Walls of sand

Terrorism in Peru forced people from the countryside, like Griselda, out from their lands to move to Lima capital. Fear congregated masses of farmers in the already-existing urban poor areas. They settled illegally in the surroundings of the southern and northern cones of Lima la hermosa. They settled where our story takes part: las invasiones.

Las invasiones, (the invasions), are the human settlements of suburban Lima. Located on hills of sand, houses threaten to fall apart due to simple gravity issues. Houses, as well as electricity connections slide down the hills creating dangerous and inhumane life conditions.  

Las invasiones are on hills of sand because they are on the coast of Peru. One of them, called Villa El Salvador, shares the sea and the sun with privileged areas like Miraflores, one of the richest districts of Lima, but is miles away in many terms; to name a few: clean water, electricity, sewage, education, income, lifestyle, skin color, etc.

Miraflores and las invasiones are both Peruvians, are both part of Lima. However the contrast between both of them represents the economic and social inequalities that we all have heard of Latin America. So, Lima is nothing more and nothing less than Buenos Aires, Bogotá or Santiago. But this thing with the sea and the shore is what got me thinking this, my first time in Peru. I’ve got to explain myself, or better I’ve got to explain the geography of both Miraflores and Villa el Salvador.

So far we have the sea, part of both areas. The shore, however, is different. In Miraflores the hills that face the sea are mountains of stone. The hills in Villa el Salvador are hills of sand. This difference in the geography became the beginning of our project.   

As described before, participatory budgeting is the process in which the people and the government meet and decide together what the priorities for public investment are. The people in Villa el Salvador decided that neither clean water, electricity, sewage, education nor higher wages where the priorities for public investment. Crazy, right? Well, the fact is not that lower-income Peruvians have distorted priorities (which in some cases we could say the have, considering cell phones rates per citizen or satellite TV in comparison to money spent on food) but in Villa El Salvador there is one thing that is more needed than anything we could have predicted for a shantytown: a wall, more specifically contention walls.

 

We came to know contention walls here in Peru. Being from Argentina myself, I knew what a shanty town looked like. But this was different. Contention walls were a new thing for me and for my South American friends. They occupied an irremovable first place on the list of priorities. This is, we learned, because they are the beginning for development. With a contention wall, that prevents the sand to keep falling down the hills and taking with it houses and electricity cables, you can install sewage, clean water pipes and solid electricity pillars.

 

Why, if contention walls are so obviously needed, does the government need participatory budgeting to decide allocation of resources on building them?

Because the promises of governments to the unprivileged people are many times as volatile as sand. “Earthquakes” caused by changes of administrations or political turmoil tend to affect more harshly the unstable areas built on sand. People need to get involved in civic life in order to hold their authorities accountable. Participation is the many-times forgotten ingredient of democracy. This is what this story is about.

 

Griselda, an old woman, together with Marisa a middle age resident of a shanty town and Daniela, a young adult Politician will show us that world of sandy instability and promise of rocky development.

Griselda..

Griselda welcomed Mario and the rest of the group into a meeting room of the size of a large classroom that would serve a class of thirty. That was the front part of her house where she holds the meetings of her organization every Saturday at 3:00 pm. The more than modest house is a building that she built with her own hands, a clear representation of Griselda’s enthusiasm and perseverance.

As we start talking to her we can notice the happiness to receive us and the simplicity of her words. “My friends come to ask me ‘Griselda, where can we go for a meal?’. I tell them that we will find a place. I ask them to be patient. Then we go together and ask in the grocery store to give us whatever they can help us with. Sometimes we also go to the municipality to ask for goodies. We are never sure whether we will find a place to eat the next day.”

Griselda, as several hundred thousand Peruvians, settled in the suburbs of Lima escaping from the insecurity created in the country side by terrorist groups like “Shining Path”; and searching for a better quality of life in the big grey city. The places that the immigrants found were hills of sand in the middle of a semi-dessert, without access to water or electricity. Little by little, the new residents like Griselda were creating communities that soon new became districts of the metropolitan Lima.  Districts like Ano Nuevo, where Griselda lives, struggled to get recognition and assistance from the central government and now we can observe streets with pavement and some public places like plazas and soccer fields. Nonetheless, poverty is still a great part of the reality of its inhabitants.     

Participatory Budgeting…a process

Participatory Budgeting is the process through which the civic society and the government get together to decide the investment budget of a municipality.  Mario, Nicolas, Shaun, and I are filming a documentary about the practice of Participatory Budgeting in the poorest areas of Lima, Peru. For the first time in Peruvian history, the most marginalized sectors of society get the chance to not only give their opinion but also to decide where the investment in infrastructure and social programs should be allocated. 

The meeting was planned to be at 10:00 am on a Sunday morning. Very few people had showed up by then. We had the camera ready and the auditorium of the Municipality of Comas, one of the suburbs of Lima, was beginning to fill up. The invitees were the leaders of the social organizations of the district, one of the poorest but best organized areas of Lima. There we saw her: an old lady of innocent eyes and a blue hat, waiting anxious for the meeting to start. She was holding papers with a signature that looked more like a drawing to us. Illiterate and extremely poor, this woman called Griselda was advocating for the construction of a homeless shelter. Mario and I approached her and we started a conversation about her life. It was 10:25 and the meeting was not even close to get started. So, we kept talking to her. She had become a natural representative of the poor by being poor herself. She had noticed that all her friends, all of them old people, did not have resources to afford the meal of the day.  She had mobilized an important group of people that were in the same circumstances to start an organization called Niño Jesús. As the meeting started, we had to stop the conversation. We took notes of her address and promised to visit her at her house.

We understood she was a potential character for our documentary, but never imagined that we would find out what we actually found when we went to her house. Her son of 60 years old opened the door and told us to wait outside. Griselda! said Mario.

To be continued…