All over Peru. Peru has tons of these sites with enormous stones that are cut with incredible precision that are made like jigsaw puzzles so they survive earthquakes.
All over Peru. Peru has tons of these sites with enormous stones that are cut with incredible precision that are made like jigsaw puzzles so they survive earthquakes.
They don't know how they did it. They don't know when they did it. They're just guessing.
It's incredible that they still have these ancient sites that for whatever reason, it seems like the money that they get gets stolen. Like the money that is supposed to be allocated towards documenting these things and registering these things. People just say, fuck it, I'm going to pocket it.
And most of it has been done in this area of Peru over the last 20 years.
I would add the biggest amount of looting happened. It's actually died down some, but the end of the 20, so 1980s to 2010s, I would say.
I don't think museums get it at all. It's private, private buyers.
Peru has become, it's not great. Peru, I think, has become, if not on the same level as Colombia, I think they might have surpassed Colombia in terms of cocaine production. They're not doing great with that right now.
And I mean, that place more than anywhere else is both more mysterious and more obvious that there was something else going on a long time ago.
You see these three different layers of architecture. There's a guy in Peru that has been researching this stuff for 50 plus years, him and his father, Jesus Guimara, who has this classification system for the architecture in Peru. So you have, he calls them Hananpacha, Uranpacha, Icunpacha, the three levels.
Like I remember an episode we did about counterfeit money, people who make fake U.S. dollars and Euros in Peru, in Lima. And this guy, like shiny eyes, so excited, showing me how he finishes these bills to make it look and feel and smell exactly like a $100 bill. And when I asked him, and he's a taxi driver by day and he does this by night, and I was asking him, so why did you accept talking to us? He says, look, my wife doesn't even know how good I am. I am the best of the best at doing this. Like nobody in the whole world can make this as well as I do. And I always wanted to be able to talk to somebody and show off how good my skills are. And you're giving me an opportunity to do this. That's crazy. So I think ego plays a huge role. And then impunity, like in places like Mexico, so much corruption. Like what's the downside to talking to this woman who comes and asks funny questions, right? Right. And then I think it's the wanting to be understood. I think everybody wants to be understood. And they know they're considered the bad guys. They know that, you know, there's so much stigma around what they do. And I tell everybody, I'm here to try to understand what you do. I'm not here to judge you because I think it's much more important to understand why you do what you do. The guy who makes counterfeit bills, what's his process? Oh, it's freaking fascinating. Because does he replicate a dollar bill with all like the little things inside of it? Everything. It was incredible. So there's different, there's the graphics person, there's the printer, and then he does the finishing job. He's the finisher. And he said he was the best finisher in the job. And I said he's, I started calling him Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player, because he's the finisher. I'm soccer. So I called him Ronaldo. Okay, you're Ronaldo. And he uses a, it's kind of like a porridge that I used to eat when I was a kid in Portugal. It's called like, it's a type of like a serac. You guys don't have it here, but it's like a meal, what do you call that? Like cornmeal, like a cornmeal. And he uses that, and I saw him using it. It's not serac, actually, it's maisena, which is another brand. But he uses a sort of cornmeal to finish these bills to make it the consistency when you touch it feel exactly like the real stuff.