"They came at night. They were crowds of construction workers, with cement trucks, and the police escorted them to build a wall that aims to isolate the slums." 38-year-old Raquel Yanak spoke of a decades-old story of class discrimination. With her children on the edge of a big gap, south of Peru's capital, Lima.
The dilapidated Yanak family home is set amidst a sea of wooden and metal huts that make up the city's slums. On the other side is Casuarinas, a neighborhood of stunning luxury, light white mansions and swimming pools, one of which is twice the size of her house.
That night, she recalled, three decades ago, residents learned that they had to leave. "In one week, they built the wall almost entirely, and people couldn't do anything about it."
The concrete barrier in Lima soon became notorious, dubbed the “wall of shame”, a six-mile concrete wall that separates the city's rich from its poor. Today, the 10-meter-high barbed-wire barrier passes through four municipalities.
The wall divides the poor areas of San Juan de Miraflores, including the Villa Maria del Triunfo neighborhood, where Yanak lives, from the rich areas where the Casuarinas neighborhood is located. The concrete wall has changed the lives and perceptions of people on both sides, and testifies to the contrast The economist of Lima, which has become entrenched in Peruvian culture through the ages.
"What do I tell my children? My six-year-old son goes there to play, looks around, and now he asks me, 'Mama, why is this wall there?'" Yanak said.
But the construction of the wall to isolate part of the city from the "other" may become a common phenomenon in an increasingly polarized world, much like other famous walls, including the "Walls of Peace in Northern Ireland," and the fence Israel has erected along its border with the territories. Palestinian, the Berlin Wall, and the fence on the US-Mexico border. Lima has become a symbol of already stark social divisions.
Abandoned hills
"It's part of this global trend of separation walls," says Belin Demison, an architect at the Catholic University of Peru who is researching the Lima Wall. "This trend is to put this physical barrier between two social groups or an ethnic group."
The Peruvian capital's wall was a response to a wave of migration from rural areas in the 1980s, created by violence between the Peruvian government and Maoist gangs.
Some who fled to Lima saw it as just a place to escape the bloodshed; others saw it as a place of opportunity, but without land, many local immigrants settled in the deserted hillsides on the edge of the city, and built a growing mass of informal settlements, stretching for tens of miles. .
Susana Galenas' parents were among those fleeing Ayacucho, the heart of the violence in southern Peru. They rape women. ”
In Lima, the Galenas family built a small tin shack, and although there was no electricity or running water, the house was safe.
Areas like Casuarinas were an economic lifeline for immigrants like this family. Every day, workers walked to the upscale neighborhoods to clean houses and build buildings, while Galen's mother was selling food. Far from her neighborhood, but as immigration continues to flow to Lima, Galenas said fear and disgust have permeated their workplaces, and they are seen as thieves, wanting to rob their homes.
Official support
Construction of the wall began in 1985, when a private elite educational academy in the Circo area surrounded the building with high walls. School officials said the barriers provided the foundation against growing immigrant settlements.
Shortly afterwards, nearby residents of Casuarinas began building their own wall, also claiming that the crime came from the other side. For three decades, the richer residents had expanded the wall with permission from local authorities, and in some cases brought police with them.
The Casuarinas neighborhood association, which is behind the original wall, refused to meet journalists, claiming that all its officials were out of Lima on vacation, yet the wealthy residents claimed that crime in their neighborhood had decreased after the wall was built.
It soon became impossible for Susanna Galenas and her mother to work on the other side. Crossing there would have to walk for two hours around the wall, or pay half of the day's pay for the bus.
Galenas's daughter says she dreams of playing in the same gardens as her mother did, but the eight-year-old did not and probably wouldn't cross the other side for her entire life.Although workers are still on the journey, some leave home at 5 am -To reach their premises, while the duration does not exceed 15 minutes, in the absence of the wall.
So they see the other
Patricia Novoa, 61, who is driving a modern car, lived in the half-year-old neighborhood of Casuarinas and was in favor of building the wall. Although she has not seen the other side for years, "people in places like San Juan de Miraflores live worse than animals. They are criminals and thieves because they have to be. They have no other jobs," she said. According to her point of view.
"The marginalized people are becoming attackers. That's the truth. They have no way to live. They live in this environment, they have no education," she said. For many others, with whom the Atlantic spoke, on the streets and at the gates of their palaces, they reacted by asking, "What wall?"
Fear of the unknown in Peru
Some 6.9 million people live below the poverty line in Peru (earning less than $ 102 a month). According to a report, 20 percent of the population earns about half of the national income, while the middle and poor classes share the rest, a segment of society remains far below the standard.
The wall widens that gap and creates fear of the unknown through physical separation, said architect Bilin Demison.
"There is an idea behind the wall that is said to create homogeneous social groups. If you build a wall or fence around the neighborhood, you show that there is a cohesive society that has no dialogue with the other."
This idea has materialized throughout the world. In the case of the West Bank, Israel has built a barrier separating it from Palestinian communities, calling it a “measure of protection”.
On the US-Mexico border, President Donald Trump's slow implementation of his pledge to build a "big and beautiful" border wall came amid a crackdown on immigration and refugees.
Casuarinas luxury homes stretch up the mountain, and are decorated with gardens and swimming pools, with groups of cars parked on the long corridors.
Early in the morning, workers from the impoverished areas of San Juan de Miraflores and Villa Maria del Triunfo walk along the fence to the decorated and closed entrances and are ignored until they reach the checkpoint, through which they must pass to enter. Casuarinas ».
Hopes dip
Lily Mamani Rice, 33, a cleaner in the upscale neighborhood, is reminded every morning when she wakes up at five, starting her two-and-a-half-hour trip to work.
Lily leaves her one-room house of wood, struggling to get clean water, spending her day cleaning houses with large swimming pools and gardens, and taking care of the gardens. The hygiene worker says she was earning about $ 15 a day, but because of the recent increase in the number of Venezuelan migrants arriving in Lima, her employer cut her wage in half, barely enough.
“I don't have the comforts they have. Why do they have these clothes and I don't? "I can't wear the kinds of clothes and the kinds of shoes they wear. I can't afford those kinds of luxuries."
Lily came to Lima at the age of 15, with hopes for education and a better life than she left on a small farm, but while looking at the unlimited horizon of fog-covered slums, she only sees that the wall has shattered those ambitions, leaving as much as possible To describe it only as «shame». "This is not the place to go. This is the wall of shame on Peru."
20% of the population of Peru
Almost crazy
Half of the national income.