Peru

Tuesday

Peter Bradshaw

The mystery of Werner Herzog

Many movie actors are famous for their unmistakable voices – people like Sean Connery, John Wayne and Peter Lorre, who all pub comedians mimic. But how many directors are like that? Only one: the German auteur Werner Herzog, hero of the New German Cinema, who at the age of 81 has published this headspinning, free-associating memoir. Its German title, Jeder Für Sich Und Gott Gegen Alle, was also the original, anarchic title of Herzog’s 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, based on the true story of a boy reportedly brought up in an isolated darkened cell. Herzog’s rasping, lilting, inscrutably sibilant and sinister voice, a vital part of all

Thursday

Daniel Hannan

A show of ample and eerie majesty: British Museum’s Peru: A Journey in Time reviewed

Growing up on a farm outside Lima, I was aware that indigenous Peruvians did not understand time in the same way that their white countrymen did. On our visits to the highlands, we would encounter a very different mode of thinking. Ask an Andean villager where the next settlement was and you’d be told, ‘aquisito no más’ — just over here. Whether ‘aquisito’ meant around the next bend or four days’ schlep across the mountains was, for aboriginal people, a meaningless question. They were not ruled, as their European-descended neighbours were, by clocks. You’d sometimes see Quechua-speaking herdsmen sitting motionless for so long that they seemed to have switched off

Thursday

Stuart Kelly

Only Iain Sinclair could glimpse Hackney in the wilds of Peru

It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer mapping ley lines between Hawksmoor churches and Ripper tours, skulking around the torque of the M25 and fulminating about the Millennium Dome and the gentrification (and gerrymandering) around the Olympic Stadium. So when I learned that his new book was about a journey to Peru, I sarcastically imagined he would be attempting to find the grave of Paddington Bear. Not so, and this is vintage Sinclair. His great-grandfather, Arthur, was a botanist and author. After sojourns in Ceylon and Tasmania, he was sent to assess an area by the ‘corporate

Thursday

Simeon Tegel

How long can Peru’s new socialist leader last?

The symbolism could hardly have been clearer when Pedro Castillo was sworn in yesterday as Peru’s new President on the country’s 200th anniversary of independence. For arguably the first time in its history, Peru has a head-of-state who personifies the national majority — a campesino hailing from a particularly impoverished region of the northern Andes — rather than a member, real or honorary, of the largely white Lima elite. Given Peru’s persistent, stark inequality, drastically exacerbated by the pandemic, perhaps the biggest surprise is that the electorate has waited until now to vote in such a radical left-populist. Although the rabblerousing rural school teacher currently appears to be tacking towards the centre, he had originally promised

Thursday

Ian Birrell

Sacrificing to the false god of gold

Deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest sits a desolate zone, stretching for miles and pockmarked with chemical-tainted water that glistens orange and blue. This was the centre of the country’s illegal gold-mining operations, where tens of thousands of desperate people dug into the soil in search of a precious mineral that could make the difference between destitution and wealth. For every ounce found in the crime-infested badlands, nine tonnes of toxic waste are thought to be left behind in an environmental catastrophe that will contaminate the region for decades. No wonder Pope Francis, on a visit to the impoverished area, called gold ‘a false god’ when so much wreckage is left