Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Over the last decade,
Speaker 1: a new tourist attraction high in the Andes Mountains of
Speaker 1: Peru has become a viral sensation. It's called Rainbow Mountain.
Speaker 2: You're probably seeing this done in rainbow colored mountains online.
Speaker 1: Of the most colorful hikes in the world.
Speaker 2: After years of seeing it look like a spattery skittles
Speaker 2: on social media, I flew to Peru. Rainbow Mountain is
Speaker 2: one of Peru's most iconic tourism destinations. And you've probably
Speaker 2: seen it on social media.
Speaker 1: That's Bloomberg's Peru bureau chief Marcelo Roscha Brum.
Speaker 2: But it's this like photogenic mountain that has colors of pink,
Speaker 2: of torquois, of mustard, a little bit of brown, and
Speaker 2: it just looks otherwordly. And you have a couple of
Speaker 2: alpacas that are wearing sunglasses next to you, and I
Speaker 2: think that is like the perfect shot that people just
Speaker 2: die to.
Speaker 1: Have, Marcelo says. Rainbow Mountain has quickly become one of
Speaker 1: Peru's most iconic tourism sites, but before twenty seventeen, very
Speaker 1: few people had even heard of it.
Speaker 2: I'm prov'n born and raised. Growing up in Peru, I
Speaker 2: had never heard of Rainbow Mountain. And the first time
Speaker 2: that I heard about Rainbow Mountain was from an American friend,
Speaker 2: and I was like, what is this place in Peru
Speaker 2: that I have never heard about? Like that makes no sense.
Speaker 1: Marcelo wanted to know more about this special place and
Speaker 1: he found just out a frame of those perfect shots.
Speaker 1: There's a much more complicated story.
Speaker 2: Whenever I watch videos of Rainbow Mountain. I think Rainbow
Speaker 2: Mountain has obviously done a lot of good for this community.
Speaker 2: It has also done a lot of harm and it's
Speaker 2: a tragic story about the power of money.
Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Speaker 1: Bloomberg News Today. On the show, an indigenous community turned
Speaker 1: Rainbow Mountain into a global tourism destination, but is the
Speaker 1: money in violence and tragedy followed. There's a story people
Speaker 1: like to tell about how Rainbow Mountain became such a
Speaker 1: popular place to visit.
Speaker 2: There's this myth that originally Rainbow Mountain was a glacier
Speaker 2: and because of global warming, that glacier melted. The mountain
Speaker 2: is very high up, so it is reasonable that it
Speaker 2: would have been covered in snow but it melted and
Speaker 2: it revealed these gorgeous colors.
Speaker 1: But Marcello says, the real story isn't quite that cinematic.
Speaker 2: I went through the set of imagery. I talked to experts,
Speaker 2: and it turns out that it was not a glacier
Speaker 2: throughout the twentieth century. That the reality was that it
Speaker 2: just it became viral in the way that viral things become.
Speaker 2: And it's hard to pinpoint the reason.
Speaker 1: The rainbow colors come from mineral deposits. And like many
Speaker 1: other mountains in the Andes, this one has been considered
Speaker 1: sacred for thousands of years.
Speaker 2: Rainbow Mountain is at a very high elevation about sixteen
Speaker 2: thousy five.
Speaker 1: Hundred feet that's more than twice the elevation of Machu Pichu.
Speaker 1: For years, the only way to get to Rainbow Mountain
Speaker 1: involved hiking for days. It just wasn't a destination tourists
Speaker 1: sought out. But Marcello says that around twenty seventeen that
Speaker 1: started to change.
Speaker 2: So one of the key people in sharing Rainbow Mountain
Speaker 2: with the world was a man called Flavio Iyatinko.
Speaker 1: Flavio grew up in an indigenous community of about five
Speaker 1: hundred people that sits beneath Rainbow Mountain. It's called Chiwani.
Speaker 2: The indigenous communities that live around Rainbow Mountain, they all
Speaker 2: belong to the Quechua ethnicity. Most of them are speakers,
Speaker 2: and it's really the poorest part of the country. The
Speaker 2: southern Previan endites have the highest poverty rates. People are
Speaker 2: usually devoted to subsistence farming. There are very few economic
Speaker 2: opportunities the youth. When they finished school, they will literally
Speaker 2: try to leave.
Speaker 1: Flavio found work cooking for trus hiking the Inca trail
Speaker 1: to Machu Pichu.
Speaker 2: And that gave Flavio some vision about the power of tourism,
Speaker 2: and he's one of the first people to realize that
Speaker 2: the Rainbow Mountain has the potential to attract tourists.
Speaker 1: It could attract tourists if they had a road to
Speaker 1: get there, and Flavio persuaded other members of the community
Speaker 1: to help build one.
Speaker 2: A lot of what went into building the road to
Speaker 2: Rainbo Mountain was digging by hand. There was limited machinery,
Speaker 2: but there was also a lot of work that had
Speaker 2: to be done by hand. Because of the small budget
Speaker 2: that they were working with. It was really an operation
Speaker 2: where the labor was coming mostly from local villagers.
Speaker 1: The road took about a year to complete, and it
Speaker 1: made it a lot easier for tourists visiting Cusco to
Speaker 1: make the trip to Rainbow Mountain.
Speaker 2: By building that road through his own community, he could
Speaker 2: cut down the time it takes to get to Rainbow
Speaker 2: Mountain to three hours, and so a tourists could wake
Speaker 2: up at three in the morning, four in the morning
Speaker 2: and go see sunrise at Rainbow Mountain. And that was
Speaker 2: the thing that really transformed this tourism destination because now
Speaker 2: it was accessible to the masses, not just to hikers.
Speaker 1: And soon the masses came from all over the world,
Speaker 1: and with them came a lot of money. Rainbow Mountain
Speaker 1: is on land that belongs to the indigenous community of Chiwani.
Speaker 1: They charge hikers an entrance fee to visit, twenty sol
Speaker 1: is for locals and thirty sol is for foreigners, both
Speaker 1: amount to less than ten dollars.
Speaker 2: It was a volume game. It was not about charging
Speaker 2: every person a lot of money. It was about multiplying
Speaker 2: that money by a lot of people. Hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of tourists a year, about a thousand tourists a day,
Speaker 2: So when you start multiplying the money, it really adds
Speaker 2: up to millions of dollars that are suddenly trickling in.
Speaker 2: It's all cash, it's all unregulated.
Speaker 1: Who is collecting that money.
Speaker 2: The entrance tickets are being collected by a centralized part
Speaker 2: of the community, but the other services being offered in
Speaker 2: the mountain are just collected by every individual member depending
Speaker 2: on what they're doing. So the road doesn't get all
Speaker 2: the way up to Rainbow Mountain, so you have to
Speaker 2: still hike a mile or two, but you can hire
Speaker 2: somebody to take you on horseback, and so in that
Speaker 2: case you're paying money to another local person. You're selling food.
Speaker 2: So it is really a cash heavy business and it's
Speaker 2: generating millions.
Speaker 1: For a rural indigenous community like chi Iwani, having this
Speaker 1: new source of revenue had the potential to be transformative.
Speaker 2: It becomes a lifeline really in a place that had
Speaker 2: no lifeline before. It's really a transformative amount of money.
Speaker 2: It puts people not just out of poverty, but it
Speaker 2: allows future generations to live better lives, to go to university,
Speaker 2: and to get the opportunities that they otherwise would not have.
Speaker 1: The dream Flavio had pitched to his community had started
Speaker 1: to come true. He was hailed as a visionary.
Speaker 2: Some people even cried when they saw tourists to write
Speaker 2: for the first time because they didn't thought that they
Speaker 2: would come through the community of chigi Wanni. Ever, and
Speaker 2: it really emboldens Flavian. He becomes the leader of the
Speaker 2: community of gigi Wanni.
Speaker 1: But all that tourus money also brought new problems for
Speaker 1: the community, a new scrutiny for Flavio. The dark side
Speaker 1: of Rainbow Mountain. That's after the break. As more and
Speaker 1: more taurusts came to Rainbow Mountain in search of that
Speaker 1: perfect selfie, millions of tourism dollars were streaming into Chiwani,
Speaker 1: but Bloomberg's Marcelo roche Brun says managing that money proved complicated.
Speaker 2: There is no concrete plan about what to do with it,
Speaker 2: how to accumulate it, how to reinvest it, how to
Speaker 2: manage it, or how to be transparent about what is
Speaker 2: coming in.
Speaker 1: It wasn't always clear how the money was being spent
Speaker 1: and by whom.
Speaker 2: What we do know is that people have directly benefited
Speaker 2: from Rainbow Mountain, but there are many questions about whether
Speaker 2: there has been mismanagement of the funds. There are many
Speaker 2: allegations that a lot of different people have been pocketing
Speaker 2: the money. So because of that, there are factions that
Speaker 2: start to emerge. One thing that is very prevalent in
Speaker 2: the Andes is that the higher up you go, the
Speaker 2: poorer people are, and that is because fewer things will
Speaker 2: grow and that leads to fewer economic opportunities.
Speaker 1: Flavio Iyatinko was part of the upper part of the village,
Speaker 1: a neighborhood called Yacto. When he was leading Tijuani and
Speaker 1: overseeing tourism and Rainbow Mountain, it flipped the dynamic and
Speaker 1: the whole community on its head. A resident from lower
Speaker 1: in the valley, Cecilio Quispanoa, started to push for a
Speaker 1: different approach to managing the mountain.
Speaker 2: So you have Flavio whose vision is to share this
Speaker 2: money with the community and to work alongside the government
Speaker 2: for it to be taxed, for it to be more transparent.
Speaker 2: And then you have Cecilio, who is very passionate about
Speaker 2: indigenous rights and thinks that the state has no business
Speaker 2: in this and that it should be up to the
Speaker 2: community's self determination to decide how to distribute the money,
Speaker 2: and that creates a lot of tension between the two men.
Speaker 1: For the first few years after the road to Rainbow
Speaker 1: Mountain was built, Flavio continued to serve as chi Juani's president.
Speaker 1: In late twenty nineteen, prosecutors alleged that Flavio had received
Speaker 1: a bribe from a tourism company, which Flavio denied. He
Speaker 1: was never charged, but the allegations raised eyebrows among chi
Speaker 1: Juani's villagers, and eventually the community chose Cecilio to be
Speaker 1: president instead. He took charge of directing tourism dollars according
Speaker 1: to his vision of community control.
Speaker 2: The tensions started to escalate because the sector that Flavia
Speaker 2: represents feels left out of the proceeds of Rainbow Mountain
Speaker 2: once the other part of the community is in charge,
Speaker 2: and so they start demanding transparency and they also start
Speaker 2: demanding more participation in the proceeds of Rainbow Mountain. And
Speaker 2: that fight, that, that struggle for the control of the
Speaker 2: money is really what just keeps growing and growing over
Speaker 2: the years.
Speaker 1: Under Cecilio's leadership, Flavio was expelled as a member of
Speaker 1: the chi Yuani community. Fights broke out between their factions,
Speaker 1: which were covered by local media. Meanwhile, tourists kept on
Speaker 1: coming to Rainbow Mountain, but some of them also started
Speaker 1: getting caught in the middle.
Speaker 2: In some cases, some tourism operators they share with us
Speaker 2: that they had been either stoned, that they had been
Speaker 2: in the middle of brawls between different factions of this community,
Speaker 2: that cars had been flipped over. In one case, some
Speaker 2: legal documents suggest that one tourists had died when a
Speaker 2: car had flipped over, and some other tourists had been injured.
Speaker 2: So it was sort of spilling over into the tourist experience,
Speaker 2: but it was not spilling over to the point that
Speaker 2: it would detract from tourists actually wanting to go to
Speaker 2: Rambum Mountain. And it's not like you were going to
Speaker 2: see headlines everywhere saying don't go to Rambo Mountain.
Speaker 1: In November twenty twenty three, tensions between Cecilio and Flavio
Speaker 1: and their supporters reached a boiling point.
Speaker 2: There was a big fight between both of these factions.
Speaker 2: Some of the documents that we reviewed suggest that there
Speaker 2: were hundreds of people involved in this, and that is
Speaker 2: when the government actually steps in finally, and the highest
Speaker 2: levels of the Provian government say we're going to create
Speaker 2: some kind of dialogue and we're going to intervene, and
Speaker 2: they promises that it will through dialogue, it will find
Speaker 2: a peaceful solution for the running of Rainbow Mountain.
Speaker 1: After years of staying out of the conflict, the Peruvian
Speaker 1: government decided to step in.
Speaker 2: The problem is this comes a little bit too little,
Speaker 2: too late.
Speaker 1: The Peruvian government took eight months to schedule the first
Speaker 1: dialogue meeting. It happened in Cusco in July of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four. There, a government official told Cecilio and Flavio
Speaker 1: to quote hug it out. The next month, the government
Speaker 1: held a second meeting, and Marcello's reporting shows it was
Speaker 1: even less successful. A video of the meeting shows a
Speaker 1: fight nearly erupting and Cecilio walking out of the meeting
Speaker 1: midway through. Before he did, he emphasized his view that
Speaker 1: the community was going to retain full contry of Rainbow
Speaker 1: Mountain and whoever disagreed with him could press charges. After
Speaker 1: the meeting, tensions at Rainbow Mountain kept escalating. A local
Speaker 1: public safety official contacted the Cusco police multiple times, asking
Speaker 1: for more officers on the ground to keep villagers and
Speaker 1: tourists safe. After Cecilio and Flavio came home from that
Speaker 1: August meeting in Cusco, the official reported another confrontation between
Speaker 1: their camps, but when officers showed up, a mob of
Speaker 1: about seventy people scattered. There were no signs of violence,
Speaker 1: so the police left.
Speaker 2: This is happening like on private land, on a tourism
Speaker 2: site operated by what amounts to a private company, which
Speaker 2: is an indigenous community, so the state is not really
Speaker 2: involved in any way. And this is also happening at
Speaker 2: the intersection of an impoverished indigenous community which has had
Speaker 2: very little state presence in the past. So there's no
Speaker 2: police station there, there's no hospit there. And while the
Speaker 2: government is involved, its involvement is not direct enough to
Speaker 2: actually have an impact on what is happening on the ground.
Speaker 2: And so this culminates on a fateful night in August
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty four. From what we've been able to reconstruct,
Speaker 2: both through legal documents and through interviews with witnesses who
Speaker 2: were at the scene, Flavio and a few relatives were
Speaker 2: getting ready to go to a wedding, and to get
Speaker 2: to that wedding, they actually had to go through the
Speaker 2: road that they had helped build to Rainbow Mountain, except
Speaker 2: they were going in the opposite direction, and because Rainbow
Speaker 2: Mountain is a destination that is mostly frequented by tourists
Speaker 2: in the morning, by the afternoon they are no more tourists.
Speaker 2: And so it is around this time that Flavier is
Speaker 2: in the motorcycle going down to another town to attend
Speaker 2: this wedding when he's ambushed. Flavi on his relatives allegedly
Speaker 2: by a mob of about seventy people made up of
Speaker 2: his own neighbors or other members of this village. They
Speaker 2: kidnapped them allegedly, and then Flavio ends up being killed.
Speaker 1: Flavio was found stoned to death. His relatives survived, and
Speaker 1: two of them shared details of the attack with Marcello.
Speaker 2: What happened to Flavio was just the most tragic result
Speaker 2: possible of what had started it as the great hope
Speaker 2: of Rainbow Mountain, the great hope that tourism would transform
Speaker 2: and make this community better for generations to come.
Speaker 1: Marcello says. It's made many members of the community see
Speaker 1: Rainbow Mountain not as their miracle to get out of poverty,
Speaker 1: but as a curse.
Speaker 2: Those factions did not exist before the money came in,
Speaker 2: and it was just this influx of money and the
Speaker 2: struggles to properly manage how much money was coming in
Speaker 2: for the benefit of everybody, and the lack of finding
Speaker 2: a mechanism for a proper oversight, whether within themselves or
Speaker 2: with the help of the state, that led to this
Speaker 2: tragic result.
Speaker 1: Thirteen people have been sent to jail for their alleged
Speaker 1: role in killing Flavio and kidnapping his family. They all
Speaker 1: deny wrongdoing.
Speaker 2: The prosecutors acknowledge that they don't actually know who may
Speaker 2: have thrown the particular stone that ultimately killed Flavia, but
Speaker 2: they suspect that all these people participated in the mob.
Speaker 2: And one of the people detained right now is Cecilio,
Speaker 2: who was president of chiji Wani at the moment of
Speaker 2: Flavio's killing.
Speaker 1: In response to the allegations against him, Cecilio and his
Speaker 1: defense have said he was nowhere close to the attack,
Speaker 1: but rather in a neighboring village. For now, the community
Speaker 1: of Chijuani has settled into an uneasy piece.
Speaker 2: There haven't been any more altercations in the root Rambo mountain,
Speaker 2: but there also hasn't been a long term solution of
Speaker 2: any sort. There are state organizations trying to broker one,
Speaker 2: but there hasn't been a proper resolution to this.
Speaker 1: You spoke with some of Flavio's family members, including his
Speaker 1: son and his mother. How do they feel about Rainbow
Speaker 1: Mountain and all that it's brought now?
Speaker 2: I think it's really hard for them to even go
Speaker 2: to Rainbow Mountain. It's a place that recalls a lot
Speaker 2: of grief for them. But even they they recognize the
Speaker 2: benefits that Rainbow Mountain has also brought. And they're not
Speaker 2: calling for the shutdown of Rainbomante or anything. They're not
Speaker 2: telling tourists not to come. Flavia's family very much wants
Speaker 2: Flavio to be remembered, to be associated with Rainbow Mountain
Speaker 2: and for tourists to ask who was Flavio Iyatinko and
Speaker 2: why did he have to die?
Speaker 1: But most of the tourists who come to Rainbow Mountain
Speaker 1: don't know Flavio's story.
Speaker 2: I think tourists sometimes overlook that they are not just
Speaker 2: visiting a mountain. They're visiting an area where people live,
Speaker 2: where families live, and tourism has consequences both good and
Speaker 2: bad and that as a tourist you need to be
Speaker 2: aware of what those are. So in this case, in
Speaker 2: the case of Rainbow Mountain in particular, you're bringing desperately
Speaker 2: needed money impoverished community. But what to it sometimes overlook
Speaker 2: is like, what is happening with that money? Is that
Speaker 2: money being used mainly for the benefit of everybody or
Speaker 2: who gets to control that money? And is there any
Speaker 2: transparency behind how that money is being used? And it's
Speaker 2: also a lesson for the Provian state that it should
Speaker 2: do more to ensure that it can meet its obligations
Speaker 2: to protect the Peruvian people. One thing that has been
Speaker 2: happening is that there are new rainbow mountains popping up
Speaker 2: in the Pervian handy. So it turns out that this
Speaker 2: rainbow mountain is not the only one. Common as to
Speaker 2: explore this alternative rainbow mountain on your own, a rainbow
Speaker 2: montagine here in Peru that nobody seems to know about
Speaker 2: just is beautiful, a bit different, and you'll likely be
Speaker 2: the only people there.
Speaker 1: This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
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