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These disparate violent encounters were spontaneous and brief. An example from 1983 is representative: One morning early in the year, the driver Victoriano brought the IMARPE jeep from its garage to the laboratory in Puno, where he picked up two scientists, Eufracio Bustamante and Hugo Treviño. (Victoriano's wife Felicia, who had prepared the results of the fishermen surveys for entry into computers, was still working at IMARPE at the time. She occasionally accompanied him on trips, but remained at the Puno office that day to assist Eufracio's secretary in preparing reports.) They anticipated that they would make a routine trip from Puno to take water samples at different parts of the lakeshore. They took the main road around the north shore of the lake. After they crossed the bridge over the Río Ramis, they turned onto a dirt road that they had taken on other occasions. Though the roads in the Ramis Delta often became impassable in the rainy season, this road, running parallel to the river on the side of a ridge, was firmer. Victoriano drove to the end of the ridge, close to the point where the river emptied into the lake. Eufracio and Hugo got out of the jeep and walked out towards the shore, while Victoriano remained with the vehicle. They had planned to measure the distance from the road, clearly marked on maps, to the lake, to note the plant species growing in the shallow water at the shore, and to collect water samples in small plastic bottles. They walked a hundred meters or so from the jeep to a spot where Eufracio stopped to jot down a few notes, while Hugo continued on towards the lake.
A villager from the local community of Cohasía had noticed their jeep driving down the dirt road and followed it on foot. When he saw that they had approached the lake and had begun writing in their notebooks, he called out to other villagers. A small crowd quickly formed. Some of them gathered around Eufracio and shouted at him. One raised his hand to his cheek and made the gesture of pressing the eye out of its socket. Others repeated this gesture. A second group of men picked up stones from the base of the ridge and threw them at Hugo. None of them hit him, though several came close. Severely frightened, Eufracio began to talk to the villagers. The ones who had been throwing stones at Hugo came over to listen to the discussion. Seeking the relatively safety of the jeep, Hugo ran back to the road and joined Eufracio. It took a long time for any mutual understanding to be reached. Victoriano, who had learned Aymara when growing up in a Spanish-speaking landowning family west of Puno, was able to translate. The people from Cohasía had thought that Eufracio and Hugo were preparing to measure the beds of totora that grew offshore so that they could impose a tax on the reeds. The villagers had heard that CENFOR required the villagers around Puno Bay to pay fees in order to receive permission to cut totora. The IMARPE scientists explained that they had nothing to do with setting payments and were not even examining the totora. Their only objective, they said, was to collect water samples and make notes about the vegetation; by gathering such information in different places and at different times, they could understand the consequences of shift in lake level. These claims mollified the villagers somewhat, who finally let them return to their vehicle. Several villagers accompanied the vehicle as it drove slowly to the edge of the village lands. It seems to me that this encounter, with its threats of violence, is also a kind of living history, though not the sort which tourists might wish to see. This living history does not evoke a bucolic harmony of villager and landscape; instead, it reenacts the skirmishes between an alien occupying force and a subjugated but defiant people. For the villagers of Cohasía, the unexpected presence of government officials on their lands brought to mind earlier periods of interference, stretching back several decades to the confiscation of fishing nets by policemen, and perhaps even further in the past to other forms of taxation and expropriation. The IMARPE biologists may have recalled the stories of Indian uprisings throughout the history of the altiplano since the Spanish Conquest; such stories surfaced occasionally in routine conversation at the IMARPE laboratory in Puno.
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