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Though Mr Zarate’s findings could fill scathing exposes of the kind churned out by Greenpeace, his technique is more like that of Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian writer who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2015. A quote from one of her books stands as the epigraph to “Wars of the Interior”: “I strive desperately to…reduce history to the human being.” Like Ms Alexievich’s narratives, Mr Zárate’s relies heavily on his subjects’ own words. Like her, he focuses on the failure of the state to protect its people.
尽管扎拉特的调查结果可能填补绿色和平组织之前揭露的大量残酷丑闻，但他的写作手法更像是2015年获得诺贝尔文学奖的白俄罗斯作家斯维特拉娜·阿列克谢耶维奇。扎拉特引用了她某本书中的一句名言作为《林内战争》的题词：“我拼命努力……为人类还原历史。”与阿列克谢耶维奇女士的小说很像的是，扎拉特的作品在很大程度上依赖于主人公自己的话。扎拉特与阿列克谢耶维奇都关注着是国家在保护人民上的失败。
In Peru extraction companies operate in 70% of the rainforest. Many ignore clauses in their contracts about respecting local people but few are held to account. Though the World Bank estimates that 80% of Peru’s wood exports have illegal origins, only a handful of loggers have ever been sent to prison for illegally felling trees. In the past decade, meanwhile, more than two Olympic swimming pools-worth of oil has leaked into the country ’s rivers. Mr Zarate forces readers to confront the human implications of development. “Osman Cunachi doesn’t understand much about environmental politics,” he writes (in Annie McDermott’s translation), “but he does know how hard it is to clean oil off your body.”
秘鲁70%的雨林都有开采公司在运作。许多公司无视合同中有关尊重当地人的条款，但很少有公司会担负责任。尽管世界银行估计，秘鲁80%的木材出口都是非法来源，但只有少数伐木者因非法砍伐树木而被送进监狱。与此同时，在过去的十年里，价值超过两个奥运游泳池的石油已经泄漏到了秘鲁河流中。扎拉特迫使读者正视发展对人类的影响。扎拉特在书中写道（安妮·麦克德莫特翻译版本），“奥斯曼·库尼亚奇对环境政治的了解不多，但他知道要清除身体上的石油有多困难。”
Economic development can no doubt be pursued more carefully, but its force seems to be unstoppable, just like the flood that destroyed the Amazonian village where Mr Zarate’s grandmother grew up in the 1940s. She left to work as a maid in Lima, as thousands of indigenous women still do each year. She married at 14, adapted her speech in order to assimilate into urban society and saved enough money to send all her children to university. To some, hers is an uplifting story. Mr Zarate isn’t so sure: “The question is what we are prepared to sacrifice, as individuals and as a society,” in the name of progress
毫无疑问，我们可以更加谨慎地追求经济发展，但它的力量似乎是不可阻挡的，就像20世纪40年代摧毁亚马孙村庄的洪水一样，扎拉特的祖母就在那个亚马孙村庄长大。她后来离开村子去利马做女佣，现在每年仍有成千上万的土著女性这样做。扎拉特的祖母14岁就结婚了，她为了融入城市社会改掉了自己的方言，并攒了足够的钱让所有的孩子上大学。对某些人来说，她的故事令人振奋。扎拉特先生却并不那么肯定：“其中的问题在于，我们身为个人和社会准备打着进步的名义去做哪些牺牲。”
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