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As with the efforts of the navy and the Ministry of Fisheries to license boats and fishermen, these visits by CENFOR met with different responses in different portions of the lake. The first region to act was the western part of the Río Ilave delta. This area, one of the earliest to become involved in fattening cattle and with large concentrations of mat-makers, was particularly dependent on totora for its economy. Afraid that they would lose control of the reed beds, villages in the districts of Acora and Ilave discussed the matter in assemblies in 1975-76. They decided to form an organization, which they named the Totora Defense League (Liga de Defensa de la Totora). They coordinated their meetings even more closely than they had in the previous decades when they met to establish harvest days for totora. Eighteen villages held assemblies in which they formed communal committees (comités comunales) and chose delegates to the League, which raised funds by collecting fees from every household of the village. These funds supported the trips of League delegates to Puno and to Lima, where they visited the offices of the Navy, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and the Ministry of the Interior. They presented memoriales, long documents that argued that CENFOR should not administer the totora beds, but should leave them in the hands of the villages instead. The presentation of these memoriales reminded villagers of other trips that delegates had made over the decades to Lima: in the 1920s to request rural schoolhouses, in the 1940s to guarantee village control over the lands that had been exposed when the lake fell during the severe drought. Though government officials first rebuffed them, the villagers persisted. Representatives from the League met with the Minister of Agriculture and Food during his visit to the department in September 1976, a month of growing political tensions throughout the Peruvian countryside and in the department of Puno [footnote 14]. Six months later, in March 1977, this ministry issued interim regulations that guaranteed the peasants in the western Ilave Delta the right to continue harvesting totora as they always had. This concession greatly heartened the villagers in this region.
These efforts of the Totora Defense League overlapped with work carried out by CENFOR in 1977 and 1978. CENFOR officials conducted research to establish the Reserve's boundaries and to determine the precise status of the new entity. There was some debate over whether the appropriate "conservation unit" was the stricter "national park," under which resource extraction would be prohibited entirely, or the more permissive "national reserve," under which it would be allowed, though regulated. The pressure from the League seems to have been a major influence in the decision to draw the boundaries so that the Ilave Delta was excluded and in choice of the less heavily controlled "reserve" option over the "park" alternative. One step down from national parks, these national reserves are the equivalent of national monuments in the United States. In 1978, the government set up the Titicaca National Reserve through Supreme Decree 185-78-AA. This decree states that the government has decided to act on the basis of studies that CENFOR and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food offices in Puno conducted, though it makes no reference to the Totora Defense League. It establishes the Reserve "in order to guarantee the conservation of natural resources and landscapes and the socioeconomic development of neighboring populations through the rational utilization of the flora and wildlife and the promotion of local tourism." The first and longest article indicates the boundaries of the reserve in its two portions, the first and smaller Ramis Sector in the Ramis Delta and the second, larger Puno Sector in Puno Bay. The next four articles charge CENFOR and the regional office of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food with the development and administration of the Reserve. In addition, these articles discuss the inhabitants of the floating islands in Puno Bay, who were deemed to be the only people who lived inside the reserve. The Decree recognizes their right to maintain their "customary agricultural activities and livestock raising". At the same time that the government issued the decree that established the reserve, it made maps that indicated the reserve and its hitos or boundary points. Rather than following the curves of the outer edge of the totora beds, the boundary of the reserve consisted of straight lines that connected these hitos. This boundary placed within the reserve a strip of open water beyond the reeds. The separation between the reserve and the rest of the lake, defined so precisely on the maps, was invisible on the lake itself. This decree raises a question: was there an urgent need to establish new mechanisms to guarantee the conservation of "natural resources and landscapes"? Though it is difficult to argue with the notion that protecting unusual ecosystems is a prudent move, the reedbeds of Lake Titicaca appear to be less vulnerable than many such ecosystems. The location and areas of these reedbeds can be traced virtually since the beginning of the twentieth century. The plants are easy to map, since they jut out the waters of the lake so visibly and since they grow unmixed with other plants, in what ecologists call "single-species stands." The French naturalist Neveu-Lamaire made the first detailed map in 1903 [footnote 15]. When it is compared with the surveys conducted by the Peruvian Military Geographical Institute in 1927, the aerial photographs made in 1955 by the Peruvian Cartographic Service and more recent satellite images, the stability of the beds is apparent. The fluctuations are very minor. Between 1927 and 1965, for example, there was a decrease of a few square kilometers of reeds off the northwest tip of the Chucuito Peninsula and an increase of a slightly larger area to the southwest of this peninsula. These maps indicate that the area of the major reedbeds in Puno Bay, the Lago Pequeño and near river deltas has changed very little. Moreover, the density of totora also appears to be stable [footnote 16].
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