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Violent encounters like the ones in the Ramis Sector were not repeated in the other portion of the reserve, the Puno Sector. Events in that area unfolded in a very different way. CENFOR had some apparent initial success in establishing new patterns of resource management and in obtaining the acquiescence of the villagers to the laws and regulations. This sector, located in Puno Bay, was the area where CENFOR made the most intense effort at control. This region is close to the capital city of Puno, where the regional navy base is located and other government offices are concentrated. CENFOR officials traveled through the Sector Puno in the late 1970s. They held meetings at which they asked village leaders to apply to them for the status of calificación. This qualification consisted of registering adult men as household heads, listing their holdings of livestock, and recording their production of craft items from totora. CENFOR stated that they would not issue contracts to members of communities that had not undergone this qualification. Most villages received the CENFOR staff openly. The inhabitants of the floating islands gave them a particularly warm welcome. Their settlements had a special status under the Supreme Decree that established the reserve, since, in the eyes of national lawmakers, they were residents who actually lived within the reserve, rather than "neighboring populations" on or near its boundaries. However, a few villages refused to meet with CENFOR. These included Yapura and Perca, both of which had long traditions of obtaining totora from the area within the reserve because of the small size of their own totora beds and their proximity to the reserve.
By 1980, CENFOR began issuing annual contracts for totora cutting in the Puno Sector. Organized initially to control the vast expanses of the Amazonian forests, this agency did not had any established procedures for regulating plants so different from trees in a region so unlike the warm humid lowlands. In a striking example of bureaucratic unwillingness to recognize regional variation, it did not create a new type of contract for the villagers who wanted to harvest a few tens of square meters of totora. Instead, it offered them permission to "extract forest resources other than timber in extensions of less than 10,000 hectares". These contracts stipulated the amount of totora that an "extractor" was permitted to cut, the precise location of the portion of the reserve where this cutting would take place, and the fee that would be charged. These contracts offered a set of tricky possibilities. First, they gave many people who did not own totora plots a chance, at least in theory, to harvest totora directly instead of getting permission from owners to cut totora in their plots. Formerly, only the inhabitant of lakeshore villages had harvested totora, but the law extended this right to all Peruvian citizens; of particular importance were peasants who did not live on the lakeshore, and traders and wealthy cattle-owners. Second, the contracts raised concerned about the fees that CENFOR would charge and the sanctions that forest rangers (guardias forestales) based in Puno would place on individuals or villages that did not comply with the law. Finally, since the law asserted that the state, rather than the villages, had sovereignty over the totora beds, the law challenged one of the fundamental principles of the social and political life of villages: their right to manage their territories. It insinuated that the government's right came from the nature of the totora as a wild plant that would be "extracted"; the villagers speak of it as a cultivated plant that they harvest. The pressure from CENFOR and the concern over sanctions led several dozen villages around Puno Bay to seek out such contracts in the early 1980s. Even in these contracts, though, the villagers demonstrated their concern on retaining control of the reeds. To apply for a contract, a set of villagers filled out a form which contained eight clauses. CENFOR officials were particularly concerned about two portions of the form: the third clause, in which the applicants indicated the specific location and the total area of the section that they would cut, and drew a sketch map of this section, and the fourth clause, in which they indicated the total amount of reeds that they would remove. The government officials pressured the villagers to quantify the total amount of reeds in cubic meters or in kilograms, since these were units that the officials could measure and verify. However, the villagers kept reporting the amount in pichus, the local customary measure. The word pichu could be translated as "chestful" since it is the amount that can be encircled in both arms and held tightly against the chest. The pichu is the basic unit of measurement of totora. Villagers know that three standard reed mats can be made from a pichu, and that a balsa of standard size requires thirty pichus. Villagers who cut large amounts arrange for donkeys to carry the reeds from shore. To calculate the number of animals they will need, they convert pichus to cargas, as donkeyloads are known. The conversion rate seems to be fixed within particular regions: five pichus per carga around Chucuito and Acora, only four near Huancané. (This difference might indicate variation in the size of the pichu, or the strength of the donkeys, or the length and steepness of the path from the lakeshore to the houses.)
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