Peru: Gunboat Diplomacy

The Peruvian gunboat Loreto should not be the pride and joy of anyone’s navy. Built in England in 1932, it makes a mere twelve knots at flank speed and looks like a cross between the Merrimac and an early Frank Lloyd Wright house. There are seven such gunboats in the Peruvian Navy, drawing cheers from the whole country. Their crews are physicians, dentists, technicians and nurses, and their mission is to build schools and provide medical care for 800,000 people, most of them primitive Indians living in the jungles along the Peruvian Amazon.

Established in late 1963, the gunboat fleet is another maneuver of President Fernando Belaunde Terry, 52, in his search for weapons to fight Peru’s own version of the war on poverty and disease. So far this year, Belaunde’s Amazon fleet has called at 140 jungle settlements, inoculated 16,216 people against smallpox and yellow fever, treated 2,153 for dental problems and another 3,657 for a host of tropical diseases. Among them are okara, a skin disorder that comes from a mosquito bite and permanently disfigures face and body with white and red spots, and uta, a dread parasite that produces strawberry-size warts that, if they burst, can bleed the victim to death.

The worst and most general health problem in the Amazon, says the fleet’s health director, Dr. Max Benzake, is simple malnutrition. The basic staples in the area are yuca, bananas, some fish and wild game—a diet woefully deficient in protein. Children almost never get milk. Everybody drinks polluted water, and so practically everybody has a variety of intestinal parasites.

At first, the Amazon Indians were suspicious of gunboats bearing doctors, had to be bribed to submit to vaccination: cigarettes for the men, loaves of bread for the women. Gradually the word spread, and the Indians now welcome the boats whenever they appear. The craft currently in service are equipped to provide only rudimentary medical services. By the end of this year, Belaunde plans to add two more gunboats armed with the most modern medical equipment, including surgery and X-ray facilities. “Then,” says one doctor, “we will really be doing things for the people.” And really doing things for Belaunde’s government, which is facing sharp new pressures in Peru’s Congress over the Castroite threat in the backlands and is convinced that one of the best weapons against subversion is a campaign of social action.