Villa El Salvador,founded by Andean refugees as a vision of co-operative living, faces a changing future as elections approachBus number 8208 chugs towards the centre of the barrio, or through the dust and past the Void Club and GANG$TA barber shop. On board sit inhabitants of the huge shanty sprawl,Villa El Salvador, climbing the desert hills above the Pan-American highway as the bus heads south from the Peruvian capital of Lima. There are women hauling bags of fruit, or elderly men with faces like tanned leather,a frigid dude with long hair, sunglasses on a cloudy day and a crash helmet.
On a wall there is a mural to remind people of the barrio’s singular history: a crowd beneath a rainbow, and the slogan “Join hands to multiply our dreams”. Dreams first realised when empty desert ground was broken here 45 years ago to build the first houses of bamboo and mud the so-called invasión of the barren land. Villa El Salvador proclaimed itself a “self-governing urban community” of indigenous people arriving from the high Andes,in flight from the great Ancash earthquake that in 1970 killed 70000 people and destroyed their mountain lives and homes – but not their ways.
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Source: theguardian.com