Burdened with debt, the national state withdrew its investment in tourism development in Cusco in the late 1970s. More ominously, the growth of the Maoist Shining Path rebellion and its attacks on travellers nearly brought the tourism economy to collapse by the end of the 1980s. Yet, this chapter also documents the grassroots innovations in Cusco’s tourism economy. As traditional tourists avoided Machu Picchu, expatriates and locals created a new adventure tourism economy based on backpacking and hiking. Using new transnational cultural and travel networks, these efforts reinvented Machu Picchu as an exotic and adventurous site. The neoliberal government of Alberto Fujimori of the 1990s employed the new imagery of Machu Picchu as it sought to attract new private investment into Peru. These efforts brought in a bonanza of new Lima-based and international investors. However, the new state policies provoked local anger who rallied against tourism development perceived as unjust and as a threat to the region’s historical heritage
