The people who pour daily into the shantytowns that surround Lima arrive with little money but a strong determination to improve their lives. In the second of our series of special reports, Isabel de Bertodano meets two Columban priests committed to helping them.

By Isabel de Bertodano (The Tablet: January 14, 2006)

At a busy intersection in the upmarket area of San Isidro in central Lima .three lines of traffic are waiting impatiently for the lights to change, allowing them to speed south into the business district of the city. Few of the drivers waiting here are inclined to have much patience for a young boy underneath the traffic lights in the middle of the road. He is bouncing on the tarmac in front of the first three cars, performing handstands and cartwheels. It is a routine which is carefully timed so that the acrobat has a minute to impress with his gymnastics and then another 30 seconds to nip between the lines of waiting cars and knock on windows. He asks for a tip before sprinting to the safety of the central reservation just as the lights change.

As he stands catching his breath, the gymnast, whose name is Juan Cifuentes, tells me that he is 11 years old and that he is here or on a nearby interchange most days of the week. He is one of a multitude of children from impoverished families in Peru who go to school erratically, if at all, and are to be found around the city doing whatever it takes to earn some money. Juan says that after exerting himself for an entire day in the suffocating fumes hanging over this road he's lucky to earn as much as two soles — about 30 pence.

This year for the first time more than half the global population will become urban. For a city such as Lima in the Peruvian Andes, the shock wave from this explosion has been enormous. In the early 1950s three-quarters of a million people lived here. By 1985 this had increased to six million. Today its population is estimated at around nine million. The city’s infrastructure is unable to cope, unemployment is out of control and shanty-town suburbs stretch as far as the eye can see. Yet still the people come, moving from the mountains searching for something better in a city already bloated with human beings.

Hunched to Lima’s east are the Andes. To the west is the Pacific Ocean and to the north and south are desert. There is little scope for expansion but somehow the shanty towns grow, creeping up barren mountainsides. Juan lives in one of the largest of these shanty towns, San Juan de Lurigancho in Lima’s Cono Norte in a one-bedroom house with his parents and three sisters.

“A school opened near my house a couple of years ago,” he says. “I go in the mornings when 1 can but I have a responsibility to my family and I often spend the whole day working.” Juan’s father is a security guard for a house in San Isidro and his mother cares for the younger children, though Juan says that she is looking for a job as a cleaner.

“My parents want me to go to school and then get a good job,” he says. “But we are saving up to improve our house so there's no time now.”

Lima’s shanty towns vary enormously from one end to another. Well-established districts, set up in the fifties and sixties, have electricity, running water and sewer systems. The multi-story buildings are made of bricks and there are shops, schools, roads and churches. The most recently built accommodation, occupying jealously guarded land where the shanty town peters out, consists of two sheets of bamboo matting which lean together to make a draughty tent shape. The number of bamboo mats will increase over time, providing walls and a roof, with a barrel outside the front door for water. As the years pass the bamboo will become wood and corrugated iron and eventually 20 years later, depending on the fortunes of the family, it will be transformed into bricks and mortar. By this time, the municipal government will have been forced to accept the presence of these people and electricity and running water may finally arrive.

Essential to the survival of rural migrants in their first years in Lima is the support offered by a group of Columban missionaries who have set up parishes throughout the shanty towns, offering friendship, help and education to people arriving in the city. I accompany the Irish director of the mission, Fr. Kevin McDonaugh, who has been in Lima for a total of 16 years, around his parish in San Juan de Lurigancho.

“I’ve always had a love affair with Peru,” he says. “I am always in admiration of the people, intrigued by their resilience and their human warmth and affection and sentimentality. They’re also very open to Gospel values, coming from the old traditions. People have a very strong sense of the sacred. We didn’t bring that, it was already here, a sense of the sacredness of the earth, sacred places and myths and pilgrimage.”

The Columbans have been in Peru since 1952. The order occupies a large building in northern Lima where the administrative work is carried out and retired priests live. Since its arrival, the order has founded 25 parishes, its priests going to the frayed outskirts of the city and working with the locals to set up an infrastructure of chapels, libraries, meeting rooms and subsidized pharmacies. After 15 or 20 years the parish is then handed to the diocese and the priests will begin again from scratch.

“We move on to places where there’s no ministry and no priest,” says Fr McDonagh. “Our practice has been to accompany people on the margins, at the very beginning. We try to enable them to stand on their own feet with dignity and defend their rights for themselves, rather than acting in a paternalistic way and doing things for them.”

Poverty in Peru is caused by a number of factors. The first is corruption, which is endemic. Another is blinkered political practice. Peru is only just emerging from decades of violence - almost 70,000 people were killed during the days of the Shining Path Maoist guerilla group in the Eighties. More recently it has begun to shake off the disillusionment created by the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in the Nineties. The third cause is racism — similarly to other Andean countries, the indigenous Aymara and Quechua people are emphatically bottom of the social pile and make up the vast majority of the poor in Peru.

“For people arriving here it’s a struggle and a fight for things against a state that they don’t feel part of,” says Fr McDonagh. “Eventually, they make a conquest of getting some kind of citizenship and basic amenities. But the basic mentality of their being outsiders hasn’t changed. What we try to do is help people to really grasp the fact that even though the color of their skin is not white and they speak with a Quechua accent, which is looked down on, they are really equal.”

There are 46 Columban priests in Peru and another 10 in training, but the life of the missionary in South America is far from easy. Fr. Peter Hughes, who has been here for longer than Fr. McDonagh, says that it takes a very particular kind of person. Both men agree that despite the poverty and hardship they see every day, which can be emotionally and physically draining, they are rewarded by people’s openness and interest in religion. Parishes run by the Columbans have up to 100,000 residents. Fr. McDonagh describes how 500 teenagers will join a new parish program of evening classes about the Gospel.

“They’re there of their own volition,” he says in astonishment. “Nobody’s twisting their arms and the program is for a whole year. They’ll sit down and do group work and there will be talks and they’ll sit and ask questions and there are texts to look at. They’re a delight to work with.”

Certainly, there is an appetite for life against the odds among people here. The day after we meet, Fr. Hughes is due to attend a festival to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first arrivals in the district where he works. “It was originally a rubbish dump,” he says. “Fifty years have passed and it’s still a rubbish dump. But there’s a sense of fiesta in the neighborhood. There’ll be a Mass and live music and dancing.”

Less agreeable to the priests is the conservative nature of the Peruvian Church, which is heavily Opus Dei dominated, with 12 bishops from the right-wing movement. Fr. Hughes describes his frustration at the conflict between opposing wings of the Church.

“They would say that to be Christian is to lead a good family life and say your prayers and forget about all this socialist stuff which they would say is very close to Marxism or violence and revolution," Fr. McDonagh explains. “But we think it’s exactly the opposite. They’re very strong on traditional sexual morals, but they pull back from involvement with social issues and the politics and economics of how people live. They feel it’s not their field, and that one shouldn’t meddle.”

Fr. McDonagh is clearly popular in his parish, hailed on every street corner by people who want to stop and chat. Here people are proud of their property and even where a home is little more than a few planks there will often be plants outside. Another is the fact that these communities are given names such as “El Paraiso” (Paradise) or “Los Jardines” (The Gardens).

We drive out to the very edges of the city to an apocalyptic, dusty moonscape where the temperature rises noticeably. Here the houses are pitifully small and insubstantial but nearby a football pitch has been ironed out of the mountainside, the air feels clean and one is struck by the silence at this distance from the city centre.

“Many see Lima, even with all its troubles and overcrowding, as offering greater possibilities,” says Fr. McDonagh. “Some of them come from places with no electricity, perhaps no schooling or they have to walk half the day to get to the nearest school.

“People come here because they aspire to something better for their children. By and large, in some small way, they will get it — eventually.”

Morales and the Bolivian presidency:
A closer look at solidarity in action
January 2006

The following reflection was written by Fr. Eugene Toland, a Maryknoll priest who has served for many years in South America. He currently lives in Bolivia and watched the campaign, election and inauguration of President Evo Morales first-hand.

If you could imagine that in the United States a coalition of Indian tribes, Afro-Americans, Hispanics, union organizations, some progressive business people, professionals and academics and senior citizens of all races and colors who need health care at some point formed a political party and, with an Indian chief as their presidential candidate, pulled off a sweeping victory to win the White House with a majority of voters perceiving it to be a party that would make needed radical changes and would be honest, you would have some idea of what it is like here on Bolivia [with] Evo Morales as president. Even more, if you imagined that the election victory was so sweeping that it wiped out both the Democratic and Republican parties and left the winning party and another new party made up of transfers from the two traditional parties to fill the congressional seats of both houses you would have an even better sense of what has happened here.

Evo Morales and his political party, Movement towards Socialism (MAS), swept to victory on December 18 and now will control both houses of the Congress as well as the presidency. The MAS won the lower house with a majority and has now gained the support of two senators from smaller parties to control the senate.

Rise in popularity
Since the day he was elected (until now), the general consensus is that everything Evo Morales and his party has said and done has gained him more support and popularity. He took off soon after the election to visit eight countries in Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

The purpose of the visits was to show, contrary to opinions before the election that with a MAS victory Bolivia would not be isolated by the international community.

Likewise the trips served to have Evo assure world leaders that Bolivia would abide by international agreements, its own laws, and respect private property. Finally, during the visits he asked advice from seasoned leaders of governments on how he might govern effectively as president. He did not go to ask for assistance but in the end most countries offered to provide financial and technical assistance to further the new government’s programs. As he returned to Bolivia opinion polls in the country showed he had a 65 percent approval rating.

There was some controversy during the trip: Evo did not don a suit and tie even when he visited the King of Spain! That provoked a few negative editorial remarks in the world press that were responded to by editorials in Bolivia pointing out that the clothes do not make the man but rather his ideas and actions. Besides, some argued it might be time for a change in the established European western standard for what makes for a well dressed leader! Open collar is certainly more comfortable than a tie introduced into western society in 1660 by a Croatian regiment presenting itself to King Louis XVI.

Gas prices
Two important visits of the newly elected president were to Brazil and Argentina, two friendly governments that import Bolivian natural gas. A Brazilian energy company is also one of the largest investors in the extraction of gas in Bolivia. With the visits Evo initiated conversations on a change in the sale price of the gas that would be more just for Bolivia and fair to the importers. Likewise he repeated the intention of his government to be 50-50 “partners” with the energy companies investing in Bolivia and thus change the give-away contracts made by previous governments. One executive of the Brazilian gas company commented, “Better a small profit than no profit at all.” Affirming what Evo has said all along- that the gas companies will not pull out of Bolivia if the government demands a more just share of profits, since they know that there is money to be made here for decades and if they pullout for sure others, such as China, will fill the vacuum.

While Evo has been on the road his vice president, Alvaro García Linera, a former guerrilla who served some time in prison and later became a respected sociologist, and other members of the MAS team have been busy with the transition which has gone smoothly with the pro-active cooperation of current interim President Eduardo Rodríguez, the chief justice who assumed office due to the constitutional crisis last June. Evo and his team have indicated that they will begin on day one to implement their program that was mandated by the overwhelming vote in December.

Changes on the way
That agenda includes preparing for a constitutional convention to change many of the laws to achieve a more just and balanced distribution of power. Also the new government will fulfill its campaign pledge to implement laws to renegotiate the contracts dealing with the exploitation of the large natural gas fields so that the country obtains a just share of the profits.

Evo announced that there will also be a change in how the executive branch operates with elimination of some cabinet offices and introduction of others. For instance the departments for Indian affairs and for women will be eliminated since both groups will have ample representation in the cabinet and government. Evo joked that someone had suggested to him that his strongly indigenous government introduce a department for K’aras, the Aymara word for “white folk.”

He did want to set up a Ministry of Sports and Culture (being an ardent soccer player himself), but there is no money in the budget for that this year.

U.S. don’t push
Evo has also indicated that he will enact a full investigation of the scandal case of the Chinese land-to-sky missiles that were somewhat outmoded and were taken by U.S. military personnel to be decommissioned but ended up being taken to the U.S. The fall-out caused President Rodríguez to relieve the commander of the army of his post and to accept the resignation of the minister of defense. The scuttlebutt is that the U.S. embassy somehow pressured someone to give up the missiles since the U.S. did not want them around with a “lefty” president in office, another sign of the extreme paranoia of the White House over what is happening in Latin America these days.

Reflecting an attitude of many, one member of the MAS transition team has said that the new government will end the long term interference of the U.S. government in the affairs of the Bolivian state removing what he referred to as a type of U.S. “hacienda” in the Quemado (Bolivian White House). However Evo has indicated that he is open to respectful relationships with all countries including the U.S. and, as is usual the case, the pre-campaign rhetoric has been toned down to a mature diplomatic discourse. While the U.S. government has been cautious in its acknowledgement of the MAS victory it recognizes that with Evo’s overwhelming electoral mandate it has no choice but to deal respectfully with this new government as with the other center-left governments elected recently in the continent. It is a wave that deserves a longer commentary later.

Most commentators recognize that with this election the country is at a critical juncture in its history with many of the recurring challenges of the past but with historic hopeful opportunities. The new government faces challenges of extreme poverty, wide gaps in distribution of wealth, attitudes of passivity and dependence on patrons, deep rooted corruption in government, the need to rewrite the constitution, provide a fair income from the country’s gas deposits, the call for local autonomy in various regions of the country, and how to resolve the production of coca in face of U.S. demands. There will be pressures from below and from the big powerful interests within and outside the country.

Yet the opportunities are there with a economy that has shown signs of growth especially with agricultural and gas exports, and a wide sense among the population that it is time to work together to make major changes, including developing a culture of values that draw on ancient Andean “commandments”- “do not rob, do not lie, do not be lazy” and that promote solidarity for the benefit of the common good.

Clearly with an uncertain future we can only hope for the best for this poor country, but as well commit ourselves to lend what hand we can to help it grow into the nation its resilient people so well deserve.