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Moonscapes and a Loss of Security

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A travel through northern Peru shows a poor, exploited nation whose people still live with the consequences of the 1990s civil war

Northern Peru

September 2018

We enter northern Peru from Ecuador in the middle of the night. We stumble off the bus and wait for the Ecuadorians to give us exit stamps before walking over a bridge to Peru. While waiting in line for our Ecuador stamps, an Ecuadorian woman says, “It makes us very happy that you chose to visit our country. Thank you very much!” A final glimpse at the warmth of Ecuadorians.

On the Peruvian side, the border guard is stamping passports in sweatpants as he rubs his eyes. No piece of official uniform whatsoever. We woke him up.

My three Korean family members cause great confusion for our sleepy customs official. He looks at their passports, and goes back to his office and grabs a piece of paper. He keeps scanning the paper confusedly. “Koreans need a visa,” he tells me. “No, sir, they do not,” I reply.

He then looks again. “Are they North or South Korean?” he asks. “South,” I firmly state.

“Oh, ok, all is ok,” he replies as he stamps the passports. This will be the first of multiple border guards in different parts of the world who are unsure if the Republic of Korea is North or South. All the funnier, though, that the first time is at 2 am with an official in pajamas.

We get back on the bus, sleep poorly for a couple hours and arrive at our destination of Piura by daybreak. The town is pure brown. The streets are unpaved and extremely dusty. The sky is cloudy. I sleepily ask myself where the hell are we.

But there is no time to sleep. We arrive and must find a bus south toward Chiclayo, our way-station where we will sleep for a day on the way to Trujillo. Taxi drivers swarm us. I ask someone working in the bus station how to get to the bus to Chiclayo and how much a taxi should cost. The bus for Chiclayo, we already know, leaves from a different terminal.

We secure a taxi but tell him I have only dollars. He says “here is puro sol,” referencing the Peruvian currency called the sol. I ask him to take me to an ATM on the way for an extra dollar. The only ATMs are in the city center.

We arrive at the bus station for Chiclayo flush with sols and anxious to leave this city. We quickly get on a double decker and head south. The scenery is dystopian. There are multiple garbage dumps in the middle of the desert, half-finished homes everywhere (people build little by little as money comes in), and a huge sign on a distant hill praising Christ. There is no color anywhere. Purely brown. Even the homes are all brown.

As we finally enter Chiclayo I see areas of new, North American style development next to the more numerous half-built houses. The new developments are walled off from neighbors, with high walls and barbed wire no different than anywhere else in Latin America.

Chiclayo feels just like our first stop in Piura. Brown, dusty, full of motorized scooter taxis. We find our reserved hotel without issue and fall into a deep sleep at 12 noon.

The next morning we take a final bus to Trujillo, a large city that has an attractive looking suburb named Huanchaco. It is on the water and we plan to stay two nights before heading into the Andes. It has taken us three long bus rides to arrive.

The ride to Chiclayo from Trujillo has the same dystopian feel as the ride from Piura to Chiclayo. The only difference is that I am well-rested and can affirm that the dystopian feel of a moonscape is real and not a function of lack of sleep.

Part of the dystopian feel, I think, is that I did not expect Peru to be a desert. The Amazon and the Andes are what I thought about when I thought about Peru, not a colorless desert. Coupled with the half-built, colorless construction, bumpy roads and periodic garbage dumps my first impressions of Peru surprise me.

The dystopian moonscape of northern Peru

I am also surprised by the weather. Despite being close to the Equator and basically at sea level, we need light jackets even during the day. As mentioned, the weather is not sunny which, in a desert, means much lower temperatures. But still, I keep looking at a map to see our proximity to the Equator. I am baffled.

It was equally strange to be in a desert next to the sea. Huanchaco, our attractive seaside suburb, has no trees. Interestingly, however, the climate of the last thirty years has changed dramatically, our hostel owner tells us. Increased agriculture in the region has caused the climate to become wetter as more trees and other plants cause more evaporation and thus precipitation.

Traditional boats on Huanchaco's shore near Trujillo in northern Peru. Not a plant in sight but the nearby agriculture, not native to the desert region, has changed the area's climate.

Peru is a major exporter of oranges, asparagus, flowers, and many other agricultural products. Our friend Katrina, a Trujillo native, tells us that even though asparagus is widely grown in Peru, you never see asparagus anywhere in Peru. “Almost all of these products are exported,” she says indignantly. Katrina does not like that Peru is a place for international companies to extract products to sell abroad. Just as the nearby agriculture is not visible from Huanchaco’s desert coast, neither are its products.

Our discussion with Katrina reminds me of what a Colombian told me in Bogota. Colombia produces great coffee, but the best coffee is exported. Many Latin Americans lament the foreign extraction of their rich resources. In Ecuador Ivan, a hostel owner, railed against foreigners thinking they could extract resources at will. In Huaraz, a Peruvian mountain town where we will head from Trujillo, a hostel owner will tell me about mines extracted by Canadian companies who left uncontrolled pollution. Local politicians in the pocket of these companies abett the practice. This reminds me of stories I heard years earlier in Guatemala of Canadian mining companies polluting drinking water which led to rampant birth defects and other health issues. To see the dark side of Canada you must go to Latin America.

In addition foreign exploitation, Peru is an unsafe country. One evening at about nine, we are in the middle of dessert with Katrina when her mother calls. “Ok, mom, I’ll be home soon,” Katrina says. Katrina, a doctor in her late 20s, lives with her parents. As a result of low wages, we find that it is common for some young professionals to live with their parents well into their thirties throughout Latin America.

Katrina says her mother is overprotective. This is only natural, though, given the level of violent crime in Peru, she says. Katrina says she almost always takes the bus because there is great risk of sexual assault from taxi drivers. I counter that Uber might be safer given that drivers are registered. She says no, a friend was raped in an Uber in Lima. A female census worker last year was raped while conducting the census. Many female workers subsequently quit in fear of the same happening to them.

The increasing insecurity of life in Peru has also created a void for children. Mariana, also a Trujillo native and friend of Katrina, tells us that as a child she would play in the streets and in parks with her friends and cousins. This is now a rare scene, she says. Children are confined to the house without outlets. The result is increased screen time and obesity rates. I remember a similar conversation at our friends’ house in Mexico City. Our friends’ mother lamented that neighborhood youth soccer pickup games in the street no longer happened. The trend is regional.

The increased criminality in society is not the only reason that children are more confined to the home. The rising cost of living means that both parents must work to make a living. Again, a refrain I hear throughout the region.

With both parents working, this leaves children with less supervision and regulation of technology use. Moreover, as our Peruvian friend Richard in the mountain Huaraz will point out, if both parents are working they come home exhausted and just happy that their children are entertained with something.

But why has Peru become more insecure? Everyone in Peru says it has become far more insecure, and I read in a newspaper that Peru has the highest rate of violent crime in Latin America.

Mariana, the friend of Katrina, tells us that due to the civil war of the 1980s and 1990s there was a massive influx of refugees to the cities. This meant that traditional communities were destroyed and many people without means came to the cities. Lacking sufficient employment, many turned to criminality.

In addition, the communities of the countryside are hard to replicate in cities. According to the book Violencia y Autoritarismo en el Perú, the Peruvian civil war produced many squatters without title to lands in Peru’s urban slums. Squatters by nature are in a precarious situation and can be forced to move at any minute. For those who can afford rent, increasing insecurity and population density has led to a preference for apartment living versus the traditional houses of the past, says Mariana. Apartments, however, make it hard to forge strong communities. Moreover, if people are moving because of rising rents, this further stymies efforts to create strong communities. Mariana adds that with more mothers working, the job of forging neighborhood communities is left unfilled.

The precarious life of the city for rural refugees is the same issue we saw in Cartagena, Colombia. Multitudes were displaced during the decades of conflict and arrived in the city without land rights and few skills. Today, Cartagena is one of the most violent cities in a violent country. Once again, what we see in Peru is part of a regional trend.

The discussion of the roots of societal violence reminds me of my time in Guatemala. The director of my Spanish school said that when she was a child in the 1960s children played in the street and you could swim in the streams. Today, children are cooped up inside for fear of violence and kidnappings and the streams are full of garbage and flow with polluted water. Not different from the polluted desert moonscape in the above photo.

The civil war destroyed Guatemala’s pre-war culture, my director said. People stopped valuing human life, which meant they stopped caring about their surroundings as well. She talked about the lost public morality.

Lost public morality has a way of degrading everything and everyone. The only thing that begins to matter is the individual. Why respect a society that does not respect you? The lost public morality and lack of public trust is something we will encounter as we move into the Andes and then to Lima.

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