The Americas: Slums in the Sun

One hot afternoon last week a truck braked to a halt in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The dust-covered tarpaulin was pulled away, and out of this one truck climbed 40-odd men, women and children — sunburned, dirty and ragged under wide-brimmed straw hats. At the end of a ten-day trek from Brazil’s drought-afflicted Northeast, they shouldered their clothes bundles and started out for one of the 300 hillside favelas (slums) that are home for almost 1,000,000 cariocas. Said one new arrival, the father of four: “God will help us. We will get jobs.” Throughout most of Latin America, there is a flight from the harsh land. Bet ter than 50% of the region’s arable land is in the hands of only 1½% of the owners; most campesinos toil like serfs on big estates for less than $50 a year.

Now, in a disheartening offshoot of the rural problem, the peasants are stampeding to the cities and creating an acute urban problem: festering slums.

Belts of Misery. While Latin America’s population grows at the rate of 2.4% per year (v. Africa’s 1.9%, Asia’s 1.8%), its cities are expanding more than twice as fast. And most of the growth is in the slums. In the past twelve years, Mexico City has grown from 3,000,000 to 4,900,000 in population; of the total, 1,500,000 exist in what Mexicans call the “belt of misery” ringing the city. Lima’s slums have grown from a handful of miserables to a city-within-a-city of 400,000. Ten years ago, Santiago, Chile, counted 32,000 slum dwellers; today it has 200,000. The swelling shack towns that overlook Caracas’ gleaming skyscrapers hold a quarter of a million people. Slums are worst in the capitals, but they grow almost as fast in secondary towns. All told, an estimated 40 million of Latin America’s 200 million people are urban slum dwellers.

The great race to the cities began after World War II, when foreign investment set off a small-scale industrial boom in Latin America. But the penniless, often illiterate, peasant soon finds the city glitter an artificial light. He may get a better-paying job, or he may not; un employment and underemployment are widespread. Even if he does, he rarely finds a decent place to live. Housing is short, and landlords greedy. He usually throws together his own shack in some squatter’s field.

The Mushroom & the Pearl. Each country has a name for its hovels— in Chile they are callampas (mushrooms) because they sprout so fast; in Argentina, villas miserias (misery towns). The names reflect the inhabitants’ pitiable hope or bitter humor. In Lima, one of the worst is wryly called Perla del Sol, meaning Pearl of the Sun. Defacing Rio’s beautiful mountainsides are slums so flimsy that they periodically collapse in the rain and slide like an avalanche to the bottom.

Last week 1,500 Rio slum dwellers were homeless after the sandy hillside on which they perched gave way. Luckily, no one was killed. A few years ago, thousands lost their homes in a similar slum slide.

In almost none of the slums are there such simple amenities as running water, electric lights or garbage collection. Fortnight ago in Bogota, rats attacked a nine-month-old baby girl left alone on a pallet and nibbled her to death. The police rarely intervene. Brazil’s favelas breed a notorious outlaw called the malandro—an all-purpose con man, pimp, thief and murderer. Of 5,000 country girls who emigrate to Santiago’s slums each month, 500 end up in brothels.

Nor are criminals the only ones who prey on the slums. In Santiago, in a recent election for an internal “command,” an entire slum of 35,000 inhabitants fell under the control of Communists. In Caracas, Reds have infiltrated the shanty towns through “neighborhood improvement committees,” and the notorious “Caracas mob” sweeping down from the hills is a major problem.

Begging for the Scraps. For all the squalor, few slum dwellers would return to the farm. Back home in Chile’s Andean highlands Alberto Paredes, 26. earned 25¢ a day working on a hacienda “with only the wind and the animals.” Today in Santiago he makes $1.50 a day as a construction helper. “Here I have a radio,” says Paredes. A Peruvian mountain couple, German and Aurelia Ortega, are stuck in El Monton (The Pile), a Lima slum of 5,000 people beside a garbage dump. With 14 relatives, they huddle in a dirt-floored hut—its walls made of flattened tin cans, scrap wood and cardboard cartons. German, 30, earns 25 soles (93¢) a day in a pottery plant; the others ragpick or beg for scraps at the back doors of restaurants. Once each day Aurelia brews a thin stew from the choicest tidbits. Says Aurelia, “We are not starving here.” Every dictator who ever looted a Latin American treasury has left behind his small quota of conspicuous public housing works, which barely scratches the surface. Last February in Mexico City, the government inaugurated a much more ambitious $2,560,000 social welfare center, which will provide medical care, vocational training and recreation for 60,000 slum dwellers; the government has also started a crash program to raze the city’s slums and replace them with low-cost housing. Much of Latin America counts on the Alliance for Progress to further slum removal. In its first year, $145 million is earmarked for urban improvement. Typical projects: $16 million to Colombia for low-cost housing and schools, $15 million to Peru for water lines and sewage pipes in the worst Lima slums.