Geographers writing in Spanish often refer to Peru’s Eastern Andes as muy accidentado, "very accidented." The same could be said of the lives shaped in these devastating mountains. If you live between Cajamarca and Chachapoyas, between the Maranon and Huallaga Rivers, you could have as a neighbor a man whose name is Hitler, or Himmler, or Lenin, or Nixon, but who’s never heard of the famous man he’s named after. Or a nun who fell in love with a terrorist, left the convent, and became the leader of a hit squad. Or an ex-soldier who wanted to make his fortune but instead was sold as a slave to a gold mine and barely escaped with his life.
Those people live relatively close to roads, police, schools--civilization. But as you travel east from the sere peaks of the Andes and fall into the greenblack, steaming jungle, the lives become even more excessive, filled with more danger. This tropical montane forest contains some of the thickest undergrowth in the world. Within six months, any machete-cut trail utterly disappears. Unless you count survival, revenge, and desire as laws, no law has penetrated this region since Inca totalitarianism fell apart more than four centuries ago. For a time in the 1700s, Spanish Franciscans tried to convert it into a paradise of cinnamon, coca, and cotton plantations farmed by Indians, but forest and natives alike proved inhospitable to life on any terms but their own. The priests fled in the early 1800s. Soon the natives were all gone, too; some migrated, and the rest died of smallpox and other European-borne diseases.