“My grandfather was a healer and my father also knew how to work with plants,” said Hernán Saavedra Gonzáles in a calm, measured voice. Shortly after, he blew smoke from a Mapacho cigarette, a type of medicinal tobacco, into a glass filled with a dark liquid that looked a lot like tea.
Hernán and his wife Jesús Arce Quinteros are a healing couple struggling to maintain an ayahuasca clinic in Tarapoto, San Martín state, in Peru’s Amazon jungle, despite many difficulties.
Jesus the healer
The healer Jesus Arce Quinteros
Image: Ramiro Solsol/UOL
Like Hernán, Jesús comes from a lineage of healers, practitioners of traditional medicine from the Peruvian jungle. But she’s an outlier in the city’s ayahuasca circuit. She is one of the few female healers, if not the only one, in Tarapoto.
Jesús is 38 years old, has been drinking ayahuasca for 20 years and has been a healer for 15 years. Despite the time in the activity, she guarantees to keep surprising her along the way. “Each ceremony is a new learning experience, I discover and learn more.”
In addition, Jesús and her husband cultivate a botanical garden with a huge variety of medicinal plants on an area of two hectares. According to the couple, many of them are threatened with extinction due to logging and mining in Peru’s Amazon rainforest.
In general, healers work with chants and various plants. The main one is ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink made from the macerated mixture of a grapevine and leaves. Used for millennia by indigenous peoples of the Amazon, it has been recognized in Peru since 2008 as part of the country’s cultural heritage.
In Brazil, in addition to indigenous communities, religious groups such as Santo Daime and União do Vegetal also use the drink in their cults. These practices are protected by a 2010 regulation by the Conad (National Drug Policy Council). For more than a decade, research has explored the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca in mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and addiction.
The healer couple Jesús Arce Quinteros and Hernán Saavedra Gonzáles
Image: Ramiro Solsol/UOL
Journey of a Healer
A giant rooster crowed, dogs barked, cats brawled in the yard and from afar, but attentively, a friendly agouti (forest rodent, better known in Peru as añuje) observed the conversation from time to time, nibbling on something with both paws , which he was holding, making a reluctant sound.
“From a young age I was interested in traditional medicine and it was at this time that I started searching for ‘maestros’. [professores] in many indigenous communities to deepen the knowledge that I had already begun to acquire from my grandfather and father,” Hernán continues about the beginning of his journey as a healer.
The Peruvian healer Hernán Saavedra Gonzáles
Image: Ramiro Solsol/UOL
The healer, or plant doctor, as people who work with Amazonian medicine in Peru are also called, says he started drinking ayahuasca when he was 20. Today he is 61. “In the first three sessions I didn’t feel anything, in the fourth I had a very deep experience, I saw my childhood traumas and the path I should take to heal myself and treat other people .”
However, Hernán reiterates that his grandfather was his greatest teacher. He healed people in the small town of Tarapoto and was also called to villages in the region.
“At that time there were no cars here, sometimes he would travel through the woods on horseback for several days until he reached a community.” There was no money either, everything was based on exchange, so usually the healer grandfather returned with food for the family.
The healer couple Jesús Arce Quinteros and Hernán Saavedra Gonzáles
Image: Ramiro Solsol/UOL
“Circus of Clowns”
Tarapoto is very different from the town where Hernán grew up. Since the 1990s, the community has emerged as a prime destination for unique tourism known as shamanic or psychedelic. According to Hernán, ayahuasca centers and resorts, many run by foreigners, are turning the tradition into a profitable business.
“It’s become a clown circus,” Hernan comments annoyed. Clowns are healers themselves, exploited by businessmen. A movement that he believes is making real Amazonian medicine disappear.
Outside of this circuit, the couple resists. For over 20 years Hernán and Jesús have maintained the Tangaranas Center where they work with a variety of medicinal plants such as Ayahuasca, Ajosacha, Chuchuhuasi and Sanango among many others. An ancient tradition that they both inherited from their ancestors and which they visibly cultivate with love and respect.
Motorcycle owned by Hernan Saavedra Gonzáles and Jesús Arce Quinteros
Image: Ramiro Solsol/UOL
It can be seen that they are not even part of the growing tourist movement around Ayahuasca. The house they live in is very simple and they don’t even own a car. They move between home and work by motorbike, the region’s main means of transport.
“We live with our two children, two dogs, two cats, several chickens, a rabbit, six turtles and a parrot that thinks it’s a rooster,” explains Hernán. He then explains that the parrot is madly in love with one of the chickens.
muscle weakness and insomnia
Although they still do not have a website to promote their work, only a page on social networks, they receive people from all over the world: the United States, Russia, France, Germany, China, Korea, Portugal, Australia, Japan , including others. More than 1,000 people have already passed the center, which was installed in a densely forested region on the banks of the Mayu River.
Among them American Benjamin Blackwell, who says he went to Tarapoto in search of answers about his life after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, fibromyalgia, a syndrome that causes pain throughout the body.
“I felt a lot of weakness in my muscles and suffered from insomnia,” says the American. According to him, the drugs he was taking caused many side effects and didn’t solve the problem.
The Healer Hernan Saavedra Gonzales
Image: Ramiro Solsol/UOL
He went on a monthlong diet with Hernán and Jesús. “I don’t feel pain anymore,” says Blackwell. “And my stress level is pretty close to zero,” he adds. “I feel at peace with my body, mind and soul.”
But the work at the Tangaranas Center is maintained with a lot of effort and dedication. “We need more hands and heads to help,” says Hernán. Sometimes patients don’t even pay for the treatment they receive.
The exchange system practiced by Hernán’s grandfather still applies in Centro Tangaranas. During the report’s visit, two foreigners were hospitalized locally, but they paid for the service with work.
Although they do not have the necessary resources, the healer couple now dreams of starting a school to teach traditional Amazonian medicine and thus keep the knowledge alive.
Hernan Saavedra Gonzales
Image: Ramiro Solsol/UOL
witch hunt
The fear that the Amazonian medicine of the ancestors will disappear from the map is not an exaggeration of the healing couple. “The new generations no longer want to follow tradition out of fear,” complains Hernán. And not without reason.
Many older leaders and healers are being persecuted and even murdered. The causes are manifold. From conflicts related to land exploitation and economic interests to prejudice from evangelical religious who see Amazonian healers as something devilish.
One of the most tragic moments happened in 2011 in the Balsapuerto district, Alto Amazonas province, Loreto state: 14 healers were killed in an ambush.
“The healers were brutally killed with machetes, axes, stones, with gunshots, and then their bodies were thrown into rivers in the region where they were eaten by piranhas,” Peruvian journalist and writer Roger Rumrill, an Amazon explorer, shared with several Books on the subject have appeared.
According to Pizango Inuma, president of the Feconacha (Federation of Chayawite Indigenous Communities), which represents the Chayahuita, Shayabit, Jebero, Balsapuertino, Shiwila and Shawis peoples, among others, no one has been convicted of the killings. According to him, the healers killed were mostly Shawis.
“There are multiple causes behind the deaths of healers, including economic interests, they don’t want healers because their herbal prescriptions replace drugs from pharmacies,” suggests Inuma. The President of Feconacha believes there is a plan to eradicate healers and sorcerers
Also in 2018, one of the oldest leaders of the ShipiboConibo ethnic group, the healer and activist Olivia Arévalo Lomas, was murdered by two men on a motorbike. A Canadian tourist named as a suspect was lynched by members of the Victoria Gracia community in Ucayali, in the Peruvian Amazon, where she lived.
But other hypotheses have also been investigated by local authorities, as the healer’s death followed other unsolved killings of Indigenous activists who have faced threats for their efforts to keep illegal loggers and palm oil producers off their lands.
*This report was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Amazon Rainforest Journalism Fund and the Gabo Foundation and Open Society Foundations’ Fund for Research and New Narratives on Drugs.