Murder on Rainbow Mountain

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1:45Sarah Holder:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Over the last decade, a new tourist attraction high in the Andes Mountains of Peru has become a viral sensation. It's called Rainbow Mountain. You've probably seen the stunning rainbow-colored mountains online. One of the most colorful hikes in the world. After years of seeing it look like a splatter of Skittles on social media, I flew to Peru and hiked up to... Rainbow Mountain is one of Peru's most iconic tourism destinations. And you've probably seen it on social media. That's Bloomberg's Peru bureau chief, Marcelo Rochebrun. But it's this like photogenic mountain that has colors of pink, of turquoise, of mustard, a little bit of brown.

2:32And it just looks otherworldly. And you have a couple of alpacas that are wearing sunglasses next to you. And I think that is like the perfect shot that people just die to have.

2:44Sarah Holder:Marcelo says Rainbow Mountain has quickly become one of Peru's most iconic tourism sites. But before 2017, very few people had even heard of it. I'm Peruvian, born and raised. Growing up in Peru, I had never heard of Rainbow Mountain. And the first time that I heard about Rainbow Mountain was from an American friend. And I was like, what is this place in Peru that I have never heard about? Like, that makes no sense. Marcelo wanted to know more about this special place. And he found, just out of frame of those perfect shots, there's a much more complicated story. Whenever I watch videos of Rainbow Mountain, I think Rainbow Mountain has obviously done a lot of good for this community.

3:23It has also done a lot of harm. And it's a tragic story about the power of money.

3:31Sarah Holder:I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, an indigenous community turned Rainbow Mountain into a global tourism destination. But as the money poured in, violence and tragedy followed.

3:51Sarah Holder:There's a story people like to tell about how Rainbow Mountain became such a popular place to visit. There's this myth that originally Rainbow Mountain was a glacier, And because of global warming, that glacier melted. The mountain is very high up, so it is reasonable that it would have been covered in snow. But it melted, and it revealed these gorgeous colors. But Marcelo says the real story isn't quite that cinematic. I went through the satellite imagery, I talked to experts, and it turns out that it was not a glacier throughout the 20th century. But the reality was that it just, it became viral in the way that viral things become, and it's hard to pinpoint the reason.

4:30Sarah Holder:The rainbow colors come from mineral deposits. And like many other mountains in the Andes, this one has been considered sacred for thousands of years. Rainbow Mountain is at a very high elevation, about 16 ,500 feet. That's more than twice the elevation of Machu Picchu. For years, the only way to get to Rainbow Mountain involved hiking for days. It just wasn't a destination tourists sought out. But Marcelo says that around 2017, that started to change. So one of the key people in sharing Rainbow Mountain with the world was a man called Flavio Illatinco. Flavio grew up in an indigenous community of about 500 people that sits beneath Rainbow Mountain.

5:13Sarah Holder:It's called Chihuahua. The indigenous communities that live around Rainbow Mountain, they all belong to the Quechua ethnicity. Most of them are Quechua speakers. And it's really the poorest part of the country. The southern Peruvian Andes have the highest poverty rates. People are usually devoted to subsistence farming. There are very few economic opportunities. The youth, when they finish school, they will usually try to leave. Flavio found work cooking for tourists, hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. And that gave Flavio some vision about the power of tourism. And he's one of the first people to realize that the Rainbow Mountain has the potential to attract tourists.

5:55Sarah Holder:It could attract tourists if they had a road to get there. And Flavio persuaded other members of the community to help build one. A lot of what went into building the road to Rainbow Mountain was digging by hand. There was limited machinery, but there was also a lot of work that had to be done by hand because of the small budget that they were working with. It was really an operation where the labor was coming mostly from local villagers. The road took about a year to complete, and it made it a lot easier for tourists visiting Cusco to make the trip to Rainbow Mountain. By building that road through his own community, he could cut down the time it takes to get to Rainbow Mountain to three hours.

6:32And so a tourist could wake up at three in the morning, four in the morning and go see sunrise at Rainbow Mountain. And that was the thing that really transformed this tourism destination because now it was accessible to the masses. not just to hikers.

6:45Sarah Holder:And soon the masses came from all over the world. And with them came a lot of money. Rainbow Mountain is on land that belongs to the indigenous community of Chihuahua. They charged hikers an entrance fee to visit. 20 soles for locals and 30 soles for foreigners. Both amount to less than$10. It was a volume game. It was not about charging every person a lot of money. It was about multiplying that money by a lot of people. Hundreds of thousands of tourists a year, about a thousand tourists a day. So when you start multiplying the money, it really adds up to millions of dollars that are suddenly trickling in.

7:23It's all cash. It's all unregulated.

7:26Sarah Holder:Who is collecting that money? The entrance tickets are being collected by a centralized part of the community. But the other services being offered in the mountain are just collected by every individual member, depending on what they're doing. So the road doesn't get all the way up to Rainbow Mountain. So you have to still hike a mile or two, but you can hire somebody to take you on horseback. And so in that case, you're paying money to another local person. You're selling food. So it is really a cash-heavy business and it's generating millions. For a rural indigenous community like Chiyiwani, having this new source of revenue had the potential to be transformative.

8:02It becomes a lifeline, really, in a place that had no lifeline before. It's really a transformative amount of money. It puts people not just out of poverty, but it allows future generations to live better lives, to go to university and to get the opportunities that they otherwise would not have.

8:18Sarah Holder:The dream Flavio had pitched to his community had started to come true. He was hailed as a visionary. Some people even cried when they saw tourists arrive for the first time because they didn't thought that they would come through the community of Chihuahua ever. And it really emboldens Flavio and he becomes the leader of the community of Chihuahua. But all that tourist money also brought new problems for the community, a new scrutiny for Flavio, the dark side of Rainbow Mountain. That's after the break. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results.

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11:26Sarah Holder:As more and more tourists came to Rainbow Mountain in search of that perfect selfie, millions of tourism dollars were streaming into Chihuahuan. But Bloomberg's Marcelo Rochebrun says managing that money proved complicated. There is no concrete plan about what to do with it, how to accumulate it, how to reinvest it, how to manage it, or how to be transparent about what is coming in. It wasn't always clear how the money was being spent and by whom. What we do know is that people have directly benefited from Rainbow Mountain, But there are many questions about whether there has been mismanagement of the funds.

12:04There are many allegations that a lot of different people have been pocketing the money. So because of that, there are factions that start to emerge. One thing that is very prevalent in the Andes is that the higher up you go, the poorer people are. And that is because fewer things will grow and that leads to fewer economic opportunities.

12:24Sarah Holder:Flavio Iatinko was part of the upper part of the village, a neighborhood called Iacto. When he was leading Chihuahua and overseeing tourism at Rainbow Mountain, it flipped the dynamic in the whole community on its head. A resident from lower in the valley, Cecilio Kispehnoa, started to push for a different approach to managing the mountain. So you have Flavio, whose vision is to share this money with the community and to work alongside the government for it to be taxed, for it to be more transparent. And then you have Cecilio, who is very passionate about indigenous rights and thinks that the state has no business in this and that it should be up to the community's self-determination to decide how to distribute the money.

13:08And that creates a lot of tension between the two men.

13:11Sarah Holder:For the first few years after the road to Rainbow Mountain was built, Flavio continued to serve as Chiuwani's president. In late 2019, prosecutors alleged that Flavio had received a bribe from a tourism company, which Flavio denied. He was never charged, but the allegations raised eyebrows among Chiuani's villagers. And eventually, the community chose Cecilio to be president instead. He took charge of directing tourism dollars according to his vision of community control. The tensions start to escalate because the sector that Flavio represents feels left out of the proceeds of Rainbow Mountain once the other part of the community is in charge.

13:53And so they start demanding transparency and they also start demanding more participation in the proceeds of Rainbow Mountain. And that fight, that struggle for the control of the money is really what just keeps growing and growing over the years.

14:08Sarah Holder:Under Cecilio's leadership, Flavio was expelled as a member of the Chihuahuan community. Fights broke out between their factions, which were covered by local media.

14:22Sarah Holder:Meanwhile, tourists kept on coming to Rainbow Mountain. But some of them also started getting caught in the middle. In some cases, some tourism operators, they share with us that they had been either stoned, that they had been in the middle of brawls between different factions of this community, that cars had been flipped over. In one case, some legal documents suggest that one tourist had died when a car had flipped over and some other tourists had been injured. So it was sort of spilling over into the tourist experience, but it was not spilling over to the point that it would detract from tourists actually wanting to go to Rainbow Mountain.

14:58It's not like you were going to see headlines everywhere saying don't go to Rainbow Mountain.

15:02Sarah Holder:In November 2023, tensions between Cecilio and Flavio and their supporters reached a boiling point. There was a big fight between both of these factions. Some of the documents that we reviewed suggested there were hundreds of people involved in this. And that is when the government actually steps in, finally. And the highest levels of the Peruvian government say we're going to create some kind of dialogue and we're going to intervene and it promises that it will, through dialogue, it will find a peaceful solution for the running of Rainbow Mountain. After years of staying out of the conflict, the Peruvian government decided to step in.

15:37The problem is this comes a little bit too little too late.

15:41Sarah Holder:The Peruvian government took eight months to schedule the first dialogue meeting. It happened in Cusco in July of 2024. There, a government official told Cecilio and Flavio to, quote, hug it out. The next month, the government held a second meeting, and Marcello's reporting shows it was even less successful. A video of the meeting shows a fight nearly erupting, and Cecilio walking out of the meeting midway through. Before he did, he emphasized his view that the community was going to retain full control of Rainbow Mountain. And whoever disagreed with him could press charges.

16:23Sarah Holder:After the meeting, tensions at Rainbow Mountain kept escalating. A local public safety official contacted the Cusco police multiple times, asking for more officers on the ground to keep villagers and tourists safe. After Cecilio and Flavio came home from that August meeting in Cusco, the official reported another confrontation between their camps. But when officers showed up, a mob of about 70 people scattered. There were no signs of violence, so the police left. This is happening on private land, on a tourism site operated by what amounts to a private company, which is an indigenous community.

17:01So the state is not really involved in any way. And this is also happening at the intersection of an impoverished indigenous community, which has had very little state presence in the past. So there's no police station there. There's no hospital there. And while the government is involved, its involvement is not direct enough to actually have an impact on what is happening on the ground. And so this culminates on a fateful night in August of 2024. from what we've been able to reconstruct both through legal documents and through interviews with witnesses who were at the scene. Flavio and a few relatives were getting ready to go to a wedding and to get to that wedding they actually had to go through the road that they had helped build to Rainbow Mountain except they were going in the opposite direction.

17:49And because Rainbow Mountain is a destination that is mostly frequented by tourists in the morning by the afternoon there are no more tourists And so it is around this time that Flavio is in a motorcycle going down to another town to attend this wedding. When he's ambushed Flavio and his relatives, allegedly by a mob of about 70 people made up of his own neighbors, other members of this village. And they kidnapped them, allegedly, and then Flavio ends up being killed.

18:21Sarah Holder:Flavio was found stoned to death. His relatives survived, and two of them shared details of the attack with Marcelo. What happened to Flavio was just the most tragic result possible of what had started it as the great hope of Rainbow Mountain, the great hope that tourism would transform and make this community better for generations to come. Marcelo says it's made many members of the community see Rainbow Mountain not as their miracle to get out of poverty, but as a curse. Those factions did not exist before the money came in. And it was just this influx of money and the struggles to properly manage how much money was coming in for the benefit of everybody.

19:03And the lack of finding a mechanism for proper oversight, whether within themselves or with the help of the state, that led to this tragic result.

19:12Sarah Holder:Thirteen people have been sent to jail for their alleged role in killing Flavio and kidnapping his family. They all deny wrongdoing. The prosecutors acknowledge that they don't actually know who may have thrown the particular stone that ultimately killed Flavio, but they suspect that all these people participated in the mob. And one of the people detained right now is Cecilio, who was president of Chiuani at the moment of Flavio's killing. In response to the allegations against him, Cecilio and his defense have said he was nowhere close to the attack, but rather in a neighboring village. For now, the community of Chihuahuan has settled into an uneasy peace.