Touching the Jaguar

John Perkins’ gripping story is a redemptive parable for our times and our potential for transformation, which he himself has undergone as an initiation. His early shamanic experiences gave him deeper insights into the nature of reality and perception. He relates how his life was saved by an Amazonian Shaman and he learned to ‘Touch the Jaguar’, meaning that ‘you can identify your fears and barriers alter your perception about them, accept their energy, and take actions to change yourself and the world.’ The local warring tribes had to do exactly this when they united against the common enemy of corporate colonisation and exploitation. John himself represented what he calls the Death economy as ‘an economic hitman’, persuading countries to develop infrastructure projects funded by the World Bank and carried out by US corporations, resulting in long-term indebtedness and a diversion of resources from other social concerns.

A pivotal incident took place in 1978 when Jaime Roldos was democratically elected President of Ecuador on the basis of reining in the oil companies, forcing them to clean up their pollution and to share a proportion of profits with Ecuadorians. He succeeded a series of CIA-supported dictators, so John and other economic hitmen followed the classic pattern with a carrot of financial rewards accompanied by the stick of CIA threats and assassinations – the jackals. Roldos refused to cooperate and was attacked as a Soviet puppet. It was not long before he died when his private plane crashed – a classic and plausibly deniable CIA-related assassination – and the similarly inclined President Torrijos of Panama died in similar circumstances only a couple of months later. When working as a consultant, John received similar threats when it became known that he was intending to write a book. His initial book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, was turned down by 39 publishers, quite probably because of their fears of repercussions. It soon became a best seller.

Corporate colonisation backed by force and violence is predicated on the idea of oil and other commodities as development and progress, when in fact it involves expropriating land and devastating landscapes inhabited for centuries by indigenous tribes, for whom the capitalist dream of consumption and materialism is a destructive nightmare. Our collective imperative is to change the dream or story we tell ourselves since the capitalist story is slowly killing the planet and destroying our health. The indigenous peoples know that ‘the dream is everything. The way we live is determined by the way we see ourselves and our relationship to the world around us.’ Globalisation has meant that the orthodox Western economic mindset has colonised the world, and we urgently need to revise our story along the lines espoused by indigenous peoples. Indeed, the Kogi refer to us as younger brothers that need educating. This also involves bringing the Eagle and the Condor together, where ‘the Eagle peoples flew the path of the mind, of science, technology and industry. The Condor peoples flew the path of the heart, of passion, intuition, and spiritual connections with nature.’ (p. 100) This is integration of left and right hemispheres.

Since the 1980s, John and his partners have been active with the Pachamana Alliance and Foundation (www.pachamana.org) to defend indigenous rights and homelands, and have taken a number of prominent groups to the Amazon so that they can see the situation for themselves. One of these involved the author Lynne Twist, who was only persuaded to help coordinate the initiative because she herself had a visionary dream in which Achuar elders appeared to her. John argues that we need to confront the Jaguar that is our fear of change in order to generate a Life Economy that is not just sustainable but truly regenerative. ‘Never before, he writes, has it been more important to alter the course of history’, and he offers practical suggestions for readers to work on, including confronting our own Jaguars, altering our perceptions, and working out what we can do personally to help change the world. We need to become ambassadors for a Life Economy – Vandana Shiva is a good example – and help willing CEOs by creating pressure from below that will encourage them to realise their highest vision for the longer term. The book closes with a significant list of key characteristics of both types of economy, and readers are by then primed to choose Life so that we can ‘maximise long-term benefits for all people and nature.’ The book is a powerful tool for personal and planetary transformation – and John will be talking about it in the October Book Briefing.