In his 47 years of life, Edwin Rojas has seen the shanty towns on Lima’s barren outskirts grow from rows of bamboo huts to a sprawling mountainside city of brightly painted homes and communal gardens linked by hundreds of outdoor staircases.
Born there, Rojas has played his part in this transformation. He runs a tour company, showing off the communities and their residents to international visitors, and helping to raise money and fund projects – from soup kitchens to schools.
“I want to show how strong these people are,” Rojas told The New Humanitarian.
Residents of the neighbouring – and wealthier – districts of the Peruvian capital haven’t, however, always shared his enthusiasm.
In the 1980s and 1990s, over half a million people – mostly Indigenous Peruvians like Rojas – were displaced by the conflict between leftist guerrilla groups and the military that raged in the countryside. They fled to Lima in droves, squatted on empty lands, and started building towns in the dirt.
As their new settlements swelled in both population and geographic size, established communities in wealthier parts of the city began building a wall to contain them, erecting a dramatic symbol of racial and class division in a city founded almost five centuries ago as Spain’s colonial capital in the Americas.
Ten kilometres long and – in its most formidable sections – up to three metres high, made of thick concrete, and topped with barbed wire, it has come to be known as El Muro de la Vergüenza or the Wall of Shame.
On one side are the poor districts of San Juan de Miraflores and Villa María del Triunfo: shanty towns with precarious structures prone to landslides that often lack running water. On the other are Lima’s wealthy districts of La Molina and Santiago de Surco: green parks, pools, and mansions valued up to $2 million.
But now, following a ruling of Peru’s constitutional court, which called the barrier “discriminatory”, the wall is coming down. And some are hailing the court's decision as an important symbolic act – one that has unveiled the reality of Peru’s stark inequalities and could help to bulldoze old biases that have long hindered progress.
“The Wall of Shame is the visible part of the iceberg,” said Luis Rodríguez, an architect, urban planner, and researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “[Inequality is] a problem of the structure of the country in general.”
Economic inequality has long plagued Latin America and the Caribbean, where the poorest 50% of the population possesses just 1% of the wealth, according to the World Inequality Report. In Peru, 70% of the population earns less than $14 each day, while the richest 20% take in nearly half the country’s income.
“The [problem] is not only the physical situation, the economic situation, and inequalities, it’s maybe more the belief that the situation is normal,” Rodríguez said.
Entrenched opposition
Confronted by deep-rooted power dynamics and mindsets, it took a five-year legal battle to make this initial step forward – one that continues to be thwarted.
In 2017, Carlos Hinostroza, a lawyer from Villa María del Triunfo, filed a lawsuit against the then-mayor of La Molina, contending that the wall was discriminatory and restricted his neighbours’ freedom of movement.
In December 2022, the court finally ordered that a 4.5-kilometre stretch of the Wall of Shame be demolished within 180 days. More than a year later, however, most of the wall is still standing.
At a glance: The numbers across the divide
Different lives on either side of the Wall of Shame in Lima reflect the broader reality of most cities in Latin America – one of the most unequal regions in the world, and one in which other similar walls have been built. Here are some figures to give a greater sense of this reality.
- At least half of Lima’s territory – 54% of the city’s area in 2016 – hosts asentamientos humanos or shanty towns.
- La Molina has the highest human development index (a UN metric that considers an area’s life expectancy, education, and income) of any district in Peru. Its rating is comparable to that of Croatia.
- Peru had the highest COVID-19 death rate in the world, due to shortages of beds and medical equipment, and an inefficient healthcare system. In 2020, in San Juan de Miraflores, the death rate was 1.38 per 1,000 people. In La Molina, it was only 0.77.
- By 2015 (the latest data available), municipal investment on the wealthy side of the wall was already four times greater than in San Juan de Miraflores.
Officials from La Molina have criticised the court’s decision, asked it to extend the deadline for compliance, installed large stone planting boxes, and planted a line of trees where the wall has already come down. They argue that this is to protect the natural habitat, but Hinostroza said it is simply replacing one barrier with another.
Clearly, the decades-old sense of division remains strong.
According to Rodríguez, there’s a deep-seated notion held by many of those on the wealthier side that people “who came from the mountains, who migrated to Lima, are destined to live [in] this [segregated] way”.
‘They say the city ends here’
Rojas is one of the few who have managed to twist that destiny on its head. He is the founder of Haku Tours, the tourism company that funds his NGO, Reciprocity.
For the popular “Shanty Town Tour”, he picks up tourists from beachfront hotels and highrises full of Airbnbs in the wealthy districts of Miraflores and Barranco, where he now lives. After just 15 minutes in the car, the wall comes into sight and Rojas crosses into the place where he grew up.
“The people from the wealthy side, some of them say that the city ends here,” he said. “That's not right. The city continues.”
Rojas’ tours accomplish two things: raising money to address the community's needs, and making people aware of the very different lives lived by a huge segment of Lima’s population.
“If 100 people see us, I believe at least one or two people will want to come here and help us,” he said.
In the poor districts of San Juan de Miraflores and Villa María del Triunfo, most families that live near the Wall of Shame bring in a monthly per capita income below $230, which barely covers their $200 basic basket of needs.
In his SUV, Rojas climbs up the mountainside on narrow roads built for water trucks. Across Lima, about 1.5 million people live in homes with no connection to drinking water or the sewage system, and the price of water is up to 10 times more expensive in poorer, harder-to-reach areas than it is in richer neighbourhoods.
Between the Wall of Shame and the steep hillside to get there, few visitors even make it to this area.
“The higher you live,” Rojas said, “the more difficult it is to get some support.”
In a community called Asentamiento Humano (human settlement) La Peruanidad, Rojas was invited for lunch at a communal soup kitchen or olla común (common pot).
Inside, a group of women was cooking creamy quinoa soup and rice for 25 local families. If they can afford to pay, it’s less than $1 a serving – for soup, rice, and drink. During the pandemic, ollas comunes were a lifeline in Lima’s poor neighbourhoods, relying on voluteers and donated food to keep families fed during the crisis. The stretch of wall nearby was built a decade ago, according to community leader Victor Parraga.
“They came with guards [to build it],” he said. “We couldn’t defend ourselves.”
Parraga was sceptical about this part of the wall being demolished – distrustful of the government and suspicious that the wealthy side was resisting.
“It is practically racism that they humiliate us with. If we are all Peruvians, why can’t we all be together, united?” he said. “It is very painful for us.”
The history of segregation
San Juan de Miraflores, the Lima district where Parraga lives, is more than 90% Indigenous, Mestizo or Afro-Peruvian. Many of its inhabitants speak Quechua, the language of the Incas.
Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro founded Lima in 1535, two years after he captured and executed the last Incan emperor, Atahualpa. Thanks to its accessibility by sea, it was established as the capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. From the beginning, according to anthropologist Leigh Campoamor, the city was designed to keep the colonial population safely separated from the nearby Indigenous and Black population they relied upon for labour.
“This was the place where all of those spatial divisions – and where race – was invented in a certain way,” Campoamor said.
In the past century, Lima, like many other major Latin American cities, saw a massive influx of migrants from rural areas. Between 1940 and 1993, the city's population grew from about 660,000 to over 6 million. They came for work and education, but also to escape brutal violence from the Maoist group “The Shining Path” in the Andes. Once in Lima, they began building their informal settlements on unoccupied land, which became known as “invasions”.
“The idea that these people are the invaders – it's reclaiming the whiteness of Lima,” Campoamor said.
“Invasions” are still happening. New settlements were occupied as recently as 2021 by squatters who could no longer pay rent during the pandemic. In the last two decades, Peru’s cities have grown by 50%, and 90% of that growth is represented by informal settlements.
“What worries me,” said Alex Angulo, a construction contractor living in La Molina, “is that [the wall coming down] leads to ‘invasions’ taking over.”
That, he added, would hurt property values and threaten their safety. And some that share Angulo’s view feel it’s unfair to be shamed simply for desiring security.
“They should give it another name that isn’t offensive,” Carola Rattay, who grew up in La Molina and now lives in Santiago de Surco, said of the Wall of Shame. “If you see it socially, it is wrong. But if you look at it from a security point of view, I don’t think it is.”
But figures from Peru‘s National Police show that during the first semester of 2023, La Molina registered nearly 690 complaints for in flagrante delicto – robbery, kidnapping, and extortion – per 100,000 people. San Juan de Miraflores’ numbers reached only 321.
These statistics, however, are unlikely to reflect the true level of crime in both areas, and in their own way are yet another sign of the underlying inequality. Residents of less affluent neighbourhoods tend to have less confidence in the police and are less likely to report crimes, according to Rodríguez. Additionally, San Juan de Miraflores and Villa María del Triunfo both have fewer police officers as a proportion of their population than La Molina.
“The wall is for them,” said 61-year-old San Juan de Miraflores resident Julia Garcia, referring to the wealthy residents on the other side. “I think it’s for protection, I don’t know… But we are not another country. It is our Peru. We don’t encroach. We take care of ourselves.”
For Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn, the wall creates an urban environment reminiscent of South Africa under apartheid.
Places like the asentamientos humanos in Villa María del Triunfo and San Juan de Miraflores, he said, are, “almost like townships, where poor people, brown people of colour, are fenced off in these slums. They're allowed to come into the wealthy parts of the city to work, then go back to these townships that are just like Soweto.”
Proportionally, the population of La Molina is more than twice as white and half as Indigenous as Villa María del Triunfo.
“In some ways, it's the same country that the Spanish imposed with their ideas of caste and race and money,” Starn said.
The long way around
In the early 2000s, archaeologists discovered Incan mummies buried beneath the shanty towns – skilled textile artisans entombed with their tools. Theirs was an empire known for extraordinary craftsmanship, engineering, and cooperation – uniting disparate cultures from the Atacama desert in present-day Chile to the towering mountains of Quito in present-day Ecuador.
“Peruvians, they're really good at stuff,” said Starn, who has been studying and visiting Peru since the 1980s. “There's just a ton of creativity and entrepreneurial energy and there's no reason Peru shouldn't be a pretty wealthy, prosperous place.”
One thing holding it back, according to Rodríguez and his colleagues, is the city’s fragmentation.
The ridge where Villa María del Triunfo meets La Molina is only about a kilometre as the bird flies from Asentamiento Humano La Peruanidad, but it takes nearly a half hour to drive there.
When Rojas arrived at the edge of Villa María del Triunfo, he was shocked to find the wall missing, nothing blocking the view of the oasis of La Molina’s pools and parks below. A resident passing by told him it was taken down just 15 days before.
But it’s not coming down everywhere. The court ruling doesn’t apply to the entire wall, and even in the places where it does, officials in La Molina have said they don’t have the funds to demolish the whole thing.
Every day, Reyna Gamboa, a resident of Villa María del Triunfo, has to make her way up the steep slope from La Molina, where she works as a cleaner and cook. Walking through the old barrier and down to her place of work in La Molina takes only half an hour, while going down the other way and catching a bus around the wall takes her two hours.
“Above all, we serve them. We are from the countryside,” she said. “We don’t have an education. We work for them.”
What Gamboa wants more than anything is a road connecting the neighbouring districts in the capital – one that would make it so she doesn’t have to hike to work, one that would help kids on her side access schools on the other.
Francisco Dumler, who recently stepped down as municipal manager of La Molina, said he supports a proposal for a cable car between the districts. But for now, much of the wall that has demarcated Lima for nearly 40 years still stands and still divides.
“They discriminate against us poor people,” said Gamboa. “If they close us in here, we will continue to be poor. We will not progress!”
Edited by Daniela Mohor.
