Jaguar Dreams

By Christine Cordi

I came around the bend and suddenly there he was. His jawline was stronger than I had imagined. His body, squatter. All the better to glide under low hanging branches. There were no crowds, just the two of us, eye to eye in the San Diego rain. Jaguar and human. The innocent prisoner paced in his 30 X 40 foot zoo cell where he would spend the rest of his days. Maybe he is a lucky one, I thought. He gets square meals and perhaps some spicy, supervised mating opportunities. He survives here as his South American rainforest habitat is methodically hacked away and burned. In 50 more years it will be gone. I looked away with guilt as I wondered whether he still dreamed of the jungle.

The jaguar was revered by the Andean people and took a place in their constellations and on their sacred Gateway to the Sun at Tiahuanaco, not far from the shores of Lake Titicaca. The Incas claimed that their capital city of Cusco resembled the body of a jaguar. Jaguars roamed on the other side of the mountains, the Eastern Andes called the "ceja de selva", the eyebrow of the jungle, which descended rapidly into the even more humid climate of the Amazon basin.

When Pizarro and his 160 conquistadors invaded Peru in 1533 they found an Incan empire populated by at least 6 million people. Stretching for thousands of miles, it started at Quito, Ecuador, and extended into Northern Chile. The Incas were superb administrators, and farmers – not easy in their high altitude terrain. They also were first class builders and had developed roads throughout the empire, many of which are still in use today. Through their relay system of runners, "chaskis" covering 155 miles per day, they could bring fresh fish for the emperor up to Cusco at 11,000 feet of altitude, and could run from Quito to Cusco faster than a first class letter travels today. Their stone masonry fit together so tightly that a knife blade could not be inserted between the large pieces of rock. They had organized their empire to radiate out from the gold bedecked Temple of the Sun in Cusco, and it was organized into four main quarters, or "suyos". Along almost 360 degrees of sight lines extending many miles were "huacas", objects that were part sacred, and perhaps part for astronomical-agrarian use. For all of their own civilization, the Incas were no match for horses, steel swords, armor, cannons, and above all, Spaniards with an insatiable thirst for gold. Additionally, they had been in the midst of a civil war of succession when Pizarro arrived. Atahualpa, the Inca leader whom Pizarro’s men kidnapped, promised them a ransom room full of gold if they would only spare his life; so history started to resemble a fairy tale without a happy ending. Eleven tons of priceless Inca gold treasures and sculptures were melted down to more than 13,000 pounds of 22-carat gold ingots, and even more of silver, for the wealth and glory of the Spanish Crown. It is said that on today’s market the amounts would fetch $7 million. But contrary to their word, the Spanish took the gold and strangled Atahualpa anyway. A series of puppet Inca emperors were then placed on the throne by the Spaniards as they set out to tame and subjugate, systematically studying and then destroying indigenous history and worship, and converting natives to their own faith. The native population fell as millions died, either stricken by disease from the outsiders, or by poor living conditions created by their new lords.

Forty years later, a rebel Inca emperor, Tupac Amaru, or "splendid serpent", reigned from the remote city of Vilcabamba, outside of Spanish occupied Peru. Seeing the Spanish advance, the Incas fled towards the jungle. But Tupac ultimately was captured. He was threatened by death by burning, a fate which terrified Incas, or, if he converted to Catholicism, the beneficent offer was that he would be beheaded. He chose the latter. The church bells in Cusco pealed when they executed him. The Spanish hadn’t found all of the Incas however. Some of them had escaped into the thick jungle foliage, greener than the jaguar’s eye, never to return.