Violent Exchanges: The Urarina Peoples and Habilitacion

Numbering between 4,000 and 6,000, the Urarina are a semi-nomadic hunting and horticultural society inhabiting a swath of Peru's lowland tropical rain forest known as the Chambira Basin (Dean 1992).

The current system of debt-peonage—or what is called colloquially in Peruvian Amazonia as habilitacion—is a living legacy of the rubber boom. Starting well over a century ago, rubber companies, patrones, and itinerant traders (regatones) began mobilizing local labor-power through the system of habilitacion that, in essence, “was an extension and intensification of pre-existing feudal relations” (Chibnik 1994: 40). In the Upper Amazon, the familiar system of compadrazgo/padrinazgo or ritual compeership, coupled with local labor-bosses and traders' virtual monopoly of cargo transport and credit, has long ensured the viability of inequitable forms of ex­change.

In Peruvian Amazonia the rubber boom was facilitated through the system of ha- bilitacion that mobilized “a long chain of debtors and creditors” (Gray 1996: 222). During the height of the rubber bonanza (circa 1870-1915), the large commercial houses of Amazonian frontier towns like Iquitos and Manaus would supply credit and goods to intermediaries, who in turn would advance manufactured goods to local rubber-tappers and their labor-bosses. Debts were then repaid with rubber.

Urarina oral history suggests long and enduring relationships with traders, inter­mediaries and other classes of extractive entrepreneurs. Elderly informants con­firmed reports that a small number of families from Iquitos established control over the flow of goods in and out of the Chambira watershed during the rubber boom (see Castillo 1958, Quintana 1948, Kramer 1979).

At the beginning of the last century, the Urarina from the lower stretches of the Chambira River were preyed upon by ruthless labor recruiters during the dreaded correrias, or slave raids. Some Urarina ended up as “virtual slaves” on feudalistic es­tates dotted along the Maranon river (Kramer 1979: 15; cf. Chibnik 1994: 41). The Urarina responded by disbanding and escaping to the far reaches of the Chambira Basin's headwaters (Kramer 1979: 52-3). Throughout the first half of that century, a number of patron-controlled Jundos, or agro-extractive estates, thrived in the Cham- bira. The fundo is a type of Amazonian commercial estate owned and operated by a labor boss—a patron—who recruits local labor-power throughout the system of ha- bilitacion (Chibnik 1994: 38; Gow 1991: 93-94). Traders and patrones regularly lived for years on end among local Chambira communities, and in so doing contrib­uted to miscegenation and cultural hybridity. Throughout Peruvian Amazonia, “pa­trones (have) entered into multiple sexual unions with women living on their fundos” (Chibnik 1994: 46).

The system of habilitacion continued to flourish in the Chambira Basin until at least the 1970s, when the “traditional” system of patron-clientilism began its decline.

The Urarina's lengthy historical experience of the violence of extractive mercan­tilism—including, forced labor conscription, rape, disease, concubinage, and abusive treatment at the hands of outsiders—reinforces their survival strategy of political autonomy through seclusion. Many Urarina communities have managed to achieve a degree of relative isolation from recurrent epidemics and the exploitation of their la­bor-power by continuing to rely on a strategy of flight. Urarina men discontented with their patron will flee, either by river or along an intricate network of forest trails (beru) linking rivers and communities. But the structure of the local labor market, coupled with the Urarina's own demand for industrial commodities, means that there is ultimately no escape: Urarina headmen, acting on behalf of their long house group, eventually enter into unequal exchange relationships with competing patrones and traders.

Urarina oral histories attest to a violent history of forced labor recruitment. Many informants were able to cite actual cases of physical abuse perpetrated by cruel labor bosses.

The virtual absence of cash on the Chambira means that the Urarina vigorously seek out relations with traders because it gives them access to commodities (rikele) of unreliable supply, and because it suits their own patterns of barter (Dean 1994; see also Hugh-Jones 1992: 69; Muratorio 1991: 151; Siskind 1977: 170-171). The allure of foreign trade-goods has drawn the Urarina into permanent, albeit episodic ex­change relations with outsiders whose behavior is motivated by entrepreneurial de­sires to profit from indigenous surplus production and forest extraction. In the Chambira watershed, goods—both “domestic” and “foreign”—are significant for they give the Urarina a way for dealing with the politics of identity, particularly in the postcolonial context. Recent scholarship has displayed the extent to which the sphere of consumption and the allure of imported goods are themselves crucial to understanding the multiple ways in which national identities have been “stated, con­tested, and affirmed in postcolonial Latin America” (Orlove and Bauer 1997: 8).

The Urarina's productive “entanglement” with manufactured and imported items (including dogs) has heightened their dependence on traders who regularly finagle unequal exchanges, often with the aid of tobacco (mapachu) and stupefying cane liquor or aguardiente (abaritι) traded at an exorbitantly inflated rate (see Castillo 1958: 28). Due in part to the barriers of language and literacy, the Urarina are not fully versed in the logics of capitalism. While many Urarina long house settlements now have portable shortwave radios that receive daily broadcasts of market prices in urban centers like Iquitos, this information does not appear to have enabled Urarina producers and consumers to obtain better terms of trade with the area's patrones and regatones. Largely innumerate, the Urarina only partially understand the dominant norms of commercial exchange—including weights and measurements—which puts them at a great disadvantage in the transcultural mercantile context.

In portraying the inequitable exchange relations between the Urarina and mestizo patrones, I do not mean to suggest the absence of any “redeeming” aspects of habili- tacion. As in other indigenous frontier zones, such as the early nineteenth-century Columbia Plateau region of North America, “the traders' (primary) purpose was to carry on a profitable—and therefore peaceable—trade with Native peoples” (Vibert 1997: 8). In the succinct words of dona Rosita, the middle-aged wife of a prominent trader operating in the Chambira Basin, “we are simply regatones, traveling mer­chants, we bring trade-goods to the Chambira so that we can make a good living” (hacer buen negocio) (field notes, May 1996). Traveling merchants and patrones will occasionally rent space on their boats (fletar), dispatch messages (pasar la voz), ob­tain desired manufactured items (pedidos), or arrange for the repair of a broken shot­gun or chainsaw in Iquitos.

Obviously, without these additional “benefits” the Urarina would not be nearly as supportive of peonage. Anthropologists working in Amazonia have long under­scored the significance of exchange as a mode of action “that is positively valued as much for the social relationship that it establishes as for the opportunity which it of­fers to acquire material goods” (Henley 1996: 234). According to classical patronage relationships, the Urarina derive the fullest benefits of peonage from exclusive alli­ances with “benevolent” patrones, rather than from non-preferential participation in the system of debt-peonage (cf. Murphy 1978: 189). The advantage of establishing long-term exchange relations with specific traders or patrones helps to explain the paradox of indigenous peoples' continued and active involvement with individual trading partners—in spite of their bitter criticism of the entire system of habilitacion.

The exchange of material goods in Amazonia pales in significance when com­pared with the importance of the circulation of persons through marriage, or with the circulation of “non-material aspects” of personhood (Henley 1996: 234; see also Viveiros de Castro 1992). In a similar vein, habilitacion cannot simply be reduced to the exchange of manufactured goods for forest produce—say mahogany logs for steel axes, or hunted game for cotton cloth or glass beads. Nor can this complex be understood simply in terms of coercive labor recruitment practices. Habilitacion rela­tionships encompass many types of circulation, both material and ideological. These multiplex relationships are much more than purely economic transactions; they in­volve the strategic manipulation of fluid codes of social distinction—many of which are inscribed in mythic praxis—and articulated as chants, songs, adages, legends, and stories.