The Great White Predator
The Great White Predator
August 29, 2005
A glance at the counter positioned at the bottom of my homepage. 2,400 connections per day since June. This might mean a thousand people connecting each day, a thousand loyal readers. Perhaps.
One day someone told me, "No wonder, your site would depress anyone!" So I took the site and stripped it of everything dramatic and anxiety-inducing. I placed that on my homepage with a little red heart, for those who, on the day they connect, do not want to see all the world's horror poured out at their feet. And it is true that, often, one must hold on. One must try to stay positive, to seek out advances that can benefit humanity, to save it. In Kirkland, autonomous systems have been developed to intelligently convert solar energy into electricity. Elsewhere, it is Belgians who have considered turning to the Fresnel mirror formula. See article. The idea is to equip poor countries with systems of this kind. Those who live crushed by the sun, without fresh water in their coastal strips. Energy would allow for the desalination of seawater. But I do not believe this project is advancing much. Where would the "profitability" be?
Yet this should be developed urgently.
Why are the Americans, in their secret base in Kirkland, more accustomed to producing devices like this one, designing things like this? For the needs of humanity? I doubt it. Probably for their own. Later, when scarcity sets in, they will sell this clean technology at a premium price. They plan to install 24,000 of these units in a desert in New Mexico. They are, moreover, quite well oriented toward renewable energies. More so than we, the French, who are doing practically nothing. Activities such as fuel and diesel savings, and solar power, are left to the "cranks," the "sixty-eighter eco-warriors." Our politicians have more serious concerns:
There is Mégajoule, Iter, the continuation of underground nuclear testing on French territory, in secret, and the construction of a new nuclear aircraft carrier. At the last salon, Alliot-Marie and Chirac posed next to the model of the future French UCAV, an unmanned combat aircraft. Who would believe that since 1996, the date of Mururoa's closure, the French have not conducted any nuclear test anywhere? But sleep soundly. No French science journalist would dare raise these questions. Mégajoule is "a sun in a test tube," ITER is "the energy of tomorrow." Of course, of course...
Do not complain endlessly. Do not whine. Try to find solutions. What do you think Christophe and I went to Dubai for? Tourism? In 14 days, we did not take a single day off, working even on "Fridays," the day of rest in Muslim countries. I threw my back out again. That workplace accident from 1976, which reminds me of its presence.
Why? To shoot for the moon, to try to find potential funding. Christophe dreams of getting the emirs interested in solar power. Instead of dedicating all their petrodollars to building a Disneyland for billionaires. With the funds remaining in one of their pockets, we would have ten times enough to work with. In Europe, we pursue a "growth" paradigm. Over there, the growth of the emirates was 52% this year. Simply an increase in the price of black gold. One of the head of state's sons bought himself a yearling for 500 million euros. They don't even know what the word "profitability" means.
This morning I came across a new file, sent by my friend Christophe Giudicci. This needs to be put somewhere. But, I warn you. If you are not in the mood this morning, move on to something else. It is grim, nauseating. These are the underworlds of the planet.
Read or click on the heart, to flee as quickly as possible.
../EVASION/evasion0.htm
Italian source:
http//www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidaino-archivio/23-Agosto-2005/art114.html
Translated from Italian by Marie-Ange Patrizio
Tuesday, August 23, 2005.
Pucallpa (Peru)
On the white road, black vultures sift through a pile of garbage in this city upstream of the Ucayali River (see attached map). A gang of kids shouts, "Hey, gringo!" and I turn around to see who is behind me: I don't really have the look of a cowboy. But no, they are really addressing me. It is disconcerting for us Europeans to be called by this term which, in Sergio Leone's films, is always stuck to North American Yankees. Thus, any white foreign woman will be called a gringa. It is not just a way of designating: the semantic field of this term is infinitely broader, and more worrying. I realize this on a boat going down the Ucayali River, when I offer a glass of drinking water to the owner of a sawmill who is telling me about his deforestation projects. He thanks me and adds: "A kid from here would never have accepted it: mothers tell them that food and drinks offered by gringos are poisoned."
The torch that stuns the indigenous
The fact is that throughout the Amazon basin, passing from tributary to tributary, the most terrifying stories about us, the gringos, circulate. In a village with no electric light, I walk down the street one evening, lighting my way with one of those latest-model torches, worn on the forehead like miners, to keep my hands free. The guide begs me to take it off: "Here, many people believe that gringos appear at night coming out of the forest, to kidnap indigenous people whom they stun with a very powerful light they have on their heads, like a laser" (indios is a term considered derogatory; "native" or "indigenous" is used instead). It is the story of the pelacara that resonates as far as Iquitos and Manaus, like an urban legend that would return, from London to Rome, and to Cairo (El Pelacara is also the title of a story by Colombian writer Nelson Estupinan Bass). Here is how I first heard it, in a jungle camp: "These gringos kidnap indigenous people at night, whose bodies are found with their faces skinless" (hence the name: in Spanish, cara means "face"). Sometimes, they even take their eyes, "lately, even the finger bones." "Do they sell the natives' faces to pharmaceutical companies or to rich head collectors? Do they use the finger bones to create fake identities for fingerprints? Why they do it, no one can say. But everyone is afraid of the pelacaras."
Indeed, such a story would not come to the mind of any European. At first glance, it is as if the indigenous people were attributing their own ancestral obsessions to whites: after all, it was certain Amazonian peoples, not Europeans, who waged war to be able to cut off their enemies' heads, work them, decorate them, adorn them, and hang them in front of their doors. But then, one thinks of the "Putumayo scandal" (a Colombian region named after a tributary of the Amazon River), during the rubber era which, from 1880 to 1920, forever changed the face of the entire Amazon, and which is known mainly thanks to Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo. On the Putumayo, at the beginning of the 20th century, reigned an emulator even more cruel and cynical than Fitzcarraldo, Julio C. Arana, who, by force or persuasion, had cleared the entire territory of his Colombian and Bolivian competitors, and recruited a veritable army of international mercenaries who defended his kingdom at gunpoint: approximately 50,000 Indians from the region were reduced to slavery and subjected to treatments whose inhumanity defies all imagination today. "Reading the thick booklets of the investigation, one is exhausted by the uniformity of the horror, ceasing to shiver with nausea except before the most ferocious acts: women used as targets for Arana's men's shooting exercises, children cut into pieces to feed the overseers' dogs, men castrated, whose organs were cooked at the end of the torture before forcing their wives to eat them, or this woman burned alive, like so many others for the greatest entertainment of their torturers, but in this case, wrapped in the Peruvian flag, first soaked in kerosene," writes the great anthropologist André-Marcel d'Aran in Indigenous Peruvian Amazonia (Plon, Paris, 1982). And he adds that Arana was never punished; he even became a senator of Peru and, in the sixties, one of his grandsons was a senator of Iquitos.
D'Aran's text, in turn, brings to mind Pedro Leon (1519-1554) who, in the Cronica del Perù, speaks of a "Portuguese named Roque Martin who hangs pieces of Indians on his veranda to feed his dogs, as if they were wild beasts": the protagonists change, centuries pass, but the appalling forms of ferocity remain monotonously the same. With such precedents in the background, one better understands the anxiety with which even the most skeptical would tell these horror legends: "I don't believe it myself, but you never know, the same stories come back from too many sources. For example, once, a friend of mine was fishing at night with a harpoon, when he saw a tall man emerge from the river, dressed entirely in black, with flippers, a mask, and a weapon. So my friend threw his harpoon, and the man fell into the water. My friend says he killed him, but that no one ever came to claim him."
The most frightening story is reported thus: "I was working at an oil field in the jungle. I had a roommate who always drank. One night, he got drunk and told me the whole story. The gringos from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (see the next episode) offered him a job, promising him he would no longer have problems, but that he must not speak of it to anyone, not even his wife. They took him by plane into the middle of the jungle and there he discovered that his job was to kill indigenous people. They knock them out, or kill them, with a lantern that emits a very strong beam. They take them to a house where they remove organs they sell for transplants and then hang them upside down, cut open in two, above a very strong heat source, in order to collect the fat, because it seems that indigenous oil is unmatched for the gringos' airplanes and spacecraft. They have killed thousands. That is why people in many villages are afraid when gringos like you arrive."
I ask: "How did this colleague come to tell all this? Was he not afraid?" The answer: "He had remorse, he had repented, and furthermore, he had not been paid for his work" recalls the beginning of another book, Thy Will Be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, by Gérard Colby and Charlotte Dennett (HarperCollins, 1995). The volume opens with this scene: in the darkness of the confessional, a man, Araide Pereira, recounts his misdeeds to a priest. "He participated in a mass extermination and can no longer continue to live with his remorse. Moreover, he was not paid the fifteen dollars he had been promised." It was in 1963, no longer in the rubber era, but in that of new technological materials, in this case cassiterite, necessary to produce tin. The Cintas Largas people had the misfortune of living precisely in this area, next to the Aripuana River, where the Arruda and Junqueira Company had discovered a vein of this rare mineral. It was thus decided to have take off, on the day the Cintas Largas were gathered in their village square to feast, from one of the airstrips cleared in the jungle, a Cessna equipped with two weapons: sugar on the first pass to attract the Indians and allay their fears, and dynamite to be dropped on the second pass, when they would all be well exposed. After that, to eliminate all survivors, a team of seven men was sent, including Araide Pereira: before finding where all the fleeing Cintas Largas had taken refuge, the commando wandered in the jungle for more than six weeks. Then, they attacked at dawn and killed all the indigenous people except a little boy and a girl. The commando leader shot the boy in the head, hung the girl from a tree with her legs spread, upside down, and dismembered her with a single machete blow. Here too, those responsible were never punished. The priest who had received the confession was killed in a car accident. The pilot of the plane that dropped the dynamite perished in a plane crash. Two defendants drowned during "fishing expeditions," the commando leader was killed by rubber tappers during a mutiny. Four other defendants disappeared.
The massacre of the Cintas Largas
Remorse and non-payment are therefore not the only elements that today link the "legend" reported to me to the 1963 massacre of the Cintas Largas (remorse and non-payment had already contributed to revealing the Putumayo scandal in 1907): there is another detail common to the horror, that of the victim hung upside down and dismembered.
The Mayas understood everything four centuries ago: their book Chilam Balam describes whites as "predators by day, criminals by night, assassins of the world." If there ever exists a "white man's burden," it is certainly not the "civilizing" mission, as Rudyard Kipling thought, but truly the weight of this past of genocides and atrocities that plunges you into embarrassment in the face of the extraordinary kindness that Amazonian indigenous people show towards you. Despite everything.
So much so that you even come to find delicate, poetic, and undeserved, this belief that is told to you when, in a boat on the immense river, you see the large pink dolphins jumping above the water, "which are called bufeos because, when they come to the surface to breathe, they make a sound like booou." According to the Shipibo, a people who live along the Ucayali, downstream from Pucallpa, the bufeo is a supernatural being, a demon, who appears as an attractive gringo who seduces and impregnates the indigenous women who look at him, and who will give birth to light-skinned children (I would later find this belief confirmed in a very recent work by French anthropologist Jacques Tournon). "That is why, if she sees a bufeo, a woman must flee the riverbank." (To be continued)
Marco D'Eramo
Tuesday, August 23, 2005.
Pucallpa (Peru)
On the white road, black vultures sift through a pile of garbage in this city upstream of the Ucayali River (see attached map). A gang of kids shouts, "Hey, gringo!" and I turn around to see who is behind me: I don't really have the look of a cowboy. But no, they are really addressing me. It is disconcerting for us Europeans to be called by this term which, in Sergio Leone's films, is always stuck to North American Yankees. Thus, any white foreign woman will be called a gringa. It is not just a way of designating: the semantic field of this term is infinitely broader, and more worrying. I realize this on a boat going down the Ucayali River, when I offer a glass of drinking water to the owner of a sawmill who is telling me about his deforestation projects. He thanks me and adds: "A kid from here would never have accepted it: mothers tell them that food and drinks offered by gringos are poisoned."
The torch that stuns the indigenous
The fact is that throughout the Amazon basin, passing from tributary to tributary, the most terrifying stories about us, the gringos, circulate. In a village with no electric light, I walk down the street one evening, lighting my way with one of those latest-model torches, worn on the forehead like miners, to keep my hands free. The guide begs me to take it off: "Here, many people believe that gringos appear at night coming out of the forest, to kidnap indigenous people whom they stun with a very powerful light they have on their heads, like a laser" (indios is a term considered derogatory; "native" or "indigenous" is used instead). It is the story of the pelacara that resonates as far as Iquitos and Manaus, like an urban legend that would return, from London to Rome, and to Cairo (El Pelacara is also the title of a story by Colombian writer Nelson Estupinan Bass). Here is how I first heard it, in a jungle camp: "These gringos kidnap indigenous people at night, whose bodies are found with their faces skinless" (hence the name: in Spanish, cara means "face"). Sometimes, they even take their eyes, "lately, even the finger bones." "Do they sell the natives' faces to pharmaceutical companies or to rich head collectors? Do they use the finger bones to create fake identities for fingerprints? Why they do it, no one can say. But everyone is afraid of the pelacaras."
Indeed, such a story would not come to the mind of any European. At first glance, it is as if the indigenous people were attributing their own ancestral obsessions to whites: after all, it was certain Amazonian peoples, not Europeans, who waged war to be able to cut off their enemies' heads, work them, decorate them, adorn them, and hang them in front of their doors. But then, one thinks of the "Putumayo scandal" (a Colombian region named after a tributary of the Amazon River), during the rubber era which, from 1880 to 1920, forever changed the face of the entire Amazon, and which is known mainly thanks to Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo. On the Putumayo, at the beginning of the 20th century, reigned an emulator even more cruel and cynical than Fitzcarraldo, Julio C. Arana, who, by force or persuasion, had cleared the entire territory of his Colombian and Bolivian competitors, and recruited a veritable army of international mercenaries who defended his kingdom at gunpoint: approximately 50,000 Indians from the region were reduced to slavery and subjected to treatments whose inhumanity defies all imagination today. "Reading the thick booklets of the investigation, one is exhausted by the uniformity of the horror, ceasing to shiver with nausea except before the most ferocious acts: women used as targets for Arana's men's shooting exercises, children cut into pieces to feed the overseers' dogs, men castrated, whose organs were cooked at the end of the torture before forcing their wives to eat them, or this woman burned alive, like so many others for the greatest entertainment of their torturers, but in this case, wrapped in the Peruvian flag, first soaked in kerosene," writes the great anthropologist André-Marcel d'Aran in Indigenous Peruvian Amazonia (Plon, Paris, 1982). And he adds that Arana was never punished; he even became a senator of Peru and, in the sixties, one of his grandsons was a senator of Iquitos.
D'Aran's text, in turn, brings to mind Pedro Leon (1519-1554) who, in the Cronica del Perù, speaks of a "Portuguese named Roque Martin who hangs pieces of Indians on his veranda to feed his dogs, as if they were wild beasts": the protagonists change, centuries pass, but the appalling forms of ferocity remain monotonously the same. With such precedents in the background, one better understands the anxiety with which even the most skeptical would tell these horror legends: "I don't believe it myself, but you never know, the same stories come back from too many sources. For example, once, a friend of mine was fishing at night with a harpoon, when he saw a tall man emerge from the river, dressed entirely in black, with flippers, a mask, and a weapon. So my friend threw his harpoon, and the man fell into the water. My friend says he killed him, but that no one ever came to claim him."
The most frightening story is reported thus: "I was working at an oil field in the jungle. I had a roommate who always drank. One night, he got drunk and told me the whole story. The gringos from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (see the next episode) offered him a job, promising him he would no longer have problems, but that he must not speak of it to anyone, not even his wife. They took him by plane into the middle of the jungle and there he discovered that his job was to kill indigenous people. They knock them out, or kill them, with a lantern that emits a very strong beam. They take them to a house where they remove organs they sell for transplants and then hang them upside down, cut open in two, above a very strong heat source, in order to collect the fat, because it seems that indigenous oil is unmatched for the gringos' airplanes and spacecraft. They have killed thousands. That is why people in many villages are afraid when gringos like you arrive."
I ask: "How did this colleague come to tell all this? Was he not afraid?" The answer: "He had remorse, he had repented, and furthermore, he had not been paid for his work" recalls the beginning of another book, Thy Will Be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, by Gérard Colby and Charlotte Dennett (HarperCollins, 1995). The volume opens with this scene: in the darkness of the confessional, a man, Araide Pereira, recounts his misdeeds to a priest. "He participated in a mass extermination and can no longer continue to live with his remorse. Moreover, he was not paid the fifteen dollars he had been promised." It was in 1963, no longer in the rubber era, but in that of new technological materials, in this case cassiterite, necessary to produce tin. The Cintas Largas people had the misfortune of living precisely in this area, next to the Aripuana River, where the Arruda and Junqueira Company had discovered a vein of this rare mineral. It was thus decided to have take off, on the day the Cintas Largas were gathered in their village square to feast, from one of the airstrips cleared in the jungle, a Cessna equipped with two weapons: sugar on the first pass to attract the Indians and allay their fears, and dynamite to be dropped on the second pass, when they would all be well exposed. After that, to eliminate all survivors, a team of seven men was sent, including Araide Pereira: before finding where all the fleeing Cintas Largas had taken refuge, the commando wandered in the jungle for more than six weeks. Then, they attacked at dawn and killed all the indigenous people except a little boy and a girl. The commando leader shot the boy in the head, hung the girl from a tree with her legs spread, upside down, and dismembered her with a single machete blow. Here too, those responsible were never punished. The priest who had received the confession was killed in a car accident. The pilot of the plane that dropped the dynamite perished in a plane crash. Two defendants drowned during "fishing expeditions," the commando leader was killed by rubber tappers during a mutiny. Four other defendants disappeared.
The massacre of the Cintas Largas
Remorse and non-payment are therefore not the only elements that today link the "legend" reported to me to the 1963 massacre of the Cintas Largas (remorse and non-payment had already contributed to revealing the Putumayo scandal in 1907): there is another detail common to the horror, that of the victim hung upside down and dismembered.
The Mayas understood everything four centuries ago: their book Chilam Balam describes whites as "predators by day, criminals by night, assassins of the world." If there ever exists a "white man's burden," it is certainly not the "civilizing" mission, as Rudyard Kipling thought, but truly the weight of this past of genocides and atrocities that plunges you into embarrassment in the face of the extraordinary kindness that Amazonian indigenous people show towards you. Despite everything.
So much so that you even come to find delicate, poetic, and undeserved, this belief that is told to you when, in a boat on the immense river, you see the large pink dolphins jumping above the water, "which are called bufeos because, when they come to the surface to breathe, they make a sound like booou." According to the Shipibo, a people who live along the Ucayali, downstream from Pucallpa, the bufeo is a supernatural being, a demon, who appears as an attractive gringo who seduces and impregnates the indigenous women who look at him, and who will give birth to light-skinned children (I would later find this belief confirmed in a very recent work by French anthropologist Jacques Tournon). "That is why, if she sees a bufeo, a woman must flee the riverbank." (To be continued)
Marco D'Eramo
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