Model Town Built Atop Inca History

Villa El Salvador, a Peruvian community, was born 21 years ago when the homeless from the Andean region were escaping violence. People running away from crowded urban conditions brought straw mats and much hope to the sandy and windy area of Tablada de Lurin. Like most pueblos jovenes --young villages--Villa El Salvador dates its founding to a violent encounter with police driving people from Lima, the capital. When Edilberto Ramos Quispe fell dead resisting police attack, he became a martyr among his people and they built the community spreading between Lima and Pachacamac, a sacred Inca site.

Since then, Villa El Salvador has enjoyed some world recognition. In 1987, Spain presented the community with the Prince of Asturias award, the country’s highest honor for social achievement. The United Nations nominated it as a “City Messenger of Peace.” And as early as 1986, it was proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“This is a collective creation and we have to continue working together, to struggle for peace and social justice,” said Miguel Azcueta, mayor of Villa El Salvador,

The young towns envelop Lima like a crescent. The 350,000 people in the dusty settlement of Villa El Salvador are among 2 million people--about one-third of Lima’s population--living on the outskirts of urban congestion. But they live with a difference: Their aim is to develop a model for a new civilization and they have been it it alone from the beginning, with almost no help from the central government.

“It is a place where there are no strangers; everybody knows their neighbors,” said City Councilman Jaime Cea. Villa El Salvador is an organized community, growing despite the havoc wreaked in nearby areas by Sendero Luminoso, the Shinning Path guerrillas of Peru, who are moving down from the mountains to become an urban force.

In Peru, where acts of terrorism make headlines almost every day, news about Villa El Salvador brings a hopeful balance to a country often wrapped in fear. “It is a fact that neighbors and leaders have devoted endless hours, working day and night, weekends and holidays, to shape a new consciousness and to encourage a sense of community,” said the Spanish- born mayor, a man regarded as a big brother as well as a politician.

Azcueta is also a popular school teacher, trying to teach new lessons of unity. “In order to transform a desert into a place worth living, to build schools, markets, medical posts, community and cultural centers, to plant half a million trees and to create many other projects, we need the participation of all the people who make up Villa El Salvador,” he said. Also, there are 156 cafeterias used as training centers for mothers and youngsters.

Like most residents, Azcueta is a member of United Left, a coalition of political parties including Communists but also including people who embrace community ideals as old as the Incas.

Azcueta credits success to the “rich experience of CUAVES,” the Spanish-language acronym for a system of self-managed urban community units based on family units. Each block has 24 lots. So far, each family has a lot (but that could change if the population increases); 16 blocks make up a residential group (which means 384 families); 22 residential groups make up a sector. In the Inca days, before the Spanish conquest of Peru, the family unit was the nucleus of highly organized, sophisticated community-development projects.

In Villa El Salvador each block appoints five leaders and each sector chooses the leader who represents them to the central executive council of CUAVES. The strength and power of this organization is in its equal representation and the ability to involve every segment of the villa.

Azcueta, now in his second term, credits Peruvian history for grass-roots cooperation, claiming that Villa El Salvador “is the fruit of centuries of experience of the farmers’ communities, of the labor unions and other popular organizations which were shaped by struggles, sometimes succeeding, others failing.”

These experiences, he added, were challenges assumed by thousands of families, “coming from all corners of Peru, to this sandy desert, willing to build a city and a better nation.”

Villa El Salvador’s major resource problem is water--lack of it. While 80% of the community has pipes, water to fill those pipes is available only every two days, usually at night.

Villa el Salvador’s major human problem is jobs. With more than 60% unemployment and 70% of the population under age 25, education has become the primary tool for social change. “We have made great progress,” said Councilman Cea, a man born in the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco. “There are 34 educational centers run by the community and two built by the state.” In addition, there is a network of libraries, cultural centers and a radio station. Because Villa El Salvador has earned national attention, volunteer teachers arrive to help the 115 residential groups deliver practical programs to 80,000 students. The result: an illiteracy rate of only 3% in a country where illiteracy is 36%.

Underemployment is also an enormous problem. The average family income is $70; many survive on $30 per month. To bring jobs to the area, an industrial park has been created. “It will cover 12 square kilometers and has $160,000 allocated through the United Nations Development Fund,” said Azcueta. The objective is to bring together all the individual small businesses and crafts centers. New small- and medium-size industries will be added later.

Leaders like Cea have ambitions beyond the gray, low cement-block housing and buildings. “The development of Villa El Salvador cannot be singled out,” he said. “We have to raise the social and economic level of all the people . . . . We will only claim success when the whole society has been transformed.”

These days, patches of green border Villa El Salvador, the result of new ecological and agricultural programs. Memories of my childhood came to me. Three decades ago, when I lived in Lima, my family used to drive south to watch the sunset by the ancient stone walls of San Salvador de Pachacamac.

“This is not a place to play, it used to be where the Incas prayed to their god, the sun,” my mother told me. Pachacamac was the lord of the invisible forces; his wrath could make the earth tremble and his name was said to contain all Inca theology. Now, near the sacred ground of Pachacamac, a new generation of Peruvians build a new faith in community and family.