Experiment in the Andes

An Indian child of three lay in a dusty courtyard under the brassy Andean sky, bony and emaciated, but big in the belly.

The visiting U.S. anthropologist, seeing at once that the child was suffering from an infestation of worms, asked the father's permission to take it to a doctor. The father shamefacedly stalled for a day, another day, and a third--until the child died. Then the reason for the father's reluctance became shockingly clear. The family and all the neighbors danced, sang and drank deep at a gay, all-night wake, planned days before and sanctioned by their belief that all children who die go happily and directly to heaven. An ill-timed cure of the youngster would have embarrassed the whole community, most of all the father in his role as begetter of the fiesta.

This incident took place in 1949 at rock-strewn Vicos Hacienda, 10,000 feet up in the Andes northeast of Lima. But since then Vicos has changed. Last week Dr. Allan Holmberg, the scientist who wanted to save the child's life, reported on the change in a lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in Stanford, Calif.

A New Patron. Vicos' plight was ancient. Spanish conquistadores reduced the Inca population there (and all along the high Andes) to feudal serfdom; with independence from Spain, Peru had merely converted the fief into government property leased at about $800 a year to patrones, who got the Indian workers along with the land. The deadening centuries had stripped the Indians of all their skills, pleasures, and arts, and even of the imagination to conceive of a happier lot.

Among the 2,500 Indians who, dumbly surviving, lived at Vicos three years ago, Manuel Cruz, a lean-faced man of 40, was typical. Daylight, for him, meant only work; he had a mild form of tuberculosis, brought up an illiterate son, drank cheap rum at funerals. For the right to keep his ancestral four-acre subsistence plot, he toiled three days a week in the fields of the patron. His superstitious technique for growing his family's food, potatoes, was to "talk to the land."

Into Cruz's timeless existence one day, word came that the hacienda was to have a new patron with a curious name: Cornell University of Ithaca, N.Y. The faraway university proposed (with help from the Carnegie Corporation of New York) to experiment on the most effective ways for bringing modern know-how to primitive peoples. What the job required, in effect, was an isolated human laboratory; Cornell's Professor Holmberg, who once tramped the Andes on a field mission, had picked Vicos.

The Power of Suggestion. Holmberg and his three associates worked largely by suggestions expertly planted with Indian may or ales (leaders) in weekly meetings where the Indians spoke of their troubles.

A potato famine provided a dramatic opportunity for the first suggestion. The scientists offered the Indians fertilizer, bug killer and a better strain of potato seed. The "medicines for the soil," as Cruz desc-ibed them, grew potatoes four to eight times bigger than Vicos had been producing. "Kcmi alii, kemi alii," said Cruz--''Very good, very good."

Fresh from that success, the scientists proposed to start a school. The labor of Cruz and others, plus $4,000 worth of fixtures, glass and plumbing, raised a building that might have cost $75,000 or more in the U.S. Lima sent teachers, and Cruz's son went to classes; now, at 15, the boy runs a store of his own, selling soap, candles, flour and cigarettes. Other suggestions, planted with the mayorales, brought about a reforestation program, a new water system, training in the trades.

The Reward of Productivity. Obviously, much was learned in the Vicos experiment, and the trifling size of the bill to its U.S. participants seemed to point still another lesson. On insistence of the Peruvians, who balked at any drastic ripping of the social fabric of the highlands, Holmberg did not relieve the Indians of their obligation to work three days a week for the patron. Instead, he increased their productivity so much that returns from Vicos' cash crops rose from $2,000 a year to $10,000. The profit nicely covered the needed fertilizer, seeds, buildings and farmers' loans. The Carnegie grant (around $18,000 a year) covered the research end; the hacienda operation paid for itself almost from the start.

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