Neri Salinas: A Female Free-Marketeer
Impacts the Peruvian Amazon

by Edwar E. Escalante *

As a barefoot young girl in the isolated community of Lake Cuipari in the Amazon region of Peru, every morning the precocious Neri Salinas hopped aboard a hand-made canoe with her father to help hunt the animals that they would sell to feed the family. Where most childhood memories consist of baseball games or merry-go-rounds, Neri’s memories would be different. She received her first pair of shoes at age 14, and her teaching degree at age 20, after which she worked as the only teacher in a school of 120 students for 22 years. Neri had her first brush with Peruvian political movements at age 43, when an armed column of MRTA (Revolutionary Movement Tupac Amaru) terrorists violently sacked her hometown of Yurimaguas on the morning of July 25, 1990.

The Tupac Amaru terrorists indiscriminately freed all of Yurimagua’s prisoners, looted all of the family businesses, and burned municipal buildings to ashes, leaving a plume of acrid smoke that Neri would remember watching from the window of her house as an omen of the troubles to come.

As a young teacher, Neri was courted by leftist political organizers, but was soon disillusioned by the overt nexus of leftists with the terrorists that had ransacked her hometown. While neither Hayek nor Burke found mention in the classrooms of the Amazon region back then, Mao’s Little Red Books could wallpaper the schools. Neri’s refusal to acquiesce to this would draw powerful enemies against her.

In 1980 she met and married fellow teacher Cirilo Torres, a political intellectual that would complement her natural libertarian instincts with a keen knowledge of political philosophy. The two soon became involved in the United Left Party, the only moderate party in a political milieu dominated by Communists, Socialists and terrorists. She was elected councilwoman of Yurimaguas by the party, and in 1990, she was elected President of the Federación de Campesinos, an organization formed to give voice to the small farmers of the region.

The small farmers had endured years of bureaucracy-induced scarcity of seed, equipment and materials, and had refused the suggested collectivization of their lands. The government in Lima had granted monopoly and oligopoly powers to shippers, processors, and distributors, to the detriment of the small, private producers. As a result, while small farmers were forced to sell their produce to monopoly processors that were able to name their price, a fully-equipped government processing plant sat dormant in Yurimaguas due to budget shortfalls and government mismanagement.

After exhausting all legal entreaties to the distant government in Lima to allow the farmers to operate the plant without any government funding, on December 20, 1991, Neri led a “peasant revolution” of 5000 small farmers that non-violently re-opened the plant and enabled the farmers to process their own produce, and to sell their goods at market prices.

When the monopolists colluded with their dependent shippers to refuse to ship the farmers’ products, Neri found a sympathetic ear in the newly-elected Fujimori government which provided boats that the farmers used to ship the produce downriver to Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, where a thriving economy paid market value for their goods. The success of the first plant, coupled with increased demand from the border countries, allowed the farmers to then build a rice and bean processing plant - without any government funds.

While her political star was rising, so too was the determination and ruthlessness of her newly-created political enemies. After breaking the monopoly, and after refusing the entreaties of the nascent terrorist group Shining Path, both Neri and Cirilo would see their political fortunes wane as the region turned into a red swamp of Communist and terrorist collaboration.

The liberationist Catholic Church of the region, whose priests were paid by the government, had allied when convenient with both the moneyed interests of the monopolists and with the increasingly militant leftist terrorists. Neri was denounced weekly on the church’s radio program, while her political enemies were supported.

In November of 1992, while on another trip to comply with the bureaucracy in Lima, Neri received news that her husband Cirilo had been arrested on charges of terrorism. But instead of being taken to jail as would have been the normal procedure, he was taken to a military base. Five days later, severely beaten and ashen, Cirilo was released to Neri and her then 12 year old daughter Hayda, both of whom were horrified by his condition.

Cirilo had not been allowed to talk to anyone, including a lawyer or family member, since he had arrived. He was released due to a complete lack of evidence for the charges. Several days later, he was re-arrested after the Federacion de Campesinos, the group that Neri had helped found, and in which Cirilo was an official, was accused of being a front for MRTA terrorists. After an independent judicial review by the fiscalía de Moyabamba, Cirilo was exonerated of all charges and released. The accuser later admitted to having been paid to make the accusation.

Upon their return to Yurimaguas, Neri and Cirilo found that the success of the processing plants and the introduction of market forces had now outstripped the community’s ability to produce and distribute their wares. Although offered a subsidy to expand the plants processing capacity, Neri refused and instead presented a project plan to the government for a loan that would be based on the value of the two successful processing plants that had previously sat collecting dust under government auspices.

To avert bureaucratic lag time and to meet the immediate demand from foreign markets, the government underwrote a loan of $700,000, collateralized by the two processing plants, to increase processing capacity and to buy three large shipping barges.

The good news would not reach the farmers of Yurimaguas before Neri’s political enemies would decide to strike. The political left had enjoyed a market-free zone in the Amazon region for decades, and the success of the processing plants were teaching the peasant farmers an object lesson in market economics. The left wing parties, now fully allied with both the Tupac Amaru and Shining Path terrorists, felt threatened by the success of the free market projects.

Political operatives of the ex-monopolists and leftist politicians would accuse Neri and Cirilo not only of terrorism, but also of murder. As the Fujimori administration began its crackdown on terrorism, false accusations became commonplace in order to satisfy political pressure to make arrests.

As they arrived in Yurimaguas with the loan documents in hand, three police cars screeched to a halt to seize Neri and Cirilo on a public street, making a spectacle of the arrest. The couple would spend the next ten months in separate jails in Lima.

It soon became public information that the accuser was an incarcerated drug runner and political operative that never produced any evidence to support his charges. After a very long judicial process, Neri and Cirilo were exonerated by the Jueces sin Rostros in Trujillo, the highest judicial authority on terrorism cases. And to underscore the injustice, a spokesman for the MRTA terrorist group, the group for which the two had been accused of being members, stated to the press that they had never belonged to the group. Moreover, the group actually praised the two for their work for the peasant farmers in Yurimaguas.

Freed on May 10, 1994, the couple returned the following week to a crowd of thousands of supporters waiting at the airport, with news cameras in tow, culminating in a reception at the processing plant. The political machinations of their political enemies had produced a blowback effect that would solidify their support in the region. In the elections of 2000, Neri would win a seat in congress. After serving her two year term, she decided, at age 52, to go to law school. She will graduate in December with honors from the Universidad Privada San Juan Bautista Lima.

While studying for her law degree, she managed to put her daughter Hayda through medical school, and she adopted a baby and a young girl from the Amazon that had both been victims of neglect. In August, she was recruited by popular demand to run for the open seat of Mayor of Yurimaguas. If she wins that race on November 19th, she will be the first woman mayor of her hometown. Not bad for a barefoot girl from the Amazon.

* Edwar E. Escalante is the executive director of Andes Libres, a free-market think in Cusco, Peru. (www.andeslibres.org)

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