Cities: The Migrating Masses

When the gold mines gave out at Concepcion del Oro in central Mexico, Fidel Escalante, 56, did what hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans are doing each year: he packed his few belongings and set out to start life over again in the big city. But his new life is hardly better than the old one: occasionally he gets work as a bricklayer, and his home is a hovel in the “misery belt” of shantytowns that ring Mexico City. “I’d like to go back to my village,” he says, “but there’s no use talking about it. I’d just have to return here. There’s no way out.”

Of Latin America’s 220 million people, 45% now live in cities, and the percentage is rising as more and more people seek to escape the unemployment and near starvation of the countryside. Four of the world’s 13 largest cities are in Latin America; Buenos Aires counts 7,000,000 people, Mexico City 5,500,000, Sao Paulo 4,300,000, Rio de Janeiro 3,700,000. Ten Latin American cities already have populations of more than 1,000,000 and by 1980, according to U.N. estimates, 16 others will top the million mark.

By Cart & by Truck. Colombia’s five largest metropolitan areas average 6% annual growth, while the country’s population as a whole gains only 3% annually. Sao Paulo accepts 5,000 newcomers each day. They arrive in donkey carts, on buses and flatbed trucks, hungry, weary and expressionless. Some cannot write their own names; in the Andean countries many of the migrants speak only an Indian dialect. But they hope for food and jobs, have heard of new factories, schools and hospitals in the big cities. Above all, there is the knowledge that things cannot get worse.

Perhaps Not. But unemployment, crushing debts, too many children and too little food are facts of life in the city just as much as they are in the boondocks. Unskilled and unschooled, the migrants simply disappear into Rio’s hillside favelas, Caracas’ ranchos, Santiago’s callampas, the slums that choke every large Latin American city. In a year’s time, squatters at the edge of Colombia’s port city of Barranquilla turned a bean field into a shantytown of crude huts housing 2,500 people. Lima’s slums are growing ten times faster than the city itself; 450,000 live in slums today, compared with 120,000 in 1957. For nearly all, the chances of ever rising out of the slums are slim. The man finds odd jobs; the mother sells pumpkin seeds and peanuts on street corners, while the children hawk papers, lottery tickets, or rummage in garbage cans for scraps.

Disappointing Magic. As permanent parts of the city landscapes, some of the older slums are getting paved streets, electricity, running water. TV antennas are beginning to sprout above tin roofs; once in a while a relatively imposing dwelling thrusts above the squalid huts. But no major Latin American city has been able to cope with the ever-growing demands for housing. At least 400,000 new low-cost urban housing units are needed in Venezuela, 400,000 in Chile, 500,000 in Argentina.

Rio recently put the torch to an entire hillside favela after moving 684 families into the new Vila Alianca housing development. But Brazilian cities must build one new house or apartment every two minutes to keep up with the growth rate—and even Sao Paulo’s amazing building boom is good for only one every ten minutes.

Both Mexico and Bolivia have ambitious plans to open up enormous tracts of virgin lands for destitute peasants. Of all the formulas, the one that holds the most magic is land reform, but so far the results are disappointing. Mexico’s government has been redistributing land ever since the 1910 revolution.

But the plots allotted to peasant families are often too small to be efficient, and the country’s significant agricultural output still comes from the larger farms. And as mechanization spreads on the land, even more small farmers will be forced to look to the cities.

Another Country. Striking closer to the heart of the problem is Venezuela, which is seeking to develop brand-new industrial complexes away from the overburdened major cities. The once-somnolent town of Valencia, 100 miles west of Caracas, is now a booming industrial city of 220,000 population with plenty of job opportunities and no slums to speak of. A second new industrial complex is going up along the Orinoco and Caroni Rivers in eastern Venezuela. Chile also hopes to spread job opportunities by building two new industrial centers out in farm provinces.

But the rush to the cities will be hard to slow down. No matter how uninviting they may seem to others, they will always look good to thousands of people like Carlos Fernandez, who recently left the rural south of Chile for Santiago. “Sometimes I’d listen to the radio,” he says, “and Santiago seemed like another country.”