American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [23]
The jungle poison seeped through his circle anyway. Pedro Pablo’s wife—my great-grandmother—who had worked tirelessly to help improve the lot of the indígenas in the mountains of Huancavelica, had a heart attack and died. Peru’s newly elected president, Augusto Leguía, a landed capitalist who was a personal friend of my great-grandfather and a defender of Julio César Arana, was wounded in an attempted assassination. He slipped off to London to convalesce.
WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER summoned his son home and quit the governorship of Cusco, he descended from the Inca omphalos in a state of high anxiety, spinning into Lima with a double vertigo: It wasn’t only his name that made him feel like a criminal—he’d been inspired by Julio César. As the rubber baron’s empire had grown, Pedro Pablo had tasted ambition: He’d tried his hand at capitalism, too.
He owned a good stretch of land in the highlands, including a vein of mercury that cut along the cordillera of the Andes. They were rich mines, old mines, with a wretched history he hoped to amend. The largest was the Santa Barbara, an ancient deposit the Spaniards had mined since the late 1500s. Las minas de muerte. The mines of death.
Just as Julio César was consolidating his power, Pedro Pablo published a book called The Mercury Mines of Peru, in which he proposed that the old mines of Santa Barbara—which now lay on his land—be reopened, so that the country would no longer be dependent on foreign imports. It was a proposal for investors, a ticket to the Arana boom, and he was ready to create an empire of his own. His book did not shrink from the truth about the abuses Indian workers had endured in earlier centuries. His own venture, he insisted, would be a model for the enlightened world, a leap into gringo modernity. He posed the program to the president of the country and got no reaction. Then he posed the question to his cousin in Iquitos and got the encouragement he desired.
He had fully expected to enter the mercantile world when his duties in Cusco were over. He had not expected the chaos that ensued: the news about the atrocities; the freeze on all Arana bank assets; the realization that beneath his own ambitions, speeches about progress, and attempts to mimic a gringo efficiency, there lurked a terrible, inescapable truth: The mercury would leave his mines the way rubber had left the jungle, the only way hard labor ever got done in the Americas—as when the Incas enslaved the Chimu, the Spaniards enslaved the cholos, the half-breeds enslaved the negros—on the backs of the darker race.
Pedro Pablo did not need to look far to see that he would never mine Santa Barbara, that he would not match the lucre the northern family had in abundance, that if he could just hold on to his good name, it was all the wealth he would ever want.
His good name. The world was telling him he couldn’t have even that. Imagine a family, the gringos intoned, who put Indians to work without payment, without food, in nakedness; with women stolen, ravished, and murdered; with Indians flogged until their bones are laid bare, left to die with their wounds festering with maggots, their bodies used as food for their dogs. Imagine what lower hell those monsters might dig, unchecked.
When Julio César Arana protested the allegations of human-rights abuses and the Peruvian government sprang to defend him, the charge then shifted from Arana to Peru, and then to all Latin America. To deny the truth is part of the Latin American character, a British parliamentarian thundered. It is an “Oriental” trait they possess, the curious belief that sustained denial is the equal of truth, no matter what the real conditions.
Eventually, Reginald Enock, a London barrister, took it upon himself to issue a final denunciation, tracing the evil back to its root, which, as he explained it, was Spain: The occurrences on the Putumayo are, to some extent, the result of a sinister human element—the Spanish character. The remarkable trait of callousness to human suffering which the people of Spain—themselves