Sounds of the Baguazo: Listening to Extractivism in an Intercultural Radio Programme from the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

This article examines a fictional radio programme from the Peruvian Amazon as a response to extractivism in the region. Etsa Nantu: Pasión en la Amazonía (2012) resulted from a six-month collaboration among Peruvians deeply concerned with how the media had portrayed Indigenous opposition to extractivism after the 2009 Baguazo, a violent struggle between the Peruvian national police (PNP) and protestors in the area surrounding Bagua, Peru. Not only does the radio drama serve as a medium for Awajún and Wampís participants to imagine alternative outcomes for such encounters, it also dramatises critical interculturality – placing Indigenous worldviews on equal ground with Western ones – to prevent further conflicts. I argue that because radio constitutes an aural format, different audiences’ listening practices will diversely mediate the hearing of these messages. In exploring listening as a challenge for allowing marginalised voices to speak to broad publics through the radio, the analysis also highlights sounds of the Baguazo in Etsa Nantu that non-Amazonian listeners might not hear. I propose auditory attention to such sounds, even when listeners cannot fully understand them, as a way to practise the interculturality proposed by the programme.

Keywords:

• Radio
• interculturality
• Indigenous media
• extractivism
• Baguazo
• Amazon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All translations are mine.

2 Extractivism refers to economic development via high-intensity extraction of a large volume of natural resources destined mainly for export with little to no processing beforehand (Acosta 2011; Gudynas 2013). It involves social, economic, and ecological changes at sites of origin with implications for public health, local economies, and biodiversity. “Extractivist culture” (Gudynas 2013, 7) ignores such costs –because they are either not immediately visible, difficult to trace, or ignored by confirmation bias – or considers them minor compared to expected return.

3 Twenty-three police officers and ten civilian protestors died. One officer disappeared, and more than 200 people were injured, among them 172 Indigenous and mestizo protestors, 50 with bullet wounds, and 33 injured police (Manacés Valverde and Gómez Calleja 2013)

4 Awajún and Wampís people speak Jivaroan languages with enough shared vocabulary to be mutually understandable. According to figures from 2007, more than 55,000 Awajún people live in the Peruvian departments of Loreto, San Martín, Amazonas, and Cajamarca, constituting the second most populous Indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon after the Asháninka (Cornejo Chaparro 2015, 14). Approximately 10,000 Wampís people live primarily in the Amazonas department near the Ecuadorian border and in north-western Loreto (Cornejo Chaparro 2015, 10).

5 Episodes available at https://tallerambulantetaf.wixsite.com/etsanantu.

6 “Apu” is the name for non-hierarchical Awajún leaders who guide consensus-based communities (I. Tukúp quoted in Royo-Villanova y Payá 2017, 25)

7 For Indigenous activists, the most egregious orders were D. Leg. Nº 1064, “Legislative order approved by the legislating body for the use of agricultural lands” (27 June 2008) and the D. Leg. Nº 1090, “Legislative order approving the Forestry and Wildlife Act” (27 June 2008), which left Indigenous communities defenceless against corporate plans for resource extraction. D. Leg. Nº 1090 was later determined unconstitutional; both orders were eventually repealed.

8 Police weaponry included military-grade weapons with enough cartridges for 40,000 shots as well as rubber bullets and tear-gas grenades (García 2019, 29).

9 García’s op-eds were titled “Gardener’s Dog Syndrome” (2007a), “Recipe to Put an End to the Gardener’s Dog” (2007b), and “The Gardener’s Dog against the Poor” (2008).

10 On the bioprospecting case, which resulted in the first instance of an Indigenous group awarded a know-how licence for traditional knowledge, see Greene (2004).

11 Indigenous Amazonian cosmovision has inspired some of the most important works of the ontological turn in anthropology. See, for example, Latour (1993), Viveiros de Castro (1998), Descola (2013), and Kohn (2013).

12 Etsa (sun) taught men to fish sustainably, and Nugkui (a kind of liana) taught women to cultivate plants sustainably. See Aurelio Chumap Lucía and Manuel García-Rendueles (Chumap Lucia and García-Rendueles 1979).

13 Michael Brown (1993, 97) states that Awajún people conceive of cultivated garden space as “a spiritually charged realm that poses dangers to the unwary and imprudent”.

14 Radio Marañón broadcast in the Department of Amazonas as well as the cities of Jaén, Cajamarca, and surrounding areas; Radio Victoria in Chachapoyas; Radio Uctubamba in Bagua Grande; Radio Estelar and Radio Ld Stereo in Bagua Chica; and Radio Nieva in Nieva (Rodríguez Daza 2018, 13).

15 Mediascapes, one of the dimensions of global cultural flow, refer to “the distribution of electronic capability to produce and disseminate information (…) and to the images of the world created by these media” (Appadurai 1996, 35).

16 I conducted two Skype interviews with Muñoz (23 August 2017 and 7 October 2019). I interviewed Vega Norell in Lima on 27 August 2019. I thank them both for their time and support during various iterations of this project.

17 See the appendix to Rodríguez Daza (2018).

18 Both networks emerged in the ‘70s and 80s’ to democratise the media sector worldwide during a time in Latin America when dictatorial military regimes controlled and censored the media.

19 The creators chose the designation “radio movie”, a movie “to watch with your ears” according to the trailer, motivated by their desire to create a new cultural product, distanced from the radionovela. Though they drew on cinematic language and sound effects, the serial drama is immediately recognisable as part of the radionovela genre, as I refer to it throughout this essay.

20 Here, I refer to mishearing by dominant groups as a form of colonialist silencing and not as Paul Carter (2004, 45) uses it to describe subaltern resistance to silencing.

21 The original quotation is from Nosotros los maestros (Arguedas 1986, 78).

22 My gratitude to Tamara Mitchell for the suggestion to dialogue with Sommer about the exposure of listeners’ potential epistemological blind spots in Etsa Nantu.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda M. Smith

Amanda M. Smith is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also co-chairs the Amazonia section of the Latin American Studies Association. Her forthcoming book, Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom, is under contract with University of Liverpool Press.