Kawsay Ñampi seventh stop: Nuevo Rocafuerte

“Why is it called Nuevo Rocafuerte and not just Rocafuerte?” - was my first question when I met Mr Tito, one of the founders of this village. “Well”  - he said - “it used to be called Rocafuerte before the Peruvian invasion of 1941. See, Rocafuerte wasn’t located here, it used to be a couple of hours down the Napo River, in Peru. When the war started, the inhabitants of Rocafuerte fled to El Coca and the Peruvian army used the town as their military base. After the peace treaty of 1942, what was once known as Rocafuerte became Cabo Pantoja, a Peruvian village. A couple of years after the war, some of the former inhabitants of Rocafuerte decided to go as close as possible to where we used to live and founded a new village, which is this one, Nuevo Rocafuerte.”

I love border towns because of their vitality, commerce, noise, smells and mixes of culture, but Nuevo Rocafuerte is exactly the oposite. It is a small town of around 1400 inhabitants where not much goes on. Not many Peruvians cross the border to get here and not many Ecuadorians travel there. People assured me that it is not because they are still angry after the war, but because there is just not much to do.

I stayed there 3 days and I’m now posting pictures from the second. I was lucky enough to have met a couple of families that let me enter their homes and see how they live. They told me that Nuevo Rocafuerte used to be the parish’s cantonal head but after a referendum in 2008 the new head became Tiputini, a town 60 km to the north. They asked me to publish that they consider this referendum illegitimate and argue that the major has moved to Tiputini and never returned back. “Because he is afraid of us. We know what he did and how much he stole” - they added.

Everybody here knows about the Manta-Manaus commercial route project, but nobody is optimistic about it. “It could boost the economy in this region, but it seems the project is dead now” - said Mr Tito.

PS.
There may be a bit of a fuzz about the picture of a boy with a collar and a swastika drown on it. I’d like to put of the fire before it starts by saying that I asked him about that and he didn’t know what it represents. He is not a neonazi nor practises hinduism. He just likes the graphics and hasn’t heard about WWII.

Next stop: Cabo Pantoja, Peru

Kawsay Ñampi fifth stop: El Coca

Puerto Francisco de Orellana, commonly know as El Coca, is a small city at the confluence of the Coca and Napo Rivers in the Ecuadorian rainforest. There are many monuments to the discovery of the Amazon River by the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana here. He led an expedition with more than a thousand indios to try to get to El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. The expedition went through the Napo and he “discovered” the Amazon River. El Dorado was never found and almost all of the expedition died. But he got the credit for the discovery of the biggest river in the world, taxes from the newly discovered tribes, and many monuments. He also had an Ecuadorian city named after him. That's not too bad. Unfortunately, the indios did not receive any monuments. Maybe that's why the city is better known for it's nickname, rather than it's official one.
Most of the inhabitants came here to work in oil related businesses from all over the country, but since oil prices are getting lower everyday, work is also disappearing. Recently Petroecuador, the state owned Ecuadorian oil company, let go 1200 people and all of them worked in this city.
However, people in this region keep on smiling and making it difficult to take “serious” pictures. When they see a gringo faced guy behind a camera (i.e. me) they start shouting “se te va a romper la cámara” (your camera will break), making the joke that they are too ugly to be
photographed. What they don't know is that for me, beauty is boring, plane and uninteresting.
I am posting some pictures of the third day in town, which was the first I could really shoot throughout the day. It was raining the first two days. Walking through the city I came across a really colorful house which instantly hooked me. I couldn't resist and rang the bell. When Fausto Chicayo opened the door, I told him the truth: I thought his house was amazing and wanted to take some pictures of the decorations inside. He let me in. Another example of “the camera is a passport to other people's lives”, like Diane Arbus once said. Let's see if you can spot which pictures were taken there. (It's really easy).
About the Manta-Manaus route? Some people have heard about it, but they were really pessimistic.  They say it's too expensive and there is no money. “It´s better the government gives jobs to poor Ecuadorians and not money to rich Chinese investors”, somebody told me on the streets.

Next stop: Puerto Providencia (the future Ecuadorian port in the Amazon rainforest)

Kawsay Ñampi: Exploring human life along the Manta - Manaus route.

Recently I embarked on a trip to explore human life along the future commerce route Manta-Manaos. This will be a multi-mode route that is supposed to compete with the Panama Canal connecting the Pacific port of Manta in Ecuador with the Brazilian port of Manaos located on the Amazon River.

Some feasability research has been done, always studying the financial and commercial part of the project. I thought that this could be a good excuse to study human life along this way. And for this I will use my preferred tool: photography.

Until December 2015 I will be documenting human life in the following cities: Manta, Quevedo, Latacunga, Tena, Shushufindi, Puerto Providencia, Puerto Nuevo Rocafuerte, Iquitos, Leticia, Tabatinga, Manaos and perhaps some other small towns along the way. This will be a roadtrip of around 2.500 Km that will allow me to explore South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean and hopefully, towards the end of the journey, I will understand this region (my region) better.

In the next couple of weeks I will be posting my findings in this blog. But take into account, these are not end results, but the research process.

Welcome on board!

First stop: Manta

Manta is an Ecuadorian coastal city that hosts the second biggest port of the country. The port works almost exclusively for import, since there is no developed industry in the city that could fuel an export business. The city is also proud to be the "Tuna Capital of the World", a title well deserved since this sort of fish drives most of the economy here (although I wonder who gives a city such titles: UNESCO? UN? Selfproclaimed? If you know something, please let me know).

For this first post I will show some of the pictures I made on my first day in town (September 2nd, 2015). The images are in chronological order and there are already some interesting relationships between photographs.

This is the process, not the end result.

The Kawsay Ñampi project is one of the winners of the grant "Fondos Concursables" from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

Next stop: Quevedo.

Misha Vallejo