Lima's 'Wall of Shame' and the Art of Building Barriers

[Judi Lynn]

The structure, a response to a wave of migration in the 1980s, now divides the Peruvian capital’s rich neighborhoods from its poor ones.

MEGAN JANETSKY SEP 7, 2019

LIMA, Peru—They came by night, Raquel Yanac remembers, the throngs of construction workers with cement trucks and police, ready to build the wall meant to keep her out.

Yanac, 38, lives with her children on the edge of the great divide here. Their home lies amid a sea of multicolored plywood-and-metal-sheet shacks that make up the city’s slums. Just a stone’s throw away is Casuarinas, a neighborhood of startling luxury, with bright-white mansions and pools twice the size of her home.

And Casuarinas, Yanac learned that night three decades ago, wanted them gone.

“In one week, they had built up practically the entire wall, and people couldn’t do anything about it,” she told me.

The border would soon become infamous in Lima, and indigent Peruvians dubbed it “The Wall of Shame”: a six-mile-long concrete structure dividing the city’s rich and poor. Today, the nearly 10-foot-high barrier, topped with barbed wire, runs like a jagged scar through four municipalities. It divides the poor areas of San Juan de Miraflores, where Yanac lives, and Villa María del Triunfo from the rich districts of La Molina and Santiago de Surco, to which Casuarinas belongs. The concrete wall has altered the lives and perceptions of those on each side, and stands as a testament to Lima’s economic disparity, which has cut across Peruvian culture for ages.

More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/09/peru-lima-wall/597085/