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  Sanctioned by their clergy, the conquistadors didn’t view their behavior toward the indígenas (the native South Americans) as subject to the rules of God or decency; they were a subhuman species on whom committing any atrocity was justified. The first Spaniards, only a few hundred strong, were able to prevail against tens of thousands of Incas because they were in a fierce civil war. Pizarro used treachery to capture the Inca emperor. The Incas paid a huge ransom in gold for his return, but Pizarro slaughtered him anyway.

  Pizarro and his men kept some of the gold but sent much of it back to King Charles. The news of this treasure attracted thousands more Spanish thugs to descend on the New World for their share of the booty.

  Later, the Spanish viceroy, who had been granted virtually unlimited authority over his domain, handed out land, and labor in the form of the native Indians, to colonialists. The pope’s gift of America to the Spanish crown was justified by the king’s mission to convert the heathen indígenas to Christianity. The system became disguised slavery, as adult male members of the tribes were forced to work for the Spanish for certain periods a year for a tiny wage.

  Founded in 1535, Lima was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1746. It is now South America’s fourth largest city, its population about five million. Though it is surrounded by endless shantytowns filled with mountain people who’ve come for work, the center itself is quite compact.

  While parts of its center retain a colonial flavor and the Plaza de Armas is impressive, much of the surrounding area is dirty, decayed, and strewn with litter. Only in the richer suburbs of Miraflores and San Isidro and along the Paseo de la Republica in the center is any effort made to plant trees and tend gardens.

  In years past, Peru was more hamstrung by regulations than Argentina, which is saying a lot. If a businessman followed the rules and didn’t set up his business on the underground economy, it took nine years to obtain a license. It even took several years just to buy a house. The government had finally started eliminating all this red tape. We saw budding entrepreneurs everywhere, in stores and countless street stalls. For sheer bustle and activity, Peru was rivaling China, the Middle East, and Africa.

  This shouldn’t be a surprise. It happens everywhere in the world once a government stands aside. Governments often think the method to get an economy moving is to give large businesses incentives or to cap prices. But the real way is to give the ordinary citizen a chance to jump in, to stop meddling with voluntary transactions—as they say in medicine, to do no harm.

  Peru excited me. Once the richest country in all the Americas, it had been in a bear market for two hundred years. To the seventeenth-century Spanish, everything north of Mexico had been on a par with how we think of northern Canada today, a vast undeveloped scrubland. Not only had there been gold in the vice royalty of Peru, but the Spanish had discovered Potosí, a mountain of pure silver that at today’s prices might fetch $200 billion.

  Peru had enjoyed a silver boom on a par with that of the Saudi royal family and the Sultan of Brunei with their oil and gas wealth. For a while—everything is for a while—Lima was the richest city in the world. “The people here live on another level from the rest of the world,” wrote a Spanish chronicler, “and the getting and spending of money is a fever that burns and possesses the whole population. They always go in cloth of gold and silver, or in scarlet silk.… In general, they eat and cook off silver plate.”

  To this day you can see the ancient wealth in Peru’s leftover, deteriorating architecture. After viewing so many Peruvian cathedrals, altars of gold, fancy coaches, and lavish homes, I was staggered at the unproductive ways the wealth had been spent. No wonder the Spanish Empire hadn’t sustained itself.

  Some day Lima will be an exciting city again. When we were there prices were terribly depressed by the Shining Path, decades of government mismanagement, and the cholera epidemic, but I saw that the new government was removing the decades-old bonds that had been strangling the country. If I were right, that the turning point was near and prosperity would return, then a higher percentage would be made here off shares than almost anywhere else.

  I figured the Path was far better at PR than fighting; it had little chance to bring down the government. This was nowhere near the successful revolution Fidel Castro’s had been.

  So, the anti-Christ invested a small amount in shoring up Peru’s capitalist structure against the depredations of the Marxist-Leninist toads.

  “They called from Queens about changing your skydiving lessons,” said Sally, the temp bookkeeper on one of my calls to New York.

  “Sally, I’m not taking skydiving lessons. I’m in Lima—Peru—South America.”

  “I wondered about that,” she said. “You’re sure you haven’t been to Queens in the past few weeks?”

  I sighed. “No. Why?”

  “I know this is complicated, Mr. Rogers. It makes me nervous.”

  “Sally, what skydiving lessons?”

  “Thank you. The woman said it had been charged to your MasterCard. She wanted to know since you hadn’t made it if you’d like to come another time.”

  “Judd! He’s done it again! What’s the credit-card number?”

  We checked, and it wasn’t a number on any of my cards. He must have sent in one of those preapproved applications with his address. I dragged Barbara Robinson, my lawyer, back in. On the card were ten thousand dollars in charges, and every now and then a thousand or so had been paid to keep it in good standing.

  Not knowing what else he might have taken, Barbara recommended canceling all the old cards and starting fresh. That seemed like a wonderful idea—till I had to resuscitate them in Lima.

  From Lima there was no direct dial. The hotel operator became snippy because I was making so many calls to New York. Despite my paying the hotel an extra dollar just to pick up the phone, it made work for her. To get new cards, to sign the right papers, we had to drive to hell and back in the Peruvian suburbs. We spent a lot of time in banks, where squads of soldiers, dressed in flak jackets and carrying machine pistols, nervously eyed our motorcycles, jeans, and black leather jackets.

  Ten cards, ten banks. Every bank officer, too, was suspicious of this guy in jeans and a black leather jacket who wanted to resuscitate a credit card that a lawyer in New York had canceled. They figured I was probably the thief who had stolen the credit card in the first place. Maybe my moll and I had killed Mr. Rogers and stolen his motorcycle, wallet, and gear and were now engaged in a bold, clever operation to obtain yet more booty at the bank’s expense. The cables north smoked with telexes, phone calls, and faxes.

  We flew to La Paz to look around.

  Near twelve thousand feet, it was the world’s highest capital city. It sat at the bottom of a natural canyon several hundred yards below the level of Bolivia’s altiplano, with snowcapped Mt. Illimani towering over it. As we flew in, the skyscrapers in the center of the city resembled scale models surrounded by the reddish and pastel houses of the indígenas, which climbed the steep slopes of the canyon.

  La Paz was founded in 1548 following the discovery of gold by the Spanish. Despite skyscrapers, the old part of the city retained a colonial Spanish flavor.

  Even though Bolivia was the poorest republic in South America, La Paz appeared more prosperous than Lima. Maybe the gold and drug money showed up here and not elsewhere in the country.

  Even more indígenas here. The women wore wonderful little bowlers, which they managed to keep on their heads in some mysterious fashion. Their style of dress had been prescribed by the Spanish several hundred years before and they still maintained it.

  Witches had set up stalls where they sold potions that brought you luck in love, business, marriage, having children, whatever you were having problems with. Taking no chances, I bought the giant-sized, high-ticket talismanic vial that was all-in-one, good for every domain of your life, which I keep on my dresser. So far, so good.

  India has its soothsayers, and the Indians consider it
bad luck to build a house or marry without consulting one of these wise men. In China we’d come across feng shui, much the same system, and Africa had its witch doctors. Our pharmacologists now acknowledge that so-called primitive healers know much more about biologicals and medications than we used to give them credit for; today ethical drug companies even hire these backwoods healers as pharmacological consultants. People all over the world use the local witch to help them make decisions, as they have for centuries—even in advanced civilizations. Is there a lot more to this than our literal-minded science understood? After all, aren’t coincidences really only scientific truths that haven’t been discovered yet?

  The traffic was as bad here as anywhere in the world. The roads weren’t made for it. Hundreds and hundreds of stalls, as well as money changers and typists, were set up on the street. Some stalls even had phones and charged for calls.

  The stock market here was only one-and-a-half years old and still had no stocks. Without a public market, I was forced to leave an order to buy stocks “in the street” or privately. I wanted a beer company, the convertible bond of a bank, and another coming new issue. The travel company here, Crillon, will be a terrific buy if it ever comes public.

  As they have for hundreds of years—long before the Spanish came—every day Bolivia’s miners consume up to a pound of coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine, for energy and endurance. Ever curious, I tried some of them the way the Bolivians do, by chewing them. My first wad was bitter, but the second and third were better. I learned to hold on until the momentary bitterness passed, then keep the wad in place the way Alabama country people chew tobacco or a cow mashes its cud. I also tried mate de coca, tea made from coca leaves, which tasted a bit like Japanese green tea. It’s even served in the U.S. embassy in Bolivia. The locals used it to ward off hunger and altitude sickness.

  I got less of a buzz off all this than from a cup of strong coffee. In its natural state the leaf was harmless. But maybe that was the point. Our people had taken tobacco, a herb sporadically used in a ceremonial fashion by the Native Americans, and smoked it ceaselessly. “Civilized” rich countries had taken a mild stimulant like coca leaves, used here the way the more sensible of us use tea and coffee, and cranked it up into a strength dozens of times its normal potency and used it several times a day, abusing it.

  The Bolivians have chewed and made tea from coca leaves for more than four thousand years. The Incas restricted its use to royalty, priests, doctors, and the empire’s messenger runners, who could travel more than a hundred miles a day by chewing the leaves.

  Modern scientists agree that the traditional way the Bolivians use coca is harmless, nor is it even slightly addictive. The U.S. had often barged into Bolivia with programs to defoliate the plants, however, provoking violent demonstrations from campesinos, or peasants. They could see no reason to give up their best cash crop, one from a hearty, resilient plant they could harvest four times a year. I wondered how we’d react to Chinese or Koreans barging into our country and telling us to defoliate our tobacco plants, that we were selling their citizens poison.

  Despite the stupidity of the drug habit, many of the financial and social problems of both South and North America won’t be solved till we legalize drugs. I know all the arguments against doing it, that we’ll have twenty-one-year-olds buying cocaine and designer drugs in the local pharmacy, but the vast crime and security apparatus we employ now to deal with this problem is crippling producer and user societies alike. Tens of billions of dollars a year are stolen in the United States to finance a drug trade bloated by illegal profits. It makes no more sense to make drugs illegal than it did to make alcohol illegal. The same basic problems have arisen—large criminal enterprises and corrupt officials. We’re handling cigarettes and alcohol by jawboning successfully against them, by turning them into a déclassé activity, and the only solution is to legalize drugs and educate people against them, too.

  The world is spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a hopeless battle. We are corrupting our entire criminal justice system. The police don’t want the drug trade stopped; for them it’s good business. They can now confiscate anything they want so long as it’s in the name of “the war against drugs.”

  We saw the corrosive effects of this drug trade everywhere in Latin America: corruption, deaths, smuggling, entire societies undermined. Why not just legalize the stuff? The hundreds of billions we would save on law enforcement if drugs were legal and the taxes we’d collect on legal drugs could be better spent on prevention and cure of whatever cases of abuse arise. There would be enough left over to deal with alcohol and tobacco use and still cut taxes.

  Little will happen until there’s a huge scandal in the United States. Perhaps the president or a member of the Supreme Court will be found to be corrupted because of drugs. Today more than fifty of the several hundred federal judges refuse to try drug cases because they find the laws useless in solving the problem and harmful to our society. If all federal judges took the same action, that would be scandal enough.

  After legalization, the freed-up jail cells could be used for corrupt politicians.

  When Peruvians talked of Titicaca, the world’s highest-altitude navigable lake, they never failed to mention it had waves. That was their way of emphasizing the size of this bright blue body of water separating Peru and Bolivia. And large it was, covering more than three thousand square miles. But while its skies were sunny and the land around it was gentle terrain, it wasn’t that hospitable. Its water was frigid year-round, the result of being more than 12,000 feet above sea level.

  According to local folklore, from Lake Titicaca sprang one of the most important cultures the world has ever known, the Incas. For them, the lake had been sacred and its islands holy. Legend had it that when the Spanish reached Cuzco, the indigenous inhabitants had taken the two-ton gold chain of Incan Prince Huáscar from its resting place at Qoricancha, the Temple of the Sun, and hurled it into the lake to hide it from the invaders. Some years ago oceanographer Jacques Cousteau spent eight weeks with a mini-submarine exploring the bottom. He found no gold, but he did discover a twenty-inch-long tricolored frog that never surfaces.

  On Titicaca’s surface were islands, the best known being the floating reed islands of the Uros tribe. Here was a remarkable method of self-defense, further proof of man’s great adaptability in the face of necessity. Around the world we’d seen caves, castles, moats, and underground cities. Here the Uros had built huge islands of reeds—ten-foot-thick reed mats on which they would build villages. When threatened by their enemies, they would sail the whole island away to safety.

  We learned that the Uros had lived with each other a while before marriage. If it didn’t work, they could try someone else—up to three partners—till a marriage took. Despite all our progress, perhaps civilized society could learn something from a more natural way of life.

  Local superstition said black blood had coursed through the Uros’ veins, allowing them to survive the frigid nights on the lake. The last full-blooded Uro died in 1959, but the island’s current inhabitants—a mix of Uro, Aymara, and Quechua peoples—still followed the Uro ways. They fished, hunted birds, and lived off lake plants, including the all-important reeds used to make their homes, build their boats, and form the base of their islands.

  On a bleak plateau nearly thirteen thousand feet high stand the remains of the brilliant, long-forgotten Stone Age civilization Tiahuanaco, which we now know predates the Spanish discovery of the Americas by several hundred years.

  Its stones are square and rigid, its vistas blocky and rectangular. Who were these pre-Columbian people? What was their fate? Unlike other ancient South American civilizations, they left no written records, only their buildings.

  One of the city’s largest structures, Puma Puncu, is now only a jumble of stones, some of them twenty-six feet long and sixteen-feet wide, hurled about as if by a natural catastrophe. No one knows whether this had once been a palace or a temple; i
t’s now a mystery.

  Excavations have proved that over the thousand years of its existence this was as many as five separate cities, one built on top of another. A thousand years of sophisticated civilization in the depths of the Bolivian jungle!

  More amazing, the quarries for the city’s stones lay sixty to two hundred miles away. Blocks of stones weighing up to one hundred tons, a few even more, were carried across the jungle floor by men without the wheel, metal, or horses. Yet even without metal blades, the blocks were as regular as if a die had cut them.

  What struck me was the universal genius of man. I was reared to think that the glories of the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans were the heights of ancient man’s accomplishments. But this trip was opening my eyes. In Carthage, in Zimbabwe, in Xi’an, in the Sahara, and in Siberia—here in Tiahuanaco, Lake Titicaca, Suzdal, Istanbul, and Samarkand—I found ancient glory after ancient glory.

  To build a mammoth stone city like this, miles square and several stories high, took more than a strong king who wanted to be well buried. A people first had to rise above the subsistence level, after which such huge structures took dozens, scores of generations of social development and organization. Their leaders had to remain focused on their goals over generations and not succumb to the burning consumption fever that later infected the Spaniards in colonial Lima. Housing, food, and labor had to be arranged; some form of capital had to be assembled; plans had to be laid and executed; and a way of motivating workers and middle management had to be found. All this by societies we deign to call primitive. To me they represented everything that makes man great. I realized again that mankind would take care of itself and survive.