Latin America: Rural Poor Fill Cities as Wild Growth Rages

Latin America’s biggest cities, already gasping for air and water, are turning into urban monsters whose size is being swollen by one of the biggest mass migrations in history.

In the last 15 years, the population of the region’s 20 largest cities has grown by more than 40 million to 85 million, making Latin America the world’s most urbanized area.

Seven of 10 Latin Americans now live in cities, according to U.N. figures. In contrast, Europe is about 50% urban, and Asia and Africa are 30% urban.

Population experts say that the prime cause of unchecked urban growth has been a prolonged mass exodus from the poverty-stricken countryside by peasants looking for jobs and opportunities in the cities. The trend continues.

1,000 Arrivals Daily

Mexico City, the world’s largest city with more than 18 million people, draws in roughly 1,000 new arrivals from the countryside every day, more than 350,000 a year.

Sao Paulo, Brazil’s industrial center, absorbed an average of 200,000 new arrivals per year from 1980 to 1986, and there is no sign that the flood is abating.

The U.N. Fund for Population Activities predicts that Mexico City and Sao Paulo will be the world’s two biggest cities by the year 2000, with 26.3 million and 25 million people respectively.

High urban growth rates are not restricted to Mexico and Brazil. Caracas doubled to 4 million people in the last 15 years. Bogota grew from 2.9 million to 5 million, Lima from 3.2 million to 5 million, Santiago from 3.4 million to 4.8 million and Buenos Aires from 8.7 million to 11 million.

Even now, resources of Latin cities are stretched to the limit. In slums ringing many capitals, millions live in tin-and-cardboard shacks without water, power or toilets.

In Mexico City, 2 million people are estimated to relieve themselves in the open for lack of facilities, producing 110 tons of human waste a day.

Once dried, it rises into the air along with exhaust fumes and a host of noxious gases to produce some of the worst air pollution in the world.

“The problems of uncontrolled urban growth are staggering,” said an expert of Mexico’s Center for Demographic and Urban Development Studies. “We are in uncharted waters. We cannot look to the past for solutions because there never were cities of this size.”

The U.S. Population Reference Bureau said last year that “problems stemming from rapid urban growth--unemployment, urban poverty, slum housing, strains on urban services and the political unrest these can generate--are among the most pressing . . . that the (Latin American) region faces.”

Warnings Have Been Ignored

Urban planners and demographers complain that their warnings of impending catastrophe have tended to fall on deaf ears, with governments doing little to break up the concentration of industry, commerce and political power that spurred rural migration in the first place.

Mexico City is a case in point. It accounts for roughly 40% of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), half the manufacturing, more than 40% of commercial activity and two-thirds of transportation.

It is also the cultural and intellectual capital--half of Mexico’s university students are there--and a center of the arts. And all political power rests in the capital.

After the earthquake that killed about 20,000 people in September, 1985, and devastated wide areas of the city center, the government announced plans to move several ministries out of the capital, relocate industrial plants and stimulate the development of smaller cities.

No official speech was complete without a reference to “decentralization,” but the word was not followed by deed. Only five of about 130,000 factories in the city were moved.

A year after the earthquake, a group advocating decentralization took out a full-page newspaper advertisement, reflecting the feelings of many. It said: “Blablablablablablablablabla. . . . Lots of bla bla, but no one is leaving.”

Instead, they keep coming, as they do in other cities, for similar reasons.

Sao Paulo has grown phenomenally because the metropolis houses South America’s greatest concentration of industry.

Santiago has more than half of the manufacturing in Chile. Two-thirds of Peru’s industry is centered on Lima.

Although government authorities in much of Latin America appear to be resigning themselves to the relentless march of urbanization, Argentina’s President Raul Alfonsin has bold plans to curb the growth of Buenos Aires.

On April 15, 1986, Alfonsin announced that Argentina’s capital would be moved to the southern city of Viedma. Buenos Aires, he said, had grown so big that it was “invading, paralyzing or distorting the forces of the whole country.”

But by standards of Latin cities, Buenos Aires’ statistics are modest. The city and its suburbs account for 35% of Argentina’s population, consume 39% of its energy and house 48% of the people employed in manufacturing.

Influx of Poor

In Argentina, rural migration has been compounded by the arrival of tens of thousands of poor foreigners from Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Chile.

To curb the flood, Alfonsin’s government last February stopped granting residence permits to most foreigners.

Buenos Aires has been one of the slowest-growing capitals in Latin America.

In 1950, it was one of only seven urban centers in the world with a population exceeding 5 million. The others were New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai and Germany’s Rhein-Ruhr area.

Communal Water Taps

Sao Paulo in 1950 had a mere 2 million, Mexico City about 3 million, Lima and Bogota fewer than 1 million.

Most day-to-day problems caused by overcrowding affect the poor more than the middle class. Slum dwellers routinely line up for water from communal taps while the rich sprinkle their lawns. But all big-city residents share a common enemy: air pollution.

Latin America’s two worst-affected capitals, according to government figures, are Mexico City and Santiago. Their geographical traits aggravate the pollution: both are in valleys, ringed by high mountains.

In winter, a phenomenon known as thermal inversion often prevents dirty air from rising out of the valley, sending pollution readings to danger level.

Air Turns Thick

With visibility reduced to a few hundred yards, air turns thick. Lungs burn, eyes water, throats and noses constrict.

Some environmental experts in Latin America believe that only a vast disaster will stir governments into resolute action to curb growth and control pollution.

They point to the cloud of black smog that killed more than 3,000 people in London during a prolonged thermal inversion in 1952. The disaster prompted government measures, which turned the British capital into one of the least-polluted cities in the industrialized world.