Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [119]
The 1999 strikes were successful, in part because local protesters were able to frame the proposed construction as a violation of their cultural and religious heritage. The strikes did not, however, halt the stream of crazy ideas to maximize traffic to the site. One recent proposal suggested installing an elevator that would convey passengers up sixteen hundred feet to Machu Picchu’s central plaza. Another recommended placing a dome over the citadel, around which would be constructed a catwalk from which tour groups could look down onto the Intihuatana and the Sacred Plaza as if watching the trained seals jump through hoops at an aquarium.
Such plans are based on the assumption that in the future the government of Peru will still own Machu Picchu. At least one person in Cusco was working hard to challenge that assumption. As it turned out, Yale was not the only party suing Peru over Machu Picchu.
Roxana Abril was a curator at Cusco’s Museo Inka. We met at the fountain in the Plaza de Armas, cut through the revelers and took seats at a second-floor café. It was an arctic day by Cusco standards, about sixty degrees, and after Roxana unwrapped herself from a thick red wool coat, I asked her to explain why, exactly, she was the rightful owner of Machu Picchu.
“Okay, let’s start at the beginning,” she said, and gave me a sad halfsmile, as if to say she’d told this story before and didn’t always get the response she hoped for.
According to Roxana, her great-grandfather started buying up properties on the left side of the Urubamba River, where Machu Picchu sits, in the years before Bingham arrived. He eventually accumulated a parcel that included all of Machu Picchu and much of the Inca Trail. Bingham struck a deal to give the landowner one third of any treasures that he found on his property. Since Machu Picchu had long since been picked over by grave robbers—and Bingham snuck out his teammates’ few valuable finds—Roxana’s great-grandfather wound up with nothing from the dig. After Bingham left, interest in Machu Picchu subsided and the site became overgrown again, an attraction only to huaqueros who almost surely went home empty-handed.
“In 1928, my grandfather, Emilio Abril, said that it was too hard for private people to take care of archaeological properties,” Roxana told me. “The owners of the land cannot prevent the huaqueros. So he offered to sell Machu Picchu to the government of Peru. In 1935, they gave an answer—‘Okay, we’ll buy it.’”
“Wait, they took seven years to respond?” I asked. “Why?”
“Mark, here in Peru things take a very long time.”
Should Roxana ever write her autobiography, that would make an excellent title. Her grandfather gave the chunk of land on which Machu Picchu sat to the state, and over the coming decades, her family continued to farm its property around the ruins, which were still relatively obscure. Roxana remembered walking parts of the Inca Trail as a girl and visiting its various sites. In the 1940s, her grandfather sold off much of his remaining land. (The family that purchased the Abril land is now also claiming title to Machu Picchu. It gets a little complicated.) According to Roxana, all her family ever received from the government in return for what became one of the most valuable pieces of land in South America were some worthless bonds. One of Roxana’s most vivid memories from her girlhood is of her father and brothers going to Lima to ask for the money they felt they were owed. “They never got an answer!” Roxana dug her phone out of her purse and dialed a number. “You should talk to my lawyer,” she said, cupping the mouthpiece. “I have a very good lawyer. He says that half of the pieces at Yale belong to my family because we had not sold the property when Bingham came. Alo?” We sat staring