Over two hundred years ago, a European naturalist characterized Peru as a “beggar sitting on a bench of gold.” The description still fits Peru of the 21st century and nowhere is this more true than in Cuzco today. The gold Cuzco sits upon is, of course, Machu Picchu and its related Incan ruins and the visitors these world class tourist destinations bring to the region. However, short-sighted thinking and poor governance threatens to limit the wealth this attraction can bring to the region and its effect on decreasing poverty.
To look upon the often-photographed main plaza in Cuzco, one might assume that not much has happened in the past 400 years. Certainly, one would be forgiven for believing that the tourism of the past 30 to 40 years has remained about the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. Peru and the department of Cusco have experienced a vertiginous rise in tourist activity. Government statistics show that the number of foreign tourists arriving in Peru nearly doubled in the six year period between 2002 and 2007, from 997 thousand to 1.8 million. Many of these visitors went to Machu Picchu itself; statistics on entries into Machu Picchu National Park show that between 1997 and 2007, the number of visitors to Machu Picchu increased between two and three times, from 297 thousand to 737 thousand. The city of Cusco itself, saw 850 thousand tourists in 2007 a fifteen percent increase from 2006, of whom, about two thirds (580 thousand) were foreign tourists, who stay longer, pay more, and need more services. The election in mid-2007 of Machu Picchu as a new seventh wonder of the world confirms the idea that Machu Picchu is a world class tourism site, and the sky is the limit if the region can figure out how to satisfy the demand.
All of these statistics would be merely interesting, if it were not for the strong link between the tourist industry and the wellbeing of Cuzco’s citizens. The strong growth in tourism has been accompanied by a strong decline in malnutrition over the same period. Jaime Althaus, a respected television journalist writes:
In spite of the fact that the percentage of Peruvians with caloric deficiency has fallen only three points between 2001 and 2006 (from 27.9% to 24.6%) there are some departments where there has been a notable improvement…the most notable case of reduction of caloric deficiency is Cuzco where the number dropped from 49.3% in 2001 to 19.7% in 2006. A drop of 30 points! That coincides with the accelerated growth of tourism consumption that went from $763 million at the national level in 2001 to $1.438 million in 2005. That is to say, it doubled, principally benefiting Cuzco.
Nevertheless, recent strikes in Cusco in the month of February have led many to speculate whether the population has truly felt the benefits of the growth in tourism, the extent to which poor leadership is pulling followers into the streets to distract them from the failings of their own administration (the Regional President and elected leaders actively promoted the strike), or whether more sinister forces are at work to embarrass Peru during an important APEC meeting. The strikes themselves were ostensibly caused by a law modifying where private investment could be placed in relation to national monuments; the law would have promoted more private investment near sites such as Machu Picchu.
How might someone from Cuzco interpret investment in tourism to be a bad thing? Without going into detail on the debate regarding the law (and, to some extent, I believe these legal details are a bit of a red herring anyway), perhaps the most perceptive analysis of what the Cuzqueños are misperceiving was made by President Alan Garcia. The President has used his bully pulpit to write a series of articles in the country’s major paper entitled “el perro de hortelano.” El perro de hortelano is the name in Spanish for the dog from an Aesop’s fable who, would rather lose his bone rather than share it with any other dog. This mentality, Garcia has argued in this series of articles, is one that has kept the State inefficient and dysfunctional, made Peruvians ambivalent toward business and private investment, and prevented groups and individuals with like interests from joining together for win-win solutions. In his third “perro” article the President takes the situation of the strikes in Cuzco and argues that this “perro de hortelano” mentality sees any private investment as something dirty and dishonorable, taken from sweat of honest workers:
[The perro’s] litany was that all capital is stolen from someone else’s labor and that investment is always exploitation and domination. He was fantastically statist, but he could never explain where the resources would come from to assure growth and employment.
Garcia’s argument goes a long way to explain the resonance of the strike’s demands with people in Cuzco. The belief that investment is bad comes from long-held (and, to some extent, legitimate) suspicions toward outsiders who would come to invest in a business and simultaneously exploit the labor of people from Cuzco. Such reserve or caution or even suspicion with outsiders is a common characteristic of highland people across the Andes. It is compounded by commonly held left-wing beliefs which see a direct relationship between any wealth and any poverty and view direct action, such as strikes and road closures, as a legitimate way of remedying this imbalance.** What makes Garcia’s arguments so powerful is not only how perceptively he characterizes this set of beliefs, but because he was once one of this camp. Thus, he can effectively say to this group, “look, I once saw things the way you did, but if you really want to help the poor, you need to update your ideas and be intellectually honest with yourself.” As he says,
The “perro de hortelano” doesn’t leave behind his intellectual poverty, nor does he want Peruvians to leave behind their educational and material poverty. Furthermore, he contends that only radicals and extremists can fight against poverty because they have a monopoly on having a heart for the people.
** A couple of personal notes on these highlands beliefs. The phrase “gente ajena”, roughly translated as “outsiders” or people outside of your family group is quite common in highlands Ecuador, but I had not heard it in Lima. It took speaking to a Peruvian highlander, who ascribed the reason why a certain agricultural project was ineffective, as being because they used “gente ajena” or outsiders for extension agents. With regard to the latter point, about left-wing beliefs in the highlands, in my last trip to Cusco, I was lucky enough to meet and have a short conversation with the regional leader for the country’s largest labor union. It was an interesting conversation; he made a point, me being an American, of assuring me that he was not one of those who was interested only in road closures and shutting commerce down, but that there had to be a balance between some people getting rich in Cusco and the continued poverty of many.
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