Nature Writing: conversation with Joseph Zárate
Mineral connection, from gold to water

Peru is the second largest Latin American country in terms of surface area covered by the Amazon rainforest. There the extractive industries are ravaging lands for their valuable resources and in the process decimating indigenous communities, pressuring, expropriating, and murdering men and women for whom these areas are ancestral living spaces. Joseph Zárate, one of the rare writers with roots in the indigenous population whose work has an international readership, carried out a years-long investigation in the heart of Amazonia that was as dangerous to do as it is riveting to read, gathering first-hand accounts from inhabitants of the zones that are being plundered. His book Guerras del interior (Wars of the Interior, tr. Annie McDermott) dissects the violent mechanisms of these economic wars and their consequences for nature and the identity of local peoples.

An investigation driven by an existential need, duty and urgency to tell others about what is going on outside the great urban centers and shift our focus in order to bring to light the realities of overlooked natural and cultural spaces.