Interview with Corinne Schmidt, History 150 Spring 2020, Conducted by Gabriel Lynch, 4/3/20

Biography:

My mother worked as a Foreign Service agent then a journalist working for both Newsweek and The Washington Post during the internal conflict in Peru during the 1980s and the 1990s. She comes from an American background and both her parents are European. While she was in Peru, she met my father and I was born in the  2000.  Later in her life, after she moved back to the United States, she wrote and published a novel by the name of Useful Fools which takes place during the time when she was there. Though this is my mother’s only published novel she draws heavily on her experiences in Peru when she is writing other work. Her time in Peru and her proficiency in the Spanish which she gained there led her to pursue a career as a middle school Spanish teacher.

Research:

By the late 1940s Peru was effectively the world’s sole producer of legal cocaine. When the drug became illegal Peruvian smugglers were the first to take advantage. By the 1980s the Upper Huagalla Valley was home to more than 120,000 hectares of coca farms which feuled the Medellin cartel based in Colombia. At its peak Peru had an output capacity of over 100 times its capacity when the drug was legal. By the 1990s the industry began to be squeezed by the US war on drugs as well as Alberto Fujimori’s crackdown on the Huallaga valley. His main interest there was against the Sendero Luminoso’s [Shining Path] guerilla fighters.

During this period of Peru’s history there were two main combative forces. There was the Shining Path and there was the regime of Alberto Fujimori. During this conflict in which many civilians were forced to choose sides there was rapid inflation and as a result of this there was a lot of fear among the people. This was different from any other war because those on either side would be living side by side once the conflict was over. This internal conflict cause a great loss of life as well as infrastructure that still has effects today. The US also enacted a “shoot down” policy on illegal flights between the fields and the Columbian drug cartels. The Peruvian industry was slowly replaced by vertical integration within the cartels and fields sprung up around Columbia, eventually reaching a size 4 times that of Peru’s share. In addition to the interest the US government had against the drug cartels and coca fields. This was all taking place during the Cold War and the US was opposed to Shining Path. In addition they had interest against MRTA, Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a Leninist-Marxist organization, which was strongly opposed to the US and their commercial interests in Peru and operated between 1982 and 1997.

Gootenberg, Paul. “Peruvian Cocaine and the Boomerang of History.” NACLA, The North American Congress on Latin America, 17 June 2014, nacla.org/article/peruvian-cocaine-and-boomerang-history.

Theidon, Kimberly Susan. Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

United States, Congress, Directorate of Intelligence. “Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement: Growing Threat to US Intrests in Peru.” Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement: Growing Threat to US Intrests in Peru.

Interview Transcript:

Gabe: Hi, mom. Good morning. Um, would you like to give me a brief introduction?

Corinne: My name is Corrine Schmidt. I’m your mother. I’m Bob’s wife. I am a teacher, and a former diplomat and former journalist and I also write fiction.

Gabe: Alright, so let’s get started off with the first question. So tell me about your training as your as a Foreign Service agent. What were you taught to expect and what was the American sentiment towards Peru at this time?

Corinne: Well, I was trained as a as an officer, not an agent. Agent tends to refer to something different when you’re talking about foreign relations. So I was in France Foreign Service officer, first in Ecuador, and then in Peru. So I was trained in Washington DC, basically in cultural studies and the Spanish language sent to Ecuador and did a test month kind of a training tour there. And then I went to Peru. Most of my training consisted of language and culture. There was probably three months where we were kind of taught the workings of American foreign policy in an embassy and America’s attitude towards Peru. This was 1986 that I handed down there was “A” that it was a country at risk of becoming a failed state, because of the shining path, terrorist organization as well as a smaller terrorist organization called the M RTA, which were causing pretty severe damage by that point, although it would get worse. And then the other aspect of America so there was a part of our policy that was aimed at shoring up democratic government there. And the other aspect, probably the predominant thing that the United States had in mind as it interfaced with Peru was Peru was the world’s at the time and world’s largest producer of coca leaf, which is processed to make cocaine and the United States was dealing with the crack epidemic at that point. We gave it far too much importance in our interactions with Peru because I think we sacrificed some other aspects of the relationship in order to further our goals on what what they called the drug war.

Gabe: So my next question was kind of what was the main objective of the United States and for when you first moved there

Corinne: So again, it was to shore up the democracy was one of the things I liked and and, and I and that was a sincere goal. That was a true goal. And but the probably the most important, the thing we received the most pressure, we had congressional delegations coming down on there called CODEL we’d have CODELs come down and the thing we were receiving the most pressure on was drug trafficking. And the idea was to lessen the production of coca leaf and then to interdict which means to interrupt the trafficking of the coca leaf was usually processed into basic paste, which is a kind of a precursor to cocaine in Peru, and then the pace would be flown on these illegal flights to cocaine processing facilities, I think usually in Colombia. So the interdiction aspects and there was a big step trying to suppress coca leaf production. And then there was trying to interdict the flights out of this semi processed coca leaf and the the the suppression aspect of it focused on eradication, they call it eradication of the coca leaf fields, mostly in voluntarily we spent a lot of money paying for Peruvian staff to go in and tear up or fumigate cocoa fields. Okay.

Gabe: All right. So how did that objective change throughout your tenure in the Foreign Service? And then after you quit also,

Corinne: I don’t think the the goal of eradication and interdiction changed at all while while I was there, um, and the sad thing is you just keep hearing the same thing over and over again, that that’s always we always think that by suppressing supply, we’re going to have a real make a real difference on demand. And it’s, it’s it’s a dicey proposition. There wasn’t enough going on in the United States at the time to lessen demand. It was a very, because the crack epidemic really hit the black community that response. Here in United States, what we, you know, you look at the, what we have now with the criminal justice system being having, like all of these policies that lead to mass incarceration of African Americans started in response to the crack epidemic. And I know, people would talk a lot about providing care for addicts instead of criminalizing the whole problem. But it was very much an attitude that was let’s criminalize the production of leave, let’s criminalize the shipping of leave and let’s criminalize the consumption of crack and I don’t know if you know this, but sentences for possession of crack or much higher than sentences for possession of cocaine. So I really don’t think the policy changed, although it was there and it was really kind of discouraging, because as in the decades since then, when I kind of dip my toe back into looking at the drug war, we still have very similar ideas on it, it has only begun to change because of the opioid crisis here, which is a very different problem and, you know, has struck more middle and working class white Americans, so we have much a much more compassionate approach to it. So I’m afraid I don’t think it changed much. I do think that we became more aware of the risks to Peruvian democracy and of course, there was a coup. So we could no longer pretend that our goal of preserving democracy could take sort of a backseat to our goals of suppressing cocoa production.

Gabe: All right. What was it like being a woman in the situation’s you were placed into and did that impact the situation at all and where most of your coworkers men?

Corinne: Um, most of my co workers were men, but as a foreign service officer, I was within sort of the first way, women who came in after the Foreign Service rules have changed in like, I don’t know how long before I came on board, it changed. But there were still women who were in higher levels, like the senior Foreign Service, who had come on board at a time when if a woman married, she had to leave the Foreign Service.

So they tended to be very tough. And they, you know, there’s a weird thing in feminism, that women who sometimes what happens is women who have made it the old way, you know, when when there was a lot more misogyny and their rights were more more curtailed, could be really unsympathetic, and be really bitter towards younger women who had you know, the right to have boyfriends and get married and so forth.

So there were there was this sort of lack of women in the senior Foreign Service because for so many decades, if you married you had to leave and you know, people like to have families and so forth. Among my peers, uh, probably there were more men. And also you gotta understand that an embassy is most of its employees are local nationals, foreigners, foreign nationals, and they actually called FSN Foreign Service nationals. And in a country like Peru you had this isn’t the 1980s and 90s. It was a male dominated workforce. So we had more male staff, but it never felt overwhelmed. Like I never felt like I was the only woman in the room by any stretch of the imagination.

Except I became an in Peru more and more involved in our I was an information officer and I became kind of the point person on in USIA, which was my agency on on the drug war. So in that when I would take journalists out into the field to visit because, you know, we were trying to keep the public in the United States aware of what we were doing and keep the when support for our goals in the Peruvian population and most of the journalists, we would take out there would tend to be men. Absolutely. And most of the DEA agents and the contractors who are working for the State Department were men. And I was a young woman at the time and that was very, I got a lot of attention as a as a as a young American woman. I got a lot of flirting. So, but it was, those were different times. I mean, I never felt belittled as a woman and I never felt that I wasn’t able to do my job as a woman. I had, I guess, I had very supportive supervisors and I just had never and again, you know, I know things have changed a lot but but the flirting that would go on never felt like it would undercut my authority.

Gabe: That makes sense. All right, did this relationship between men and women change as a result of switching being from being a Foreign Service agent to a journalist?

Corinne: When I became a journalist of course, I had far far less interaction with Americans. And almost all of my interactions with Peruvians because I was covering at that point, my my, as a journalist, my attention pivoted away from I still covered the drug war. And I wrote a lot about the drug war. But of course, Peru was moving towards what looked like it might be a civil war and it all culminated in the coup before a civil war could happen.

But there was the terrorism was just increasing, increasing increasing and that was essentially a Peruvian problem. So you might, you know, you might interview an embassy staff person, whether the American Embassy right now there’s embassy to get sort of the foreign perspective on this but most of the story was in country. So I had very little interaction with Americans once I left the Foreign Service except his friends.

But professionally, I was dealing mostly with with Peruvians and again, there was the flirtatious aspect that was being the young blonde woman, but it was never. I mean, I had front page coverage in the Washington Post. I was actually one of the first people to know about Javi miles capture.

I was one of the first people to know when there was an American plane crashes carrying DEA personnel. And know nothing, nothing changed, I think now, again, when you’re a woman in a country like Peru, when you’re a foreign woman, especially an American woman and country like Peru in the 80s, and 90s, you’re kind of an honorary man. So, treatment of women was not great in Peru, and still isn’t. I mean, there’s there’s a really strong feminist movement trying to improve that. But I could see that for the average low income Peruvian woman life was really really hard. They were only starting to get access to birth control.

When I first arrived in Peru, the leading cause of women being incarcerated was having had an illegal abortion or assisted and illegal abortion because of course, all abortions were illegal, and I believe still on that changed while I was there, the leading cause of incarceration became acting as what they call mulas carrying drugs out of the country. So there was a lot of misogyny but I was not subjected to that now as I would walk along the street. Yes, I got really tired of it. would not go for a walk anywhere without being noticed and without being whistled at and you know, though, I would say there was a kind of a was kind of wearing, like just knowing that if I, if I went out in at all revealing clothes, I wasn’t asking to get raped but I was asking to get whistled at and harassed and you know, cat calls and so forth. I mean people would just men would just be very, and it’s, you know, the friend, the Peruvian whistle was “ssssssss,” you know, you’re just walking by.

And I can remember once Papi and I were downtown, near the old San Marcos campus in the center of the city, not the main San Marcos campus. And we were going through this we’d separated he was going to go buy something we’re at this like street market, he was getting something I was gonna do something and all of a sudden, I feel this hand on my butt. And I and add this little voice saying mamacita and I whirled around ready to punch because it was the most believable thing in the world. That’s a man who do that and it was Papi teasing. But he came this close to getting punched. And the funny thing is, it was absolutely believable to me that a man would just total stranger, like do that. Yeah, cuz that’s, and I don’t know if that has changed, it certainly didn’t get any better while I was there, I’m sure it would be different now. And just because I’m older, I don’t I mean, I think I wouldn’t be in a different sort of like, Oh, she’s a foreign American woman, you know, and I think I would still probably be an honorary man, I just probably wouldn’t get as much attention.

Gabe: How does the conflict of conflict improve effectiveness decision to become a mother? How did it change as time went on?

Corinne: How did the conflict change or How did my decision

Gabe:How did your decision change?

Corinne: I know I wanted kids so it really had no influence on my desire to become a mother. I think Looking back, because of course, you know, I was still I mean, Peru was a lot less dangerous by the time you were born, you know, because really, they captured female [Abimael] Guzman [leader of the Shining Path] in 1992. So the economic troubles lasted longer, but it was much less dangerous. But if you know, if we had we got married and what we also get married 92. A lot happened in 1992. But you know, if that year I had gotten pregnant, I think I what would have happened is I wouldn’t be doing a lot less of the reporting that I was doing. I mean, I would not have wanted to be going out into the shanty towns and interviewing Senderistas or going out to a Ayacucho or up to …. If I had been pregnant or had a child, I think it would have influenced my willingness to take some of the dangerous assignments. But I mean, you were what one or two when I went on a trip into the jungle and led a journalism seminar on if you remember that mighty took care of you. And I went up we did this journalism seminar environmental journalism on Conservation International hired me to do that. And I left you behind in Lima but it wasn’t dangerous it was but you know, I was still doing my job

Gabe: Other than the fact that you would have been moved out of Peru what me what other things made you want to quit the Foreign Service and what made you want to stay in Peru?

Corinne: I would have been sent to El Salvador, and we had reelected a Republican president, and I did not want to be representing the US government and El Salvador. That was a piece of it. But the truth of the matter is, the danger and the feeling of impending catastrophe. Were very, very exciting. You felt like it’s kind of like living now only this is this feeling that you’re living through history. Is it was very appealing to me like this was a historical moment in Peru, you know, it’s the whole system was at stake. You know, in in 1988, when I made the decision to quit, it was not at all clear that sundown might not win. Or that the war which essentially remained a terrorist campaign, but couldn’t become a civil war, there was there was just no guarantee that it would remain, the situation would remain in control. And I was just that I found that very exciting. I wanted to be there, you know. But the other thing is, I really, really loved Peru. I mean, I hadn’t met Papi yet, so it had nothing to do with romantic relationships. I really, and to this day, there’s a part of like, there’s this part of my chest that kind of stirs when I think of the Andes and I think of the jungle and I just think of people and I loved being an expat during those years. Um, I actually loved feeling of being different from everybody around me. And, you know, I have to say, you know, different in a privileged way, right, because being an American was a very privileged thing to be in Peru as you know.

So I loved Peru and I wanted, and then the last thing is I had always wanted to be a writer. And I thought, you know what, there’s a there’s a news story here. And I had met so many journalists as a Foreign Service officer. In fact, I kind of dated one of them. And I decided, you know, I could do this and he encouraged me, you know, yeah, you could be a freelancer and there was plenty of work to be done. So it was a chance for me to stay in Peru, cover a big story and start writing for a living, which is what I had always wanted to do.

Gabe: Now, when you visit Peru, what is the biggest change? You see the general sentiment and day to day life now versus then?

Corinne: Well, for me, it’s a lot less interesting. It’s a lot. It’s a lot more cosmopolitan. I mean, it’s a lot more Americanized, it’s a lot more developed. I think it’s lost a lot of what made it uniquely Peruvian in traditional sense of, you know what people ate where you went on a Saturday afternoon. There’s a lot more traffic. But you know, part of it is it’s it’s no longer in the kind of crisis it’s in. So what were shanty towns made of: woven read maps that people lived in with no running water or plumbing are now neighborhoods where people can live in cement. So I mean, it’s, I’ll be honest with you, this is kind of an imperialist thing to say it’s less interesting to me, but it’s probably a better place for most Peruvians. But it’s a less interesting place to be a writer or a journalist.

Gabe: Well was the general set of proven sentiment towards communism? And how did that change that time? And also, like how do people shift their support between the shining path and Fujimori?

Corinne: I’m gonna take the last question first. There was never widespread support for the shining path. There was never ever widespread support. They had a core of people who believed in what they were doing. They have a lot of people who lived in area where there are areas where there had never really been much government presence for good or for ill. I mean, the government just never got there. I mean, there were no health posts or you know, like they’d be a teacher, one teacher for a village or something. And you know, shining path got in many cases early on came in and, you know, did organize work for gates so that people would get them a well, or they would deal with cattle rustlers or they would, you know, they would establish their kind of revolutionary councils and if you were beating your wife then you will be punished. So, so early on the shining path was going into these villages, especially in the Ayacucho, you know, in the southern Andes and won some local support, but it was never massively supported across Peru. So the shining path kept thinking, Oh, we can create an insurrectionary movement moment.

So the idea of terrorism is you, you, you, you, you, it was called sharpening the contradictions, right. So you make clear that this is an unjust system, and you keep pressing and pressing in and then one day, everything shifts, and there’s an insurrection and everybody rises up and in that moment, because you’re the organized opposition, you take power. Well, they never really got there because they weren’t taught to send that Easter’s there. etiology was kind of like hard for people to understand. I remember interviewing some coca growers, and these were really interesting people. They became coca growers. They lived out you know, they were farmers out the outside Tingo Maria, and they became coca farmers so that they could afford to send their kids to university. And I met their son and and it was, I mean, these two people like they’re, you know, humbly dressed in the kind of T shirts, they just look like campasinos. And I had not realized that an engineer with a project that I was visiting was her son. And he didn’t like interact with her too, because of course, there’s that shame thing of I’m the professional quicienero. No. And, and afterwards, I was talking to her and we just kind of bonded as women. And she said, you know, full on or whatever his name was m’ijo [mi hijo my child]. And I think she saw I was surprised. And she said, you would never have guessed which you? And I said no. And she said, Yeah, and she was very proud of him and of her daughter, but the husband and wife lived down the chakra and grew coca, and he was often in working actually for USAID and a developer. projects. It’s kind of funny.

But anyway, she told me she was one and told me, you know, yeah, the compass, which is what they would call them, um, the Senderistas would come in and they give us their talks, we would all have to sit and listen to them and never really knew what they were talking about. But, you know, most of these people since I had no real relationship with the government, so what the government unfortunately in many cases, what the government often did was, they would go in and they would just see, you know, okay, here’s this woman, she’s been in a meeting of a senderista, so they’re going to treat her as a son that Easter. But in that area, they were a little bit smarter and a lot of cases. And so what the government went in and did, especially one general in the army would go in and would bring more development projects. And so in the end, a lot of people. So as it’s sort of happening, so So imagine there’s this family, right, and the shining path is given there incomprehensible talks about politics and the third wave of revolution and all this stuff that they believed in But then the government comes in and says, Okay, we have these food supplies for you. And we’re going to build you this irrigation project. And so the conversation was like, Okay, well, we’ll do that. Well, then the Sendero would come in and destroy the irrigation project. And that pissed people off, and then people would get pissed off. And they might say, yeah, so and so is a senderista, so then Sundero would come in and kill that person. And Sendero just kept reacting in a more and more violent way. And killing the people they were supposed to represent.

My novel is about their murder of a low, you know, poor woman who organized in the shanty town, because they would kill the people they were supposed to represent. Because they were like, that’s just the way that was their attitude towards if you’re not with us, you’re against the community, you’re against us, we’re going to kill you. So they never won mass support. Peru had a huge leftist tradition. A very, very important one. leftist tradition both kind of left of center and then socialists and communists. I mean, your father was a Maoist when he was a young man, and to this day is a socialist. So there was a there was and socialist thought in pro liberation theology, which is kind of like socialist Catholicism was born in Peru. The founding theologian is Gustavo Gutierrez. So there is was a huge tradition of leftist thought in Peru. And what Sendero did unfortunately, was it contaminated people’s attitude towards that, so it became very easy for the right wing to sort of conflate everything on the left with terrorism. “ah son commonistas, you know, they’re there. They’re practically terrorists.” It also you the left everywhere in the world tends to play. It’s like, you know, the infighting on the left find me Bob could tell you about that. It’s the same thing here in the United States. I mean, it’s like Bernie and Joe, you know, like, there’s so much infighting always on the left. And so what Sendero did actually was helped destroy the leftist tradition in Peru because they turned a lot of people, and he’s like this woman in the in the, in the in the upper Huallaga Valley. She’s not going to really distinguish between a socialist and a communist. If someone if the army comes in and says no, they’re all terrorists she’s not she’s not going to have the sophistication she’s not bending in reserve some might understand the difference, right? So a lot of people just it became easier to just completely turn away from that. And then, of course, after Fujimori’s coup that had that was another blow to leftists, and you know, when you have a war, you strengthen the army, right? And so the army becomes an important source of organizing and the army actually killed an awful lot of democratic socialist people. So in the end, what the ward did was kind of destroy progressivism in Peru. And you should ask Papi to I mean, Papi could go into like a dissertation on that. But I mean, I really think that Sendero was just the worst thing that ever happened to Peru because it made progressive ideas suspect. So, you know, there was never a real huge number of communists in Peru but progressive thought was very powerful. When I got there, it is the most leftist country in Latin America when they out there and not anymore. So it’s very sad.

 

Gabe: Well, thank you.

 

Corinne: You’re welcome.

 

Overview of Interview Process

Interviewing my mom was fairly easy overall. We talked in person. I just had to set up my phone to record on the kitchen table which I had cleared for us. My mom was overall very receptive to all the questions I asked her and answered everything to the fullest ability as well as providing additional information. She was thorough but didn’t overdo it at all. I had to comb through the transcript because the AI didn’t pick up everything perfectly but it was easy to tell what was wrong.

I think that the interview went well. I didn’t ever have a need to go off script except skipping one question which she ended up answering in a previous response. I think that my questions were very well suited for the interview and they made the interview flow very well. There were no points where it felt like I was asking something completely out of the blue and I think that it was comfortable for my mom to answer all the questions. If I had the interview to do over I do not think that I would do anything differently as I am very happy about how the interview went.