This page is a little bit of a catch-all page. Mostly it offers links to other sites that have current news on the status of Quechua: achievements, movements, news programs, and other miscellaneous links that do not more appropriately fit in one of the other categories covered on the main Quechua web page.

Andean Languages and Cultures in the News

Rapping in Aymara

Wednesday, September 20 2006 @ 03:34 PM PDT
Contributed by: Collin Sick
Views: 85

http://www.alternet.org/wiretap/41902/

Art & RevolutionAt 13,000 feet, the hip hop movement in El Alto, Bolivia is probably the highest in the world. The music blends ancient Andean folk styles and new hip hop beats with lyrics about revolution and social change. As the sun set over the nearby snow capped mountains, I sat down with Abraham Bojorquez, a well known El Alto hip hop artist. We opened up a bag of coca leaves and began to talk about what he calls a new "instrument of struggle." We were at Wayna Tambo, a radio station, cultural center and unofficial base of the city's hip hop scene. Bojorquez pulled a leaf out of the bag to chew and said, "We want to preserve our culture through our music. With hip hop, we're always looking back to our indigenous ancestors, the Aymaras, Quechuas, Guarani." He works with other hip hop artists in El Alto to show "the reality of what is happening in our country. Through our lyrics we criticize the bad politicians that take advantage of us. With this style of hip hop, we're
an instrument of struggle, an instrument of the people."

By Benjamin Dangl, Upside Down World

In Bolivia, hip-hop music and culture are becoming key parts of a larger liberation struggle.

At 13,000 feet, the hip hop movement in El Alto, Bolivia is probably the highest in the world. The music blends ancient Andean folk styles and new hip hop beats with lyrics about revolution and social change. As the sun set over the nearby snow capped mountains, I sat down with Abraham Bojorquez, a well known El Alto hip hop artist. We opened up a bag of coca leaves and began to talk about what he calls a new "instrument of struggle."

We were at Wayna Tambo, a radio station, cultural center and unofficial base of the city's hip hop scene. Bojorquez pulled a leaf out of the bag to chew and said, "We want to preserve our culture through our music. With hip hop, we're always looking back to our indigenous ancestors, the Aymaras, Quechuas, Guarani." He works with other hip hop artists in El Alto to show "the reality of what is happening in our country. Through our lyrics we criticize the bad politicians that take advantage of us. With this style of hip hop, we're an instrument of struggle, an instrument of the people."

Bojorquez belongs to a group of rappers in El Alto, a sprawling city above La Paz which is home to around 800,000 people. His group and music is called Wayna Rap (Wayna means young in Aymara). Under the umbrella of Wayna Rap are smaller bands like Insane Race, Uka Mau y Ke, Clandestine Race and others. They often get together in freestyle events, where different singers take turns at the mike, rapping.

Some of their songs are completely in Aymara, an indigenous language. Others include a mixture of Spanish, English, Quechua and Portuguese. This fusion of languages is an integral part of the group's philosophy, and adds to their appeal in El Alto, where a large section of the population speaks Aymara. "The door is open to everyone...This is our proposal for how to change society," Bojorquez said. Though they collaborate with a wide variety of people, "we don't just sing things like 'I'm feeling bad, my girlfriend just left me and now I am going to get drunk.' It's more about trying to solve problems in society." The social and political themes in the music come from the city's reality. The death and conflicts in the 2003 Gas War made a huge impact on El Alto, and many of these songs reflect that.

One song which Abraham made in his own group Uka Mau y Ke deals with the October 2003 mobilizations in El Alto against the gas exportation plan and president Sanchez de Lozada. In the song, "we speak about how bullets are being shot at the people and how we can't put up with this because the people are reclaiming their rights." This song starts out with the president saying he won't resign. His voice is ominous, gruff and peppered with an unmistakable US English accent: "Yo no voy a renunciar. Yo no voy a renunciar." The sounds of street clashes in the song become louder. The roar of machine guns and helicopters come and go until the beat and lyrics begin. "We are mobilized, arming street barricades. We are mobilized without noticing that we are killing between brothers." Another singer comes in, rapping about the "corrupt governments...with closed eyes that don't look at the reality in the society. Many people are ending up in poverty and delinquency, which is why they dema
nd justice..." The song goes on to call Sanchez de Lozada a traitor and assassin. They demand his head, along with that of Carlos Mesa, the vice president. The music fuses with a testimony from a woman whose family member was shot by soldiers. The lyrics kick back in, "We hear over there that there are dead: 80 citizens, 5 police, and mass of people gravely injured. We're in a situation worse than war, killing each other, without a solution."

In many of Bojorquez's songs, Andean flutes and drums mesh with the beat. This aspect, along with the indigenous language, sets the music apart from standard hip hop. The topics covered are also distinct. In one song, they grapple with street violence and homelessness in El Alto. It deals with "children living in the street, orphans of mothers and fathers and the violence that grows every day. The lack of work, all of these things," Bojorquez explained. "We try to show the true reality of what is happening in the country, not hide it."

One of the most moving experiences Bojorquez said he's had within his musical career came when he was invited to perform at the office of the Neighborhood Organizations (Fejuve) of El Alto. He was nervous at first because the place was full of older people. His music is directed more toward a younger audience. After the first song, people clapped weakly. "Then we sang in Aymara and people became very emotional, crying. This was a very happy event for us. It made us think that what we are doing isn't in vain, that it can make an impact on people."

The title of his next CD is "Instrument of Struggle", referring to his musical philosophy. "More than anything our music is a form of protest, but with proposals. We unite, we organize. We look for unity, not division. We want to open the eyes of people with closed eyes...The music is a part of life."

When Bojorquez and I met months later, it was clear that El Alto's hip hop movement was growing. More people were calling Bojorquez for pointers on their music or for help with CD recordings. Others were starting their own groups and showing up at Wayna Tambo for concerts. "Today this music is arriving to many young people who identify with the songs and lyrics," Bojorquez said. "In El Alto there is a lot of poverty and in the lyrics we talk about this. People identify with it."

He had recently helped initiate hip hop classes in a large prison in La Paz which focuses on prisoners that are between 16-18 years old. The idea started when Bojorquez and others did a concert there. The reception was so enthusiastic that they worked to organize a hip hop class in June 2006. Through the classes, Bojorquez said they are trying to "show the jail's reality from the inside." He said the jail was a whole other city within La Paz, a "dead city" without hope. "This is where the hip hop comes in, so that people don't feel like all is lost." At the end of the program, the group will put on a performance and record a disk. Based on the success of the class, Bojorquez expects the program to continue into the future. "They are telling a history that reaches people and can prevent other youth from making the same mistakes," he said. "A lot of them regret what they did and they talk about it in their songs." He offered lyrics by Cesar as an example:

"Yo soy preso en San Pedro/I am a prisoner in San Pedro Estoy esperando la puta paciencia de mi abogado/I am waiting on the fucking patience of my lawyer Lo que el me ha dicho ya me olvidado/What he has told me I already forgot Por tomar el camino mas corto/ By taking the short cut Yo mismo me fregado/I messed myself up"

Back at Wayna Tambo, I ran into some of Bojorquez's fellow rappers, Grover Canaviri Huallpa and Dennis Quispe Issa. Both worked jobs and studied at the same time, leaving little room for writing lyrics and listening to music. We were waiting for a bus to a hip hop concert. It was cold and the bus was late, so we went inside and talked. Like others going to the concert, they were dressed like people I knew in New York City. The camouflage and baseball caps, the baggy pants, it was all very familiar. But it wasn't just the clothing style that these two felt a connection with. "I identify a lot with the hip hop groups in the US that speak of violence and discrimination," Huallpa said. "My mother only studied to 5th grade. She has suffered discrimination. We used to all be out in the streets."

Huallpa started listening to rap in the mid 1990s, and started writing his own lyrics a few years later. "Before Wayna Tambo there were pirated radios, secret places where we gathered because our parents didn't accept it." Both admitted their parents didn't understand their lifestyle as rappers. "They think we are just copying the US," Issa said. "People on the street discriminate us for the way we talk, walk and dress." They both agreed that this kind of hip hop was growing in El Alto in part because of the experience of the Gas War. "October 2003 was a huge change for us musically," Issa explained, referring to the mobilizations. "It had a big impact on El Alto."

Below El Alto, in La Paz, another hip hop movement was thriving. Sdenka Suxo Cadena, a 27 year old hip hop artist and marketing major in college, has been a part of the scene for over ten years. When I met her at the home of Mujeres Creando (Women Creating), an anarchist, feminist group, Cuban salsa was playing on the radio. Her hair was in pigtails and she smiled and laughed a lot while talking about her work. She started rapping in 1996, when she was in high school. "I started doing it because I didn't like society's system - the classism, materialism, the elite. This didn't make people happy." After hanging out with different hip hop groups in La Paz and El Alto, she decided to start a women's hip hop group in 2000. "I didn't like to be controlled by a boy, or be someone else's lady. Other women didn't either. So we started our own group called the Nueva Flavah and had our own meetings and events."

Each Thursday they organized a gathering of men and women from different areas of the city to perform hip-hop, break dance and exchange styles. "We wanted to share hip hop without caring about the differences between us." They did have some rules, however. "We didn't let people in that just talked about gangs, violence, drugs and guns." Her music deals with such topics as Latin American unification, chauvinism, AIDS, race, women's issues and nationalism. She knew politics were important, "but for real change to happen, people have to change themselves."

When I met her, Cadena was about to open a place for hip hop activities and recording music. "Some kids need help editing music, recording. We help them get their message out." One of the events their doing now is a CD exchange where other artists can bring in their own disks and trade or buy one for less than a dollar.

She believed hip hop was becoming more popular in Bolivia because anyone can produce the music, regardless of whether or not they know how to play an instrument. "It's popular in poor neighborhoods where people might not have a guitar. All you need is a pen and paper. You don't need money. You can do it anywhere. People largely identify with it in marginalized neighborhoods, where people don't have access to music lessons or instruments." She also said it is growing along with the current political changes all around Latin America. "It's part of this regional protest movement."

I had an opportunity to see this movement in action at a hip hop concert one cold June night in a neighborhood outside La Paz. We zipped up into the hills like a roller coaster, weaving up steep streets past angry dogs, lit up corner stores, a woman shaking laundry out the window and soccer games under street lamps. The road wound up the hill like a drunken snake at impossible angles. The route was a cavernous labyrinth that never seemed to end. We almost crashed twice and had to ask for directions three times. Eventually the city spread out below in a vast collection of blue, white, yellow and orange lights, oozing and bubbling with life. Beyond the lights were the Andes Mountains in complete darkness. The stars were barely visible, belittled by the constellation of the city.

The concert took place at a large room in a school building. A banner hung outside the door, where young people dressed like New York City rappers were hanging out and smoking. Tilted baseball caps, baggy pants and shirts with US sports logos were the norm. It cost about 12 cents for a ticket. I handed over the money while my friend and I were frisked for alcohol: it was a dry event. Inside, the room was packed with people standing up, bopping to the music, or sitting in chairs. On a balcony above the crowd the performers swung microphones, shook their fists in the air and rapped tirelessly. It looked like a cross between a high school dance and a poetry reading. It had the same angst and self consciousness. The sound quality of the speakers was poor, but the enthusiasm was high. The audience clapped and cheered at every opportunity that merited it. Most songs were a mixture of Spanish and Aymara, with three words making regular appearances: coca, revolution and Mother Earth
.

Many of the young people were sipping on clandestine bottles of booze, making out and slicking back their hair. The room was a convergence of cultures. Some rappers spoke of blunts and guns in one breath and their president Evo Morales the next. Bojorquez wore a red baseball cap from a US team, but his coat had indigenous designs on it with the name of his band in Aymara written across the front. I recognized some of the beats from US music, but the flutes, drums and rhythms were all Bolivian. The concert mixed Andean phrases and symbols thousands of years old with themes and rhymes fresh out of MTV music videos. Nations, music, histories and dance moves fused in a new Bolivian hip hop.

The finale was a performance by a young kid who couldn't have been more than ten years old. He proceeded to swing his cap, move his feet and dance exactly like Michael Jackson. The crowd went wild.

Benjamin Dangl is the author of "The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia," forthcoming from AK Press in March, 2007. He is the editor of TowardFreedom.com and UpsideDownWorld.org.

Smart Money Goes Multilingual

Wednesday, 13 June, 2001, 11:14 GMT 12:14 UK

[image here]

The new machines offer an unprecedented level of security.

By the BBC's Andrew Enever in Bolivia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1386310.stm

A Bolivian company is closing the gap between urban and rural economies through the design and production of its own easy-to-use smart card operated cash machines.

Prodem, which has been offering microcredit and other financial services for over 14 years to Bolivia's poor urban and rural population, sees the multilingual ATM is just the latest step in its services to those excluded from mainstream society - but it could become a Latin American hit.

Operated using only a smart card and a fingerprint scanner the new machines offer an unprecedented level of security to Prodem's clients." There is no possibility of fraud," commented Sergio Prudencio Tardío, national commercial manager at Prodem.

"If a customer loses their card, it is impossible for another person to use it because of the digital fingerprint." Another advantage of the smart cards is that they store customer's
personal details, account numbers, a record of transactions and a fingerprint. Remote areas of rural Bolivia have been neglected by the financial industry. Working to find easier ways for rural people to access their savings. This allows the cash dispensers to operate without a permanent network connection, a great help in remote rural areas.

Simplistic approach

The machines also offer a functional simplicity capable of overcoming language barriers and illiteracy.

The Bolivian model will speak instructions to clients in a choice of either Spanish or one of the two predominant indigenous languages Aymara and Quechua.

To make things even easier clients will be able to access the various services available by simply touching the screen.

The ATMs and smartcards are the outcome of Prodem's work to find easier and more secure ways for rural people to access their savings.

However the decision to import the various technologies and make a final product in Bolivia was forced upon the company by the prohibitive prices offered by the industry leaders.

Expanding networks

Having taken on the task Prodem acted with speed, developing software to link the fingerprint and smart card readers with the dispenser, and adapting the Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual 'C'
operating software to their specific requirements.

Less than a year later the company are completing tests on the prototype and the first ten production machines will be up and running by August of this year.

Prodem have further plans to expand their national network of machines but their ambitions have already spread beyond Bolivia's borders.

According to Prodem's Director Eduardo Bazoberry the company is on the verge of clinching its first deal to export 40 machines.

Other negotiations over the sale of programmed smart cards and the accompanying reader software to a Peruvian client are at an advance stage and on top of this certain major rural banking groups
including Colombia's Bancafé and Banrural in Guatemala have made enquiries.

Cost effective

Such levels of interest are highly promising for the company, though they are hardly surprising when considering the competitiveness of Prodem's ATM.

Despite the technical advantages offered by the hardware combination of a De La Rue cash dispensing system, France's Gemplus smart card technology and a fingerprint reader from US-based Digital Persona, Prodem are building their machine for only $15,000, less than half
the price of standard ATM's, which can cost anywhere between $35,000-$40,000.

Prodem have made the smart cards available to all their account holders at a price of $10 with a further $7 annual operating charge applicable.

The company operate 55 branches throughout Bolivia and plans to establish a branch in every one of Bolivia's 312 municipalities over the next five years.

Peru

Google it in Quechua

Aug 17th 2006 | LIMA
From The Economist print edition

http://economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7798868

More power for an ancient language

HILARIA SUPA wears the ancestral clothing and round hat typical of peasant women from her village near Cusco, the former Inca capital in Peru. She also speaks Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire, which is still used widely in the Peruvian Andes. She claims that she has no real need for Spanish because her neighbours all speak Quechua. But that doesn't go for other members of Peru's Congress, to which Ms Supa was recently elected.

Along with a colleague, Ms Supa, who speaks fluent Spanish, has insisted on speaking to the legislature in her first language. This, she says, will increase respect for Andean Indian culture and help the language to survive. It has forced the Congress to hire translators.

Estimates of the prevalence of Quechua vary widely. In Peru, there are thought to be 3m to 4.5m speakers, with others in Bolivia and Ecuador. The language has long been in slow decline, chiefly because the children of migrants to the cities rarely speak it. But it is now getting a lot more attention.

In recent months, Google has launched a version of its search engine in Quechua while Microsoft unveiled Quechua translations of Windows and Office. Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui, who last year translated “Don Quijote” into Quechua, recalls that a nationalist military government in the 1960s ordered that the language be taught in all public schools. It didn't happen, because of lack of money to train teachers. By law its official use—and bilingual education—is now limited to highland areas where it is predominant.

This month Peru's new president, Alan García, signed a law making discrimination on the basis of language a criminal offence. Applying this will be hard: a recent poll found that two-thirds of respondents believe the country to be racist. Some may argue that Peruvians should be concentrating on learning English—the government has signed a free-trade agreement with the United States. But Peru will only become a harmonious democracy when it recognises and overcomes its ethnic inequalities. Ms Supa is engaging in gesture politics—but she may have a point.

INDIGENOUS FILMS FROM CHILE PREVIEW IN NEW YORK

(December 1, 2006) The 13th Native American Film and Video Festival began Thursday at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. Of the 550 entries submitted, four Chilean films have made the final festival, including the new music video from Mapuche hip hop artist JAAS.

One hundred and twenty-five films will premiere in their native language at this year’s festival, which features a mix of fiction, short film and animation from the U.S., Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Ecuador and Guatemala.

Amongst Chile’s contributions are a Mapuche music video, directed by Jennifer Aguilera Silva and a documentary about Mapuche activism by Australian resident Juan Francisco Salazar.

In “Newen” (Life Force), JAAS calls on her Mapuche ancestors in native language Mapadungun to awaken the warrior spirit within the Mapuche people of today.

Salazar’s documentary, “De la Tierra a la Pantalla” (From Land to Screen), offers a journey into the lives and work of three Mapuche media activists working in radio and video. They counter mainstream media coverage of events with Mapuche perspectives and images.

The festival aims to offer perspectives of what it means to be indigenous in the 21st century. Works includes narratives, animations, and documentaries on issues of personal identity, struggle for native lands, community strengths, and the impact of multi-nationalism. Border and cross-cultural realities infuse many of the pieces.

“Indigenous Latin American fiction film is very rare,” said Amalia Córdova, Chilean and Coordinator of Latin American Programs at the New York museum. “The majority are documentaries due to lack of funding.”

According to Córdova, the key question is: where is the audience for a film about Chile’s indigenous population? “In the majority of cases it’s for their own small community, or for the developed world as a form of political activism,” she said.

SOURCE: LA NACION
By Beatrice Karol Burks (editor@santiagotimes.cl)

More on the Aymara future: a response to Dorais and Klein

From Jenny Lederer (jennylederer@hotmail.com) 1 Sept 2006:

This note is written in response to Harriet E. M. Klein, Louis-Jacques Dorais, and others who may feel that the Aymara conception of time that Núñez and Sweetser describe in their article is not unique to this group. I do not represent N & S's opinions, but I am very familiar with the full paper, since I used it in a course I taught this past summer on "Mind and Language." There are several things I'd like to clarify about the paper that may have been misrepresented in press accounts.

First, and most important, N & S's conclusions are based on a convergence of several different types of linguistic and gestural evidence that point to a complete, systematic understanding of time in which the FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and THE PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO. Many documented languages
(as the previous correspondence has pointed out) have words or morphemes which, on their own, refer to the past by means of some spatial term that references the space in front of the speaker. But detailed fieldwork, including gesture and a full linguistic account of the metaphors for time,
must be carried out on these languages to ensure that these isolated uses are part of a larger systematic understanding of the PAST as IN FRONT. It is common for a language to have isolated cases that appear to activate this metaphor, even though the rest of the linguistic and gestural data
fall under the normal pattern of FUTURE IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST BEHIND.

Researchers must be careful not to assume that every word or morpheme that links 'back/behind' with 'future' activates the FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO metaphor. A common metaphor for time is TIME IS AN OBJECT MOVING TOWARDS THE EGO. In this metaphor, events that are just about to happen are
located in front of events that are located more "distantly" in the future. From this perspective, future events are behind current events. When studying metaphors for time it is crucial not just to identify what spatial terms are used, but also to identify to what metaphorical land-
marks these terms are oriented.

Finally, I do not think N & S intended to say that Aymara speakers are the only speakers in the world to systematically activate this understanding of time. They simply noted that, thus far, Aymara is the only language in which this conceptual system has undergone a detailed study. I'm sure
they would encourage others to do similarly detailed field work involving gesture and language with the intention of adding other languages to the category of those who have a "reversed" conceptualization of time.

* And still more...

From Koontz John E (John.Koontz@Colorado.edu) 18 Sept 2006:

Harriet Klein (SSILA Bulletin #243) writes:

Finally, to add to Louis-Jacques' list of Aymara, Inuktitut and Vietnamese, we should also note that, inter alia, in Classical Greek one faces the past with the future behind.

In addition to the three languages that Klein notes, Dorais made a point of including English ('before' : 'after' :: 'fore' : 'aft') on his list. I'm pretty sure we can also add Latin, with ante- and post-. Anterior is earlier and in front of; posterior is later and in back of.

Are there any languages that do approach the future, etymologically
speaking, facing it?

In English and in Greek, the metaphor is mixed: 'foresight' : 'hindsight' :: Prometheus : Epimetheus. And, of course, I certainly think in terms of facing the future, the hereafter, even if I do look over my shoulder a lot at the past, what has happened heretofore. (I should never have loaned Pandora the box!)

It seems to me that in English it depends on whether we are thinking relative to people or points in time. One has the future before one and the past behind one, but yesterday was before now and tomorrow is after it. Maybe we are facing forward, but history is facing backward? We certainly are when we contemplate it.

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > TECHNOLOGY

Microsoft Unveils Inca Windows Patch

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Aug25/0,4670,BoliviaMicrosoft,00.html

Friday, August 25, 2006

By DAN KEANE, Associated Press Writer

SUCRE, Bolivia — Just click"Qallariy"to begin. The word _ pronounced"KAH-lyah-ree"_ replaces"Start"on Microsoft Windows'familiar taskbar in a new Quechua translation of the program, which got its Bolivian debut Friday.

Microsoft Corp.'s chief of Bolivia operations, Nelson Cuentas, tried out a little of his own Quechua at the launch event, where translations of both Windows and Office were demonstrated on a large screen before a gathering of Quechua Indians in striped red and black ponchos and colorful hats.

"Anchay agradeseiki ('Thank you'in Quechua) for trusting us,"Cuentas said."Microsoft Bolivia wants indigenous culture to form a part of the information age."

Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, himself an Aymara Indian, said the translated software marked a new era of inclusion after centuries of prejudice faced by speakers of indigenous languages.

"It was not so many years ago that speaking Quechua was considered backward,"he said,"but in these last few years our people are in a full process of emergence, and the world knows we are individuals."

First launched in Peru in June and now freely available for download online, the software is a simple patch that translates the familiar Microsoft menus and commands. Microsoft teamed up with several universities in Peru's Quechua-speaking south to create the translation program, joining 47 other versions of Windows in such languages as Kazakh, Maori and Zulu.

And while relatively few of South America's estimated 10 to 13 million Quechua speakers have regular access to a computer, the project is already paying dividends for Microsoft: The company recently won a contract from the Peruvian government for 5,000 Quechua-equipped computers.

The Quechua translation balances traditional words with some newly minted terms.

For"file,"they chose"kipu"(KEE-poo), borrowing the name of an ancient Inca practice of recording information in an intricate system of knotted strings."Internet"became"Llika"(LEE-ka), the Quechua word for spider web.

Meanwhile,"My documents"becomes"Documentoykuna."

Such borrowed words"are one way that a language evolves,"said Serafin Coronel-Molina, a linguist at Princeton University and native Quechua speaker."But you can't just fill up a language with borrowed words, because then what have you got?"

While Microsoft's new translation will make its essential computer programs more user-friendly for Quechua speakers, it will only reach those few who have regular access to computers.

Student Wilver Vedia, 16, dressed in a round black felt hat hung with pink and yellow tassels, was part of a delegation of students from the small village of Tarabuco who turned out for Friday's event to deliver a letter asking Bolivian President Evo Morales to provide more computers for their school. But Morales canceled his appearance at the last minute.

Vedia pointed out that the translation program would be of only limited value in Tarabuco, where 240 students share eight computers, and the nearest internet connection is an hour away.

"It would be a great help if they gave us Internet access. And computers,"he shrugged."Because with just eight of them, what are we going to do?"

___

Associated Press writers Leslie Josephs in Cuzco, Peru, and Allison Linn in Seattle, Washington, contributed to this report.