Sometimes the mist is so dense in this upper area of Lima that you can’t see it, but the wall is always there.
In the settlements of the Pamplona Alta areain the populous Lima district of San Juan de Miraflores, have grown accustomed to living surrounded by the ten kilometers of concrete wall topped with barbed wire that separates them from the wealthiest Peruvians in the neighboring district of Surco, where the exclusive Casuarinas development stands. For whose luxury houses with swimming pools, sports courts and all the comforts, several million dollars are paid.
On the Pamplona Alta side the picture is different. The streets have no asphalt, the dogs rummage through the garbage and scratch frantically trying in vain to relieve the itching of the fleas. There is no running water or sewers, so people urinate and defecate in holes dug in the ground.
The wall has become something so everyday in this area, where any notion of urban planning is conspicuous by its absence, that many residents have turned it into one more of the walls of the houses that they have built irregularly over the years.
Many in Peru began to call it the “wall of shame”as the one that divided Berlin after the Second World War was known in its day, and that is how it began to be mentioned in the media.
The return to the headlines
Last week -in the midst of a truce in the protests in the country after the departure of Pedro Castillo from power, and which were resumed this Wednesday- a judicial decision returned the expression to the headlines, this time to refer to another “wall of the shame” of Lima, the one that separates the district of La Molina and that of Villa María del Triunfo, between which there are also notable socioeconomic differences.
The Constitutional Court of Peru ruled that the Municipality of La Molina must demolish within 180 days the wall that it built on its border with the Villa María del Triunfo district, made up mostly of human settlements and informal housing.
Magistrate Gustavo Gutiérrez Ticse, rapporteur for the sentence ordering the demolition of the La Molina wall, told BBC Mundo that its construction “violated the right to free movement of people, among others” and that “it cannot be that we divide to Peruvians by social class”.
But the mayor of La Molina, Diego Uceda, assured that the wall has steps enabled for the residents of Villa María del Triunfo and seeks to protect the Ecological Park of La Molina from illegal construction, a 200-hectare space that “will be the green lung that Lima needs”. The mayor does not rule out taking the matter to international courts.
In a country where inequality between rich and poor and complaints about the distribution of the fruits of growth in recent years have become dominant issues in public debate, physical barriers such as those in Surco or La Molina have become symbols of controversy
They are nothing new. And the one that separates the inhabitants of Pamplona Alta from Surco is not threatened by any judicial resolution, since the appeal presented before the Constitutional Court only referred to that of La Molina and is the only one affected by the sentence.
A dream
In the Nadine Heredia slum in Pamplona Alta, Julissa Paredes dreams that one day the wall that surrounds her and her neighbors will also fall.
“Without the wall there would be light. Now it is as if we were not people, as if we were only thieves for the silver people on the other side, ”she says with one of her two children in her arms.
Although the wall has attracted the attention of the media, there are mixed opinions among the residents.
For Ofelia Moreno, who has run a soup kitchen here for years, more than the demolition of the wall, the main demand is that they be given the title to the land on which they settled and that the water supply and sewerage to the area.
And Lidia Paredes believes that “if they knocked down the wall, young people could see how those on the other side live and wonder why they can’t live like that.”
But seeing what is on the other side, for now, is impossible. Unless it is done like the filmmaker Rossana Díaz Costa, who flew a drone over the border between Surco and San Juan de Miraflores to film one of the scenes of her film adaptation of the novel “A world for Julius”, by Alfredo Bryce. Echenique, precisely one of the works that have addressed the problem of inequality in contemporary Peru.
Díaz Costa’s aerial camera was able to capture the contrast between the large houses with swimming pools and the green of the gardens of the Casuarinas urbanization with the precarious sheet metal shacks built on the dry hill on the other side of the wall.
From the other side
From the Casuarinas Urbanization, one of his neighbors who preferred not to give his name told on the phone how things look there. “Fencing off our property is our right and it is a security decision that has helped us to have far fewer crime incidents here.”
In addition to the wall, the urbanization is protected by a security perimeter and the guards who guard it do not allow anyone to enter who has not been invited.
Carmen Mevius, general manager of the Casuarinas de Monterrico homeowners association, said in an email that her wall was built to comply with the laws that require the fencing off of unbuilt private land and “for security reasons, so that no invaded or used in a way that goes against the law”.
For Mevius, the wall, the first sections of which began to be erected in the 1980s, has served to protect the 15,000 families that he claims live next to him.
Concern for a park
The history of the wall of La Molina, the one that the Constitutional Court has ordered demolished, is something different.
In 2002, the Superintendence of National Assets of the Peruvian State ceded to the Municipality of La Molina a piece of land of more than 200 hectares, bordering the district of Villa María del Triunfo, to develop the projected Ecological Park on it.
Juan Carlos Sure, mayor of La Molina between 2011 and 2018, explained to BBC Mundo that the Municipality later decided to build a wall there to delimit the land and protect it from land traffickers while waiting to have the resources to carry out the project. which until today has only been partially done.
In Peru, the practice of land trafficking has been widespread for years, whereby criminal groups appropriate public land and then sell it to individuals or families, often low-income, who inhabit it without property title or paying taxes.
According to Sure, the municipal officials feared that the same thing would happen with the land reserved for the Ecological Park. “We know that they are public areas and that they should always be open, but the reality of Lima has meant that the parks have established entrance areas and operating hours.”
For Candy Bernilla, who since she lost her job as a nurse at a school due to the pandemic, has made a living selling soft drinks to cyclists and hikers who travel the arid slopes of the park, the Constitutional ruling endangers a space for recreation and nature loved by its neighbors. “Now there will be no shortage of malicious people who put their houses here and bring crime and make children sell things and beg, and we don’t want that to happen in our park.”
But magistrate Gutiérrez Ticse affirms that “the municipality can establish other mechanisms to monitor the park, such as posting guards, what it cannot do is build a wall that prevents circulation.”
However the litigation in La Molina ends, in Casuarinas they are calm. They know their wall is safe. “The case is radically different. The La Molina wall is located on public property; the one in Surco is the fence of an unbuilt lot of private property”. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
