Cocaleros
Cocalero is the name given to a coca leaf grower in the regions of Peru and Bolivia. The term coca refers to the leaf of small trees of the genus Erythroxylum and also to the dried leaves of these plants. In addition to having several ritual and medicinal uses in indigenous cultures, coca is also the main plant ingredient of cocaine.
Coca is legally harvested by cocaleros such as Antonio's family (with whom Bruce stayed) but although picking coca is legal, there are still some restrictions applied to coca farming, which Bruce suggests as a possible motive for the cocalero strikes that occurred during the crew's journey to Louisiana.
Once coca leaf has been harvested it is sometimes used in cocaine production -the first stage of which is to create coca base in a coca lab (known as a bossa). Bruce and Matt N visited one such bossa in the Louisiana area, which they filmed in their video blogs.
The process of making coca base is illegal and convictions usually result in imprisonment. There is an active campaign against this process, carried out by both the US Drugs Enforcement Agency and the Peruvian military authorities. An example of an armed raid upon suspected coca labs was witnessed by Willow, our Assistant Producer, on her recce trip to the Louisiana area.
Louisiana
Bruce and the crew were based in the hacienda at Louisiana while filming families harvesting coca in the nearby area. The Louisiana hacienda was once a working farm and a tourist resort, and was host to Jacques Cousteau when he travelled in the area. The farm was abandoned during the time of unrest between the Shining Path and the Peruvian authorities, which Bruce details in his blog written on his first day staying at the hacienda. Guillermo, the owner of the hacienda and the self proclaimed 'Governor of Louisiana', has begun work in the last year to restore his family farm of Louisiana to its former glory. According to him, Louisiana is one of the few farms in the area that has never produced any coca.
The rivers Ene and Tambo
The Río Ene is part of the headwaters of the Amazon River, and flows in a northwesterly direction. The general consensus is to pinpoint the source of the Amazon to the Nevado Mismi south of Cusco, and this tributary becomes the Apurímac River, which is where Bruce and the crew rafted.
The Rio Ene is formed at the confluence of the Mantaro and Apurimac rivers. It is along the Ene that Bruce and the crew joined the Ashaninka communities with whom they stayed in the last week of November. At the confluence of the Perené River and the Ene River, the waters become the Rio Tambo, flowing in an easterly direction. The waters next meet the Ucayali River, which later forms the Amazon.
Shining Path
Shining Path, known as Senderos Luminoso in Spanish, were a Maoist insurgency group operating in Peru mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. The group was founded more than 30 years ago as a radical splinter movement of the Peruvian Communist Party. Shining Path members entered the Ayacucho region (the region around Louisiana) in 1982 as part of the movement's avowed aim to overthrow the existing order and create a perfect communist state in Peru. But their often brutal enforcement of rules and lack of respect for indigenous culture meant that the group lost sympathy among the wider population. Anti-Shining Path patrols known as rondas began to form and rebel brutality was met by state or state sponsored repression. A government commission found that around 70,000 people died in the insurgency between 1980 and 2000, and that more than half of these people were killed by the Shining Path.
The Ashaninka
Location:Rainforests of Peru and the Acre area of Brazil.
Other names:Campa / Kampa - a derogatory name attributed by outsiders, thought to be from the Quechua 'thampa', which means ragged and dirty. Ashaninka means 'our fellows' or 'our kin-folk'.
Population:The Ashaninka are the largest indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon but population estimates for the entire Ashaninka vary widely: from around 25,000 to 45,000.
Diet:The Ashaninka practice subsistence agriculture, keeping poultry for meat and eggs, and also practice hunting and fishing. Generally women are in charge of the garden and gathering foodstuffs such as honey, mabe root, ants and palm fruits and men hunt species such as tapirs, boars, and monkeys. The Ashaninka also work in coffee production.
History:Europeans initially tried to colonize Ashaninka areas in the last years of the sixteenth century and had some control over these areas until an Amerindian rebellion in the eighteenth century, which expelled missionaries and colonists. The Ashaninka and other neighbouring Amerindians had control of the land on which they lived for over a century but by the mid-nineteenth century the encroachment of agriculture and the arrival of the rubber-tapping industry from the Amazon brought Europeans back, which resulted in the Ashaninka people becoming workers for European companies. Viral epidemics combined with conditions of work akin to slavery resulted in a sharp drop in population.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the Ashaninka people suffered from the internal armed conflict between the Peruvian Army and the Shining Path, a communist rebel group.
According to the Peruvian authorities during this time, "10,000 Ashaninka were displaced, 6,000 Ashaninka died, 5,000 Ashaninka were taken captive by the Shining Path, and between 30 and 40 Ashaninka communities disappeared."
Current situation:A few years ago the Ashaninka succeeded in getting legal title to a portion of land. This land is now a National Park and a Reserved Zone: The Otishi National Park.
Threats:Oil companies, Shining Path, the rubber and timber trade, coca trade, disease.
Education:Literacy levels are estimated to be between 10% and 20%. Social unrest in the later part of the 20th century negatively affected education in the area. Since 1990, over 70 rural schools have been reported as closed and dozens of teachers are reported as having 'disappeared'.
Relevant websites:
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