Word: lima
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...others, Peru has them all-and more. It is the biggest of the west-coast nations, the heart of the ancient Inca empire, and no place for the timid. "When you see no trees," said one 16th century Spanish navigator, "you have reached Peru." The seacoast capital, Lima, is bigger than Detroit, and sleek modern skyscrapers crowd in on some of the most magnificent Spanish architecture this side of Madrid. Yet 400,000 of its 2,000,000 citizens squat in festering slums, among them the infamous Planeta, built next to a centuries-old garbage dump, where stony-faced Indians...
...Peru's 11 million people, virtually all of them Indians. Some labor in the mines for $2 a day; others work the steeply terraced hillsides, chewing gummy wads of coca, a leafy narcotic, to ward off hunger and cold. In the village of Hualcan, 200 miles northwest of Lima, only eight of 900 people can even communicate in Spanish; the rest speak Quechua, the language of their Inca ancestors. After a visit to Hualcan, a U.S. anthropologist reported that the Indians at first thought him an evil spirit come to steal the fat from their bones...
...where he designed private homes, started a magazine called El Arquitecto Peruano, and signed on as a government public-housing consultant. "I was interested in politics," he says, "but purely from the professional point of view." In 1945 he ran for the Chamber of Deputies, won a seat from Lima and quickly made a name for himself fighting for low-cost public housing...
Disgusted at the ever-expanding Lima slums and impatient for swifter reforms, Belaúnde finally decided to form his own political party a few months before the 1956 presidential elections. He named it Accion Popular, a catch phrase suggesting that the best help is selfhelp. No one would help the peasants unless they awoke from their coca-chewing lethargy and helped themselves-in the same cooperative, community spirit of their Inca forefathers. Working together, they could build roads and schools and hospitals -Belaúnde would see that they got the tools. "This was the philosophical idea," he says...
Army General Manuel Odria, then in power, scoffed at the upstart architect and declared Belaúnde's candidacy illegal for lack of enough petition signatures. Belaúnde called a protest demonstration in downtown Lima, raised high a Peruvian flag, and shouting "Adelante!", led a mob of 1,000 toward the President's palace. Waiting police hurled tear gas. His eyes streaming, Belaúnde delivered an ultimatum: "I will wait half an hour. If by then I have not been inscribed, we will march." Odria grudgingly let him run. In the voting, Belaúnde lost...