Life on the Uros Islands, a settlement built on 120-odd rafts made from bulrush reeds floating atop southern Peru’s Lake Titicaca, has never been easy. Its 1,300 or so inhabitants claim to be related to the first tribes to populate the Andes, which moved onto the water when the Incas, and later the Spanish, came knocking on their doors. Living conditions on the highest lake in the world were harsh then, and still are today.
Unable to grow crops or keep livestock, the Uros people survive by hunting and fishing. Parents must keep an eye on children to make sure they don’t fall in the water and drown. Cold nights promise early-onset rheumatism, while the heat of stoves and lanterns has burned down entire homes. Before the arrival of mass tourism and humanitarian projects, having your own functioning toilet was considered a luxury. Finishing high school, a distant dream.
Life on these unique and beautiful islands survives today largely thanks to tourism. The Uros Islands are Peru’s second most popular travel destination after Machu Picchu, with islanders offering guided tours via boats and kayaks and selling handicrafts woven from the same totora reeds as the islands themselves. Given this reliance, the Uros were particularly affected by the coronavirus pandemic. And now, just as visitor numbers are starting to recover, they face a new kind of threat: political unrest.
In December, Peru’s president, Pedro Castillo, was ousted from office after attempting to dissolve the Congress. His vice president, Dina Boluarte, was swiftly sworn in as president, sparking nationwide protests calling for new elections, from the capital of Lima to the mountaintops of Cusco. Some of the biggest, deadliest demonstrations took place on Titicaca’s shores, where almost all people identify as Indigenous.
Many Indigenous people viewed Castillo – a rural schoolteacher and union leader with no previous political experience – as a champion of the country’s excluded sectors and marginalised communities. Like many in the region, the Uros hoped Castillo would grant them greater bargaining power in Lima. They joined other Peruvians of Indigenous descent – including the Quechuas and Aymaras – in calling for Boluarte’s resignation. On 24 January, hundreds of islanders climbed onto their caballitos de totora – traditional banana-shaped boats used for fishing and ferrying tourists, woven from the same reeds as the islands themselves – and set sail for the shoreside town of Puno. “We are tired of always being discriminated against and left aside,” one of the protesters told a Peruvian newspaper as the procession entered Puno’s Plaza de Armas.
So far, the protests have accomplished little in terms of change at the top. Boluarte is still the unelected leader of Peru. Meanwhile, the unrest has deepened the divide between Lima’s light-skinned elite and the Peruvian south. A total of 66 deaths have been reported since December – including one particularly devastating clash between protestors and police at an airport in Juliaca (north of Puno) that left 204 injured and 18 dead.
To Peruvian anthropologist Guillermo Salas Carreño, the high death-count demonstrates the government’s “clear disregard for the lives of Indigenous citizens of the southern Andes”. This disregard existed long before Castillo took office, and Carreño believes it partly informed his ousting. “The Castillo government has faced open opposition and obstruction by all possible means from the dominant sectors of the capital,” he said. “All of this obstruction effort has clearly been laced with racist expressions.”
Despite hailing from the mostly non-Indigenous northern region of Cajamarca, Castillo positioned himself as a champion of Indigenous voters. Elected in July 2021, he faced two unsuccessful impeachment attempts on corruption charges before finally being removed from office in December. And while Boluarte was Castillo’s deputy, the protestors do not accept her as a replacement, given that she was installed without the consent of the people. Identity, then, is at the heart of Peru’s ongoing democratic crisis.
“Indigenous people disproportionately lack access to basic services, such as water, sewage and health care,” said Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, a programme director at Human Rights Watch. “Many in these communities distrust the national government, particularly the Congress, and had pinned their hopes for change on former president Castillo.”
Some of these supporters saw Castillo’s failed attempt to dissolve Congress as an effort to break through the gridlock that keeps Peruvian society tilted in favour of the elite. His opponents, by contrast, compared the move to a successful self-coup or “autogolpe” carried out in the 1990s by the authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori, who is currently serving time for human rights violations and briefly shared a jailhouse with Castillo after the latter’s arrest. Still, as protest-related casualties continue to mount, so does disapproval of Boluarte’s government, which recently reluctantly agreed to move planned elections from April 2026 to April 2024.
Like many Indigenous communities, the Uros hoped that Castillo would grant them greater autonomy, back up their contested claim to their historic habitat, and in doing so help preserve their unique way of life. Social relations on the islands are meant to be shaped not only by private interests but also by commitment to the wellbeing of the entire community. Mayors are elected to help distribute resources, including tourism revenue, investing it in public goods. Most importantly, the Uros have figured out how to simultaneously protect and prosper off Peru’s abundant natural resources – qualities which have allowed them to survive for centuries.
But political turmoil renders their future uncertain. The unrest has taken a toll on the Peruvian economy in general. Roadblocks organised by protesters disrupted the supply chains of industries great and small, from the Las Bambas mine near Cusco – responsible for 2 per cent of the world’s copper supply – to pharmacies and supermarkets. In Puno, the nearest city to the Uros Islands, construction projects remain unfinished. Shops and restaurants are shut. Unemployed workers wander the streets looking to pass the time. According to the Ministry of Economics and Finance, the number of Puno residents living below the poverty line of 378 soles or $100 per month has risen from 43 per cent to 80 per cent since Castillo was ousted in December.
The isolated Uros people can adapt to the chaos, but they are not entirely immune to it. If the markets on the mainland don’t have enough to sell, they can always take their caballitos out onto the lake in search of fish and bird eggs. However, Peru’s tourism industry has also taken a substantial hit. News of travellers getting stuck in the ill-provisioned town of Aguas Calientes, at the base of Machu Picchu, or being pummelled with pieces of burning tire while backpacking around Lake Titicaca, convinced many potential visitors to postpone their trip to Peru indefinitely.
If the tourism economy doesn’t make a strong recovery, many Uros families won’t have enough money to purchase school supplies for their children. Nor will they be able to obtain the materials necessary to maintain their natural water filters and biodegradable latrines.
Indigenous Peruvians everywhere find themselves in a difficult spot. Currently, protesting is the only way they can exert pressure on the national government. However, the more they protest, the more they risk damaging their already strained financial situation. A fresh round of protests in July sought political reform, the drafting of a new constitution and justice for abuses committed during previous anti-government clashes. But many fear that this third wave of protests will cause even greater economic damage.
Others have expressed doubt that Boluarte’s resignation would lead to a change in the status quo. “There is no party that is sufficiently organised, experienced and free of corruption to offer anything different from what came before,” says Salas Carreño. He implies that Peruvian democracy is rotten to the core: politics are shaped by an outdated constitution implemented during the Fujimori era. Congress is filled with representatives who prioritise private interest. And courts rule in favour of the highest bidder.
Could there possibly be change under Boluarte? Theoretically, says Sánchez-Moreno, the current government could change its course by “taking steps to address the deep inequities and lack of access to basic services in the most affected areas, acknowledging the government’s responsibility for the abuses, and inviting an independent international commission to support the criminal investigations and examine the broader drivers of the crisis.” And yet doing so would require the country’s first-ever female president to go against the very groups that guarantee her precarious hold on power.
The Covid pandemic and the recent protests have exposed the economic precarity of the Uros Islands, while underlining the power imbalance between the capital and the south of Peru. This holds true even when it comes to the tourist economy. The vast majority of tourists arrive via Lima and then travel south, to Cusco and to Machu Picchu; to the enormous geoglyphs of the Nazca Desert; and to Lake Titicaca to set foot on the stunning and exceptional Uros Islands. But a significant percentage of all tourism revenue – from tour tickets to hotel bookings – is sent to the capital city, which seemingly has little interest in investing that revenue beyond its own suburbs.
There is little doubt that Indigenous communities like the Uros will survive. But they won’t thrive until the government starts to take seriously their right of representation and proves willing to serve every citizen – regardless of whether they live in a house of cement in Lima or a floating island made from reeds.
This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
