Marie Arana - Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story

ALSO BY MARIE ARANA

Bolvar: American Liberator

Lima Nights

Cellophane

The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work

American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2019 by Marie Arana

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2019

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Carly Loman

Jacket design by Anna Morrison/Orionbooks

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arana, Marie (Writer), author.

Title: Silver, sword, and stone: three crucibles in the Latin American story / Marie Arana.

Description: New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018057093|ISBN 9781501104244 (hardback) | ISBN 1501104241 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Gonzales, Leonor. | Buergos, Carlos. | Albr, Xavier, 1934|Latin AmericaBiography. |Latin AmericanHistory.|BISAC: HISTORY/Latin America/General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE/Developing Countries.

Classification: LCC F1407 .A685 2019 | DDC 920.08dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057093

ISBN 978-1-5011-0424-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-0502-9 (ebook)

In memory of

Mara Isabel Arana Cisneros,

Y sabe lo todo,

godmother, inquisitor, and dazzling mentor

Peru is a beggar sitting on a bench of gold.

Old Peruvian adage

In the stinging cold just before dawn, Leonor Gonzles leaves her stone hut on a glacial mountain peak in the Peruvian Andes to trudge up a path and scour rock spills for flecks of gold. Like generations before her, she has teetered under heavy bags of stone, pounded it with a crude hammer, ground it to gravel with her feet, crushed it to a fine sand. On rare, lucky days, she teases out infinitesimally small motes of gold by swirling the grit in a mercury solution. She is only forty-seven, but her teeth are gone. Her face is cooked by a relentless sun, parched by the freezing winds. Her hands are the color of cured meat, the fingers humped and gnarled. She is partially blind. But every day as the sun peeks over the icy promontory of Mount Ananea, she joins the women of La Rinconada, the highest human habitation in the world, to scale the steep escarpment that leads toward the mines, scavenging for all that shines, stuffing stones into the backbreaking rucksack she will lug down-mountain at dusk.

It might be a scene from biblical times, but it is not. Leonor Gonzles climbed that ridge yesterday during the pallaqueo , the hunt for gold her forebears have undertaken since time immemorial, and she will climb it again tomorrow, doing what she has done since she first accompanied her mother to work at the age of four. Never mind that a Canadian mining company less than thirty miles away is performing the same task more efficiently with hulking, twenty-first-century machinery; or that just beyond Lake Titicacathe cradle of Inca civilizationAustralian, Chinese, and United States corporate giants are investing millions for state-of-the-art equipment to join the Latin American mining bonanza. The business of digging deep into the earths entrails to wrest glittering treasures has long, abiding roots on this continent and, in many ways, defines the people we Latin Americans have become.

Leonor Gonzles is the embodiment of silver, sword, and stone, the triad of this books titlethree obsessions that have held Latin Americans fast for the past millennium. Silver is the lust for precious metals; the infatuation that rules Leonors life as it has ruled generations before her: a frantic hunt for a prize she cannot use, a substance that is wanted in cities she will never see. The passion for gold and silver is an obsession that burned brightly before Columbuss time, consumed Spain in its relentless conquest of America, drove a cruel system of slavery and colonial exploitation, sparked a bloody revolution, addled the regions stability for centuries, and morphed into Latin Americas best hope for the future. Just as Inca and Aztec rulers made silver and gold symbols of their glory, just as sixteenth-century Spain grew rich and powerful as the preeminent purveyor of precious metals, mining remains at the heart of the Latin American promise today. That obsession lives onthe glistening troves extracted and sent away by the boatloadseven though the quarries are finite. Even though the frenzy must end.

Leonor is no less a product of silver than she is of the sword, Latin Americas abiding culture of the strongman that accompanies it: the regions proclivity, as Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Jos Mart, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others have pointed out, to solve problems by unilateral and alarming displays of power. By brutality. By a reliance on muscle, coercion, and an overweening love for dictators and the military: la mano dura , the iron fist. Violence was certainly the easy expedient in the day of the war-loving Moche in AD 800, but it grew more so under the Aztec and Inca Empires, was perfected and institutionalized by Spain under the cruel tutelage of Corts and Pizarro, and became ingrained during the hellish wars of Latin American independence in the nineteenth century. State terrorism, dictatorships, endless revolutions, Argentinas Dirty War, Perus Shining Path, Colombias FARC, Mexicos crime cartels, and twenty-first-century drug wars are its legacies. The sword remains as much a Latin American instrument of authority and power as it ever was five hundred years ago when the Dominican friar Bartolom de Las Casas lamented that the Spanish colonies were choakd up with Indian Blood and Gore.

No, Leonor Gonzles is no stranger to oppression and violence. Her ancestors, people of the altiplano, were conquered and forced into labor by the Incas and then reconquered and enslaved by Spanish conquistadors. For centuries, her people were relocated by force at the whims of the mitmaq the compulsory labor system that the Inca Empire, and then Spain, demanded of the vanquished. Or they were taken away in the Churchs reductions: massive resettlements of indigenous populations in the ongoing enterprise to save their souls. In the nineteenth century, Leonors people were herded at swords point to fight and be sacrificed on opposing sides of the revolution. In the twentieth century, they were driven higher and higher into the snowy reaches of the Andes to escape the wanton massacres of the Shining Path. But even in that airless aerie, eighteen thousand feet above sea level, the sword has continued to be master. Today in the wild, lawless mining town of La Rinconada, where murder and rape are rampantwhere human sacrifices are offered to mountain demons and no government police chief dares goLeonor is as vulnerable to brute force as her forebears were five hundred years ago.