Peru: The Master is Dead

He commanded respect, despite his old-fashioned and dirty appearance. The principal personages of Cuzco greeted him seriously. It was uncomfortable to walk with him because he kneeled down before all the churches and chapels and ostentatiously took off his hat to every priest he met. My father hated him; he had worked as a scribe in the Old Man’s haciendas. “From the hilltops he shouts with the voice of damnation, warning his Indians that he is everywhere. He harvests his vegetables, and then lets them rot; he thinks they are too cheap to sell in the cities, and too dear to be eaten by his serfs. He will go to Hell,” my father said of him. —JOSE MARIA ARGUEDAS, Los Rios Profundos.

THE HACIENDA LAURAMARCA—the largest estate in the Department of Cuzco, ancient seat of the Inca Empire—is a gray-green feudal domain stretching over 200,000 acres of rolling, windy puna of grass and stubble and glacial stone in the highlands of southern Peru, occupied by immense herds of sheep, llamas, and alpacas, and roughly 5,000 Indian serfs. There is a primeval and intricate confusion of stone fences, defining each of the Indians’ tiny subsistence plots, alongside the small river dividing the puna as ...