Submerged and buried

While the Peruvian hydraulics celebrated a triumph, she lost a great part of her life.

 

By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo. Photographs by Franco Alburqueque.

 

LANCONÉS, Peru – Benefit for farmers or a dictatorship’s megalomania?Over 800 million cubic meters  --4/5 parts of its capability— Poechos Reservoir begins the water transference from Chira River to Piura River.

 

Not all people share the joy. Turning 74 years, Mariana Távara settles down far her home, now submerged under all that liquitd amount. On behalf of the departmen’s agricultural expansion, she must brand a new life next to her family in a town with almost all the comfort, but her heart. “The history of Lanconés finished with Poechos Dam,” she states 35 years later.

 

Walking among rim orchards

When Sullana Province just crowled 8 months old, Mariana born in Lanconés, a village located at Chira River’s rim near Ecuador. It was mid-July. “It was a little town with wood houses, it was rrare the one made of mud brick.”

 

The people supplied of water and food directly from the Chira. “My dad had a piece of land, a rim orchard, wwhere we grew corn, squash,sweet potato. Everyone went and got 30 or 50 meters of rim and grew right there .”

 

People grew fowls and some dedicated to jobs linked to the countryside, as the carpentry that was done by who became his husband, Ambrosio Palacios. Rather, there was some organization among the informality. The most appreciated good of that time were burden beasts, and they were well paid in Ecuador.

 

“Every year, we went to the fairs they made in Celica and Pindál for sselling the beasts: horses, mules, donkeys. They didn’t celebrate any saint but they made big parties.”

 

By its side, Lanconés was offered to Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, a 17^th-century Catholic monl recognized across Peru by his miracles. His statue was in a priviledged place of the local temple. “Old Lanconés church was big. It had a tower and three naves inside – two besides, one main,pretty well decorated.”

 

Mariana calculates 80 families lived in town. While the surrounding towns did not build their chapels, the religious activities concentrated in Lanconés and almost all the community’s life too.

 

In 1917, Peru’s Government raised Lanconés as a district, occupying the north-eastern portion of Sullana Province. Its neighbors aare Marcavelica at the west, Querecotillo and Sullana at the south, Suyo (Ayabaca) at the east, and Ecuador at the north, forming a kind of U-letter which middle is marked by the Chira entrance fully in the Peruvian territory after serving as a border between Ayabaca Province and Ecuador’s Loja Province.

 

Underwater stones

The childhood of Mariana was marked between the town life, the trips to Ecuador, and the walks to places where the surrounding dry forest still keeps history. “I knew a site where there were some rocks that seemed the ancesstors rooms, it was also the Inca Canal that came from very far, Las Lomas it seems.”

 

It’s supposed the Coast Inca Trail came out from Pelingara,near Las Lomas –that it was called Suipira at that time—, rimmed El Eréo Mount, and advanced to La Solana, where Pedro Cieza de León assures that there was a tambo or post. He also mentions Puechio as a place where temples raised, apparently dedicated to the Moon, judging the disgust which he refers to sodomy, an extended habit among the Chimu leaders, possibly tolerated by the Inca conquerors but not by the Spaniards.

 

There are still La Solana and Puechio, that became Poechos as the time went by, but the trail trace and the canal that Mariana saw are underwater and tons of sediment of the so-called Peruvian Coast’s largest water artificial mirror.

 

A neighbor

Lanconés ever had a good relationship with Ecuador as much as it fought with Peru in 1941 because a limits controversy. The operations fields staged in Zapotillo, that was invaded by Peruvian troops, and Macará, far away about 25 and 40 miles to the northeast respectively. (Both cities belong to Loja Province, Ecuador.)

 

In the Mariana’s immediate space (who was 29 years old, then) and her neighborhood, the stuff was frozen because although there was no troops movilization, there was no access to the other boundary neither. However, many males were enrolled to participate in the contends.

 

As the years passed by, Ecuador improved its boundary with towns and estates supplied with all the services (although the telephone was very bad quality) and the time froze everything like a non-imprisoned fosile.

 

Both nations signed a definitive peace agreement in 1998after a first document, subscribed 56 years before, was objected because of undefined borders in the nascent of Cenépa River, Amazonas, where struggles staged in 1995. As a peace product, Peru and Ecuador established five vial axis to promote the binational interchange and development.

 

The second of them passes by Lanconés. It starts in Arenillas, el Oro, ends in LaLámor, Loja, crosses over Alamor River, and it starts at the Peruvian side in the same-name town, until getting to the district’s capital, following by Querecotillo, and reaching Sullana City, the province’s capital. In July 2011, Peru’s President Alan Garcia opened a section between Querecotillo and Lanconés that was not asphalted, but the drivers who connect Sullana with that site everyday observed that the work was weak, and if it rained heavy, the cure could be worse than the ill.

 

Also, from there to the borderline, the road is practically affirmed. Crossing the borderline, the story is completely different. “The road is gonna slice or make holes,” the car driver which we travel to Lanconés says, once we get to Santa Victoria, 20 miles to the northwest of Sullana City. Just 6 miles more and we’ll get to Mariana’s house who was neither of the official joyful this time.

 

Who pushed pause?

Mariana Távara refuses to call Lanconés her home where sshe lived for three decades and a half – she ever mention it as Nuevo Lanconés (New Lanconés). Her daughter, Zoila Palacios, tells when the old town began to flood, there was no choice to claim: “We got to get out anyway.”

 

Francisco Morales Bermudez’s military regime dispossed trucks for moving the people to a plain very near Huaypirá Village and the dam made to hold the water of Poechos Reservoir. The anecdotic of the issue is the land is in the neighbor Querecotillo District.

 

The homesick journeys lasted five hours, as Mariana remembers: “They put us all the comfort but our church became pretty littler, with just one nave – nothing to do what we had before.” Since then, Lanconés almost didn’t grow up and its population should work in cattle because the lands was not considered as part of Chira-Piura Project’s irrigation.

 

The whole district is in similar conditions, and it was ranked as extreme poverty despite the biodiversity in the surrounding ddry forest.

 

Old stories

Only the Lanconés old people hold on the place. The generations who knew the first color-TV’s and the cellphones might get out to brand a future at the most developed cities of the region, or beyond.

 

Aware about that, Manuel Vasquez dedicated to interview the old male and female to rebuild the community’s history, and resulted a typewritten draft that is a sort of local best-seller entitled Social-Cultural Survey of Lanconés District.

 

Although the administrations of Isaías Vasquez  and Carlos Galvez tried to dynamize the district, it’s been gotten very few except the vigorous Cabrería Town that, with support of Care, got to launch a communitarian business of blancmange and goat milk cheese. The neighborhood expected that Power Saldaña’s administration manifested. “The only one we have seen is more people working in the municipality,” the driver who gets us closer to Lanconés says us.

 

But, being fair, much of the local heritage has been rescued by this town hall. The case is it is waiting for somebody who gets to it for taking the dust out, like Mariana Tavara’s heart, that has left submerged and buried right there where the hope of thousands of Piura-natives emerged.

 

Produced by Franco Alburqueque. Additional production and edited by Nelson Peñaherrera with reports of Aral editors and Peru21. © 2011 Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved. Comment this in the box below or on our Facebook and Twitter accounts. Would you like to know the places quoted in this story? Write us at factortierra@gmail.com for more information.