Holiday in Peru

Oct. 20, 2004

Lima, I fear, is a snapshot of what the world could become.
There are eight million people living in this oceanside slum-prison which serves as the capital of Peru. It’s a city which offers a dystopian forecast of what happens when there’s a deep, deep divide between the very few rich, hiding behind their armed guards and razor wire-topped walls, and millions of desperately poor, barely literate and jobless people.
The traffic in Lima is so hideous that the taxis diverge from the main highway to and from the airport -- they filter through the poorest neighborhoods along alternative routes like water through a sieve. For the rich American traveler (you and I are millionaires to most Peruvians) this is a real eye-opener. The yards of these neighborhoods are filthy packed red dirt, as are the floors of the hovels in the slums near the airport. Starving, scarred dogs scavenge on three legs through the open sewers, and along a river running through the north side of town (or is it a giant sewer, cut like an open, festering wound across the trash-strewn land?) you see people scavenging for garbage along the banks.
Riding in your taxi, you are aware of the fact that tourists such as yourself are sometimes kidnapped en route, driven down a dirt path in just such a barrio by outlaw taxi drivers and stripped of their riches at best or never heard from again at worst. Not likely, but possible. Sometimes, gun-bearing robbers stop the buses making the run into town to rip off the whole shebang. The $200 you have in your wallet would make a year’s pay for some of these folks, while the cash in your moneybelt would amount to unimaginable riches. Everywhere there are reminders that this is a desperate place; from the broken glass atop the walls of the poorest slum dwelling (meant to cut the hands of burglars) to the heavy iron grates of your hotel door and the spiked walls beyond, everyone is a prisoner here, rich and poor.
There’s a .50 caliber machine gun atop a tank outside the governmental palace downtown. A huge armored car mounted with water cannon guards the other side in case the people revolt. Cops are everywhere: blue-clad for the traffic police or else governmental guards in full banana republic regalia with epullettes and gold-roped hats you’d expect to find on naval commanders. Guards with tommy guns lounge outside banks which require being buzzed through bulletproof glass doors for entry. Private guards stand outside walled mansions with guns at the ready. None of this inspires confidence -- it reinforces the idea that riots and murder are just a car bomb blast away.
Things are far nicer out in the country, but even so, the crushing poverty is evident at every turn in the hands of the peasant people whose fingers and toes are black from frostbite, heat in the winter being unknown. In the richest agricultural valley in Peru, people are still tilling the fields with oxen. Oxen! For most of us far-from-the-farm Americans, that fact has no meaning whatsoever other than a picturesque memory and a snapshot; but suffice to say that tramping through cowshit churning the dirt with flies buzzing around your head all day behind an ox is a brutal way to make a living. The reward is a diet of corn and potatoes all year long with no money to show, and something on the order of a 40-year lifespan.
For tourists, Peru is a dirt-cheap paradise and one of the most fascinating spectacles on earth. The food is great, the Inka ruins spectacular, and you can get a $200 alpaca sweater for about 12 bucks on any corner in Cuzco. But you’d have to be a halfwit not to see the glare of poverty in the eyes of the people passing by in a blur of wanting and need. And poverty is pain and violence, pure and simple.
Today, wealthy interests from Europe, the U.S., Japan and other nations come to places like Peru to do tax-free business in exchange for kickbacks to corrupt officials. Peru’s last president was run out of the country on bribery, drug-running and murder charges, among others. Natural resources are carted out of Peru at a fraction of what they’re worth, harvested with virtual slave labor -- in fact at wages which would amount to less than what a slave owner might provide a captured people -- and nothing goes back into the infrastructure in the way of new roads, bridges, hospitals, schools or hope. Instead, they have huge churches, built on the ruins of Indian temples.
Uneducated, impoverished people breed more in kind, their numbers swelled by the urgings of religious leaders in golden robes, flooding into Lima -- millions upon millions, and where will it end?
Here in America, we like to imagine that we have some clue about what’s going on in the world through our TV sets and our internet. Yet the fact is that the vast majority of us know nothing at all about places like Lima, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Mumbai, Nairobi, Manilla, Havana and a host of supercities with populations of 10 million or more; places that provide templates for the same road we are starting to head down in our own small way, even here in Michigan. We too are begging corporations to stick around with the lure of tax breaks. We too are packing our federal government with those who represent oil corporations, coal plants and war profiteers. We too are seeing the growing divide between the rich and poor, the rise of gated communities and private security guards. We too are seeing wages plummet as we compete with workers in China and India.
When I drive through a place like Benzie County these days, I see the two Americas that vice presidential candidate John Edwards warns of. Along the waterfronts of Crystal Lake or the Lake Michigan bluffs are the homes of the elite, starting at half a million dollars and rising precipitously upward. But our small towns are filled with people with little in the way of higher education and few job skills, wondering where in the heck they’re going to find something that pays more than minimum wage.
The outsourcing of jobs to other countries is a minor issue in the current presidential election. Wait until 2008 when it becomes the whole flaming ball of wax.
Who knows? Maybe our technology will save us. Maybe we’ll become so anesthetized by reality TV shows that being broke and freezing in the dark won’t matter. Maybe today’s kids will be happy to pay off George Bush’s deficit at minimum wage with no health care. Happy with their $300 tax cut, like poor folks celebrating a nickel raise.
All I know is that when our plane touched down in Traverse City a couple of weeks ago after 10 days in Peru, I felt like getting down on my hands and knees and kissing the ground. America -- don’t ever let it be robbed of its promise.