Probably one Indian in a thousand has any idea why people come to Cuzco to look at ruinas. The rest have other things to think about, like getting enough to eat, and this has made Cuzco one of the continent's liveliest hotbeds of Communist agitation.

Communist-inspired “peasant uprisings” are old-hat in Cuzco, dating back to the early 1940s. Indeed, they're familiar all over Peru. At one point during World War II, Communists took over Cuzco and built a giant hammer and sickle out of whitewashed stones on a hill overlooking the city.

The pattern hasn't changed too much since then. Last winter peasant leader Hugo Blanco organized an Indian militia in the Convencion Valley near here and carried out a series of hit-and-run harassments. At about the same time, there were strikes and fighting at the United States-owned Cerro de Pasco mines.

But the phenomenon is restricted neither to the cities nor to Peru alone. It's also seen in the countryside and in the other two Andean countries, Ecuador and Bolivia. Of the three nations, only Bolivia has made any attempt to bring the Indians into the national life. Peru has taken some nervous and tentative steps, and Ecuador has done almost nothing.

Yet the combined populations of the three countries total some 18,500,000, of which about 10 percent are white. About 40 per cent are pure Indian, and the rest are mixed-blood cholos, or mestizos. If the Indians and cholos join and develop their full power, the shape of northern South America may never be the same.

Communism, though, isn't the only persuasion that can rouse the normally placid Indians to violence. Another is the powerful chicha beer, the Andes' answer to home brew, which they drink in heavy amounts. In 1953 an anthropological field survey in Bolivia reported 979 bottles were consumed in one province for every adult man and woman, an average of 2? bottles a day.

Another agitating influence is extreme conservatism. One example: Last fall in Ecuador, a sanitation unit from the U.N.-sponsored Andean Indian Mission was attacked by Indians who'd been told the men were “Communist agents.” A doctor and his assistant were killed, and the doctor's body was burned. The Ecuadorian press, pointing out the Communists certainly didn't tell the Indians the U.N. officials were “Communist agents,” called the incident “a tragic consequence of the rivalry between the extreme left and the extreme right to win Indian support.”

This incident and many others like it were blamed on conservative elements opposed to land reform or any other change in the status quo. The example of Bolivia has shown that once the Indian begins voting, he has little common cause with large landowning or industrial interests. Thus the best hope for the status quo is to keep the Indian ignorant, sick, poverty-stricken, and politically impotent.