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| NEW INTERNATIONALIST 197 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| THIS MONTH'S THEME | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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State
of fear A
shining path of blood Senderista Paulina Cocaine
country Surviving
chaos Peruvians
Humpty
Dumpty, the Scriptwriter and the Little Bean |
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PERU |
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| FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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'But, I suppose', the taxi driver says, winding up a series of prognostications, 'You must hear a lot in your country about what is happening in Peru.' 'Well, er ... not as much as you might imagine.' He swerves suddenly to avoid a straggle of cambistas - the money-changers to be found anywhere and everywhere. With inflation running at over 1,000 per cent, changing your cash into dollars is the only sensible thing to do. 'But surely you must hear about all the problems we have here . the violence . the economy . the cocaine..' Not necessarily. News is a strange business. And foreign news is strangest of all. If you live in a country like Peru for a while you realize that what is considered worth reporting abroad has little to do with what is happening or how important it might be. The intention seems merely to keep the foreign reader's prejudices and preconceptions fed. Different countries symbolize different things. Chile 'means' torture and tear gas; Brazil, debt and dam projects; Colombia, cocaine. So it took two years for journalists in Lima to get the British press to carry a story about a civil war being fought in Peru. Human-rights abuses, disappearances, mass graves - none of these things could attract the attention of Western news editors. Why? asked a Lima-based reporter. 'Well, we've been running stories on mass graves in Argentina,' came the reply from the foreign news desk. Argentina, evidently, had come to mean mass graves, while Peru, presumably, still signified Incas and llamas. What, one wonders, has to happen before perceptions can be stretched a bit and public interest and concern allowed to grow? Newspaper editors do have a problem, of course. Space is limited for international news. So it is difficult to give readers a clear sense of what is happening in a little-known country on the other side of the globe. Stories have to be simple and it is easier if they fulfill the reader's expectations. Peru fails on both counts. NI editors should be able to do better. We devote the magazine to one theme per month so we can tackle complex subjects, disentangle them and, hopefully, bring them alive. We can also use a more personal approach. Ordinary people can be invited to talk about their lives and we can also use 'non-news' devices, such as the short story we commissioned from Peruvian poet Sonia Luz Carrillo. Peru is going through a deep and violent crisis. Most Peruvians I met on my recent visit were facing it with characteristic resourcefulness, scepticism and humour. But fear is in the air and nobody really knows - not even taxi drivers - what is going to happen next. Perhaps this magazine will enable readers to make a bit more sense of those puzzling two-paragraph snippets from Reuter or AP or UPI that occasionally make it into the papers. |
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Letters
FRONT COVER: Carlos Reyes / Andes Press Agency |
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Vanessa Baird
for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
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Taxi
drivers in Peru seem to know everything: which town the Maoist guerillas will
take next; who will win the Presidential elections in 1990 - if parliamentary
democracy lasts that long. And if not, they can tell you the probable date
for a right-wing military coup that could replace it. No one else knows these
things, but taxi drivers know.
