The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

the punitive expedition, and as they tortured Jum they kept repeating: “Forget the cooperative.”
    All this had just happened. Jum’s wounds were still oozing pus. His hair had not grown back in. As they translated this story for us in the peaceful clearing, of Urakusa—Jum could get out little more than a few hoarse sentences in Spanish—I thought: “I must talk this over with Saúl.” What would Mascarita say? Would he admit that in a case like this it was quite obvious that what was to Urakusa’s advantage, to Jum’s, was not going backward but forward? That is to say, setting up their own cooperative, trading with the towns, prospering economically and socially so that it would no longer be possible to treat them the way the “civilized” people of Santa Maria de Nieva had done. Or would Saúl, unrealistically, deny that this was so, insist that the true solution was for the Viracochas to go away and let the inhabitants of Urakusa return to their traditional way of life?
    Matos Mar and I stayed awake all that night, talking about Jum’s story and the horrifying condition of the weak and the poor in our country that it revealed. Invisible and silent, Saúl Zurata’s ghost took part in our conversation; both of us would have liked to have him there, offering his opinion and arguing. Matos Mar thought that Jum’s misfortune would provide Mascarita with further arguments to support his theory. Didn’t the entire episode prove that coexistence was impossible, that it led inevitably to the Viracochas’ domination of the Indians, to the gradual and systematic destruction of the weaker culture? Those savage drunkards from Santa María de Nieva would never, under any circumstances, lead the inhabitants of Urakusa on the path to modernization, but only to their extinction; their “culture” had no more right to hegemony than that of the Aguarunas, who, however primitive they might be, had at least developed sufficient knowledge and skill to coexist with Amazonia. In the name of age-old prior occupation, of history, of morality, it was necessary to recognize the Aguarunas’ sovereignty over these territories and to expel the foreign intruders from Santa María de Nieva.
    I didn’t agree with Matos Mar; I thought Jum’s story was more likely to bring Saúl around to a more practical point of view, to accepting the lesser evil. Was there the slightest chance that a Peruvian government, of whatever political persuasion, would grant the tribes extraterritorial rights in the jungle? Obviously not. That being the case, why not change the Viracochas so that they’d treat the Indians differently?
    We were stretched out on a floor of beaten earth, sharing a mosquito net, in a hut reeking of rubber (it was the storeroom of Urakusa), surrounded by the breathing of our slumbering companions and the unfamiliar sounds of the jungle. At the time, Matos Mar and I also shared socialist ideas and enthusiasms, and in the course of our talk together, the familiar subject of the social relations of production, which like a magic wand served to explain and resolve all problems, naturally cropped up. The problem of the Urakusas, that of all the tribes, should be seen as part of the general problem resulting from the class structure of Peruvian society. By substituting for the obsession with profit—individual gain—the idea of service to the community as the incentive to work, and reintroducing an attitude of solidarity and humanity into social relations, socialism would make possible that coexistence between modern and primitive Peru that Mascarita thought impossible and undesirable. In the new Peru, infused with the science of Marx and Mariategui, the Amazonian tribes would, at one and the same time, be able to adopt modern ways and to preserve their essential traditions and customs within the mosaic of cultures that would go to make up the future