A Book Review - Wars of the Interior - Joseph Zarate, translated by Annie McDermott

After returning to his Ashaninka roots, Edwin Chota fights illegal logging in the Amazon community of Saweto until he is shot to death by timber traffickers. Máxima Acuña, a farmer and shepherd from the Andes of Cajamarca, is reluctant to abandon what she considers her property despite the presence of the Conga mining project, which seeks to extract gold on the same boundaries. Eleven-year-old Osman Cuñachí appears bathed in oil in a photo that travels the world and reports on the spill that contaminated the Nazareth community and the river where the Awajún swam and fished. Written with journalistic rigor and literary pulse, these chronicles by Joseph Zárate - awarded the 2016 Ortega y Gasset Prize and the 2018 Gabriel García Márquez Prize - not only seek to denounce the social, economic, political and environmental wars that explode in the interior of Peru . They also illuminate the personal, psychological and emotional wars of men and women who, due to different circumstances, decide to defend and conserve their lands, customs and identities. What are we capable of doing - as individuals, as a society - in the name of what we call "progress"?