Melting sacred glaciers and other fundamental changes confront the Andes's Quechua-speaking farmers
By Barbara Fraser
MAHUAYANI, Peru—A full moon hangs in the frosty sky as hundreds of dancers file in darkness toward the top of the Sinakara valley high in the Andes. Footsteps crunch frozen tundra, and dancing shoes step gingerly over ice-covered rivulets. Musicians blow on numb fingers as sunlight tips the hills to the west and creeps up the valley.
High above, ice fields on the eastern peaks remain in shadow.
Suddenly dancers and musicians turn eastward and kneel, baring their heads. A halo rims the tallest crag, and as the sun appears, music bursts from scores of flutes, drums, accordions and saxophones. Moments later the air fills with the sound of running water, as the skin of ice melts, freeing the rivulets.
At more than 15,000 feet above sea level, it is easy to understand why Andean people have long worshiped the elements that allow them to survive in this harsh climate. In the dry season - May to October - rivulets form streams that flow to rivers far below, providing drinking water and keeping alpine pastures alive so livestock can survive until the rains come again.
Backlit by the sun, long columns of men dressed in shaggy black robes stream down the mountainsides. In a test of endurance and devotion, they have spent the night on the glaciers that still cling to the rocks above the valley. Waving banners and surrounded by dancers, they return to the sanctuary of the Señor de Qoyllur Rit'i, the center of a Christian fiesta rooted in a far older Andean devotion.
These men, known as ukukus, whose costumes evoke the Andean spectacled bear, used to hack off huge hunks of ice and haul them down the mountain on their backs. That is now forbidden. They and the tens of thousands of pilgrims who stream up the mountainside every year are worried that the glacier that is central to this ritual is disappearing.
Climate change is forcing a cultural change.
While governments seek technical solutions to climate-related problems, Quechua-speaking farmers in the Andes are struggling to understand events that are altering their livelihood. Drip irrigation and water reservoirs are only a partial response to a profound change in their relationship with their environment.
People in the Andes "lead vertical livelihoods," says Jeffrey Bury of the University of California at Santa Cruz. They take advantage of every ecological niche, growing crops in valleys and grazing llamas and alpacas on to bleak mountaintops. But farmers are being squeezed by warmer temperatures that shift crops up mountainsides and the expansion of mountaintop mining that destroys high wetland pastures, Bury says.
Audio slide show: Effects of Climate Change on People in the Andes
Andean peaks are more than scenery; they are protective deities, or apus. For generations, the massive and powerful Mt. Ausangate near the Qoyllur Rit'i sanctuary has been white. Now, it is streaked where snow has melted and bare rock shows.
"The mountains are powerful in a very everyday kind of way. People speak of them, there's a lot of ritual involved with them, and their darkening is very disturbing," says Ben Orlove, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis, who has studied Andean communities since the 1970s. "There's something very troubling about the glaciers being gone."
Carlos Flores, an anthropologist and former Jesuit priest who accompanied the Qoyllur Rit'i pilgrimage for several decades, recalls people commenting on glacial retreat as long ago as the 1970s. Some saw it as a sign of the end of the world.
The Rev. Antonio Sánchez-Guardamino, the Catholic priest in Ocongate, who has also worked among remote Andean communities for decades, is more cautious. "The snow-capped peaks are not the only apus," he says. "There are many apus that are not snow-capped, and people make offerings to them."
Nevertheless, the vanishing glaciers may still signal the end of the world as the Quechua farmers know it.
"If the snow disappears, the people will disappear, too," Sánchez-Guardamino says. "If the snow disappears, we will be left without water. The pastures and the animals will disappear. Everything is interconnected. The problem of the melting of the glaciers is that the source of life is drying up."
Andean farmers struggle to understand the changes. Some say the mountains are turning black because they are angry or sad. Some blame pollution. Carmina Sicusta has another explanation.
"The earth itself is sick," she says.
Sicusta, 48, lives in Amaru, a village of small adobe houses on a mountainside above Pisaq, a picturesque town near Cusco that is best known for Inca ruins and a Sunday market that draw tourists from around the world.
In the past decade or so, Amaru's farmers have watched the pattern of hillside fields change. On the frigid hilltops, the tundra-like pasture suitable only for llamas is receding. Fields of grain blanket high hillsides that were once too cold for anything but animals. Families that used to own dozens of llamas now have only a handful.
"The earth is warming. The waters are warming. The springs are drying up," Sicusta says in Quechua, looking up from her weaving. "There is going to be a shortage of food. Our children will have less to eat."
Her husband, Eugenio Palomino, 46, adds, "There's less and less rain. There won't to be a good harvest."
Farmers say weather patterns are changing, rain and frost come out of season, and the signs they always used to tell when it was time to till or plant are no longer reliable.
Agriculture depends on predictability, Bury says. Early rains wash seeds away, a dry spell during the growing season keeps potato tubers from developing, and rain at the normally dry harvest time rots grain. All spell disaster for subsistence farmers.
While physical scientists may consider people's perceptions of climate change subjective and unreliable, Bury insists it is important to see the world as mountain people do. "When you lose your crops, it's not a subjective event," he says. "People have a good 10-year memory of how things have changed."
In some cases, perceptions may run ahead of scientific evidence, he says, because people could see very local changes that do not show up on computer models with a 100-kilometer resolution. This is not the first time people have had to adjust to climate change in the Andes. Historian Mark Carey of Washington and Lee University has heard legends referring to glacial retreat and lake formation. Based on pollen from lake sediment cores, French climate researcher Alex Chepstow-Lusty believes gradual warming beginning in 1100, after a long arid spell, facilitated the rise of the Inca Empire.
But it is not easy for Andean farmers to conceive of life in a radically different environment. People in Copa Grande, a village in the snow-capped Cordillera Blanca in central Peru, cannot imagine living like farmers in the bare Cordillera Negra across the valley, who depend only on rainwater for irrigation.
"People generally have a very bleak outlook, and most are thinking on a very short time scale," says anthropologist Katherine Dunbar of the University of Georgia, who is doing doctoral research in Copa Grande. "People say, 'The glaciers are going to go, there's not going to be water and we're all going to die.'"
A generation ago, the glacier above the village was the place where teenagers spent time with friends and courted. Fewer go now, because the glacier is farther away and the ice at the edge is soft and dangerous.
"The loss of the glacier is the loss of a social scene," Dunbar says.
Because environmental changes have a social and cultural impact, technical solutions alone are not enough, says Lino Loayza of ANDES, a Peruvian non-profit organization working with residents of Amaru and neighboring communities.
"Our first priority is food security, so people eat well and have enough food," Loayza says.
Besides planting a variety of staple crops, the communities have established the Parque de la Papa, or "Potato Park," to preserve some 700 varieties of native potatoes adapted to different altitudes. They prepare medicinal plants and are branching into tourism, with hiking circuits, a restaurant specializing in potato dishes, and crafts workshops. As farming becomes more unpredictable, they hope the alternatives will enable them and their children to stay on their land.
Further north, the snow-capped Cordillera Blanca has long been a draw for Peruvian and foreign hikers and climbers. In the communities Cary has studied, about 25 percent of the people work in tourism. The area is losing about 10 percent of its snow cover per decade, and guides say softer snow is making some climbing routes more dangerous.
Worldwide, studies predict the migration of between 25 million and 1 billion people because of climate change and related disasters, but economics also plays a role. A sagging tourist industry in the Cordillera Blanca could mean fewer jobs, spurring migration to cities even before the glaciers disappear. And most of Peru's large cities are in the coastal desert, where water stress is likely to be greater.
Nevertheless, the pilgrims at Qoyllur Rit'i pilgrims faced the future with faith. Awaiting sunrise on a ridge below the sanctuary, a tall, young ukuku with a short, braided beard and a single silver earring - himself an emblem of cultural change - said the rituals will continue even if the glaciers are gone.
"These people are very resilient," Orlove says. "They're in it for the long haul. They're very committed to their land. They're able to come up with remarkable responses."
This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.
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lawyerinperu at 11:41 PM on 10/14/09
Dear Sir.
What had said Miss Barbara Frasser is absolutely true, and be must added to that tragedy, the poverty of the most of the people who live in those almost desert zones. The ecosystem of that towns depend almost solely of the melting ice and seasonal rain, and if that changes dramatically as now and in the nexts years, the peoples destiny of that zones will be worst than use to be
sábado, 17 de octubre de 2009
miércoles, 7 de octubre de 2009
Peru's Lost City of Gold
by Jonathan Levi | Published March 2009
When Machu Picchu is overrun with tour buses, Choquequirao—just twenty-five miles away and accessible only on foot—is deserted. Jonathan Levi sets off on a five-day trek and discovers the secret of Peru's original El Dorado
Don Nazario Turpo died a stupid death. The driver of the bus in which he was traveling from Saylla to Cuzco didn't realize that the local campesinos were making one of their quixotic low-tech protests—placing stones and tree trunks across the road without warning. Fourteen others besides Nazario died in the crash, and fifty were wounded. I had met Nazario, the pacu, or shaman, of Ausangate, a couple of years before at Machu Picchu. Long after the other tourists had gone, he sat in the quiet of the ruins and told my daughter's fortune. Although pacu translates into English as shaman, the pacu is little different from the priest of any religion who acts as an intermediary between the human and the divine. It's just that in the religion of the Incas—and Nazario, like most Peruvians, was a descendant of the Incas—mountains, rivers, and all the forces of nature are apus, spirits. "I'm coming back to Peru," Rebecca had whispered to me as we walked past grazing llamas in the dusk.
"But not to Machu Picchu," Nazario had said to me the next morning. The impregnable fortress of the Incas had fallen to the forces of mass tourism. Every day, foreigners by the hundreds were arriving from Aguas Calientes on buses belching diesel, and charging down the Inca Trail and through the Sun Gate. They came here guzzling pisco sours on the five-hundred-dollar-a-head Orient-Express Hiram Bingham deluxe day-trip from Cuzco, gazing seraphically at campesinos tilling their fields with hand ploughs—a journey to what is fast becoming one of the world's most endangered gorgeous sites.
Nazario had mentioned another ancient Incan citadel, a name full of guttural q's in the local Quechua language. No one went to this place. But it wasn't until Roger Valencia of the tour operator Auqui e-mailed me with news of Nazario's death that I wrote back to ask if he knew about this sister to Machu Picchu.
"Choquequirao," Roger answered instantly. "Even more beautiful than Machu Picchu. When do you want to go?"
Choquequirao. Choqeqirau. Chokekiraw. I Googled as many variations as I could imagine and came up with very little. I pulled my much abused copy of Lost City of the Incas off the shelf and searched the index. Lost City was written by Hiram Bingham forty years after he had become the first Northerner, in 1911, to "discover" Machu Picchu. Pictures of Bingham in Peru show a certain kind of Yalie who was still in residence several generations later: a Faulknerian dreamer from the provinces (in Bingham's case, Hawaii instead of Mississippi); a man whose height and good looks made him the rumored inspiration for Indiana Jones, and doomed him to a desire for easy conquests. Yet without the inheritance that many of his classmates brandished on their lapels, Bingham realized that he needed to write himself into mythology. "Machu Picchu was to Bingham the crowning of all his purest dreams as an adult child," wrote Che Guevara decades later.
Lost City was full of Choquequirao. Choquequirao, in fact, was Bingham's destination on his virgin trip to Peru in 1909, the city he believed to be the last holdout of the Incas during the dark days of the 1530s, when the Spanish conquistadors of Francisco Pizarro systematically destroyed their empire. City of Gold was how the Peruvians translated the name to Bingham, a guttural El Dorado. The last holdout would hold the last treasure—not to mention the thrill of danger. "In the journey to Choquequirao," Bingham wrote, "it seemed as though our heavily laden mules must surely lose their footing and roll down the fifteen hundred feet to the raging Apurímac River below."
Once Bingham decided that Machu Picchu, in fact, was the City of Gold, Choquequirao faded like a discarded high school girlfriend. But recent archaeologists have cast doubt on Bingham's theories on Machu Picchu. Choquequirao, the original City of Gold, may be getting ready for its red carpet walk.
I called Rebecca. My daughter had already fulfilled Nazario's prophecy, having returned to Peru just after college graduation to teach the local children in the town of Urubamba, up the river from Machu Picchu.
"Sure," she said. "May's good for me, I can take a day off." I replied that there's a reason Choquequirao is so unknown. It takes more than a day to reach it, and even then there's no easy way to do so. I knew some people who had flown in by helicopter, but the winds in the mountains can be vengefully unpredictable. They had nearly crashed. Three times.
"It's a five-day hike," Roger said.
"With mules?" I asked, imagining Bingham's heavily laden companions.
"Leave it me."
And so it was that at noon on an early-May day, after a four-hour drive from Urubamba, Rebecca and I found ourselves at the beginning of the trail, squatting beside a camp stove with our guide, Ana, and our cook, Felicitas, finishing up a lunch of cold chicken and cauliflower. The fifth member of our party, Carlos, our arriero (muleteer), ran after one of our three mules, which had just disappeared off the side of the road.
It was Ana who, several years before, had introduced us to Nazario and invited him on our trip to Machu Picchu. The daughter of a schoolteacher from Cuzco and a Quechua-speaking mother, she had begun guiding visitors into the rain forest of Manu and the Incan villages of the altiplano during the worst of the guerrilla violence of the 1980s. Ana knew a lot of facts—names of plants and trees and birds and historical dates—but even better, she knew a lot of rumors, a lot of folk history, tales of ghosts and apus.
For the first hour, we skipped three abreast on a wide trail. Rebecca and I looked at the broad panorama of Salcantay Mountain and the nearer glacial peak of Padreyoc across the river, and then at each other. This was lovely. Less than twenty miles to Choquequirao. Piece of cake.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.
"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.
"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.
In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.
Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chiquisca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.
The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.
The next morning, we let gravity and altiplano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.
"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.
"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.
In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.
Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chiquisca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.
The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.
The next morning, we let gravity and altiplano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.
"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.
"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.
In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.
Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chiquisca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.
The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.
The next morning, we let gravity and altiplano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.
"The engineers came to build the lodge," Isabel Pancorvo told me. "The first time, I cooked for them, gave them beer and chichi [homemade Peruvian corn beer] and they paid. The second time, the same thing and they paid. The third time, they put in plumbing, ate my food, drank my chicha, locked the doors, and ran away. They didn't pay."
I found Isabel in a dark shack across from the deserted buildings at Playa Rosalina, waiting for the occasional hiker to walk by and buy a soft drink or chicha. In her broad-brimmed straw hat, she came about halfway up my chest. I bought three passion fruits and invited her to join us for a cup of mate de coca. She sat with us on a low wall outside the abandoned buildings. I asked where she lived. She pointed up the mountain.
"Behind the tree house?" I asked.
"I think in the tree house," Rebecca whispered to me.
"Alone?" I whispered back.
Rebecca quickly translated Isabel's rapid Spanish. She was sixty-two years old. There was a husband who was superfluous, and a few sons who had either died or run off to Lima—Rebecca was unsure. The deserted lodge was part of a Peruvian-French initiative, brokered in part by Eliane Karp, the French-born wife of former president Alejandro Toledo. The flight of the engineers presumably coincided with the end of Toledo's term.
"What did she say?" I asked.
"Something about debt forgiveness," Rebecca answered. "Is that a word?"
"Didn't she say something about Russia?"
"Sí, sí," Isabel answered. "Last year, four beautiful Russian ballerinas came with three musicians. They played and danced—right here." She pointed to the concrete terrace of the abandoned lodge as visions of sugarplum fairies danced in my head. Petrushka by the Apurímac, Swan Lake with condors, all to a balalaika accompaniment. "I taught them a huayño dance," she said, putting down her teacup and demonstrating the shuffle step. "I'll teach you."
"I bet Hiram Bingham never did that," I boasted to Rebecca fifteen minutes later as we crossed the bridge and waved good-bye to Isabel.
"You mean kick a small old Quechua woman?" It was true. I had had trouble with the shuffle step.
And then we began the uphill. The sun had started to shine, and although the switchbacks afforded the occasional shade, our conversation consisted of panting and pointing. A waterfall here, a hawk there.
"Chestnut-fronted parrots," Ana said as our arrival sent them into squawking flight. "And these," Ana said, stopping by a powder of yellow petals on the trail, "are lady's slippers, ayaq zapatillas. The locals put them in coffins to walk the dead to the afterlife."
Six hours after leaving the camp of Chiquisca, we arrived at Marampata Hill. The twelve members of the Covarrubias family who owned that side of the valley had tapped into the glacial feed from above and carved out a small farm. Once again, we had a campsite to ourselves. From our private plateau, the Apurímac Valley opened up farther to the west and turned north, toward the jungle. We lunched on fresh cheese and guacamole from Covarrubias avocados and gazed hypnotized by fatigue and the view.
Carlos brought mate de coca and hot water for washing to our tent at six the next morning. It had rained during the night. But here, at ten thousand feet above sea level, we had a clear light for the big day at Choquequirao, the City of Gold. We left Felicitas, Carlos, and the mules to rest for the day. The path was level. And around the next bend, finally, Choquequirao.
We were still two hours away, but finally we had a sense of what we had hiked down and up a canyon to see. A puzzle, a mystery. Across the ravine and a thousand feet below us, a series of terraces, impossibly steep, had been excavated. Farther up the hill was another set of terraces, partially cleared but still with large clumps of trees. Far above the terraces, directly across from us, was the perfect helipad of the ushnu, "the sacred meeting place of Choquequirao," Ana said. And above that, joined by a neatly mown plaza on the ridge, was more of the site. At this distance, Choquequirao was a giant Sudoku with only a handful of numbers penciled in. In comparison, Machu Picchu is a fully filled color-by-numbers.
"People have known about Choquequirao for centuries," Ana told me. "There was a French explorer, the Count de Sartiges, in the 1800s. But before him there were Spaniards." And after. Some say the city was built during the reign of Pachacutec in the mid-1400s and became the last refuge of the Incas under the final ruler, Manco Inca, a hundred years later. Others say that pieces of pottery found at Choquequirao show that it was inhabited hundreds of years earlier. Each successive visit by anthropologists and archaeologists brings a new theory. And yet Choquequirao gave off a whiff of inscrutability as we came around the bend in the ravine.
"When I was a little girl," Isabel had told me down by the river, "I lived at Marampata and looked after the cows. But my uncles told me that Choquequirao was full of ghosts. 'Never go there,' they warned. Even when a cow wandered off into the ruins, we left her for the ghosts."
There was something ethereal about Choquequirao as we walked out of the trees and onto the paved terrace leading to the deserted city. City may be too grand a word for what has been uncovered so far. Choquequirao is compact in its emptiness. There are a couple of town squares and a handful of Incan stone buildings like the ones at Machu Picchu, with tapered doorways and intricate niches and hooks for hanging lamps or securing ropes for the roof thatching.
Ana pointed out a set of protruding beams at the level of the second floor. "Balconies," she said. "The Incas didn't know about balconies before the Spanish came. There are no balconies in the houses of Machu Picchu, only here." It's a small marvel, a modest discovery.
The latest find is one that hasn't yet made it into the books or blogs on Choquequirao. Four years ago, terraces were discovered on the far side of the mountain, the side away from our approach. On the walls of these terraces, in crude mosaics of white stone, are the figures of twenty-three llamas, some adult, some baby llamitas. Former first lady Eliane Karp has grandly taken some of the credit for this discovery. But as with everything else at Choquequirao, it's hard to know what to make of the llamas.
Puzzlement plus silence equals mystery. And silence is abundant at Choquequirao. During the eight hours we wandered through the ruins, lunched on the plaza, and explored the terraces and forests, we saw two groups of six people in addition to the guardian of the site, perched with a paperback on the heights of the sacred ushnu with an overview of anyone entering. That was all.
From the ushnu, I could look back at the path we had taken—two days to walk down one side of the canyon and up the other. I had become used to thinking of time as airplane time: one hour to get to the airport; check in two hours before departure; ten hours from New York to Lima. But here in front of me were two days, laid out in the zigzags of a rocky trail, the thread of a distant river, the tightness of a hamstring. There was a physicality to time that I never felt on a plane to Cuzco or a train to Machu Picchu.
In the tranquility of that late afternoon on the ushnu, I made the most precious discovery of time as I listened to Rebecca talk with wisdom about Mariluz and Rodrigo, Vilma and Ignacio, the children of Urubamba. She might not have become a pacu like Nazario. But the days spent walking the trails of the apu of Choquequirao had opened my ears to how my daughter had become an intermediary between two worlds.
At five o'clock, the sun set at the far end of the valley, and we began the two-hour hike back to Marampata. As the darkness fell, Rebecca and Ana strapped tiny miner's lamps to their foreheads. I followed their dim beams and voices as closely as I could, wondering how the Incas six hundred years ago, how Hiram Bingham a hundred years ago, how Nazario had felt out this trail, clinging to the protection of the mountain, moving forward without slipping into the Apurímac a mile below. I felt stupid not to have brought a lamp—as stupid, perhaps, as that bus driver the moment before he hit the rock that sent him and Nazario to their death.
Suddenly the path opened up in front of me, bright as dusk. I found Rebecca and Ana standing in wonder, their lamps extinguished. The earth had breathed a thousand fireflies to light our way home.
"I could keep walking like this another week," Rebecca said, taking my arm, "all the way to Machu Picchu." The apu of Choquequirao, or the spirits of Nazario and Hiram Bingham, had brought me gold.
PERU: PLACES & PRICES
The best way to explore the Choquequirao ruins is to fly into Cuzco and then drive to the town of Urubamba (9,400 feet above sea level), in the Sacred Valley. In Cuzco, a handful of tour operators can arrange trips to Choquequirao. Roger Valencia of Auqui Tours has a reputation for quality customized trips to all the famous sites in the Sacred Valley—Machu Picchu, Ausangate—and into the rain forest as well as to other parts of Peru. A five-day hike to Choquequirao includes tents, cots, three-course dinners with wine, and transportation to and from Cuzco or Urubamba (84-261517; auqui.com; five-day hike, $800 per person with a four-person minimum).
Travelers who don't mind carrying their own equipment can take a public bus from Cuzco to Saihuite, where they can hire a taxi or walk the 40 minutes to Cachora, the head of the trail. Farmers host the campsites (a donation is expected), and mules can be rented from concessionaires. Dario Cunza and his wife have a dozen horses and mules for hire at the Hospedaje San Pedro ($10 per day).
High-altitude hiking is best done with a hat, sunscreen, and insect spray. A sturdy rubber-tipped walking pole will save wear and tear on your knees.
The country code for Peru is 51. Prices quoted are for March 2009.
Lodging and Dining
The 30-room Hotel Sol y Luna, in Urubamba, is the luxury choice, with everything from massages to horseback rides to special pachamanca feasts (84-201-620; bungalows, $200). The Sonesta Posadas del Inca, in Yucay, has 84 rooms, a colonial chapel, and even a ghost (84-20-1107; doubles, $160). Part of the Libertador chain and with a private train to Machu Picchu, the Tambo del Inka Luxury Collection Hotel is scheduled to open later this year in Urubamba.
The road from Cuzco to Cachora passes through plenty of small towns, all of which have at least one shop where you can stock up on provisions, including (if you're lucky) the pita-shaped local bread. Campsites along the trail itself also have shops that may sell fruit, bottled beverages, and packets of instant noodles. Fresh water is abundant, but it pays to ask the locals where the stray horses are grazing—and to avoid those streams.
Reading
Hiram Bingham's Lost City of the Incas is a classic that, like the best non-fiction, is only partially true (Phoenix Press, $13). Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (Everyman's, $20) and the photographs of the mid-20th-century Cuzqueñan Martín Chambi ( martinchambi.com) are still my favorite introduction to the complex culture of highlands Peru.
When Machu Picchu is overrun with tour buses, Choquequirao—just twenty-five miles away and accessible only on foot—is deserted. Jonathan Levi sets off on a five-day trek and discovers the secret of Peru's original El Dorado
Don Nazario Turpo died a stupid death. The driver of the bus in which he was traveling from Saylla to Cuzco didn't realize that the local campesinos were making one of their quixotic low-tech protests—placing stones and tree trunks across the road without warning. Fourteen others besides Nazario died in the crash, and fifty were wounded. I had met Nazario, the pacu, or shaman, of Ausangate, a couple of years before at Machu Picchu. Long after the other tourists had gone, he sat in the quiet of the ruins and told my daughter's fortune. Although pacu translates into English as shaman, the pacu is little different from the priest of any religion who acts as an intermediary between the human and the divine. It's just that in the religion of the Incas—and Nazario, like most Peruvians, was a descendant of the Incas—mountains, rivers, and all the forces of nature are apus, spirits. "I'm coming back to Peru," Rebecca had whispered to me as we walked past grazing llamas in the dusk.
"But not to Machu Picchu," Nazario had said to me the next morning. The impregnable fortress of the Incas had fallen to the forces of mass tourism. Every day, foreigners by the hundreds were arriving from Aguas Calientes on buses belching diesel, and charging down the Inca Trail and through the Sun Gate. They came here guzzling pisco sours on the five-hundred-dollar-a-head Orient-Express Hiram Bingham deluxe day-trip from Cuzco, gazing seraphically at campesinos tilling their fields with hand ploughs—a journey to what is fast becoming one of the world's most endangered gorgeous sites.
Nazario had mentioned another ancient Incan citadel, a name full of guttural q's in the local Quechua language. No one went to this place. But it wasn't until Roger Valencia of the tour operator Auqui e-mailed me with news of Nazario's death that I wrote back to ask if he knew about this sister to Machu Picchu.
"Choquequirao," Roger answered instantly. "Even more beautiful than Machu Picchu. When do you want to go?"
Choquequirao. Choqeqirau. Chokekiraw. I Googled as many variations as I could imagine and came up with very little. I pulled my much abused copy of Lost City of the Incas off the shelf and searched the index. Lost City was written by Hiram Bingham forty years after he had become the first Northerner, in 1911, to "discover" Machu Picchu. Pictures of Bingham in Peru show a certain kind of Yalie who was still in residence several generations later: a Faulknerian dreamer from the provinces (in Bingham's case, Hawaii instead of Mississippi); a man whose height and good looks made him the rumored inspiration for Indiana Jones, and doomed him to a desire for easy conquests. Yet without the inheritance that many of his classmates brandished on their lapels, Bingham realized that he needed to write himself into mythology. "Machu Picchu was to Bingham the crowning of all his purest dreams as an adult child," wrote Che Guevara decades later.
Lost City was full of Choquequirao. Choquequirao, in fact, was Bingham's destination on his virgin trip to Peru in 1909, the city he believed to be the last holdout of the Incas during the dark days of the 1530s, when the Spanish conquistadors of Francisco Pizarro systematically destroyed their empire. City of Gold was how the Peruvians translated the name to Bingham, a guttural El Dorado. The last holdout would hold the last treasure—not to mention the thrill of danger. "In the journey to Choquequirao," Bingham wrote, "it seemed as though our heavily laden mules must surely lose their footing and roll down the fifteen hundred feet to the raging Apurímac River below."
Once Bingham decided that Machu Picchu, in fact, was the City of Gold, Choquequirao faded like a discarded high school girlfriend. But recent archaeologists have cast doubt on Bingham's theories on Machu Picchu. Choquequirao, the original City of Gold, may be getting ready for its red carpet walk.
I called Rebecca. My daughter had already fulfilled Nazario's prophecy, having returned to Peru just after college graduation to teach the local children in the town of Urubamba, up the river from Machu Picchu.
"Sure," she said. "May's good for me, I can take a day off." I replied that there's a reason Choquequirao is so unknown. It takes more than a day to reach it, and even then there's no easy way to do so. I knew some people who had flown in by helicopter, but the winds in the mountains can be vengefully unpredictable. They had nearly crashed. Three times.
"It's a five-day hike," Roger said.
"With mules?" I asked, imagining Bingham's heavily laden companions.
"Leave it me."
And so it was that at noon on an early-May day, after a four-hour drive from Urubamba, Rebecca and I found ourselves at the beginning of the trail, squatting beside a camp stove with our guide, Ana, and our cook, Felicitas, finishing up a lunch of cold chicken and cauliflower. The fifth member of our party, Carlos, our arriero (muleteer), ran after one of our three mules, which had just disappeared off the side of the road.
It was Ana who, several years before, had introduced us to Nazario and invited him on our trip to Machu Picchu. The daughter of a schoolteacher from Cuzco and a Quechua-speaking mother, she had begun guiding visitors into the rain forest of Manu and the Incan villages of the altiplano during the worst of the guerrilla violence of the 1980s. Ana knew a lot of facts—names of plants and trees and birds and historical dates—but even better, she knew a lot of rumors, a lot of folk history, tales of ghosts and apus.
For the first hour, we skipped three abreast on a wide trail. Rebecca and I looked at the broad panorama of Salcantay Mountain and the nearer glacial peak of Padreyoc across the river, and then at each other. This was lovely. Less than twenty miles to Choquequirao. Piece of cake.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.
"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.
"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.
In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.
Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chiquisca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.
The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.
The next morning, we let gravity and altiplano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.
"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.
"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.
In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.
Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chiquisca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.
The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.
The next morning, we let gravity and altiplano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.
"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.
"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.
In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.
Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chiquisca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.
The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.
The next morning, we let gravity and altiplano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.
"The engineers came to build the lodge," Isabel Pancorvo told me. "The first time, I cooked for them, gave them beer and chichi [homemade Peruvian corn beer] and they paid. The second time, the same thing and they paid. The third time, they put in plumbing, ate my food, drank my chicha, locked the doors, and ran away. They didn't pay."
I found Isabel in a dark shack across from the deserted buildings at Playa Rosalina, waiting for the occasional hiker to walk by and buy a soft drink or chicha. In her broad-brimmed straw hat, she came about halfway up my chest. I bought three passion fruits and invited her to join us for a cup of mate de coca. She sat with us on a low wall outside the abandoned buildings. I asked where she lived. She pointed up the mountain.
"Behind the tree house?" I asked.
"I think in the tree house," Rebecca whispered to me.
"Alone?" I whispered back.
Rebecca quickly translated Isabel's rapid Spanish. She was sixty-two years old. There was a husband who was superfluous, and a few sons who had either died or run off to Lima—Rebecca was unsure. The deserted lodge was part of a Peruvian-French initiative, brokered in part by Eliane Karp, the French-born wife of former president Alejandro Toledo. The flight of the engineers presumably coincided with the end of Toledo's term.
"What did she say?" I asked.
"Something about debt forgiveness," Rebecca answered. "Is that a word?"
"Didn't she say something about Russia?"
"Sí, sí," Isabel answered. "Last year, four beautiful Russian ballerinas came with three musicians. They played and danced—right here." She pointed to the concrete terrace of the abandoned lodge as visions of sugarplum fairies danced in my head. Petrushka by the Apurímac, Swan Lake with condors, all to a balalaika accompaniment. "I taught them a huayño dance," she said, putting down her teacup and demonstrating the shuffle step. "I'll teach you."
"I bet Hiram Bingham never did that," I boasted to Rebecca fifteen minutes later as we crossed the bridge and waved good-bye to Isabel.
"You mean kick a small old Quechua woman?" It was true. I had had trouble with the shuffle step.
And then we began the uphill. The sun had started to shine, and although the switchbacks afforded the occasional shade, our conversation consisted of panting and pointing. A waterfall here, a hawk there.
"Chestnut-fronted parrots," Ana said as our arrival sent them into squawking flight. "And these," Ana said, stopping by a powder of yellow petals on the trail, "are lady's slippers, ayaq zapatillas. The locals put them in coffins to walk the dead to the afterlife."
Six hours after leaving the camp of Chiquisca, we arrived at Marampata Hill. The twelve members of the Covarrubias family who owned that side of the valley had tapped into the glacial feed from above and carved out a small farm. Once again, we had a campsite to ourselves. From our private plateau, the Apurímac Valley opened up farther to the west and turned north, toward the jungle. We lunched on fresh cheese and guacamole from Covarrubias avocados and gazed hypnotized by fatigue and the view.
Carlos brought mate de coca and hot water for washing to our tent at six the next morning. It had rained during the night. But here, at ten thousand feet above sea level, we had a clear light for the big day at Choquequirao, the City of Gold. We left Felicitas, Carlos, and the mules to rest for the day. The path was level. And around the next bend, finally, Choquequirao.
We were still two hours away, but finally we had a sense of what we had hiked down and up a canyon to see. A puzzle, a mystery. Across the ravine and a thousand feet below us, a series of terraces, impossibly steep, had been excavated. Farther up the hill was another set of terraces, partially cleared but still with large clumps of trees. Far above the terraces, directly across from us, was the perfect helipad of the ushnu, "the sacred meeting place of Choquequirao," Ana said. And above that, joined by a neatly mown plaza on the ridge, was more of the site. At this distance, Choquequirao was a giant Sudoku with only a handful of numbers penciled in. In comparison, Machu Picchu is a fully filled color-by-numbers.
"People have known about Choquequirao for centuries," Ana told me. "There was a French explorer, the Count de Sartiges, in the 1800s. But before him there were Spaniards." And after. Some say the city was built during the reign of Pachacutec in the mid-1400s and became the last refuge of the Incas under the final ruler, Manco Inca, a hundred years later. Others say that pieces of pottery found at Choquequirao show that it was inhabited hundreds of years earlier. Each successive visit by anthropologists and archaeologists brings a new theory. And yet Choquequirao gave off a whiff of inscrutability as we came around the bend in the ravine.
"When I was a little girl," Isabel had told me down by the river, "I lived at Marampata and looked after the cows. But my uncles told me that Choquequirao was full of ghosts. 'Never go there,' they warned. Even when a cow wandered off into the ruins, we left her for the ghosts."
There was something ethereal about Choquequirao as we walked out of the trees and onto the paved terrace leading to the deserted city. City may be too grand a word for what has been uncovered so far. Choquequirao is compact in its emptiness. There are a couple of town squares and a handful of Incan stone buildings like the ones at Machu Picchu, with tapered doorways and intricate niches and hooks for hanging lamps or securing ropes for the roof thatching.
Ana pointed out a set of protruding beams at the level of the second floor. "Balconies," she said. "The Incas didn't know about balconies before the Spanish came. There are no balconies in the houses of Machu Picchu, only here." It's a small marvel, a modest discovery.
The latest find is one that hasn't yet made it into the books or blogs on Choquequirao. Four years ago, terraces were discovered on the far side of the mountain, the side away from our approach. On the walls of these terraces, in crude mosaics of white stone, are the figures of twenty-three llamas, some adult, some baby llamitas. Former first lady Eliane Karp has grandly taken some of the credit for this discovery. But as with everything else at Choquequirao, it's hard to know what to make of the llamas.
Puzzlement plus silence equals mystery. And silence is abundant at Choquequirao. During the eight hours we wandered through the ruins, lunched on the plaza, and explored the terraces and forests, we saw two groups of six people in addition to the guardian of the site, perched with a paperback on the heights of the sacred ushnu with an overview of anyone entering. That was all.
From the ushnu, I could look back at the path we had taken—two days to walk down one side of the canyon and up the other. I had become used to thinking of time as airplane time: one hour to get to the airport; check in two hours before departure; ten hours from New York to Lima. But here in front of me were two days, laid out in the zigzags of a rocky trail, the thread of a distant river, the tightness of a hamstring. There was a physicality to time that I never felt on a plane to Cuzco or a train to Machu Picchu.
In the tranquility of that late afternoon on the ushnu, I made the most precious discovery of time as I listened to Rebecca talk with wisdom about Mariluz and Rodrigo, Vilma and Ignacio, the children of Urubamba. She might not have become a pacu like Nazario. But the days spent walking the trails of the apu of Choquequirao had opened my ears to how my daughter had become an intermediary between two worlds.
At five o'clock, the sun set at the far end of the valley, and we began the two-hour hike back to Marampata. As the darkness fell, Rebecca and Ana strapped tiny miner's lamps to their foreheads. I followed their dim beams and voices as closely as I could, wondering how the Incas six hundred years ago, how Hiram Bingham a hundred years ago, how Nazario had felt out this trail, clinging to the protection of the mountain, moving forward without slipping into the Apurímac a mile below. I felt stupid not to have brought a lamp—as stupid, perhaps, as that bus driver the moment before he hit the rock that sent him and Nazario to their death.
Suddenly the path opened up in front of me, bright as dusk. I found Rebecca and Ana standing in wonder, their lamps extinguished. The earth had breathed a thousand fireflies to light our way home.
"I could keep walking like this another week," Rebecca said, taking my arm, "all the way to Machu Picchu." The apu of Choquequirao, or the spirits of Nazario and Hiram Bingham, had brought me gold.
PERU: PLACES & PRICES
The best way to explore the Choquequirao ruins is to fly into Cuzco and then drive to the town of Urubamba (9,400 feet above sea level), in the Sacred Valley. In Cuzco, a handful of tour operators can arrange trips to Choquequirao. Roger Valencia of Auqui Tours has a reputation for quality customized trips to all the famous sites in the Sacred Valley—Machu Picchu, Ausangate—and into the rain forest as well as to other parts of Peru. A five-day hike to Choquequirao includes tents, cots, three-course dinners with wine, and transportation to and from Cuzco or Urubamba (84-261517; auqui.com; five-day hike, $800 per person with a four-person minimum).
Travelers who don't mind carrying their own equipment can take a public bus from Cuzco to Saihuite, where they can hire a taxi or walk the 40 minutes to Cachora, the head of the trail. Farmers host the campsites (a donation is expected), and mules can be rented from concessionaires. Dario Cunza and his wife have a dozen horses and mules for hire at the Hospedaje San Pedro ($10 per day).
High-altitude hiking is best done with a hat, sunscreen, and insect spray. A sturdy rubber-tipped walking pole will save wear and tear on your knees.
The country code for Peru is 51. Prices quoted are for March 2009.
Lodging and Dining
The 30-room Hotel Sol y Luna, in Urubamba, is the luxury choice, with everything from massages to horseback rides to special pachamanca feasts (84-201-620; bungalows, $200). The Sonesta Posadas del Inca, in Yucay, has 84 rooms, a colonial chapel, and even a ghost (84-20-1107; doubles, $160). Part of the Libertador chain and with a private train to Machu Picchu, the Tambo del Inka Luxury Collection Hotel is scheduled to open later this year in Urubamba.
The road from Cuzco to Cachora passes through plenty of small towns, all of which have at least one shop where you can stock up on provisions, including (if you're lucky) the pita-shaped local bread. Campsites along the trail itself also have shops that may sell fruit, bottled beverages, and packets of instant noodles. Fresh water is abundant, but it pays to ask the locals where the stray horses are grazing—and to avoid those streams.
Reading
Hiram Bingham's Lost City of the Incas is a classic that, like the best non-fiction, is only partially true (Phoenix Press, $13). Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (Everyman's, $20) and the photographs of the mid-20th-century Cuzqueñan Martín Chambi ( martinchambi.com) are still my favorite introduction to the complex culture of highlands Peru.
viernes, 2 de octubre de 2009
Pasos para una negociación exitosa, según William Ury
Pasos para una negociación exitosa, según William Ury
Durante el World Negotiation Forum Argentina, William Ury nos propuso una clase magistral de negociación, donde nos explicó sobre como siempre tenemos que encontrar el BATNA de cada problema, acrónimo de “Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement” o “Mejor Alternativa a un Acuerdo Negociado”, y el corazón de su estrategia de negociación se basa en algunos pasos imprescindibles y muy claros para una negociación exitosa.
Salga al balcón
En el medio de una negociación hay que tener la capacidad para distanciarse un poco del tema en cuestión y pensar. Algunos sólo meditan en un parque o plaza, otros consultan con expertos, algunos usan el tetris para balconear, otros fuman y hay otros charlan con sus esposas. Lo importante es salirse del medio y poner tener una visión de mayor espectro para entender cuál es la situación y por que motivos estamos inmersos en esos problemas, para así encontrar una solución mejor y más rápido.
Póngase del lado del contrario
Es la idea de hacer exactamente lo contrario a lo que el otro espera de nosotros en ese momento. Así logramos romper el esquema mental de la contraparte para entender de que van sus problemas. Lo mejor sucede cuando invitamos al otro a ponerse en nuestro lugar, si el otro negociador es hábil, lo hará, y juntos se encontrará el mejor BATNA posible.
Usar criterios objetivos para decidir lo justo
Debe haber equidad en la negociación, objetividad mutua
Identificar los intereses detrás de las posiciones de las personas
Hay que preguntar: ¿Por qué el otro quiere esto?, ¿para qué quiero yo esto?, ¿y por qué no? Diciéndole al otro algo poco habitual: “Ayúdeme a entender sus necesidades” y “Ayúdeme a ayudarlo“. No hay que rechazar propuestas, hay que redireccionarlas, lograr que el otro diga lo que nosotros queremos que diga.
Encontrar siempre las opciones de ganancias mutuas
Creatividad en la negociación, que más puedo agregar? si todo se puede…
Conozca su BATNA (vitál para cualquier negociación!)
El poder de la negociación está influenciado por lo que cada parte considera su “BATNA” (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement/ Mejor Alternativa a un Acuerdo Negociado). Es decir, el mejor curso de acción a tomar, si no logra ponerse de acuerdo. O dicho en una pregunta: ¿Qué hacer si fracasa la negociación? También es importante delimitar lo mínimo que aceptarías.
Construya un puente dorado
Sobre un desfiladero lleno de inseguridades trate de entender las necesidades del otro y que sea atractivo para su empresa y sus posibles decir que sí.
Durante el World Negotiation Forum Argentina, William Ury nos propuso una clase magistral de negociación, donde nos explicó sobre como siempre tenemos que encontrar el BATNA de cada problema, acrónimo de “Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement” o “Mejor Alternativa a un Acuerdo Negociado”, y el corazón de su estrategia de negociación se basa en algunos pasos imprescindibles y muy claros para una negociación exitosa.
Salga al balcón
En el medio de una negociación hay que tener la capacidad para distanciarse un poco del tema en cuestión y pensar. Algunos sólo meditan en un parque o plaza, otros consultan con expertos, algunos usan el tetris para balconear, otros fuman y hay otros charlan con sus esposas. Lo importante es salirse del medio y poner tener una visión de mayor espectro para entender cuál es la situación y por que motivos estamos inmersos en esos problemas, para así encontrar una solución mejor y más rápido.
Póngase del lado del contrario
Es la idea de hacer exactamente lo contrario a lo que el otro espera de nosotros en ese momento. Así logramos romper el esquema mental de la contraparte para entender de que van sus problemas. Lo mejor sucede cuando invitamos al otro a ponerse en nuestro lugar, si el otro negociador es hábil, lo hará, y juntos se encontrará el mejor BATNA posible.
Usar criterios objetivos para decidir lo justo
Debe haber equidad en la negociación, objetividad mutua
Identificar los intereses detrás de las posiciones de las personas
Hay que preguntar: ¿Por qué el otro quiere esto?, ¿para qué quiero yo esto?, ¿y por qué no? Diciéndole al otro algo poco habitual: “Ayúdeme a entender sus necesidades” y “Ayúdeme a ayudarlo“. No hay que rechazar propuestas, hay que redireccionarlas, lograr que el otro diga lo que nosotros queremos que diga.
Encontrar siempre las opciones de ganancias mutuas
Creatividad en la negociación, que más puedo agregar? si todo se puede…
Conozca su BATNA (vitál para cualquier negociación!)
El poder de la negociación está influenciado por lo que cada parte considera su “BATNA” (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement/ Mejor Alternativa a un Acuerdo Negociado). Es decir, el mejor curso de acción a tomar, si no logra ponerse de acuerdo. O dicho en una pregunta: ¿Qué hacer si fracasa la negociación? También es importante delimitar lo mínimo que aceptarías.
Construya un puente dorado
Sobre un desfiladero lleno de inseguridades trate de entender las necesidades del otro y que sea atractivo para su empresa y sus posibles decir que sí.
sábado, 22 de agosto de 2009
Cómo promocionarse a sí mismo cuando su trabajo peligra
DAISY WADEMAN DOWLING
Cómo promocionarse a sí mismo cuando su trabajo peligra
Lunes 3 de Agosto de 2009, 10:54:38 I Recesión. Manejo personal. Planificar su carrera.
¿Teme que lo despidan? ¿Conoce a alguien que no?
Nadie, salvo los abogados que se especializan en quiebras, puede sentirse seguro en su trabajo en medio de la actual crisis económica. Pero revisar constantemente el precio de las acciones de su empresa no cambiará nada. Tampoco cambiará nada escuchar los rumores de oficina y andar buscando información sobre los supuestos despidos y las indemnizaciones. Es natural sentir ansiedad pero esas conductas no lo protegerán de lo que realmente esté a punto de ocurrir. La pregunta que cabe hacerse ahora no es "¿Corre usted un riesgo?” sino "¿Qué hará al respecto?"
El reciente artículo en Harvard Business Review "Proteja su empleo durante una recesión" ofrece varios consejos a los ejecutivos que enfrentan la posible pérdida de sus cargos: mantener una actitud alegre; ser flexible; ser un buen ciudadano corporativo.
He aquí otro consejo más. Hay una expresión que dice "cada trabajo es una venta", y eso es exactamente lo que usted debe hacer ahora: venderse.
En mi trabajo haciendo coaching a las estrellas ascendientes, me he percatado que este tipo de persona suele pertenecer a una de dos categorías:
Las que dejan que su buen trabajo hable por ellas
Las que comunican su valor a sus jefes, sus pares y a sus subordinados, y además, al resto del mundo.
Cuando se trata de compensaciones y ascensos, el segundo grupo suele lograr mejores resultados. Y cuando la tendencia del mercado es a la baja, son éstas las personas que suelen sobrevivir.
No me malinterprete, no estoy proponiendo que usted se jacte, ni tampoco estoy diciendo que haya algún substituto para el buen desempeño. Lo que estoy ofreciendo son métodos específicos y concretos para que usted se auto promocione, de manera delicada y con integridad; le muestro cómo presentarse como una persona que la organización debe mantener. En estos tiempos, usted no se puede dar el lujo de no hacerlo. He aquí lo que debe hacer:
Envíe un e-mail a su jefe alabando el trabajo de un joven empleado en un reciente proyecto. Esto lo hará verse como un buen miembro de un equipo, y también como un jefe considerado, y al mismo tiempo hará que se fijen en el éxito de su grupo. Además, es bueno hacerlo para su subordinado.
Pida a su jefe feedback respecto de sus prioridades (en lugar de respecto de su desempeño).Haga una lista de sus proyectos y metas clave para los próximos seis meses y revísenla juntos. El mensaje que recibirá su jefe: Soy considerado y soy orientado hacia la acción.
Encuentre un momento para enseñar. Contar chismes con sus pares respecto de la crisis subprime no es una muestra de liderazgo. Pero tomar la iniciativa de reunir en una sala de conferencia a los empleados recién graduados y contratados por su división para explicarles exactamente qué significa la "crisis subprime" sí lo demuestra.
Llegue temprano. No trabaje jornadas más largas, pero sí llegue más temprano. Las personas en altos cargos suelen comenzar su día temprano, y se darán cuenta si usted está ahí. Recuerde, usted no sabe quién está tomando las decisiones acerca de los nombres que aparecerán en la lista tan temida
Cómo promocionarse a sí mismo cuando su trabajo peligra
Lunes 3 de Agosto de 2009, 10:54:38 I Recesión. Manejo personal. Planificar su carrera.
¿Teme que lo despidan? ¿Conoce a alguien que no?
Nadie, salvo los abogados que se especializan en quiebras, puede sentirse seguro en su trabajo en medio de la actual crisis económica. Pero revisar constantemente el precio de las acciones de su empresa no cambiará nada. Tampoco cambiará nada escuchar los rumores de oficina y andar buscando información sobre los supuestos despidos y las indemnizaciones. Es natural sentir ansiedad pero esas conductas no lo protegerán de lo que realmente esté a punto de ocurrir. La pregunta que cabe hacerse ahora no es "¿Corre usted un riesgo?” sino "¿Qué hará al respecto?"
El reciente artículo en Harvard Business Review "Proteja su empleo durante una recesión" ofrece varios consejos a los ejecutivos que enfrentan la posible pérdida de sus cargos: mantener una actitud alegre; ser flexible; ser un buen ciudadano corporativo.
He aquí otro consejo más. Hay una expresión que dice "cada trabajo es una venta", y eso es exactamente lo que usted debe hacer ahora: venderse.
En mi trabajo haciendo coaching a las estrellas ascendientes, me he percatado que este tipo de persona suele pertenecer a una de dos categorías:
Las que dejan que su buen trabajo hable por ellas
Las que comunican su valor a sus jefes, sus pares y a sus subordinados, y además, al resto del mundo.
Cuando se trata de compensaciones y ascensos, el segundo grupo suele lograr mejores resultados. Y cuando la tendencia del mercado es a la baja, son éstas las personas que suelen sobrevivir.
No me malinterprete, no estoy proponiendo que usted se jacte, ni tampoco estoy diciendo que haya algún substituto para el buen desempeño. Lo que estoy ofreciendo son métodos específicos y concretos para que usted se auto promocione, de manera delicada y con integridad; le muestro cómo presentarse como una persona que la organización debe mantener. En estos tiempos, usted no se puede dar el lujo de no hacerlo. He aquí lo que debe hacer:
Envíe un e-mail a su jefe alabando el trabajo de un joven empleado en un reciente proyecto. Esto lo hará verse como un buen miembro de un equipo, y también como un jefe considerado, y al mismo tiempo hará que se fijen en el éxito de su grupo. Además, es bueno hacerlo para su subordinado.
Pida a su jefe feedback respecto de sus prioridades (en lugar de respecto de su desempeño).Haga una lista de sus proyectos y metas clave para los próximos seis meses y revísenla juntos. El mensaje que recibirá su jefe: Soy considerado y soy orientado hacia la acción.
Encuentre un momento para enseñar. Contar chismes con sus pares respecto de la crisis subprime no es una muestra de liderazgo. Pero tomar la iniciativa de reunir en una sala de conferencia a los empleados recién graduados y contratados por su división para explicarles exactamente qué significa la "crisis subprime" sí lo demuestra.
Llegue temprano. No trabaje jornadas más largas, pero sí llegue más temprano. Las personas en altos cargos suelen comenzar su día temprano, y se darán cuenta si usted está ahí. Recuerde, usted no sabe quién está tomando las decisiones acerca de los nombres que aparecerán en la lista tan temida
jueves, 13 de agosto de 2009
domingo, 26 de julio de 2009
Endangered Site: Chan Chan, Peru
About 600 years ago, this city on the Pacific coast was the largest city in the Americas
By Bruce Hathaway
Smithsonian magazine, March 2009
Once the capital of an empire, Chan Chan was the largest adobe city on earth.
Courtesy of Flickr user Michel Gutierrez
During its heyday, about 600 years ago, Chan Chan, in northern Peru, was the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on earth. Ten thousand structures, some with walls 30 feet high, were woven amid a maze of passageways and streets. Palaces and temples were decorated with elaborate friezes, some of which were hundreds of feet long. Chan Chan was fabulously wealthy, although it perennially lacked one precious resource: water. Today, however, Chan Chan is threatened by too much water, as torrential rains gradually wash away the nine-square-mile ancient city.
Located near the Pacific coast city of Trujillo, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú civilization, which lasted from A.D. 850 to around 1470. The adobe metropolis was the seat of power for an empire that stretched 600 miles from just south of Ecuador down to central Peru. By the 15th century, as many as 60,000 people lived in Chan Chan—mostly workers who served an all-powerful monarch, and privileged classes of highly skilled craftsmen and priests. The Chimú followed a strict hierarchy based on a belief that all men were not created equal. According to Chimú myth, the sun populated the world by creating three eggs: gold for the ruling elite, silver for their wives and copper for everybody else.
The city was established in one of the world's bleakest coastal deserts, where the average annual rainfall was less than a tenth of an inch. Still, Chan Chan's fields and gardens flourished, thanks to a sophisticated network of irrigation canals and wells. When a drought, coupled with movements in the earth's crust, apparently caused the underground water table to drop sometime around the year 1000, Chimú rulers devised a bold plan to divert water through a canal from the Chicama River 50 miles to the north.
The Chimú civilization was the "first true engineering society in the New World," says hydraulic engineer Charles Ortloff, who is based in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago. He points out that Chimú engineering methods were unknown in Europe and North America until the late 19th century. Although the Chimú had no written language for recording measurements or drafting detailed blueprints, they were somehow able to carefully survey and build their massive canal through difficult foothill terrain between two valleys. Ortloff believes the canal builders must have been thwarted by the shifting earth. Around 1300, they apparently gave up on the project altogether.
While erratic water supplies created myriad challenges for agriculture, the Chimú could always count on the bounty of the sea. The Humboldt Current off Peru pushes nutrient-rich water up to the ocean's surface and gives rise to one of the world's richest marine biomasses, says Joanne Pillsbury, director of pre-Columbian studies at Washington, D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University. "The Chimú saw food as the tangible love their gods gave them," Ortloff says. Indeed, the most common images on Chan Chan's friezes are a cornucopia of fish, crustaceans and mollusks, with flocks of seabirds soaring overhead.
Chan Chan's days of glory came to an end around 1470, when the Inca conquered the city, broke up the Chimú Empire and brought many of Chan Chan's craftsmen to their own capital, Cuzco, 600 miles to the southeast. By the time Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived around 1532, the city had been largely abandoned, though reports from the expedition described walls and other architectural features adorned with precious metals. (One of the conqueror's kinsmen, Pedro Pizarro, found a doorway covered in silver that might well have been worth more than $2 million today.) Chan Chan was pillaged as the Spaniards formed mining companies to extract every trace of gold and silver from the city.
Chan Chan was left to the mercy of the weather. "The Chimú were a highly organized civilization" and any water damage to the adobe-brick structures of Chan Chan "could be repaired immediately," says Claudia Riess, a German native who now works as a guide to archaeological sites in northern Peru. Most of the damage to Chan Chan during the Chimú reign was caused by El Niño storms, which occurred every 25 to 50 years.
Now they occur more frequently. Riess believes that climate change is a primary cause of the increasing rainfall—and she's not alone. A 2007 report published by Unesco describes the erosion of Chan Chan as "rapid and seemingly unstoppable" and concludes "global warming is likely to lead to greater extremes of drying and heavy rainfall." Peru's National Institute of Culture is supporting efforts to preserve the site. Tentlike protective structures are being erected in various parts of the city. Some friezes are being hardened with a solution of distilled water and cactus juice, while others have been photographed, then covered to protect them. Panels with pictures of the friezes allow visitors to see what the covered artwork looks like.
Riess believes the best solution for Chan Chan would be a roof that stretches over the entire area and a fence to surround the city. But she acknowledges that both are impractical, given the ancient capital's sheer size. Meanwhile, the rains continue, and Chan Chan slowly dissolves from brick into mud.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional Sources
Reading Art without Writing: Interpreting Chimú Architectural Sculpture, by Joanne Pillsbury, Dialogues in Art History, edited by Elizabeth Cropper, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), 2009
Water Engineering in the Ancient World: Archaeological and Climate Perspectives on Societies of South America, the Middle East and South East Asia, by Charles R. Ortloff, Oxford University Press, August 2009
During its heyday, about 600 years ago, Chan Chan, in northern Peru, was the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on earth. Ten thousand structures, some with walls 30 feet high, were woven amid a maze of passageways and streets. Palaces and temples were decorated with elaborate friezes, some of which were hundreds of feet long. Chan Chan was fabulously wealthy, although it perennially lacked one precious resource: water. Today, however, Chan Chan is threatened by too much water, as torrential rains gradually wash away the nine-square-mile ancient city.
Located near the Pacific coast city of Trujillo, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú civilization, which lasted from A.D. 850 to around 1470. The adobe metropolis was the seat of power for an empire that stretched 600 miles from just south of Ecuador down to central Peru. By the 15th century, as many as 60,000 people lived in Chan Chan—mostly workers who served an all-powerful monarch, and privileged classes of highly skilled craftsmen and priests. The Chimú followed a strict hierarchy based on a belief that all men were not created equal. According to Chimú myth, the sun populated the world by creating three eggs: gold for the ruling elite, silver for their wives and copper for everybody else.
The city was established in one of the world's bleakest coastal deserts, where the average annual rainfall was less than a tenth of an inch. Still, Chan Chan's fields and gardens flourished, thanks to a sophisticated network of irrigation canals and wells. When a drought, coupled with movements in the earth's crust, apparently caused the underground water table to drop sometime around the year 1000, Chimú rulers devised a bold plan to divert water through a canal from the Chicama River 50 miles to the north.
The Chimú civilization was the "first true engineering society in the New World," says hydraulic engineer Charles Ortloff, who is based in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago. He points out that Chimú engineering methods were unknown in Europe and North America until the late 19th century. Although the Chimú had no written language for recording measurements or drafting detailed blueprints, they were somehow able to carefully survey and build their massive canal through difficult foothill terrain between two valleys. Ortloff believes the canal builders must have been thwarted by the shifting earth. Around 1300, they apparently gave up on the project altogether.
While erratic water supplies created myriad challenges for agriculture, the Chimú could always count on the bounty of the sea. The Humboldt Current off Peru pushes nutrient-rich water up to the ocean's surface and gives rise to one of the world's richest marine biomasses, says Joanne Pillsbury, director of pre-Columbian studies at Washington, D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University. "The Chimú saw food as the tangible love their gods gave them," Ortloff says. Indeed, the most common images on Chan Chan's friezes are a cornucopia of fish, crustaceans and mollusks, with flocks of seabirds soaring overhead.
Chan Chan's days of glory came to an end around 1470, when the Inca conquered the city, broke up the Chimú Empire and brought many of Chan Chan's craftsmen to their own capital, Cuzco, 600 miles to the southeast. By the time Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived around 1532, the city had been largely abandoned, though reports from the expedition described walls and other architectural features adorned with precious metals. (One of the conqueror's kinsmen, Pedro Pizarro, found a doorway covered in silver that might well have been worth more than $2 million today.) Chan Chan was pillaged as the Spaniards formed mining companies to extract every trace of gold and silver from the city.
Chan Chan was left to the mercy of the weather. "The Chimú were a highly organized civilization" and any water damage to the adobe-brick structures of Chan Chan "could be repaired immediately," says Claudia Riess, a German native who now works as a guide to archaeological sites in northern Peru. Most of the damage to Chan Chan during the Chimú reign was caused by El Niño storms, which occurred every 25 to 50 years.
Now they occur more frequently. Riess believes that climate change is a primary cause of the increasing rainfall—and she's not alone. A 2007 report published by Unesco describes the erosion of Chan Chan as "rapid and seemingly unstoppable" and concludes "global warming is likely to lead to greater extremes of drying and heavy rainfall." Peru's National Institute of Culture is supporting efforts to preserve the site. Tentlike protective structures are being erected in various parts of the city. Some friezes are being hardened with a solution of distilled water and cactus juice, while others have been photographed, then covered to protect them. Panels with pictures of the friezes allow visitors to see what the covered artwork looks like.
Riess believes the best solution for Chan Chan would be a roof that stretches over the entire area and a fence to surround the city. But she acknowledges that both are impractical, given the ancient capital's sheer size. Meanwhile, the rains continue, and Chan Chan slowly dissolves from brick into mud.
Comments.
Peru has many locations throughout its territory of great historical significance, ancient Peruvians buildings that are a challenge to the imagination as the Nazca Lines, the city of Macchu Picchu, the city of Caral, natural wonders such as the Callejón de Huaylas, the Colca Canyon, Manu jungle, etc.. Never regret having visited Peru. People are very hospitable. The remaining investments are in tourism to make the stay more comfortable, but the darling of Peruvians offset the discomfort of the journey.
http://alonsosarmiento.googlepages.com
By Bruce Hathaway
Smithsonian magazine, March 2009
Once the capital of an empire, Chan Chan was the largest adobe city on earth.
Courtesy of Flickr user Michel Gutierrez
During its heyday, about 600 years ago, Chan Chan, in northern Peru, was the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on earth. Ten thousand structures, some with walls 30 feet high, were woven amid a maze of passageways and streets. Palaces and temples were decorated with elaborate friezes, some of which were hundreds of feet long. Chan Chan was fabulously wealthy, although it perennially lacked one precious resource: water. Today, however, Chan Chan is threatened by too much water, as torrential rains gradually wash away the nine-square-mile ancient city.
Located near the Pacific coast city of Trujillo, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú civilization, which lasted from A.D. 850 to around 1470. The adobe metropolis was the seat of power for an empire that stretched 600 miles from just south of Ecuador down to central Peru. By the 15th century, as many as 60,000 people lived in Chan Chan—mostly workers who served an all-powerful monarch, and privileged classes of highly skilled craftsmen and priests. The Chimú followed a strict hierarchy based on a belief that all men were not created equal. According to Chimú myth, the sun populated the world by creating three eggs: gold for the ruling elite, silver for their wives and copper for everybody else.
The city was established in one of the world's bleakest coastal deserts, where the average annual rainfall was less than a tenth of an inch. Still, Chan Chan's fields and gardens flourished, thanks to a sophisticated network of irrigation canals and wells. When a drought, coupled with movements in the earth's crust, apparently caused the underground water table to drop sometime around the year 1000, Chimú rulers devised a bold plan to divert water through a canal from the Chicama River 50 miles to the north.
The Chimú civilization was the "first true engineering society in the New World," says hydraulic engineer Charles Ortloff, who is based in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago. He points out that Chimú engineering methods were unknown in Europe and North America until the late 19th century. Although the Chimú had no written language for recording measurements or drafting detailed blueprints, they were somehow able to carefully survey and build their massive canal through difficult foothill terrain between two valleys. Ortloff believes the canal builders must have been thwarted by the shifting earth. Around 1300, they apparently gave up on the project altogether.
While erratic water supplies created myriad challenges for agriculture, the Chimú could always count on the bounty of the sea. The Humboldt Current off Peru pushes nutrient-rich water up to the ocean's surface and gives rise to one of the world's richest marine biomasses, says Joanne Pillsbury, director of pre-Columbian studies at Washington, D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University. "The Chimú saw food as the tangible love their gods gave them," Ortloff says. Indeed, the most common images on Chan Chan's friezes are a cornucopia of fish, crustaceans and mollusks, with flocks of seabirds soaring overhead.
Chan Chan's days of glory came to an end around 1470, when the Inca conquered the city, broke up the Chimú Empire and brought many of Chan Chan's craftsmen to their own capital, Cuzco, 600 miles to the southeast. By the time Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived around 1532, the city had been largely abandoned, though reports from the expedition described walls and other architectural features adorned with precious metals. (One of the conqueror's kinsmen, Pedro Pizarro, found a doorway covered in silver that might well have been worth more than $2 million today.) Chan Chan was pillaged as the Spaniards formed mining companies to extract every trace of gold and silver from the city.
Chan Chan was left to the mercy of the weather. "The Chimú were a highly organized civilization" and any water damage to the adobe-brick structures of Chan Chan "could be repaired immediately," says Claudia Riess, a German native who now works as a guide to archaeological sites in northern Peru. Most of the damage to Chan Chan during the Chimú reign was caused by El Niño storms, which occurred every 25 to 50 years.
Now they occur more frequently. Riess believes that climate change is a primary cause of the increasing rainfall—and she's not alone. A 2007 report published by Unesco describes the erosion of Chan Chan as "rapid and seemingly unstoppable" and concludes "global warming is likely to lead to greater extremes of drying and heavy rainfall." Peru's National Institute of Culture is supporting efforts to preserve the site. Tentlike protective structures are being erected in various parts of the city. Some friezes are being hardened with a solution of distilled water and cactus juice, while others have been photographed, then covered to protect them. Panels with pictures of the friezes allow visitors to see what the covered artwork looks like.
Riess believes the best solution for Chan Chan would be a roof that stretches over the entire area and a fence to surround the city. But she acknowledges that both are impractical, given the ancient capital's sheer size. Meanwhile, the rains continue, and Chan Chan slowly dissolves from brick into mud.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional Sources
Reading Art without Writing: Interpreting Chimú Architectural Sculpture, by Joanne Pillsbury, Dialogues in Art History, edited by Elizabeth Cropper, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), 2009
Water Engineering in the Ancient World: Archaeological and Climate Perspectives on Societies of South America, the Middle East and South East Asia, by Charles R. Ortloff, Oxford University Press, August 2009
During its heyday, about 600 years ago, Chan Chan, in northern Peru, was the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on earth. Ten thousand structures, some with walls 30 feet high, were woven amid a maze of passageways and streets. Palaces and temples were decorated with elaborate friezes, some of which were hundreds of feet long. Chan Chan was fabulously wealthy, although it perennially lacked one precious resource: water. Today, however, Chan Chan is threatened by too much water, as torrential rains gradually wash away the nine-square-mile ancient city.
Located near the Pacific coast city of Trujillo, Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú civilization, which lasted from A.D. 850 to around 1470. The adobe metropolis was the seat of power for an empire that stretched 600 miles from just south of Ecuador down to central Peru. By the 15th century, as many as 60,000 people lived in Chan Chan—mostly workers who served an all-powerful monarch, and privileged classes of highly skilled craftsmen and priests. The Chimú followed a strict hierarchy based on a belief that all men were not created equal. According to Chimú myth, the sun populated the world by creating three eggs: gold for the ruling elite, silver for their wives and copper for everybody else.
The city was established in one of the world's bleakest coastal deserts, where the average annual rainfall was less than a tenth of an inch. Still, Chan Chan's fields and gardens flourished, thanks to a sophisticated network of irrigation canals and wells. When a drought, coupled with movements in the earth's crust, apparently caused the underground water table to drop sometime around the year 1000, Chimú rulers devised a bold plan to divert water through a canal from the Chicama River 50 miles to the north.
The Chimú civilization was the "first true engineering society in the New World," says hydraulic engineer Charles Ortloff, who is based in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago. He points out that Chimú engineering methods were unknown in Europe and North America until the late 19th century. Although the Chimú had no written language for recording measurements or drafting detailed blueprints, they were somehow able to carefully survey and build their massive canal through difficult foothill terrain between two valleys. Ortloff believes the canal builders must have been thwarted by the shifting earth. Around 1300, they apparently gave up on the project altogether.
While erratic water supplies created myriad challenges for agriculture, the Chimú could always count on the bounty of the sea. The Humboldt Current off Peru pushes nutrient-rich water up to the ocean's surface and gives rise to one of the world's richest marine biomasses, says Joanne Pillsbury, director of pre-Columbian studies at Washington, D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks, a research institute of Harvard University. "The Chimú saw food as the tangible love their gods gave them," Ortloff says. Indeed, the most common images on Chan Chan's friezes are a cornucopia of fish, crustaceans and mollusks, with flocks of seabirds soaring overhead.
Chan Chan's days of glory came to an end around 1470, when the Inca conquered the city, broke up the Chimú Empire and brought many of Chan Chan's craftsmen to their own capital, Cuzco, 600 miles to the southeast. By the time Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived around 1532, the city had been largely abandoned, though reports from the expedition described walls and other architectural features adorned with precious metals. (One of the conqueror's kinsmen, Pedro Pizarro, found a doorway covered in silver that might well have been worth more than $2 million today.) Chan Chan was pillaged as the Spaniards formed mining companies to extract every trace of gold and silver from the city.
Chan Chan was left to the mercy of the weather. "The Chimú were a highly organized civilization" and any water damage to the adobe-brick structures of Chan Chan "could be repaired immediately," says Claudia Riess, a German native who now works as a guide to archaeological sites in northern Peru. Most of the damage to Chan Chan during the Chimú reign was caused by El Niño storms, which occurred every 25 to 50 years.
Now they occur more frequently. Riess believes that climate change is a primary cause of the increasing rainfall—and she's not alone. A 2007 report published by Unesco describes the erosion of Chan Chan as "rapid and seemingly unstoppable" and concludes "global warming is likely to lead to greater extremes of drying and heavy rainfall." Peru's National Institute of Culture is supporting efforts to preserve the site. Tentlike protective structures are being erected in various parts of the city. Some friezes are being hardened with a solution of distilled water and cactus juice, while others have been photographed, then covered to protect them. Panels with pictures of the friezes allow visitors to see what the covered artwork looks like.
Riess believes the best solution for Chan Chan would be a roof that stretches over the entire area and a fence to surround the city. But she acknowledges that both are impractical, given the ancient capital's sheer size. Meanwhile, the rains continue, and Chan Chan slowly dissolves from brick into mud.
Comments.
Peru has many locations throughout its territory of great historical significance, ancient Peruvians buildings that are a challenge to the imagination as the Nazca Lines, the city of Macchu Picchu, the city of Caral, natural wonders such as the Callejón de Huaylas, the Colca Canyon, Manu jungle, etc.. Never regret having visited Peru. People are very hospitable. The remaining investments are in tourism to make the stay more comfortable, but the darling of Peruvians offset the discomfort of the journey.
http://alonsosarmiento.googlepages.com
sábado, 25 de julio de 2009
martes, 21 de julio de 2009
jueves, 2 de julio de 2009
How To Fix Executive Pay
Whom to Pay is More Important than How Much or How
1:20 PM Thursday July 2, 2009
by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz
Tags:Boards, Compensation, Human resources, Job search, Leadership transitions
Having read every posting and response so far in the debate, I see that everyone has naturally focused either on the moral and practical appropriateness of how much to pay, or on practical suggestions on how to pay. That is all very good when it comes to avoiding scandals and abuses, and will to some extent improve performance and value creation.
But the real aim should be not just to avoid public frustration and excess, but to aim for a much more ambitious objective -- to ensure that CEOs and other leaders make the greatest potential contribution towards building lasting greatness. Whom you pay is much more important than how much you pay, and even how you pay.
I base this assertion on more than 20 years of global executive search experience, as well as current research on motivation based on neuroscience, and the best research I've seen regarding the impact of compensation systems not just to avoid mistakes or promote performance but for achieving outstanding levels of lasting greatness.
The first point to remember is that people are very different when it comes to how they perform in complex jobs. Research shows that the difference in performance grows exponentially with the complexity of the job. While a star blue collar worker on a traditional assembly line would be 40% more productive than a typical worker, that performance advantage can be 240% for a star insurance salesman, and more than 1,000 % for star workers in more complex jobs such as a computer programmer or an account manager of a professional service firm. Thus CEOs performance, given the complexity of the job, will have a huge spread. Therefore, the key debate should not be about how much and how to pay to the CEO, but rather about how to make sure that the best CEO is in place, and boards should focus much more, and much better, on that question.
Second, it is important to understand the basics of motivation. The stronger source of motivation is internal and not external, though external incentives can help as long as they are applied to the right people and properly aligned with internal motivators. However, external motivators are tricky. Recent research from neuroscience has demonstrated that our brain has an altruism center which is separate and quite distinct from the center aroused by financial incentives. Financial incentives trigger one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, which has traditionally been associated with our "wild side." Scientists call this region the "pleasure center" because it is linked with the "high" that results from drugs, sex, and gambling. Furthermore, research shows that the pleasure center and the altruism center cannot both function at the same time: One or the other is in control. Finally, it turns out that when the pleasure and altruism centers go head to head, the pleasure center seems to be able to hijack the altruism center. In other words, there is a neurophysiological reason why exaggerated financial incentives can override our altruistic motives. For this reason, companies should make sure that financial incentives are not exaggerated and are in any case properly aligned with the desirable objectives of building lasting greatness.
Third, as mentioned, research seems to show that the impact of compensation systems (going beyond the obvious basic conditions) for achieving outstanding levels of lasting greatness appears to be quite limited. As I highlight in my book on great people decisions, when Jim Collins was asked how important executive compensation and incentive decisions are for building a great company he concluded, after 112 analyses, that his research could find no pattern. In other words, executive compensation appears to play no significant role in determining which companies become great. His conclusion strongly reinforces the argument that decisions about whom to pay in the first place are much more important than how much or how.
Still, companies need to pay reasonably well in order to attract and retain the right people in the first place. However, the purpose of compensation in my view and Jim's research is not to "motivate" the right behaviors from the wrong people. Compensation should be reasonable because it is part of human nature to expect fair treatment when it comes to compensation, which should be somehow proportional to our efforts and/or results. This sense of a fair deal seems to be genetically anchored. Even primates respond with aggression or anger when they feel unfairly treated. This has been revealed by some fascinating research with capuchin monkeys. In their experiments the primatologists created a market in which monkeys were trained to give them a pebble in exchange for food. While 95% of the monkeys participated in that market initially, when relative rewards became unfair only 20% of the monkeys continued to trade... and some got so frustrated they simply tossed away their pebbles!
Dear Mr.
A widespread misconception in the business is giving wrong signals to people about the system of compensation or remuneration for work performed. It is common in my country to pay more to the employee who has better marketed and left behind to those that can not display their virtues that are even higher than the first. This creates a huge business wear and a loss of opportunities to exploit the hidden talents of employees. Companies should promote equal opportunities for all employees to show their abilities to work and not only boasts of effectiveness.
- Posted by Alonso Sarmiento
July 2, 2009 10:28 PM
1:20 PM Thursday July 2, 2009
by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz
Tags:Boards, Compensation, Human resources, Job search, Leadership transitions
Having read every posting and response so far in the debate, I see that everyone has naturally focused either on the moral and practical appropriateness of how much to pay, or on practical suggestions on how to pay. That is all very good when it comes to avoiding scandals and abuses, and will to some extent improve performance and value creation.
But the real aim should be not just to avoid public frustration and excess, but to aim for a much more ambitious objective -- to ensure that CEOs and other leaders make the greatest potential contribution towards building lasting greatness. Whom you pay is much more important than how much you pay, and even how you pay.
I base this assertion on more than 20 years of global executive search experience, as well as current research on motivation based on neuroscience, and the best research I've seen regarding the impact of compensation systems not just to avoid mistakes or promote performance but for achieving outstanding levels of lasting greatness.
The first point to remember is that people are very different when it comes to how they perform in complex jobs. Research shows that the difference in performance grows exponentially with the complexity of the job. While a star blue collar worker on a traditional assembly line would be 40% more productive than a typical worker, that performance advantage can be 240% for a star insurance salesman, and more than 1,000 % for star workers in more complex jobs such as a computer programmer or an account manager of a professional service firm. Thus CEOs performance, given the complexity of the job, will have a huge spread. Therefore, the key debate should not be about how much and how to pay to the CEO, but rather about how to make sure that the best CEO is in place, and boards should focus much more, and much better, on that question.
Second, it is important to understand the basics of motivation. The stronger source of motivation is internal and not external, though external incentives can help as long as they are applied to the right people and properly aligned with internal motivators. However, external motivators are tricky. Recent research from neuroscience has demonstrated that our brain has an altruism center which is separate and quite distinct from the center aroused by financial incentives. Financial incentives trigger one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, which has traditionally been associated with our "wild side." Scientists call this region the "pleasure center" because it is linked with the "high" that results from drugs, sex, and gambling. Furthermore, research shows that the pleasure center and the altruism center cannot both function at the same time: One or the other is in control. Finally, it turns out that when the pleasure and altruism centers go head to head, the pleasure center seems to be able to hijack the altruism center. In other words, there is a neurophysiological reason why exaggerated financial incentives can override our altruistic motives. For this reason, companies should make sure that financial incentives are not exaggerated and are in any case properly aligned with the desirable objectives of building lasting greatness.
Third, as mentioned, research seems to show that the impact of compensation systems (going beyond the obvious basic conditions) for achieving outstanding levels of lasting greatness appears to be quite limited. As I highlight in my book on great people decisions, when Jim Collins was asked how important executive compensation and incentive decisions are for building a great company he concluded, after 112 analyses, that his research could find no pattern. In other words, executive compensation appears to play no significant role in determining which companies become great. His conclusion strongly reinforces the argument that decisions about whom to pay in the first place are much more important than how much or how.
Still, companies need to pay reasonably well in order to attract and retain the right people in the first place. However, the purpose of compensation in my view and Jim's research is not to "motivate" the right behaviors from the wrong people. Compensation should be reasonable because it is part of human nature to expect fair treatment when it comes to compensation, which should be somehow proportional to our efforts and/or results. This sense of a fair deal seems to be genetically anchored. Even primates respond with aggression or anger when they feel unfairly treated. This has been revealed by some fascinating research with capuchin monkeys. In their experiments the primatologists created a market in which monkeys were trained to give them a pebble in exchange for food. While 95% of the monkeys participated in that market initially, when relative rewards became unfair only 20% of the monkeys continued to trade... and some got so frustrated they simply tossed away their pebbles!
Dear Mr.
A widespread misconception in the business is giving wrong signals to people about the system of compensation or remuneration for work performed. It is common in my country to pay more to the employee who has better marketed and left behind to those that can not display their virtues that are even higher than the first. This creates a huge business wear and a loss of opportunities to exploit the hidden talents of employees. Companies should promote equal opportunities for all employees to show their abilities to work and not only boasts of effectiveness.
- Posted by Alonso Sarmiento
July 2, 2009 10:28 PM
sábado, 13 de junio de 2009
martes, 5 de mayo de 2009
Get Some Perspective on Swine Flu
Panic seems to be spreading faster than the H1N1 (swine) flu. Egypt proposed killing all of the pigs in the country. China is quarantining Mexican nationals without any sign that they might be sick. The Vice President warned against traveling in confined spaces, like the subway. Frightened fliers kicked a man off a United Airlines flight because he had a cold. (United, at least, rebooked and upgraded the poor guy with the sniffles.) Even in my office there’s been debate over the effectiveness of various types of faces masks.
But when you start looking at the numbers of confirmed swine flu cases, it just doesn’t look that bad:
As of this morning, 1124 people worldwide have been diagnosed with swine flu, and 26 people have died. Out of a population of 6.7 billion.
Think it’s worse if you look only at the United States? Think again. 286 people diagnosed and 1 death in a population of 304 million.
What about Mexico, where this may have begun? 590 people diagnosed and 25 deaths. Population: 110 million.
For comparison, let’s try looking at the annual number of deaths by various causes in the United States, courtesy of the CDC*.
Cardiovascular disease: 856,030
Lung cancer: 159,292
Influenza and pneumonia: 63,001
Motor vehicle accidents: 45,343
Breast cancer: 41,491
Homicide: 18,124
Asthma: 3,884
Peptic ulcer: 3,478
Malnutrition: 3,003
Hodgkin’s disease: 1,272
Pregnancy and childbirth: 760
Meningitis: 669
Tuberculosis: 648
Whooping cough: 31
I don’t mean to imply that the swine flu couldn’t turn into something really bad. But right now the situation appears to be mild, with the CDC and the WHO and other health authorities having things under control. (Isn’t that why we hire these people?) Does it make sense to avoid public spaces or lock yourself in your home? Do we quarantine everyone who is sniffling through allergy season? Swine flu might not go away for a while, but if you start worrying now, you might give yourself an ulcer or a heart attack, and those are far more deadly than swine flu at the moment.
Instead, take sensible precautions, such as washing your hands, covering your coughs and sneezes with a tissue, avoid touching your mouth, nose and eyes and staying home if you’re sick. Of course you should pay attention to what is going on in your neighborhood and act accordingly. But like I said last week: Don’t panic.
*Note: This data, from 2005, was published in the National Vital Statistics Report, April 24, 2008. Numbers come from Table 10, All Ages.
1 Comment »
Dear Sir.
It is terrible to be sick, but the worst it is the fear of not to have a cure, whether for economic reasons or for medical reasons. When we listen that the virus is new and there is no vaccine or antiviral drugs sufficient to cure if the disease spreads, then is when panics installs. It is much better to take extreme measures, to avoid that a problem of sanity become a problem of national stability.
Comment by Alonso Sarmiento — May 6, 2009 @ 1:15 am
But when you start looking at the numbers of confirmed swine flu cases, it just doesn’t look that bad:
As of this morning, 1124 people worldwide have been diagnosed with swine flu, and 26 people have died. Out of a population of 6.7 billion.
Think it’s worse if you look only at the United States? Think again. 286 people diagnosed and 1 death in a population of 304 million.
What about Mexico, where this may have begun? 590 people diagnosed and 25 deaths. Population: 110 million.
For comparison, let’s try looking at the annual number of deaths by various causes in the United States, courtesy of the CDC*.
Cardiovascular disease: 856,030
Lung cancer: 159,292
Influenza and pneumonia: 63,001
Motor vehicle accidents: 45,343
Breast cancer: 41,491
Homicide: 18,124
Asthma: 3,884
Peptic ulcer: 3,478
Malnutrition: 3,003
Hodgkin’s disease: 1,272
Pregnancy and childbirth: 760
Meningitis: 669
Tuberculosis: 648
Whooping cough: 31
I don’t mean to imply that the swine flu couldn’t turn into something really bad. But right now the situation appears to be mild, with the CDC and the WHO and other health authorities having things under control. (Isn’t that why we hire these people?) Does it make sense to avoid public spaces or lock yourself in your home? Do we quarantine everyone who is sniffling through allergy season? Swine flu might not go away for a while, but if you start worrying now, you might give yourself an ulcer or a heart attack, and those are far more deadly than swine flu at the moment.
Instead, take sensible precautions, such as washing your hands, covering your coughs and sneezes with a tissue, avoid touching your mouth, nose and eyes and staying home if you’re sick. Of course you should pay attention to what is going on in your neighborhood and act accordingly. But like I said last week: Don’t panic.
*Note: This data, from 2005, was published in the National Vital Statistics Report, April 24, 2008. Numbers come from Table 10, All Ages.
1 Comment »
Dear Sir.
It is terrible to be sick, but the worst it is the fear of not to have a cure, whether for economic reasons or for medical reasons. When we listen that the virus is new and there is no vaccine or antiviral drugs sufficient to cure if the disease spreads, then is when panics installs. It is much better to take extreme measures, to avoid that a problem of sanity become a problem of national stability.
Comment by Alonso Sarmiento — May 6, 2009 @ 1:15 am
lunes, 23 de marzo de 2009
Slumdogs vs. Millionaires
Although it's hard to believe, Wall Street's Gucci-wearing financiers actually have quite a bit in common with slum dwellers in Kenya and Mumbai at the moment—they're both mired in shadow economies, where basic facts like who owns what are nearly impossible to determine. That murkiness, says Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, is the source of the continuing credit crunch gripping New York, London and other financial capitals, and a basic fact of life for much of the developing world. (Read de Soto's article on the subject here. De Soto, who now runs the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, a global think tank, spoke with NEWSWEEK's Barrett Sheridan from his office in Lima. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Your bestseller, "The Mystery of Capital," tackles the idea of property rights and their impact on economic development.
Hernando de Soto: What makes a market economy possible is that people are able to find out facts about each other and about their enterprises in spite of the fact that they don't have direct physical contact. So the question is, how do you get to know things? How do you get facts? You will find out that most of the facts you want are in property papers. One of the things that developing countries miss is that close to 80 percent of their enterprises are actually not fully recorded as property.
And the simplest way in which this idea takes shape is that a lot of poor people in the developing world don't have deeds to their houses.
They don't have recorded deeds. They may actually have a deed, but it's not in the knowledge system, therefore you can't read about it.
So this knowledge of who owns what is not standardized.
It's not standardized and it's not distributed. I may have a manuscript here that actually says—from the King of Spain—that ever since the Spaniards landed in Peru, I own this land. But you may not know about it unless I record it.
Why does ownership matter so much?
Ownership means that I have something to lose. If you're a banker, it means that you've got collateral. It also means that I'm credible, so you can give me credit. When you think about it, whether it's ownership, whether it's credit, whether it's capital, whether it's identification, none of the things that make a modern economy are possible without property.
How does this relate to the financial crisis?
The enormous amount of derivatives that had poured into the market—there are close to $600 trillion of these papers around—are also not recorded in a global or centralized manner, or in a manner that allows you to begin to quantify them. [Former SEC Chairman Christopher] Cox thought that maybe the toxic part of all of these assets was $1 trillion to $2 trillion. [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner told us there's maybe $3 trillion or $4 trillion. Nobody really knows, so in a way [they've created an] informal or shadow economy. This unidentified paper is the source of uncertainty and the credit contraction.
So they're unidentified in the same way that ownership of, say, a slum in Peru or Africa is unidentified.
That's right. We have worked in places like Tanzania and Egypt and Ethiopia. When you go visit a home there you don't find justification for it through the books. In other words, it's not centrally available information. When you talk about shadow economies in many places, it's not only the economy of gangsters. It's also economies that are legal in every respect except for the fact that the paper, which backs up the ownership or the evidence that something exists, is not easily and publicly available. That creates the shadow.
Has the subprime mortgage market become a shadow economy?
Subprime mortgages are not a shadow economy. But what happened is that a lot of these mortgages got repackaged into securities. Then they became collateralized debt obligations and some of these mortgages were sliced and diced and put into tranches. When some of these mortgages went sour and people started defaulting on their payments, then of course a lot of the securities tied to them also started defaulting. But when you try and trace who's ultimately responsible for the value of that paper, you couldn't find it. That's the part of the market that has become the shadow.
So basically ill-defined property rights in the subprime mortgage sector caused a meltdown. Does the same happen in the developing world?
Yes. That shadow hopefully is a temporary condition in the United States and in Western Europe. And it might pass in a year or 10 years, but it will pass. That passing condition that's occurring now in developed countries, that's a chronic condition in developing countries. We're always chronically in credit crunches—because you don't know who owns what, nobody dares lend to somebody else. Bringing the law to emerging markets is possibly the most important measure that can be taken to help these countries become rich. Look at the Iranians, look at the North Koreans—they're building nuclear plants. Look at the computer—they're being built in northern India. The issue isn't the expansion of technology. We can all get it, borrow it, buy it or steal it. The issue is how do you get a legal system that allows people to cooperate so as to create more complex systems and objects.
So at this point, a Wall Street banker in a $10,000 suit is encountering basically the same problem that Nairobi slum dwellers have had to deal with for decades or more.
Absolutely. The difference, however, is that in Nairobi they are still struggling to understand that a property system is the best way that they can do things. In the United States, every piece of land, every house, every automobile, every airplane, every manuscript for a film, every patent is written up and recorded and described. There's only one thing in the United States which is not recorded in such a way and that's derivatives. We're only talking about 7 percent of the subprime market being in default, yet it is causing a major contraction in your economy. You're not getting your credit flowing because you don't know what is where and who it belongs to.
What's the answer? How do we assign "property rights" to derivatives?
The banks and the holders of all of these instruments have got to report them in such a way that your government and the public knows who owns what and where. Once the light shines, you will know who's solvent, who's insolvent. You'll be able to have a clean debate as to who to help and who not to help. And you're going to have a much better idea of the consequences of not helping or helping. Right now you're talking about all of those issues, but you still don't have the facts. So the first thing is to have the law require those people who own these things to fess up.
It sounds so simple when you put it like that, but I guess there are special interests blocking that from happening.
I am convinced that there are special interests. Creating property rights in the United States [was much easier to do], because a lot of the land, the assets, the woods and the rural areas actually belonged to nobody, or they belonged to indigenous people or Mexicans. But in Britain, those who owned property were able to resist registration throughout part of the 19th century. They even argued that public knowledge of who owned what could eventually lead to kidnappers or things of that kind. And they managed to avoid the light being shined [up until 1925]. The fact is that a market economy works on information. If you don't have the facts, you don't have a market and you can't have justice.
Have we in the West forgotten that?
Einstein was credited with having said, "What does the fish know about the water in which it swims?" You've got to be a human being and look at it from the outside—then you'll understand why the fish lives where it lives. So I think what's happened is that Westerners got property [rights] very early on, about 200 years ago if you're American, and you've grown accustomed to it. You're the fish in the water.
© 2009
Member Comments
Report Abuse Reply Posted By: lawyerinperu @ 03/23/2009 11:34:43 PMDear Sir.
My compatriot Hernando de Soto is right much like my countrywoman Mrs Carmen Rhor that comments the note; nevertheless I would add that all this is the old history of the powerful ones that privatizes the gains but they socialize the losses. In the measurement that advance in the democratization of the society where all are really equal before the Law and where each individual can obtain its place under the sun, even though with economic differences; it will be possible to be developing one more a happier society.
Alonso Sarmiento
http://alonsosarmiento.googlepages.com
NEWSWEEK: Your bestseller, "The Mystery of Capital," tackles the idea of property rights and their impact on economic development.
Hernando de Soto: What makes a market economy possible is that people are able to find out facts about each other and about their enterprises in spite of the fact that they don't have direct physical contact. So the question is, how do you get to know things? How do you get facts? You will find out that most of the facts you want are in property papers. One of the things that developing countries miss is that close to 80 percent of their enterprises are actually not fully recorded as property.
And the simplest way in which this idea takes shape is that a lot of poor people in the developing world don't have deeds to their houses.
They don't have recorded deeds. They may actually have a deed, but it's not in the knowledge system, therefore you can't read about it.
So this knowledge of who owns what is not standardized.
It's not standardized and it's not distributed. I may have a manuscript here that actually says—from the King of Spain—that ever since the Spaniards landed in Peru, I own this land. But you may not know about it unless I record it.
Why does ownership matter so much?
Ownership means that I have something to lose. If you're a banker, it means that you've got collateral. It also means that I'm credible, so you can give me credit. When you think about it, whether it's ownership, whether it's credit, whether it's capital, whether it's identification, none of the things that make a modern economy are possible without property.
How does this relate to the financial crisis?
The enormous amount of derivatives that had poured into the market—there are close to $600 trillion of these papers around—are also not recorded in a global or centralized manner, or in a manner that allows you to begin to quantify them. [Former SEC Chairman Christopher] Cox thought that maybe the toxic part of all of these assets was $1 trillion to $2 trillion. [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner told us there's maybe $3 trillion or $4 trillion. Nobody really knows, so in a way [they've created an] informal or shadow economy. This unidentified paper is the source of uncertainty and the credit contraction.
So they're unidentified in the same way that ownership of, say, a slum in Peru or Africa is unidentified.
That's right. We have worked in places like Tanzania and Egypt and Ethiopia. When you go visit a home there you don't find justification for it through the books. In other words, it's not centrally available information. When you talk about shadow economies in many places, it's not only the economy of gangsters. It's also economies that are legal in every respect except for the fact that the paper, which backs up the ownership or the evidence that something exists, is not easily and publicly available. That creates the shadow.
Has the subprime mortgage market become a shadow economy?
Subprime mortgages are not a shadow economy. But what happened is that a lot of these mortgages got repackaged into securities. Then they became collateralized debt obligations and some of these mortgages were sliced and diced and put into tranches. When some of these mortgages went sour and people started defaulting on their payments, then of course a lot of the securities tied to them also started defaulting. But when you try and trace who's ultimately responsible for the value of that paper, you couldn't find it. That's the part of the market that has become the shadow.
So basically ill-defined property rights in the subprime mortgage sector caused a meltdown. Does the same happen in the developing world?
Yes. That shadow hopefully is a temporary condition in the United States and in Western Europe. And it might pass in a year or 10 years, but it will pass. That passing condition that's occurring now in developed countries, that's a chronic condition in developing countries. We're always chronically in credit crunches—because you don't know who owns what, nobody dares lend to somebody else. Bringing the law to emerging markets is possibly the most important measure that can be taken to help these countries become rich. Look at the Iranians, look at the North Koreans—they're building nuclear plants. Look at the computer—they're being built in northern India. The issue isn't the expansion of technology. We can all get it, borrow it, buy it or steal it. The issue is how do you get a legal system that allows people to cooperate so as to create more complex systems and objects.
So at this point, a Wall Street banker in a $10,000 suit is encountering basically the same problem that Nairobi slum dwellers have had to deal with for decades or more.
Absolutely. The difference, however, is that in Nairobi they are still struggling to understand that a property system is the best way that they can do things. In the United States, every piece of land, every house, every automobile, every airplane, every manuscript for a film, every patent is written up and recorded and described. There's only one thing in the United States which is not recorded in such a way and that's derivatives. We're only talking about 7 percent of the subprime market being in default, yet it is causing a major contraction in your economy. You're not getting your credit flowing because you don't know what is where and who it belongs to.
What's the answer? How do we assign "property rights" to derivatives?
The banks and the holders of all of these instruments have got to report them in such a way that your government and the public knows who owns what and where. Once the light shines, you will know who's solvent, who's insolvent. You'll be able to have a clean debate as to who to help and who not to help. And you're going to have a much better idea of the consequences of not helping or helping. Right now you're talking about all of those issues, but you still don't have the facts. So the first thing is to have the law require those people who own these things to fess up.
It sounds so simple when you put it like that, but I guess there are special interests blocking that from happening.
I am convinced that there are special interests. Creating property rights in the United States [was much easier to do], because a lot of the land, the assets, the woods and the rural areas actually belonged to nobody, or they belonged to indigenous people or Mexicans. But in Britain, those who owned property were able to resist registration throughout part of the 19th century. They even argued that public knowledge of who owned what could eventually lead to kidnappers or things of that kind. And they managed to avoid the light being shined [up until 1925]. The fact is that a market economy works on information. If you don't have the facts, you don't have a market and you can't have justice.
Have we in the West forgotten that?
Einstein was credited with having said, "What does the fish know about the water in which it swims?" You've got to be a human being and look at it from the outside—then you'll understand why the fish lives where it lives. So I think what's happened is that Westerners got property [rights] very early on, about 200 years ago if you're American, and you've grown accustomed to it. You're the fish in the water.
© 2009
Member Comments
Report Abuse Reply Posted By: lawyerinperu @ 03/23/2009 11:34:43 PMDear Sir.
My compatriot Hernando de Soto is right much like my countrywoman Mrs Carmen Rhor that comments the note; nevertheless I would add that all this is the old history of the powerful ones that privatizes the gains but they socialize the losses. In the measurement that advance in the democratization of the society where all are really equal before the Law and where each individual can obtain its place under the sun, even though with economic differences; it will be possible to be developing one more a happier society.
Alonso Sarmiento
http://alonsosarmiento.googlepages.com
sábado, 14 de marzo de 2009
Aquaculture May Replace Wild Fish Stocks
A new report from the United Nations notes that farmed fish are beginning to make up for the decline in wild catches
By Nathanial Gronewold
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released its latest report on global fisheries and aquaculture with no new 2008 catch and production figures, as the agency continues to piece together 2007 data.
Nevertheless, FAO is sounding an alarm on gradual declines in wild catch fishing production and depletion of stocks, while being careful to note that growth in the global aquaculture industry is largely making up the difference and seems poised to overtake capture fishing as the world's leading source of seafood.
Efforts to reduce the overcapacity in fishing fleets, fed by generous subsidies from European and Asian nations, have failed, and progress toward reversing the depletion of the ocean's resources is too slow, the agency warns.
FAO is also warning governments to do more to understand the likely effects of climate change on fishing and how best to adapt to the challenge.
The most recent data suggest that the vast majority of the world's wild fish stocks either are being overexploited or have reached their maximum productive capacity as fishing fleets have expanded and moved into previously untapped regions of the seas. Twenty percent of fish stocks have room to grow, according to the latest available data.
"Overall, 80 percent of the world fish stocks for which assessment information is available are reported as fully exploited or overexploited and, thus, requiring effective and precautionary management," FAO says in its report.
The northeast Atlantic Ocean is among the regions suffering from the highest numbers of overexploited stocks, the report says. That area is home to a popular bluefin tuna fishery, where European fleets have been openly breaking their catch quotas for years.
The West Indian Ocean and Northwest Pacific fisheries also suffer from overfishing.
Trends in the data from 2005 to 2006 suggested that the condition of the world's wild fish stocks is worsening, and most observers widely expect 2007 and 2008 figures to show the same. But FAO officials in Rome say they are still in the process of simply gathering 2007 numbers and have yet to request catch figures for last year, a reflection of constraints on time and manpower at the fisheries and aquaculture department.
"You're talking about a huge amount of data," said FAO spokesman George Kourous. "Not all countries are in a position to report it in real time. Often, it gets reported in mixed formats or with different measures."
Still, China likely retains its top spot in wild-fish production, with 17 million metric tons during 2006. Peru and the United States round out the top three, at 7 million metric tons and 4.9 million metric tons, respectively. The northwest Pacific Ocean is the world's most productive fishery, supplying the world with 21.6 million metric tons in 2006.
Early 2007 data suggest worldwide production from capture fisheries, excluding China, had risen by at least 3 percent in 2007. Last year, China revised downward its 2006 catch figures by 2 million metric tons, citing enhanced data collection, throwing into doubt its 2007 reported catch numbers.
Anchoveta, Alaska pollock and skipjack tuna are the world's most heavily exploited wild fish species. Capture fisheries production has largely stayed the same over the past few years, rising and falling between 90 million to 94 million metric tons annually, hitting 92 million metric tons in 2006. Ebbs and flows in the catch numbers can largely be explained by the El Niño weather phenomenon, which has a strong effect on Peruvian anchoveta, Kourous explained.
But the world's three largest fisheries could now be feeling the effects of depletion due to overfishing. Last year, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration closed the Alaska pollock season early after alarms were raised over low catch numbers, sending prices for the fish spiking temporarily.
Aquaculture rising FAO figures show that aquaculture's share of the global fish industry continues to rise, with China leading the surge.
"After growing steadily, particularly in the last four decades, aquaculture is for the first time set to contribute half of the fish consumed by the human population worldwide," said Ichiro Nomura, assistant director general of FAO's fisheries and aquaculture department. "This reflects not only the vitality of the aquaculture sector but also global economic growth and continuing developments in fish processing and trade."
In 2006, China grew 34.4 million metric tons of fish on farms, far outstripping the 17 million metric tons that nation caught on the open ocean. China accounts for roughly 66 percent of the world's total aquaculture production in tonnage, and that country exported $9.3 billion worth in 2007.
Worldwide aquaculture has grown on average by about 6.9 percent annually in recent years. FAO estimates that the industry expanded by a further 7 percent in 2007, but 2008 production growth numbers could be affected by worsening economic conditions later that year. FAO had already earlier reported that growth in aquaculture in China appears to be leveling off.
Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
Comentario
Dear Sir.
In Peru, my country, there is the problem of the excess of warehouse, that is to say, an amount of fishing boats far beyond the possibilities of the biomass. Even though periods of prohibition in the fishing settle down, this comes causing the ruin from many artisan fishermen and the depredation of our sea blessed by the cold current of Humbolt.
Alonso Sarmiento
By Nathanial Gronewold
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released its latest report on global fisheries and aquaculture with no new 2008 catch and production figures, as the agency continues to piece together 2007 data.
Nevertheless, FAO is sounding an alarm on gradual declines in wild catch fishing production and depletion of stocks, while being careful to note that growth in the global aquaculture industry is largely making up the difference and seems poised to overtake capture fishing as the world's leading source of seafood.
Efforts to reduce the overcapacity in fishing fleets, fed by generous subsidies from European and Asian nations, have failed, and progress toward reversing the depletion of the ocean's resources is too slow, the agency warns.
FAO is also warning governments to do more to understand the likely effects of climate change on fishing and how best to adapt to the challenge.
The most recent data suggest that the vast majority of the world's wild fish stocks either are being overexploited or have reached their maximum productive capacity as fishing fleets have expanded and moved into previously untapped regions of the seas. Twenty percent of fish stocks have room to grow, according to the latest available data.
"Overall, 80 percent of the world fish stocks for which assessment information is available are reported as fully exploited or overexploited and, thus, requiring effective and precautionary management," FAO says in its report.
The northeast Atlantic Ocean is among the regions suffering from the highest numbers of overexploited stocks, the report says. That area is home to a popular bluefin tuna fishery, where European fleets have been openly breaking their catch quotas for years.
The West Indian Ocean and Northwest Pacific fisheries also suffer from overfishing.
Trends in the data from 2005 to 2006 suggested that the condition of the world's wild fish stocks is worsening, and most observers widely expect 2007 and 2008 figures to show the same. But FAO officials in Rome say they are still in the process of simply gathering 2007 numbers and have yet to request catch figures for last year, a reflection of constraints on time and manpower at the fisheries and aquaculture department.
"You're talking about a huge amount of data," said FAO spokesman George Kourous. "Not all countries are in a position to report it in real time. Often, it gets reported in mixed formats or with different measures."
Still, China likely retains its top spot in wild-fish production, with 17 million metric tons during 2006. Peru and the United States round out the top three, at 7 million metric tons and 4.9 million metric tons, respectively. The northwest Pacific Ocean is the world's most productive fishery, supplying the world with 21.6 million metric tons in 2006.
Early 2007 data suggest worldwide production from capture fisheries, excluding China, had risen by at least 3 percent in 2007. Last year, China revised downward its 2006 catch figures by 2 million metric tons, citing enhanced data collection, throwing into doubt its 2007 reported catch numbers.
Anchoveta, Alaska pollock and skipjack tuna are the world's most heavily exploited wild fish species. Capture fisheries production has largely stayed the same over the past few years, rising and falling between 90 million to 94 million metric tons annually, hitting 92 million metric tons in 2006. Ebbs and flows in the catch numbers can largely be explained by the El Niño weather phenomenon, which has a strong effect on Peruvian anchoveta, Kourous explained.
But the world's three largest fisheries could now be feeling the effects of depletion due to overfishing. Last year, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration closed the Alaska pollock season early after alarms were raised over low catch numbers, sending prices for the fish spiking temporarily.
Aquaculture rising FAO figures show that aquaculture's share of the global fish industry continues to rise, with China leading the surge.
"After growing steadily, particularly in the last four decades, aquaculture is for the first time set to contribute half of the fish consumed by the human population worldwide," said Ichiro Nomura, assistant director general of FAO's fisheries and aquaculture department. "This reflects not only the vitality of the aquaculture sector but also global economic growth and continuing developments in fish processing and trade."
In 2006, China grew 34.4 million metric tons of fish on farms, far outstripping the 17 million metric tons that nation caught on the open ocean. China accounts for roughly 66 percent of the world's total aquaculture production in tonnage, and that country exported $9.3 billion worth in 2007.
Worldwide aquaculture has grown on average by about 6.9 percent annually in recent years. FAO estimates that the industry expanded by a further 7 percent in 2007, but 2008 production growth numbers could be affected by worsening economic conditions later that year. FAO had already earlier reported that growth in aquaculture in China appears to be leveling off.
Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
Comentario
Dear Sir.
In Peru, my country, there is the problem of the excess of warehouse, that is to say, an amount of fishing boats far beyond the possibilities of the biomass. Even though periods of prohibition in the fishing settle down, this comes causing the ruin from many artisan fishermen and the depredation of our sea blessed by the cold current of Humbolt.
Alonso Sarmiento
viernes, 20 de febrero de 2009
The Hard Cases
Will Obama institute a new kind of preventive detention for terrorist suspects?by Jane Mayer
February 23, 2009
The last “enemy combatant” being detained in America is incarcerated at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina—a tan, low-slung building situated amid acres of grassy swampland. The prisoner, known internally as EC#2, is an alleged Al Qaeda sleeper agent named Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. He has been held in isolation in the brig for more than five years, although he has never stood trial or been convicted of any crime. Under rules established by the Bush Administration, suspected terrorists such as Marri were denied the legal protections traditionally afforded by the Constitution. Unless the Obama Administration overhauls the nation’s terrorism policies, Marri—who claims that he is innocent—will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
On September 10, 2001, Marri, a citizen of Qatar, who is now forty-three, came to America with his family. He had a student visa, and his ostensible purpose was to study computer programming at a small university in Peoria, Illinois. That December, he was arrested as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. However, when Marri was on the verge of standing trial, in June, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the military to seize him and hold him indefinitely. The Bush Administration contended that America was in a full-fledged war against terrorists, and that the President could therefore invoke extraordinary executive powers to detain Marri until the end of hostilities, on the basis of still secret evidence. That day, Marri was put on a military jet to Charleston, and since then he has been living as the only prisoner in an eighty-bed high-security wing of the brig, with no visits from family, friends, or the media.
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who has taken the lead role in Marri’s legal defense, says that the Bush Administration’s decision to leave him in sustained isolation was akin to stranding him on a desert island. “It’s a Robinson Crusoe-like situation,” he told me. In 2005, Hafetz challenged the constitutionality of Marri’s imprisonment. A lower court affirmed the government’s right to detain him indefinitely. After several appeals, the case is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court in April. Hafetz calls the Marri case a pivotal test of “the most far-reaching use of detention powers” ever asserted by an American President.
The Court’s calendar requires the Obama Administration to file a reply to the challenge by March 23rd. Unless some kind of diversionary action is taken—such as sending Marri home to Qatar, or working out a plea agreement—the Court’s schedule will likely force the Obama Administration to offer quick answers to a host of complicated questions about its approach to fighting terrorism.
John Bellinger III, who served as the counsel to the State Department under President Bush, says of officials in the Obama Administration, “They will have to either put up or shut up. Do they maintain the Bush Administration position, and keep holding Marri as an enemy combatant? They have to come up with a legal theory.”
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisAmong the issues to be decided, Hafetz says, is “the question of who is a soldier, and who is a civilian. Is the fight against terrorism war, or is it not war? How far does the battlefield extend? In the past, they treated Peoria as a battlefield. Can an American be arrested in his own home and jailed indefinitely, on the say-so of the President?” Hafetz wants the Supreme Court to rule that indefinite executive detention is illegal, and he hopes that Obama will withdraw Bush’s executive order labelling Marri an enemy combatant, and issue a new one classifying him as a civilian. This shift would allow Marri either to be charged with crimes or to be released.
The Obama Administration’s strategy in the Marri case will almost certainly establish legal principles that will have ramifications for future cases, as well as for the two hundred and forty or so similarly designated “unlawful enemy combatants” held in the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During the Bush years, the designation encompassed not just members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban but also anyone who associated with them, supported them, or supported organizations associated with them, even if unwittingly. In 2004, a Bush Administration lawyer told a judge that, in theory, an enemy combatant could even be “a little old lady in Switzerland” whose charitable donations had been channelled, without her awareness, to Al Qaeda front groups.
If the Marri case reaches the Supreme Court, it will test the limits of such theories. The case is therefore being closely watched by civil libertarians on both the left and the right. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal advocacy organization, and the Cato and Rutherford Institutes, which lean to the right, are among the many legal groups that have signed eighteen amicus briefs on Marri’s behalf. Individual lawyers who have taken up his cause include Nicholas Katzenbach, the Attorney General in the Johnson Administration, and William Sessions, who was appointed director of the F.B.I. by President Reagan. The editorial page of the Times has written repeatedly about the case, demanding that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ affirmation of Marri’s military detention be reversed: “People accused of bad deeds should be tried in court—not in sham proceedings. They should be put in jail—not secret detention.”
No matter how Obama responds to the case, his decision is likely to arouse controversy. Hafetz says, “If President Obama is serious about restoring the rule of law in America, they can’t defend what’s been done to Marri. They would be completely buying into the Bush Administration’s war on terror.” This view is widely held by Obama’s political base. Yet the political risks of change are obvious. In 2004, Jeffrey Rapp, an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, claimed in a sworn affidavit, without providing evidence, that Marri had met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and “offered to be an al Qaeda martyr.” The government’s theory is that Marri came to America in order to help carry out a second wave of terrorist attacks. “Al-Marri must be detained to prevent him from aiding al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States,” Rapp said in his statement, which is the sole public document offering reasons for holding him.
In early February, former Vice-President Dick Cheney increased the pressure on Obama, by warning that a catastrophic nuclear or biological terrorist attack on America would occur unless Obama kept the Bush policies in place. In an unusually contentious interview for an erstwhile high official, Cheney told Politico that the Obama Administration was “more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States.” Two days after Cheney’s remarks were published, the White House was visited by families of victims killed in the September 11th attacks and in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000. Some of those families have organized an advocacy group, Military Families United, which claims sixty thousand members, and which has circulated a petition demanding that Congress reject all efforts by the Obama Administration to relocate any detained terrorist suspects to its members’ districts.
Amid such competing viewpoints, a compromise idea has also emerged, which the Obama Administration is weighing. A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.
One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). In his first appearance before the Supreme Court, he persuaded a majority of the Justices to declare that the Guantánamo military-commission system was illegal, arguing that Congress had not authorized the commissions. Katyal’s new job is to represent the government before the Supreme Court. Given the sensitivity of this role, Katyal declined to comment for this story. But in October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.” This new system, he wrote, would give the government the “ability to temporarily detain a dangerous individual,” including in situations where “a criminal trial has failed.” There are hundreds of legal variations that could be considered, he said. In 2007, Katyal published a related essay, co-written with Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who served as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department. The essay argued that preventive detention, overseen by a congressionally authorized national-security court, was necessary to insure the “sensible” treatment of classified evidence, and to protect secret “sources and methods” of gathering intelligence. In his Web post, Katyal wrote, “I support such a security court.”
Such schemes have already stirred considerable controversy elsewhere in the world, including in Great Britain, where since 2005 some three dozen terror suspects have been detained for a time under house-arrest-like conditions, in some cases being required to wear ankle monitors, obey curfews, and refrain from using phones or the Internet. In America, such a compromise is sure to alarm many human-rights advocates and civil libertarians, who regard indefinite detention as antithetical to the American legal system’s most basic tenets. Alberto Mora, a Republican lawyer who, as general counsel of the Navy, broke with the Bush Administration after concluding that some of its brutal counterterrorism policies were potential war crimes, warns, “We simply can’t have indefinite detention. Due process and fundamental fairness make that clear.”
Marri himself is cautiously hopeful. Despite restrictions on his consumption of television and print news, he followed the Presidential campaign from inside the brig. According to Hafetz, “He’s happy about Obama, but worried he won’t be able to fulfill all the promises and expectations.” Through his lawyers, Marri, speaking publicly for the first time, said, “I am not asking to be taken at my word and to be released, although I very much want to go home to my family. All I am asking for is to be treated like every other person in the United States who is accused of a crime, including terrorism, and to be given a fair trial in an American court.”
As a candidate, Obama promised a sharp break with the Bush Administration’s counter terrorism policies. In a written statement for the Boston Globe, Obama, who taught constitutional law in the nineteen-nineties, said, “I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.” (In fact, the Bush Administration went beyond this claim, arguing that Congress had explicitly granted the President this authority, in a bill passed after the attacks.) In the Globe, Obama went on, “The detention of American citizens, without access to counsel, fair procedure, or pursuant to judicial authorization, as enemy combatants is unconstitutional.” In his Inaugural Address, Obama further underscored his differences with Bush in this area, saying, “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” A top legal adviser to Obama told me that the President also believes that legal residents in America, like Marri, are entitled to due process.
Former Bush Administration officials who were involved in its anti-terror program suggest that Obama may find it harder than expected to translate idealistic rhetoric into action. “Governing is different from campaigning,” says Bellinger, who predicts that Obama and his officials will soon discover that “they can’t just set the clocks back eight years, and try every terror suspect captured abroad in the federal courts.” Bellinger now says that the treatment of Marri was a “failed experiment.” John Ashcroft, who was Attorney General when Marri was designated an enemy combatant, makes no such apologies. Interviewed just before the Inauguration, he defended what he described as a “sound decision” to “maximize the national interest,” and predicted that, in the end, President Obama’s approach to handling terror suspects would closely mirror his own: “How will he be different? The main difference is going to be that he spells his name ‘O-b-a-m-a,’ not ‘B-u-s-h.’ ”
So far, the Obama Administration has declined to state a position on the Marri case. It’s already becoming apparent, though, that Ashcroft was mistaken in his broader point. Obama, in his first week in office, issued three executive orders, undoing many of the most controversial elements of the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation programs. Most notably, Obama declared that the Administration hoped to close Guantánamo within a year. A little noticed memorandum issued at the time of the orders was dedicated to Marri. It called for a Cabinet-level inter-agency task force, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, to review Marri’s case, with an eye toward finding alternative ways to deal with him.
The same officials will review the status of the enemy combatants held in Guantánamo. The Obama Administration has indicated that it hopes to return the majority of the detainees to other countries, or to try them in civilian and military courts. The looming question, however, is whether there is a category of terror suspect whose status precludes such options. It’s unclear whether some home countries can provide fair trials or secure prisons. More important, the high standard of evidence required in U.S. courts—guilt must be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt”—might result in dangerous individuals being set free.
Qatar has made known its interest in having Marri come home. But the Obama Administration has to decide whether he poses a recidivism risk—an assessment that has to be made, in part, on the basis of statements elicited through torture. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was waterboarded by the C.I.A., and reportedly said that Marri was a fellow-terrorist.) As such, Marri may exemplify what Greg Craig, Obama’s White House counsel, calls “the toughest question” facing the Administration as it tries to bring the Bush program within the rule of law: what to do with the so-called “third category” of detainees—suspects who may be difficult to convict under the American standards of justice, but who may pose a palpable threat if released.
Depending upon how many such “hard cases” exist, Craig says, the Administration will decide whether new laws, including possibly those enabling some sort of preventive detention, are necessary. Although the detainees from the Bush era pose the most immediate problem, he said, it’s possible that the new Administration may also want to handle future prisoners outside the existing criminal- and military-court system. “A good deal of policy research remains,” he said. “The door was not left open by accident. Obama wants the freedom to hear the recommendations of the most experienced and smartest people, on how to protect the American people while still respecting the rules of the road on liberty.” He suggested that the Administration would prefer not to go in that direction. “It’s possible but hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law,” Craig said. “Our presumption is that there is no need to create a whole new system. Our system is very capable.” Then again, the idea is not being ruled out, which may be surprising to some constituents, given Obama’s past support for civil liberties and Craig’s own record—in the early nineties, he served as the chairman of the board of the International Human Rights Law Group, an advocacy organization now known as Global Rights.
Obama’s legal team is aware that every step it takes will be seen as an indication of core convictions. Craig, who will coördinate the revamping of the Bush Administration’s legal policies on terrorism, said, “One way we’ve looked at this is that we own the solution. We don’t own the problem—it was created by the previous Administration. But we’ll be held accountable for how we handle this.”
The Obama Administration has already inflamed some members of the human-rights community. On February 9th, the Justice Department adopted the same position that Bush had taken in a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The government attempted to squelch a lawsuit initiated by a group of terrorist suspects—one of whom had allegedly been tortured in Morocco after being transferred there by the C.I.A.—on the ground that it would open up state secrets. Scott Horton, a law professor at Columbia University, characterized the new Justice Department’s position as a betrayal of the “promises of transparency and accountability” made by Obama during the campaign.
The first step in cases such as Marri’s, Craig suggests, will be to evaluate the “dangerousness” of each detainee, and to scrutinize all documents passed on by the previous Administration. “We need the facts,” he said. “And we need fresh eyes.” For years, John Ashcroft has justified the military detention of Marri as a safety precaution. “Sometimes the criminal courts are not up to it,” he told me. But, as the new team reviews Marri’s story, it will likely find ample grounds to reassess the notion that the courts can’t handle terror suspects, and that such suspects can’t be safely housed in the United States without incident.
In a recent interview, David Kelley, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who supervised the early stages of the Marri case, revealed that he had warned his bosses in the Justice Department that they were making a mistake by sidestepping the criminal courts. Kelley co-chaired the Justice Department’s nationwide investigation into the 9/11 attacks, and headed the investigations into the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; he also led the prosecution of Ramzi Yousef, in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 2003, he successfully prosecuted John Walker Lindh, the American accused of aiding the Taliban. In the interview, Kelley said he believed that the government had a strong case against Marri: he had been charged with credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent. He thought that Marri could be convicted in a matter of a few months, and sentenced to years in prison. Kelley, who is now a partner at Cahill Gordon, in Manhattan, was disappointed when, on the basis of a one-page executive order, Marri was suddenly sent to the brig. “My view is, we haven’t really exhausted the potential for using the criminal-justice system,” he said.
James Benjamin, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, is now a partner at the law firm Akin Gump. In 2008, he co-wrote a review of the Marri case, characterizing the switch to military detention as counterproductive. “Definitely, the criminal-justice system can handle someone like Marri,” he told me. “They caught him under the criminal-justice system. And, based on what we know, they were poised to convict him.” What happened to Marri before he was moved “proves the system was up to it.”
Marty Lederman, a former Georgetown Law professor, whom Obama has appointed to be a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, argues that the Bush Administration’s claims to be acting out of necessity were “nonsense.” In an essay published before he joined the Administration, Lederman wrote, “Even if everything the government alleges about al-Marri’s ties to al Qaeda are true,” he was not a danger “because he was already incapacitated—imprisoned—within the criminal-justice system, where his trial was pending.”
Marri had aroused the suspicion of law-enforcement officers almost as soon as he arrived in the Midwest with his wife, Maha, who spoke no English, and their five young children. His timing was conspicuous—he arrived in Chicago the day before 9/11. The next day, the family took a hundred-and-fifty-mile taxi ride to Peoria.
Marri enrolled in computer-science classes at Bradley University, where he and a brother had obtained undergraduate degrees. Qatar, which has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world, pays college tuition for many of its citizens, and several members of the Marri family have attended school in America. According to the Washington Post, as an undergraduate at Bradley Marri wore a ponytail and was known for his partying and his quick sense of humor. He returned to Qatar in 1991, after graduation. Later that decade, a palace coup in Qatar shook his family, eventually prompting some members to leave for Saudi Arabia, where many of his brothers and his wife now live. Marri reportedly ended up in Afghanistan. According to the sworn statement given by Jeffrey Rapp, the D.I.A. analyst, at some point between 1996 and 1998 Marri was trained in chemical weaponry at an Al Qaeda camp there. (Marri, through his lawyer, denied these allegations.)
Patrick Theros, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Qatar during this period, is skeptical of the terrorism allegations. “I’ve never heard anyone say this Qatari kid did anything,” he told me. Theros described Qatar as both religiously conservative and tolerant, and says that as far as he knows it is home to virtually no violent radical Islamic movements.
In the summer of 2000, Marri returned to Illinois, where he allegedly registered a carpet business in Macomb, and opened multiple bank accounts, under a false name and Social Security number. When he went back in the fall of 2001, according to the Washington Post, he had a briefcase filled with hundred-dollar bills. Rapp’s statement claims that Marri had obtained more than thirteen thousand dollars in cash from Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, the financier in the United Arab Emirates who is known to have bankrolled the September 11th hijackers. Phone records apparently offered further evidence of a tie between Marri and Hawsawi.
Law-enforcement authorities pieced together this picture bit by bit. In September, according to the Post, local police stopped Marri while he was driving, checked his license, and discovered an outstanding warrant for drunken driving, dating back to his earlier student days, as well as the briefcase filled with cash. The police notified the F.B.I. Several weeks later, his lawyers say, a cell-phone salesman, noting discrepancies in Marri’s identification documents, also called the bureau. In October and December, 2001, F.B.I. agents interviewed Marri; they say that he offered to let them search his laptop computer, his minivan, and his small rental apartment. Later, Marri’s lawyers argued that the agents had failed to obtain a warrant, and that the information from the search could therefore not be admitted into evidence. According to Rapp’s statement, Marri’s computer was filled with information on deadly poisons, including a step-by-step guide to making hydrogen cyanide—a toxic substance that can be used in poison-gas attacks. Marri, in claiming his innocence, has had no chance to see the evidence against him. Asked recently why he was researching such chemicals, Marri, through his lawyers, gave his first public answer. He was “doing research for a family member in the petrochemical industry to be used for industrial purposes. The research involved visiting Web sites that contained hundreds of nonpoisonous chemicals (not just cyanide). And even cyanide has numerous industrial uses.”
The laptop also reportedly contained lectures by bin Laden, and unsent e-mails to an address that Rapp said was connected to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Some of Marri’s e-mails were encoded. Upon discovering this information in his laptop, the F.B.I. arrested Marri as a material witness to its investigation of the attacks. Soon after, he was charged with credit-card fraud and with failing to tell the F.B.I. about his 2000 visit to America and his phone calls to Hawsawi.
On the morning of June 23, 2003, only days before Marri’s defense team was to make its arguments about suppressing the laptop and other evidence, one of his lawyers received a phone call informing him that a U.S. Attorney would be making an unexpected appearance at the courthouse that day. President Bush, the lawyers soon learned, had signed an executive order directing the military to seize Marri. “We should have seen it for what it was—the foreshadowing of an Administration that was going to forsake the Constitution in the war on terror,” Lawrence Lustberg, one of the earliest defense lawyers on what has come to be Marri’s team, said. “From then on, we didn’t see Marri or hear from him again until late 2004. He just went into the abyss.”
Before agreeing to transfer Marri to the brig, however, the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be placed in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal. Benjamin, the former prosecutor, insists that “there is a whole bag of tools for dealing with truly bad guys—there are many other statutes that the government could explore, including material support of terrorism, conspiracy charges, and mail- and wire-fraud charges.” But, he suggests, by taking Marri outside the regular criminal system “there’s no doubt they made all kinds of problems for themselves.”
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal terrorism prosecutor who writes for National Review, defends Marri’s transfer to the brig. “Sure, the criminal-justice system, by permitting Marri’s pretrial detention, neutralized him, at least for a time,” he says. “But there’s always the chance the court will release a defendant on bail.” Moreover, he argues that open criminal trials run many risks, including the accidental, or oblique, disclosure of classified information. It’s also unclear how to handle witnesses who may themselves be terrorists: they may demand immunity before they will talk. Or it may be that their testimony was obtained by unsavory means, which could scuttle a conviction.
In the Marri case, however, it does not appear that a fear of losing led Bush to transfer him to the Navy brig. Kelley, for example, thought that the case the government had was “solid.” Instead, it appears that the real motive was frustration on the part of the Justice Department at being unable to make Marri confess. Kelley was told to push him hard, which he did, but Marri kept professing his innocence. As Ashcroft wrote in his 2006 book about fighting terrorism, “Never Again,” “Al-Marri rejected numerous offers to improve his lot by cooperating with the F.B.I. investigators and providing information. He insisted on becoming a ‘hard case.’ ” Mark Berman, an early member of Marri’s defense team, asserts that the Bush Administration “really just wanted to interrogate him” in a rough manner. “No doubt about it.”
The right to remain silent is a fundamental aspect of the American justice system. Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in the 2004 case Rumsfeld v. Padilla, wrote, “Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure.… For if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.”
The summer of 2003, when Marri entered the brig, was the height of the Bush Administration’s program of authorized abusive interrogations. The C.I.A. had just taken Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into custody, and was using extreme measures to make him divulge information (much of which he later recanted). Marri was among those whom Mohammed apparently implicated during this period. By then, Bush appointees in the Justice Department had produced numerous memos advising the C.I.A. and the Pentagon that there were virtually no legal impediments to the use of physical and psychological force to break “unlawful enemy combatants.” Suspects considered especially “high value” were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation and other harsh tactics, which were modelled on Soviet and Chinese torture programs that had been studied and copied by the C.I.A.
Inside the Charleston brig, documents show, officials were ordered to follow the same rules as those at Guantánamo. Lustberg, however, says, “I’ve been to Guantánamo. Marri was far more isolated. He had no contact with any other detainees. Most days, he had no human contact at all.”
For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read. An internal report, declassified in 2005, showed that during this period the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran of a detainee in the brig. Marri was also deprived of visits from the Red Cross, in violation of international laws. He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold: he was given no socks, and his bed had only a stiff “anti-suicide” blanket—one that cannot be made into a noose. Andrew Savage, the local counsel for Marri in Charleston, says, “It was a psychological effort to devalue him. He was going crazy. He thought the smells from the nearby paper mill were poisoning him.” At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating that microphones had been installed in his cell. “He was getting delusional,” Savage said.
When unidentified interrogators finally showed up at the brig, Marri told them that he needed three things: a blanket, shoes, and socks. If he was given those, he said, he would talk to them in another six months. “He said, ‘You deprive me? I’ll deprive you,’ ” Savage said. Instead, “the interrogators got rougher.” Marri was chained in a fetal position on the floor. When he started to chant prayers rather than listen to the interrogators’ questions, Savage said, they tried to silence him by wrapping duct tape around his mouth. When he kept humming, they tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop. The episode was documented by closed-circuit surveillance cameras, Pentagon officials have confirmed.
A spokesperson for Lieutenant General Michael Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Times that Maples considered Marri’s treatment “acceptable.” But the Pentagon has refused to share the tape of the gagging, which evidently still exists, with Marri’s defense team. Though the Defense Department has admitted to erasing a number of other tapes of Marri, the surviving tapes could prove damaging should the case go to trial.
Despite the so-called “enhanced” interrogation tactics used on Marri, he continued to insist that he had never met Osama bin Laden, was not a terrorist, and wished the U.S. no harm. If Marri was cast into military detention in order to make him confess, it didn’t work. “I’m not surprised,” Kelley said. “I don’t know of many instances where other agencies have got more out of defendants than the F.B.I. can.”
In October, 2004, after a sixteen-month blackout, Marri’s defense lawyers were finally allowed to meet with him again. The Supreme Court had just ruled, in Rasul v. Bush and in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that “unlawful enemy combatants” were entitled to legal representation and some form of due process. As three of his defense lawyers watched from one side of a glass partition, Marri was brought in wearing a belly chain and shackles, which were bolted to the floor. Guards wearing black gloves and covered I.D. tags stood by.
“It was unbelievably emotional,” Lustberg recalls. “We had fought so hard for the right to see him. He was obviously suffering the effects of long-term isolation. He seemed paranoid, scattered, distracted, and disturbed. He was showing signs of mental illness.” Berman recalls, “He was much thinner. Mentally, he’d been through a lot. He was a little off-kilter.”
As the debate over indefinite detention intensifies, Marri’s example may prove cautionary to those who think that it can be designed in a humane way. Savage, the Charleston lawyer, now speaks to Marri by phone every few days, and visits him in person every other week. He believes that nothing has been tougher on his client than the uncertainty of not knowing if he would ever be released. “He would have preferred beatings,” Savage said. “He’d say, ‘Andy, it’s worse than beating.’ He wanted to be sent to Egypt to be renditioned. He’d say, ‘Torture me—but end it!’ ”
By the spring of 2005, Savage feared that Marri was, as he put it, “slipping away.” Previously undisclosed correspondence between Marri and his attorneys shows that he was thinking about getting a divorce; as he later explained to Savage, he thought that his wife should marry his brother rather than be abandoned in his absence. “I feel something will happen to me,” Marri wrote in February, 2005. “I want to make sure everything is documented.” Two months later, he wrote, “My body is tired & I don’t know how long I can take it anymore.” In the spring of 2007, Marri gave Savage power of attorney, as if preparing to die.
Given the reputation that military prisons have developed after the abuse scandals at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the lawyers for Marri were surprised to discover that they had allies in the Navy brig who shared their concerns over Marri’s treatment. Unlike the staff at Abu Ghraib, the brig staff had been trained for the job. Their mission, as they saw it, was to run a safe, professional, and humane prison, regardless of who was held there. It was the political appointees in Washington, at the Pentagon and the Department of Justice, who wanted Marri to be kept in prolonged isolation. In 2005, Savage discovered that the head of security at the brig, Air Force Major Chris Ferry, “would stay all night with Marri. He’d go down to the brig and sit with him, and tell him to hold on. Chris was there at three in the morning, on the darkest nights.” Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, would not allow Ferry to be interviewed for this story, saying, “Given that President Obama has ordered a review of the al-Marri case, we feel it would be best to complete that work before publicly discussing any further the specific aspects of his detention or interrogation.” Morrell added, “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.”
In 2005, Marri’s lawyers filed suit against the Department of Defense, alleging that conditions at the brig were causing a “mental health emergency” for Marri. Savage said, “Later, we found the biggest lobbyists for improved conditions were . . . the staff of the brig. The commanders were terrific. They kept rotating through. My sense is that they saw things becoming too pressured psychologically. They’re good G.I. Joes—they salute and follow orders. But they’re human.” Documents released in response to a Freedom of Information request by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, at Yale Law School, show that unnamed officers in the brig worried that the enemy combatants being held there at the time were close to losing their sanity. “I fear the rubber band is near the breaking point,” one internal e-mail said. Other e-mails show that unnamed brig staff officers fought to get the detainees almost anything to occupy their minds, from a deck of cards to a soccer ball. Their concern wasn’t entirely altruistic. In his despair, Marri had increasingly become “non-compliant,” covering the closed-circuit cameras in his cell with spitballs, refusing to eat, and throwing cups of his urine at guards.
After Savage filed suit, Marri’s conditions started to improve, and so did his behavior. Marri was gradually given reading material and exercise equipment. A year after his father died, in 2007, an imam was sent to the brig to tell him. More recently, he was granted the right to make two phone calls a year to his family. (Last month, however, he was denied a visit from his eldest son.) Savage is now allowed to bring him Muslim religious texts, which he spends most of his time poring over, and kosher food from a deli in Charleston, whose method of food preparation resembles that prescribed by halal.
Marri’s conditions have so improved that his lawyers jokingly refer to him these days as “the Emir of the S.H.U.”—the high-security wing of the brig is known as the Special Housing Unit. He remains the sole prisoner in the wing, but he now has the regular use of three cells, which he refers to as his “executive suite.” One cell contains a memory-foam mattress. Another houses a personal library containing hundreds of volumes. The third contains alcohol-free cleaning supplies, in compliance with his Muslim religious needs. When visitors come, he sees them in an upper-tier room that he calls his “summer chalet.” He also has exclusive access to a thousand-square-foot dayroom equipped with a treadmill and an elliptical machine. Officially barred from watching the evening news, Marri has become a devotee of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart—whom he calls “that Jewish guy.”
Marri is still not always a model prisoner. At one point, he became angry at Stephanie Wright, the brig’s commander at the time, for being slow in getting him medicine that he had requested. He picked up a guard’s two-way radio, which had been left unattended, and screamed into it, “Stephanie! This is me—Ali—EC#2! Move your ass!” His voice was heard over all the radios in the brig. Guards came running toward him. “I think he acted out for his own entertainment,” Savage said.
Since prison censors cut many of the hard-news stories out of the papers he received, Marri began sending brig authorities frequent notes about local ads. As Savage recalls it, one note said, “It’s a two-for-one sale on upholstered chairs! I’ll take the purple—you can have the lime green.”
Soon after Obama issued the executive order to close Guantánamo, Republican Senator Pat Roberts, of Kansas, called “unacceptable” any possibility that detainees might be moved to Fort Leavenworth, the Department of Defense’s only maximum-security prison, which is in Roberts’s home state. Senator Chris Bond, of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that he could not “think of any city or town across this country that will be thrilled to have Khalid Sheikh Mohammad or Abu Zubaydah living down the street.”
But in Charleston, where the only enemy combatant in America really does live down the street, the picture is more reassuring. In December, Marri, wearing goggles, earmuffs, a belly chain, and shackles, was led out of his cell block. No one told him where he was going, but the guards said that he had a visitor. The destination, it turned out, was the visitors’ center, where the commander of the brig, John Pucciarelli, who was transferring out of the facility the next day, had two things to tell him. According to Savage, Pucciarelli said that he was sorry that he had been unable to do more for Marri, but he had treated him as well as he could. He also said that there was a gift waiting for Marri, back in the dayroom. When Marri returned, he found a thirty-two-inch-screen television.
Andrew Savage was delighted. Although he had been skeptical about Marri, he has become convinced that he poses no danger. “I don’t fear him, not personally and not for the United States,” Savage said. “Is he putting me on? Scamming me? Putting it over on me? I really don’t think so. I’m not naïve. I’ve defended multi-murderers, child murderers, child molesters, and all sorts of violent criminals. But I really don’t think Ali’s a terrorist.”
Michael McGovern, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who indicted Marri, scoffs at Savage’s notion that he is harmless. “I find that statement pretty remarkable, given that the evidence showed that he was communicating directly with the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks.”
Before the Bush Administration’s experiments with executive detention, the way to settle such disputes was in the courtroom. Depending on how Obama decides to move ahead, that situation may prevail again. If so, he will have history and tradition on his side. As Hafetz puts it, “In the more than two hundred and thirty years since this country’s founding, we have not found a better way to find the truth than through a criminal trial.” ♦
COMMENT:
President Obama must make a decision about the persons detained on suspicion of terrorism and to date, through a presidential decree of former president Buch, do not have the right to be considered prisoners, nor to demand a trial; remaining indefinitely as detained. Obama offers in his election campaign, give a solution within the law of the U.S. (this means they must be brought before a court and there must define their situation), but there are fears of a large part of politicians, scholars and citizens in general, that they can be free, for lack of evidence (although the suspicion of being linked to terrorism, has a handle).
In my opinion this is the old dilemma, and even more in the U.S., about the supremacy of the individual over the state. Should individual rights be respected even if it will threaten the state? (eye "State" as the organization of society). Or should the state be protected even if that limit or eliminate the rights of the individual?. In this regard, I believe that the solution depends on the circumstances. How far people are willing to allow any supremacy?. I think that is the measure.
Lawyerinperu http://alonsosarmiento.googlepages.com
February 23, 2009
The last “enemy combatant” being detained in America is incarcerated at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina—a tan, low-slung building situated amid acres of grassy swampland. The prisoner, known internally as EC#2, is an alleged Al Qaeda sleeper agent named Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. He has been held in isolation in the brig for more than five years, although he has never stood trial or been convicted of any crime. Under rules established by the Bush Administration, suspected terrorists such as Marri were denied the legal protections traditionally afforded by the Constitution. Unless the Obama Administration overhauls the nation’s terrorism policies, Marri—who claims that he is innocent—will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
On September 10, 2001, Marri, a citizen of Qatar, who is now forty-three, came to America with his family. He had a student visa, and his ostensible purpose was to study computer programming at a small university in Peoria, Illinois. That December, he was arrested as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. However, when Marri was on the verge of standing trial, in June, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the military to seize him and hold him indefinitely. The Bush Administration contended that America was in a full-fledged war against terrorists, and that the President could therefore invoke extraordinary executive powers to detain Marri until the end of hostilities, on the basis of still secret evidence. That day, Marri was put on a military jet to Charleston, and since then he has been living as the only prisoner in an eighty-bed high-security wing of the brig, with no visits from family, friends, or the media.
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who has taken the lead role in Marri’s legal defense, says that the Bush Administration’s decision to leave him in sustained isolation was akin to stranding him on a desert island. “It’s a Robinson Crusoe-like situation,” he told me. In 2005, Hafetz challenged the constitutionality of Marri’s imprisonment. A lower court affirmed the government’s right to detain him indefinitely. After several appeals, the case is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court in April. Hafetz calls the Marri case a pivotal test of “the most far-reaching use of detention powers” ever asserted by an American President.
The Court’s calendar requires the Obama Administration to file a reply to the challenge by March 23rd. Unless some kind of diversionary action is taken—such as sending Marri home to Qatar, or working out a plea agreement—the Court’s schedule will likely force the Obama Administration to offer quick answers to a host of complicated questions about its approach to fighting terrorism.
John Bellinger III, who served as the counsel to the State Department under President Bush, says of officials in the Obama Administration, “They will have to either put up or shut up. Do they maintain the Bush Administration position, and keep holding Marri as an enemy combatant? They have to come up with a legal theory.”
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisAmong the issues to be decided, Hafetz says, is “the question of who is a soldier, and who is a civilian. Is the fight against terrorism war, or is it not war? How far does the battlefield extend? In the past, they treated Peoria as a battlefield. Can an American be arrested in his own home and jailed indefinitely, on the say-so of the President?” Hafetz wants the Supreme Court to rule that indefinite executive detention is illegal, and he hopes that Obama will withdraw Bush’s executive order labelling Marri an enemy combatant, and issue a new one classifying him as a civilian. This shift would allow Marri either to be charged with crimes or to be released.
The Obama Administration’s strategy in the Marri case will almost certainly establish legal principles that will have ramifications for future cases, as well as for the two hundred and forty or so similarly designated “unlawful enemy combatants” held in the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During the Bush years, the designation encompassed not just members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban but also anyone who associated with them, supported them, or supported organizations associated with them, even if unwittingly. In 2004, a Bush Administration lawyer told a judge that, in theory, an enemy combatant could even be “a little old lady in Switzerland” whose charitable donations had been channelled, without her awareness, to Al Qaeda front groups.
If the Marri case reaches the Supreme Court, it will test the limits of such theories. The case is therefore being closely watched by civil libertarians on both the left and the right. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal advocacy organization, and the Cato and Rutherford Institutes, which lean to the right, are among the many legal groups that have signed eighteen amicus briefs on Marri’s behalf. Individual lawyers who have taken up his cause include Nicholas Katzenbach, the Attorney General in the Johnson Administration, and William Sessions, who was appointed director of the F.B.I. by President Reagan. The editorial page of the Times has written repeatedly about the case, demanding that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ affirmation of Marri’s military detention be reversed: “People accused of bad deeds should be tried in court—not in sham proceedings. They should be put in jail—not secret detention.”
No matter how Obama responds to the case, his decision is likely to arouse controversy. Hafetz says, “If President Obama is serious about restoring the rule of law in America, they can’t defend what’s been done to Marri. They would be completely buying into the Bush Administration’s war on terror.” This view is widely held by Obama’s political base. Yet the political risks of change are obvious. In 2004, Jeffrey Rapp, an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, claimed in a sworn affidavit, without providing evidence, that Marri had met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and “offered to be an al Qaeda martyr.” The government’s theory is that Marri came to America in order to help carry out a second wave of terrorist attacks. “Al-Marri must be detained to prevent him from aiding al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States,” Rapp said in his statement, which is the sole public document offering reasons for holding him.
In early February, former Vice-President Dick Cheney increased the pressure on Obama, by warning that a catastrophic nuclear or biological terrorist attack on America would occur unless Obama kept the Bush policies in place. In an unusually contentious interview for an erstwhile high official, Cheney told Politico that the Obama Administration was “more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States.” Two days after Cheney’s remarks were published, the White House was visited by families of victims killed in the September 11th attacks and in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in 2000. Some of those families have organized an advocacy group, Military Families United, which claims sixty thousand members, and which has circulated a petition demanding that Congress reject all efforts by the Obama Administration to relocate any detained terrorist suspects to its members’ districts.
Amid such competing viewpoints, a compromise idea has also emerged, which the Obama Administration is weighing. A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.
One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). In his first appearance before the Supreme Court, he persuaded a majority of the Justices to declare that the Guantánamo military-commission system was illegal, arguing that Congress had not authorized the commissions. Katyal’s new job is to represent the government before the Supreme Court. Given the sensitivity of this role, Katyal declined to comment for this story. But in October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.” This new system, he wrote, would give the government the “ability to temporarily detain a dangerous individual,” including in situations where “a criminal trial has failed.” There are hundreds of legal variations that could be considered, he said. In 2007, Katyal published a related essay, co-written with Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who served as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department. The essay argued that preventive detention, overseen by a congressionally authorized national-security court, was necessary to insure the “sensible” treatment of classified evidence, and to protect secret “sources and methods” of gathering intelligence. In his Web post, Katyal wrote, “I support such a security court.”
Such schemes have already stirred considerable controversy elsewhere in the world, including in Great Britain, where since 2005 some three dozen terror suspects have been detained for a time under house-arrest-like conditions, in some cases being required to wear ankle monitors, obey curfews, and refrain from using phones or the Internet. In America, such a compromise is sure to alarm many human-rights advocates and civil libertarians, who regard indefinite detention as antithetical to the American legal system’s most basic tenets. Alberto Mora, a Republican lawyer who, as general counsel of the Navy, broke with the Bush Administration after concluding that some of its brutal counterterrorism policies were potential war crimes, warns, “We simply can’t have indefinite detention. Due process and fundamental fairness make that clear.”
Marri himself is cautiously hopeful. Despite restrictions on his consumption of television and print news, he followed the Presidential campaign from inside the brig. According to Hafetz, “He’s happy about Obama, but worried he won’t be able to fulfill all the promises and expectations.” Through his lawyers, Marri, speaking publicly for the first time, said, “I am not asking to be taken at my word and to be released, although I very much want to go home to my family. All I am asking for is to be treated like every other person in the United States who is accused of a crime, including terrorism, and to be given a fair trial in an American court.”
As a candidate, Obama promised a sharp break with the Bush Administration’s counter terrorism policies. In a written statement for the Boston Globe, Obama, who taught constitutional law in the nineteen-nineties, said, “I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.” (In fact, the Bush Administration went beyond this claim, arguing that Congress had explicitly granted the President this authority, in a bill passed after the attacks.) In the Globe, Obama went on, “The detention of American citizens, without access to counsel, fair procedure, or pursuant to judicial authorization, as enemy combatants is unconstitutional.” In his Inaugural Address, Obama further underscored his differences with Bush in this area, saying, “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” A top legal adviser to Obama told me that the President also believes that legal residents in America, like Marri, are entitled to due process.
Former Bush Administration officials who were involved in its anti-terror program suggest that Obama may find it harder than expected to translate idealistic rhetoric into action. “Governing is different from campaigning,” says Bellinger, who predicts that Obama and his officials will soon discover that “they can’t just set the clocks back eight years, and try every terror suspect captured abroad in the federal courts.” Bellinger now says that the treatment of Marri was a “failed experiment.” John Ashcroft, who was Attorney General when Marri was designated an enemy combatant, makes no such apologies. Interviewed just before the Inauguration, he defended what he described as a “sound decision” to “maximize the national interest,” and predicted that, in the end, President Obama’s approach to handling terror suspects would closely mirror his own: “How will he be different? The main difference is going to be that he spells his name ‘O-b-a-m-a,’ not ‘B-u-s-h.’ ”
So far, the Obama Administration has declined to state a position on the Marri case. It’s already becoming apparent, though, that Ashcroft was mistaken in his broader point. Obama, in his first week in office, issued three executive orders, undoing many of the most controversial elements of the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation programs. Most notably, Obama declared that the Administration hoped to close Guantánamo within a year. A little noticed memorandum issued at the time of the orders was dedicated to Marri. It called for a Cabinet-level inter-agency task force, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, to review Marri’s case, with an eye toward finding alternative ways to deal with him.
The same officials will review the status of the enemy combatants held in Guantánamo. The Obama Administration has indicated that it hopes to return the majority of the detainees to other countries, or to try them in civilian and military courts. The looming question, however, is whether there is a category of terror suspect whose status precludes such options. It’s unclear whether some home countries can provide fair trials or secure prisons. More important, the high standard of evidence required in U.S. courts—guilt must be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt”—might result in dangerous individuals being set free.
Qatar has made known its interest in having Marri come home. But the Obama Administration has to decide whether he poses a recidivism risk—an assessment that has to be made, in part, on the basis of statements elicited through torture. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was waterboarded by the C.I.A., and reportedly said that Marri was a fellow-terrorist.) As such, Marri may exemplify what Greg Craig, Obama’s White House counsel, calls “the toughest question” facing the Administration as it tries to bring the Bush program within the rule of law: what to do with the so-called “third category” of detainees—suspects who may be difficult to convict under the American standards of justice, but who may pose a palpable threat if released.
Depending upon how many such “hard cases” exist, Craig says, the Administration will decide whether new laws, including possibly those enabling some sort of preventive detention, are necessary. Although the detainees from the Bush era pose the most immediate problem, he said, it’s possible that the new Administration may also want to handle future prisoners outside the existing criminal- and military-court system. “A good deal of policy research remains,” he said. “The door was not left open by accident. Obama wants the freedom to hear the recommendations of the most experienced and smartest people, on how to protect the American people while still respecting the rules of the road on liberty.” He suggested that the Administration would prefer not to go in that direction. “It’s possible but hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law,” Craig said. “Our presumption is that there is no need to create a whole new system. Our system is very capable.” Then again, the idea is not being ruled out, which may be surprising to some constituents, given Obama’s past support for civil liberties and Craig’s own record—in the early nineties, he served as the chairman of the board of the International Human Rights Law Group, an advocacy organization now known as Global Rights.
Obama’s legal team is aware that every step it takes will be seen as an indication of core convictions. Craig, who will coördinate the revamping of the Bush Administration’s legal policies on terrorism, said, “One way we’ve looked at this is that we own the solution. We don’t own the problem—it was created by the previous Administration. But we’ll be held accountable for how we handle this.”
The Obama Administration has already inflamed some members of the human-rights community. On February 9th, the Justice Department adopted the same position that Bush had taken in a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The government attempted to squelch a lawsuit initiated by a group of terrorist suspects—one of whom had allegedly been tortured in Morocco after being transferred there by the C.I.A.—on the ground that it would open up state secrets. Scott Horton, a law professor at Columbia University, characterized the new Justice Department’s position as a betrayal of the “promises of transparency and accountability” made by Obama during the campaign.
The first step in cases such as Marri’s, Craig suggests, will be to evaluate the “dangerousness” of each detainee, and to scrutinize all documents passed on by the previous Administration. “We need the facts,” he said. “And we need fresh eyes.” For years, John Ashcroft has justified the military detention of Marri as a safety precaution. “Sometimes the criminal courts are not up to it,” he told me. But, as the new team reviews Marri’s story, it will likely find ample grounds to reassess the notion that the courts can’t handle terror suspects, and that such suspects can’t be safely housed in the United States without incident.
In a recent interview, David Kelley, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who supervised the early stages of the Marri case, revealed that he had warned his bosses in the Justice Department that they were making a mistake by sidestepping the criminal courts. Kelley co-chaired the Justice Department’s nationwide investigation into the 9/11 attacks, and headed the investigations into the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; he also led the prosecution of Ramzi Yousef, in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 2003, he successfully prosecuted John Walker Lindh, the American accused of aiding the Taliban. In the interview, Kelley said he believed that the government had a strong case against Marri: he had been charged with credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent. He thought that Marri could be convicted in a matter of a few months, and sentenced to years in prison. Kelley, who is now a partner at Cahill Gordon, in Manhattan, was disappointed when, on the basis of a one-page executive order, Marri was suddenly sent to the brig. “My view is, we haven’t really exhausted the potential for using the criminal-justice system,” he said.
James Benjamin, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, is now a partner at the law firm Akin Gump. In 2008, he co-wrote a review of the Marri case, characterizing the switch to military detention as counterproductive. “Definitely, the criminal-justice system can handle someone like Marri,” he told me. “They caught him under the criminal-justice system. And, based on what we know, they were poised to convict him.” What happened to Marri before he was moved “proves the system was up to it.”
Marty Lederman, a former Georgetown Law professor, whom Obama has appointed to be a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, argues that the Bush Administration’s claims to be acting out of necessity were “nonsense.” In an essay published before he joined the Administration, Lederman wrote, “Even if everything the government alleges about al-Marri’s ties to al Qaeda are true,” he was not a danger “because he was already incapacitated—imprisoned—within the criminal-justice system, where his trial was pending.”
Marri had aroused the suspicion of law-enforcement officers almost as soon as he arrived in the Midwest with his wife, Maha, who spoke no English, and their five young children. His timing was conspicuous—he arrived in Chicago the day before 9/11. The next day, the family took a hundred-and-fifty-mile taxi ride to Peoria.
Marri enrolled in computer-science classes at Bradley University, where he and a brother had obtained undergraduate degrees. Qatar, which has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world, pays college tuition for many of its citizens, and several members of the Marri family have attended school in America. According to the Washington Post, as an undergraduate at Bradley Marri wore a ponytail and was known for his partying and his quick sense of humor. He returned to Qatar in 1991, after graduation. Later that decade, a palace coup in Qatar shook his family, eventually prompting some members to leave for Saudi Arabia, where many of his brothers and his wife now live. Marri reportedly ended up in Afghanistan. According to the sworn statement given by Jeffrey Rapp, the D.I.A. analyst, at some point between 1996 and 1998 Marri was trained in chemical weaponry at an Al Qaeda camp there. (Marri, through his lawyer, denied these allegations.)
Patrick Theros, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Qatar during this period, is skeptical of the terrorism allegations. “I’ve never heard anyone say this Qatari kid did anything,” he told me. Theros described Qatar as both religiously conservative and tolerant, and says that as far as he knows it is home to virtually no violent radical Islamic movements.
In the summer of 2000, Marri returned to Illinois, where he allegedly registered a carpet business in Macomb, and opened multiple bank accounts, under a false name and Social Security number. When he went back in the fall of 2001, according to the Washington Post, he had a briefcase filled with hundred-dollar bills. Rapp’s statement claims that Marri had obtained more than thirteen thousand dollars in cash from Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, the financier in the United Arab Emirates who is known to have bankrolled the September 11th hijackers. Phone records apparently offered further evidence of a tie between Marri and Hawsawi.
Law-enforcement authorities pieced together this picture bit by bit. In September, according to the Post, local police stopped Marri while he was driving, checked his license, and discovered an outstanding warrant for drunken driving, dating back to his earlier student days, as well as the briefcase filled with cash. The police notified the F.B.I. Several weeks later, his lawyers say, a cell-phone salesman, noting discrepancies in Marri’s identification documents, also called the bureau. In October and December, 2001, F.B.I. agents interviewed Marri; they say that he offered to let them search his laptop computer, his minivan, and his small rental apartment. Later, Marri’s lawyers argued that the agents had failed to obtain a warrant, and that the information from the search could therefore not be admitted into evidence. According to Rapp’s statement, Marri’s computer was filled with information on deadly poisons, including a step-by-step guide to making hydrogen cyanide—a toxic substance that can be used in poison-gas attacks. Marri, in claiming his innocence, has had no chance to see the evidence against him. Asked recently why he was researching such chemicals, Marri, through his lawyers, gave his first public answer. He was “doing research for a family member in the petrochemical industry to be used for industrial purposes. The research involved visiting Web sites that contained hundreds of nonpoisonous chemicals (not just cyanide). And even cyanide has numerous industrial uses.”
The laptop also reportedly contained lectures by bin Laden, and unsent e-mails to an address that Rapp said was connected to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Some of Marri’s e-mails were encoded. Upon discovering this information in his laptop, the F.B.I. arrested Marri as a material witness to its investigation of the attacks. Soon after, he was charged with credit-card fraud and with failing to tell the F.B.I. about his 2000 visit to America and his phone calls to Hawsawi.
On the morning of June 23, 2003, only days before Marri’s defense team was to make its arguments about suppressing the laptop and other evidence, one of his lawyers received a phone call informing him that a U.S. Attorney would be making an unexpected appearance at the courthouse that day. President Bush, the lawyers soon learned, had signed an executive order directing the military to seize Marri. “We should have seen it for what it was—the foreshadowing of an Administration that was going to forsake the Constitution in the war on terror,” Lawrence Lustberg, one of the earliest defense lawyers on what has come to be Marri’s team, said. “From then on, we didn’t see Marri or hear from him again until late 2004. He just went into the abyss.”
Before agreeing to transfer Marri to the brig, however, the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be placed in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal. Benjamin, the former prosecutor, insists that “there is a whole bag of tools for dealing with truly bad guys—there are many other statutes that the government could explore, including material support of terrorism, conspiracy charges, and mail- and wire-fraud charges.” But, he suggests, by taking Marri outside the regular criminal system “there’s no doubt they made all kinds of problems for themselves.”
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal terrorism prosecutor who writes for National Review, defends Marri’s transfer to the brig. “Sure, the criminal-justice system, by permitting Marri’s pretrial detention, neutralized him, at least for a time,” he says. “But there’s always the chance the court will release a defendant on bail.” Moreover, he argues that open criminal trials run many risks, including the accidental, or oblique, disclosure of classified information. It’s also unclear how to handle witnesses who may themselves be terrorists: they may demand immunity before they will talk. Or it may be that their testimony was obtained by unsavory means, which could scuttle a conviction.
In the Marri case, however, it does not appear that a fear of losing led Bush to transfer him to the Navy brig. Kelley, for example, thought that the case the government had was “solid.” Instead, it appears that the real motive was frustration on the part of the Justice Department at being unable to make Marri confess. Kelley was told to push him hard, which he did, but Marri kept professing his innocence. As Ashcroft wrote in his 2006 book about fighting terrorism, “Never Again,” “Al-Marri rejected numerous offers to improve his lot by cooperating with the F.B.I. investigators and providing information. He insisted on becoming a ‘hard case.’ ” Mark Berman, an early member of Marri’s defense team, asserts that the Bush Administration “really just wanted to interrogate him” in a rough manner. “No doubt about it.”
The right to remain silent is a fundamental aspect of the American justice system. Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in the 2004 case Rumsfeld v. Padilla, wrote, “Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure.… For if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.”
The summer of 2003, when Marri entered the brig, was the height of the Bush Administration’s program of authorized abusive interrogations. The C.I.A. had just taken Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into custody, and was using extreme measures to make him divulge information (much of which he later recanted). Marri was among those whom Mohammed apparently implicated during this period. By then, Bush appointees in the Justice Department had produced numerous memos advising the C.I.A. and the Pentagon that there were virtually no legal impediments to the use of physical and psychological force to break “unlawful enemy combatants.” Suspects considered especially “high value” were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation and other harsh tactics, which were modelled on Soviet and Chinese torture programs that had been studied and copied by the C.I.A.
Inside the Charleston brig, documents show, officials were ordered to follow the same rules as those at Guantánamo. Lustberg, however, says, “I’ve been to Guantánamo. Marri was far more isolated. He had no contact with any other detainees. Most days, he had no human contact at all.”
For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read. An internal report, declassified in 2005, showed that during this period the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran of a detainee in the brig. Marri was also deprived of visits from the Red Cross, in violation of international laws. He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold: he was given no socks, and his bed had only a stiff “anti-suicide” blanket—one that cannot be made into a noose. Andrew Savage, the local counsel for Marri in Charleston, says, “It was a psychological effort to devalue him. He was going crazy. He thought the smells from the nearby paper mill were poisoning him.” At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating that microphones had been installed in his cell. “He was getting delusional,” Savage said.
When unidentified interrogators finally showed up at the brig, Marri told them that he needed three things: a blanket, shoes, and socks. If he was given those, he said, he would talk to them in another six months. “He said, ‘You deprive me? I’ll deprive you,’ ” Savage said. Instead, “the interrogators got rougher.” Marri was chained in a fetal position on the floor. When he started to chant prayers rather than listen to the interrogators’ questions, Savage said, they tried to silence him by wrapping duct tape around his mouth. When he kept humming, they tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop. The episode was documented by closed-circuit surveillance cameras, Pentagon officials have confirmed.
A spokesperson for Lieutenant General Michael Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Times that Maples considered Marri’s treatment “acceptable.” But the Pentagon has refused to share the tape of the gagging, which evidently still exists, with Marri’s defense team. Though the Defense Department has admitted to erasing a number of other tapes of Marri, the surviving tapes could prove damaging should the case go to trial.
Despite the so-called “enhanced” interrogation tactics used on Marri, he continued to insist that he had never met Osama bin Laden, was not a terrorist, and wished the U.S. no harm. If Marri was cast into military detention in order to make him confess, it didn’t work. “I’m not surprised,” Kelley said. “I don’t know of many instances where other agencies have got more out of defendants than the F.B.I. can.”
In October, 2004, after a sixteen-month blackout, Marri’s defense lawyers were finally allowed to meet with him again. The Supreme Court had just ruled, in Rasul v. Bush and in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that “unlawful enemy combatants” were entitled to legal representation and some form of due process. As three of his defense lawyers watched from one side of a glass partition, Marri was brought in wearing a belly chain and shackles, which were bolted to the floor. Guards wearing black gloves and covered I.D. tags stood by.
“It was unbelievably emotional,” Lustberg recalls. “We had fought so hard for the right to see him. He was obviously suffering the effects of long-term isolation. He seemed paranoid, scattered, distracted, and disturbed. He was showing signs of mental illness.” Berman recalls, “He was much thinner. Mentally, he’d been through a lot. He was a little off-kilter.”
As the debate over indefinite detention intensifies, Marri’s example may prove cautionary to those who think that it can be designed in a humane way. Savage, the Charleston lawyer, now speaks to Marri by phone every few days, and visits him in person every other week. He believes that nothing has been tougher on his client than the uncertainty of not knowing if he would ever be released. “He would have preferred beatings,” Savage said. “He’d say, ‘Andy, it’s worse than beating.’ He wanted to be sent to Egypt to be renditioned. He’d say, ‘Torture me—but end it!’ ”
By the spring of 2005, Savage feared that Marri was, as he put it, “slipping away.” Previously undisclosed correspondence between Marri and his attorneys shows that he was thinking about getting a divorce; as he later explained to Savage, he thought that his wife should marry his brother rather than be abandoned in his absence. “I feel something will happen to me,” Marri wrote in February, 2005. “I want to make sure everything is documented.” Two months later, he wrote, “My body is tired & I don’t know how long I can take it anymore.” In the spring of 2007, Marri gave Savage power of attorney, as if preparing to die.
Given the reputation that military prisons have developed after the abuse scandals at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the lawyers for Marri were surprised to discover that they had allies in the Navy brig who shared their concerns over Marri’s treatment. Unlike the staff at Abu Ghraib, the brig staff had been trained for the job. Their mission, as they saw it, was to run a safe, professional, and humane prison, regardless of who was held there. It was the political appointees in Washington, at the Pentagon and the Department of Justice, who wanted Marri to be kept in prolonged isolation. In 2005, Savage discovered that the head of security at the brig, Air Force Major Chris Ferry, “would stay all night with Marri. He’d go down to the brig and sit with him, and tell him to hold on. Chris was there at three in the morning, on the darkest nights.” Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, would not allow Ferry to be interviewed for this story, saying, “Given that President Obama has ordered a review of the al-Marri case, we feel it would be best to complete that work before publicly discussing any further the specific aspects of his detention or interrogation.” Morrell added, “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.”
In 2005, Marri’s lawyers filed suit against the Department of Defense, alleging that conditions at the brig were causing a “mental health emergency” for Marri. Savage said, “Later, we found the biggest lobbyists for improved conditions were . . . the staff of the brig. The commanders were terrific. They kept rotating through. My sense is that they saw things becoming too pressured psychologically. They’re good G.I. Joes—they salute and follow orders. But they’re human.” Documents released in response to a Freedom of Information request by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, at Yale Law School, show that unnamed officers in the brig worried that the enemy combatants being held there at the time were close to losing their sanity. “I fear the rubber band is near the breaking point,” one internal e-mail said. Other e-mails show that unnamed brig staff officers fought to get the detainees almost anything to occupy their minds, from a deck of cards to a soccer ball. Their concern wasn’t entirely altruistic. In his despair, Marri had increasingly become “non-compliant,” covering the closed-circuit cameras in his cell with spitballs, refusing to eat, and throwing cups of his urine at guards.
After Savage filed suit, Marri’s conditions started to improve, and so did his behavior. Marri was gradually given reading material and exercise equipment. A year after his father died, in 2007, an imam was sent to the brig to tell him. More recently, he was granted the right to make two phone calls a year to his family. (Last month, however, he was denied a visit from his eldest son.) Savage is now allowed to bring him Muslim religious texts, which he spends most of his time poring over, and kosher food from a deli in Charleston, whose method of food preparation resembles that prescribed by halal.
Marri’s conditions have so improved that his lawyers jokingly refer to him these days as “the Emir of the S.H.U.”—the high-security wing of the brig is known as the Special Housing Unit. He remains the sole prisoner in the wing, but he now has the regular use of three cells, which he refers to as his “executive suite.” One cell contains a memory-foam mattress. Another houses a personal library containing hundreds of volumes. The third contains alcohol-free cleaning supplies, in compliance with his Muslim religious needs. When visitors come, he sees them in an upper-tier room that he calls his “summer chalet.” He also has exclusive access to a thousand-square-foot dayroom equipped with a treadmill and an elliptical machine. Officially barred from watching the evening news, Marri has become a devotee of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart—whom he calls “that Jewish guy.”
Marri is still not always a model prisoner. At one point, he became angry at Stephanie Wright, the brig’s commander at the time, for being slow in getting him medicine that he had requested. He picked up a guard’s two-way radio, which had been left unattended, and screamed into it, “Stephanie! This is me—Ali—EC#2! Move your ass!” His voice was heard over all the radios in the brig. Guards came running toward him. “I think he acted out for his own entertainment,” Savage said.
Since prison censors cut many of the hard-news stories out of the papers he received, Marri began sending brig authorities frequent notes about local ads. As Savage recalls it, one note said, “It’s a two-for-one sale on upholstered chairs! I’ll take the purple—you can have the lime green.”
Soon after Obama issued the executive order to close Guantánamo, Republican Senator Pat Roberts, of Kansas, called “unacceptable” any possibility that detainees might be moved to Fort Leavenworth, the Department of Defense’s only maximum-security prison, which is in Roberts’s home state. Senator Chris Bond, of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that he could not “think of any city or town across this country that will be thrilled to have Khalid Sheikh Mohammad or Abu Zubaydah living down the street.”
But in Charleston, where the only enemy combatant in America really does live down the street, the picture is more reassuring. In December, Marri, wearing goggles, earmuffs, a belly chain, and shackles, was led out of his cell block. No one told him where he was going, but the guards said that he had a visitor. The destination, it turned out, was the visitors’ center, where the commander of the brig, John Pucciarelli, who was transferring out of the facility the next day, had two things to tell him. According to Savage, Pucciarelli said that he was sorry that he had been unable to do more for Marri, but he had treated him as well as he could. He also said that there was a gift waiting for Marri, back in the dayroom. When Marri returned, he found a thirty-two-inch-screen television.
Andrew Savage was delighted. Although he had been skeptical about Marri, he has become convinced that he poses no danger. “I don’t fear him, not personally and not for the United States,” Savage said. “Is he putting me on? Scamming me? Putting it over on me? I really don’t think so. I’m not naïve. I’ve defended multi-murderers, child murderers, child molesters, and all sorts of violent criminals. But I really don’t think Ali’s a terrorist.”
Michael McGovern, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who indicted Marri, scoffs at Savage’s notion that he is harmless. “I find that statement pretty remarkable, given that the evidence showed that he was communicating directly with the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks.”
Before the Bush Administration’s experiments with executive detention, the way to settle such disputes was in the courtroom. Depending on how Obama decides to move ahead, that situation may prevail again. If so, he will have history and tradition on his side. As Hafetz puts it, “In the more than two hundred and thirty years since this country’s founding, we have not found a better way to find the truth than through a criminal trial.” ♦
COMMENT:
President Obama must make a decision about the persons detained on suspicion of terrorism and to date, through a presidential decree of former president Buch, do not have the right to be considered prisoners, nor to demand a trial; remaining indefinitely as detained. Obama offers in his election campaign, give a solution within the law of the U.S. (this means they must be brought before a court and there must define their situation), but there are fears of a large part of politicians, scholars and citizens in general, that they can be free, for lack of evidence (although the suspicion of being linked to terrorism, has a handle).
In my opinion this is the old dilemma, and even more in the U.S., about the supremacy of the individual over the state. Should individual rights be respected even if it will threaten the state? (eye "State" as the organization of society). Or should the state be protected even if that limit or eliminate the rights of the individual?. In this regard, I believe that the solution depends on the circumstances. How far people are willing to allow any supremacy?. I think that is the measure.
Lawyerinperu http://alonsosarmiento.googlepages.com
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