A Bolivian Andean Slope is no Match for a Man in Love

There is Still a Free Seat on the Taxi's Rack

Get help with your Migraine

Do you suffer from migraine? I’ll be happy to refer you to my friend, the Moroccan barber. He will make two incisions in your neck and suck its excess blood into small cups applied to the incisions. He promises you’ll walk away with a lighter head.

Colombia. Boyaca Province.

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How Rain Forest Indians Kept Invaders At Bay

In Ecuador, as in other Amazon countries, people cannot call themselves the owners of a patch of forest until they have “developed it.” In the Amazon, to develop the forest means felling it and turning it into agricultural plots or cattle pasture. The same goes for the rain forest covering the Pacific coast of Colombia and northern Ecuador.

This is bad for the forest and bad for the climate. And it can be deadly for the Indians who have lived there since time immemorial, wisely leaving the forest intact for future generations. The poor Indians are now seeing their forest invaded by outsiders in ever greater numbers. For the Indians, losing the use of their forests is losing the means to a dignified survival and traditional way of life. Unfortunately, paved roads are now opening the forest to the modern world, with oil, mining, logging, and mega agricultural and cattle companies following.  Armed with axes and machetes, thousands of pioneers also follow, cutting trails deeper into the forest and battling the Indians.

This is bad enough when the newcomers only wish to grow some manioc, corn, plantain, and bananas and raise a few chickens. But when the invaders come in armed like commandos to mine gold or plant coca, whole Indian clans can be sent packing to the other world. Survivors will eventually die from new illnesses against which they have developed no natural protection or from drinking from rivers poisoned by mercury.

Twenty years ago, International Wildlife magazine assigned me to photograph the Awa Indians of Ecuador’s coastal rain forest near the Colombian border. The Awa had made news by having devised an ingenious way of keeping settlers out of their vast forest. Over more than 100 miles, they had axed a 50-feet-wide corridor around their territory and planted it with fruit trees. They had effectively cut off access to their forest by taking legal possession of that buffer zone, which trespassers would have to cross illegally to get to the forest on the other side. Signs planted at regular intervals warned potential invaders away from private property.

I don’t know whether the Awa have been able to keep invaders away all those years, but I very much hope so. Whatever the case, their story is certainly another proof that tribal people are our world’s forests best custodians. And we should not forget that they know the curative properties of hundreds if not thousands of rain forest plants and trees that could someday save humanity from some of its worst diseases. Many of our drugs already originated there.

The following photographs attempt to give an idea of the Awa Indians’ world. 

Awa hamlet, as seen from the communal house, where community questions are discussed.

Awa community house.

Awa Community leader urging his people to fight for their rights.

Using machetes to weed orchard corridor 

Leaving the orchard corridor they opened and planted with fruits all around their vast forest to protect it from the incursions of mestizo colonists.

Ecuador. Pacific Coast rain forest. Awa Indians build fence around seedlings to protect them from foraging pigs. They will be planted in an agricultural corridor around the Awa's rain forest to mark it as private property.

Using a machete to cut sugarcane.

Carrying sugarcane from the family's forest garden. Large leaves protect the women from the rain.

Carrying plantain from theiir forest garden.

Carrying home plantain (cooking bananas) from forest garden.

Burning capybara's hair to roast the animal with is slin on, as is done with pigs.

Playing soccer in the rain 

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The Panama Hat Odyssey

Panama hats were never made in Panama, though that country does produce some small and unimpressive straw hats worn only by peasants. Nothing comparable to what such famous people as former President Franklin Roosevelt, Humphrey Bogart, and Al Capone once put in vogue.

Panama hats got their name from the place that first sold them to the world at large, namely the Panama Canal. During the canal’s construction, workers used them against the fierce sun. But the hats had been made in Ecuador.

Americans started buying Panama hats when traveling across the United States through the canal before the transcontinental railway offered them a shorter route. In 1898, during the American-Spanish War, the U.S. government ordered 50,000 hats from Ecuador for Caribbean-bound troops. They were so popular in the 1940’s that they were Ecuador’s main export product for a number of years.

Panama hats originated in Ecuador’s Manabi Province, around the towns of Montecristi and Jipijapa, as far back as 1630. The best hats are still woven there, though much of the production of Panama hats has moved to the Andean town of Cuenca.

I had just gotten off the bus in Montecristi one early sunny Sunday when I saw a man sitting at the front of his shop. He was finishing a Panama hat he had bought from someone. I stopped to photograph him, and he presented himself as Galo Pachay

He explained that he buys unfinished hats from weavers out in the country and then finishes them for resale to one of the town’s exporters. Weavers always sell their hats unfinished, with the straw dangling all around the brims, to be handed later to an array of specialists like Pachay, starting with the rematador, who back-weaves the straw into a strong bindings.

To earn extra money, whole families around Montecristi and Cuenca weave Panama hats at home or while walking to their fields. It’s hard and patient work, taking at least 12 hours to produce the cheapest model, one that pays the weaver only about one dollar, Ecuador’s currency, minus the cost of the straw.   

“The finest of the finest may take six months to weave,” Pachay said, “and fetch up to in $1,500 in the United States. For wanting the best one available, England’s Prince Edward VII once paid his Bond Street hatter 9,300 pounds.

“But it’s a dying craft,” Pachay sighed. “Too much work for too little money, and a shrinking market. Now Brazilian peones, who used to buy our cheapest hats, buy them from the Chinese. Made of paper, they’re even cheaper.”

Flattered by my interest, Pachay stopped weaving and closed his shop to take me on an educational tour. I hired a friend of his to drive us to the village of Pile. On the way there I photographed a man hanging paja toqilla, palm leaves used in Panama hats, on a rope to dry.

Later, inside the unfurnished front room, the man and his seven-year-old daughter pulled nascent palm leaves out of their green sheaths and agitated them vigorously to separate them before laying them on the floor. Their next step would be to remove the veins and other hard parts. Younger children sat on a pile of the palm leaves.

In Pile, a woman guided us to a café’s back room, past men reeking of beer and aguardiente (sugarcane liquor). In that room another woman accepted to work on a hat for my camera. People don’t weave on Sunday. And they don’t weave during any day’s hot hours, which make the straw brittle. The best weavers prefer to weave by moonlight, or at least under an overcast sky.

Pachay took me then up the street to a split bamboo hut on stilts. An old man there was weaving a “fino,” a fine one. It would take him a month to complete. and probably earn him $40. Meanwhile, a younger relative sold Pachay an unfinished hat.

Returning to Montecristi, we stopped at a poor desert settlement near the sea. Here Pachay purchased another hat. The seller was the wife of a fisherman. Her three good- looking girls stood around as we talked to her. Though the eldest was only twenty-two, and none were married, they already had eight children among the three of them. Though inevitably poor, they appeared very happy.

Before bringing me back to a bus, Pachay and his friend took me to a jipijapa palm plantation.  A worker there cut a young shoot, split it open, and showed me the tender green leaves inside waiting like chicks in eggs to come to light.

   

“That’s the stuff of panamas,” Pachay said. “It grows only on the coast, helped by the humid gárua, the mist that the cold Humboldt Current causes to shroud this area for six months a year. But to use it you must first boil it for five minutes, dry it, separate its fibers with your fingernails into thin even strips, wash it in cold water, and whiten it by hanging it over the smoke of burning sulfur in closed containers, like oil drums.”

The sun was much lighter early the next Sunday, when I got off another bus at some eight thousand feet up in the Andes. I had arrived at the small town of Chordeleg, a forty-minute ride from Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest city (280,00 inhabitants). The fruit and produce market on one of the large squares was in full swing, and the mixed aromas of vegetable soups, chicken stews, and roast pork attracted hungry early risers to scattered food stalls.

Along a side of the plaza, a row of women was selling paja toquilla. Buyers examined it closely, going from one vendor to the next to compare the quality and haggle over the price. On the opposite side of the market, panama weavers, who had come down from the countryside, were selling their families’ production to comisionista (brokers of both sexes), who would resell them to factories in Cuenca. Those buyers also haggled and examined the products carefully. 

By taxi, that afternoon, I went to several farms to watch hats being woven. The three-generation women in one house reminded me of women of old who embroidered while enjoying an afternoon of conversation. At one house, a 12-year-old boy arrived from school to pull a chair outside his adobe house and resume his own work on a hat. At another farm, a woman was spreading paja toquilla to dry.

Back in Cuenca, I visited the Homero Ortega Panama hats factory. “You should not have bothered going to Chordeleg to photograph weavers,” Ortega said... And he led me t a corner of his factory where he had built the front part of a wattle-and-daub farm house. He asked one of his female employees to sit there, weaving a hat, and I politely took her photograph. However, she was dressed way too elegantly to look as genuine as her background.

Ever trying to help, Ortega assigned a driver to me, who took me to a number of Panama hat finishers working for him in their own houses around town. There I watched them wash, dry, shape, iron, and finish hats.

At Ortega’s factory I also watched the paja toquilla being dyed in various colors, and hats being shaped and market with the company’s logo. 

Last but not least, I observed Ortega review the many hats a comisionista had brought him. I could not have gone any faster if I had just counted them. “Experiencia,” he shrugged, when I asked him how he could spot so quickly the defects of hats he discarded.

While he finished his most urgent work, I was guided to the showroom. A couple of middle-aged American tourists were posing in the mirror, trying on various hats.

 “How much is this one,” the man asked the saleswoman, “Three hundred dollars? Would you have anything finer than that?”

 “Americans only want the best,” the sales girl told me later, something I had already heard once at an Ecuador banana plantation.

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