and fifty years ago, were surely much busier. At that time, our guide told us, there would be five to six meters guano for workers to mine, annually. In mid-19th century Peru, no commodity was more important than bird guano.

The droppings were mined and exported as phosphorus- and nitrogen-rich fertilizer around the world. Peru’s guano was especially sought-after because the country’s climate (little rain, arid atmosphere) better preserves the nitrates from evaporating. From 1840 to 1880 (Peru’s Guano Golden Age), the country exported 20 million tons of guano, earning around US$2 billion in profits.

Chinese coolies began arriving to toil here after slavery was abolished here in 1854. The coolies in the guano mines and sugar plantations were nearly all men and all bound to eight years’ servitude if and when they made it through their passage from Macau to Lima.

In the New World, the coolies endured conditions on par with the slaves that had preceded them: squalor and neglect, prolonged bouts of illness, back-breaking work and physical punishment. At night, they were thrown together with the army deserters and convicts they worked alongside in cramped rooms and locked up until morning.

Guano harvesting in the 19th century was similar to how it is done today. From an enlightening New York Times article published last year:

Guano is also an undeniably strenuous enterprise from the perspective of the laborers who migrate to the islands to collect the dung each year. In scenes reminiscent of open-pit gold mines on the mainland, the laborers rise before dawn to scrape the hardened guano with shovels and small pickaxes.

Many go barefoot, their feet and lower legs coated with guano by the time their shifts end in the early afternoon. Some wear handkerchiefs over their mouths and nostrils to avoid breathing in guano dust, which, fortunately, is almost odorless aside from a faint smell of ammonia.

Meanwhile, the worldwide “guano rush” was on. The British Empire monopolized Peru’s guano trade in places like the Islas Ballestas. The US Congress, in turn, passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. This allowed any American citizen to take peaceable possession of any “deposit of guano on any island, rock or key” not inhabited or occupied by another government. All told, the US would claim around 60 islands in the Caribbean and Pacific on guano grounds.

As artificial fertilizers were developed later in the 19th century, guano’s importance plummeted. Peru’s economy suffered a steep decline, acerbated by its foreign debt and years of mismanaging its guano income.

Fast-forward a hundred and fifty years, and now, Peru’s guano is back in demand. From the Times article mentioned above, guano from Peru is fetching up to US$500 per ton as an organic alternative to synthetic fertilizers. While the article isn’t positive about guano’s long-term viability – one interviewee predicts supplies will last another 10 years before bird populations are completely gone – it is a fascinating read.

I came away more (cautiously) optimistic after my guano run-in, however. Granted the islands I visited were in a national park, but there seemed no shortage of birds or guano. The droppings were sensibly being harvested every five years, and we tourists didn’t even step foot outside the boat. If nothing else, these small, barren rocks aren’t really usable for anything besides what falls on them. What would the government have to lose by protecting a few more guano islands from fisherman and trampling tourists, and making a few bucks in the process?