Word: slum
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Belts of Misery. While Latin America's population grows at the rate of 2.4% per year (v. Africa's 1.9%, Asia's 1.8%), its cities are expanding more than twice as fast. And most of the growth is in the slums. In the past twelve years, Mexico City has grown from 3,000,000 to 4,900,000 in population; of the total, 1,500,000 exist in what Mexicans call the "belt of misery" ringing the city. Lima's slums have grown from a handful of miserables to a city-within-a-city...
Last week 1,500 Rio slum dwellers were homeless after the sandy hillside on which they perched gave way. Luckily, no one was killed. A few years ago, thousands lost their homes in a similar slum slide...
...criminals the only ones who prey on the slums. In Santiago, in a recent election for an internal "command," an entire slum of 35,000 inhabitants fell under the control of Communists. In Caracas, Reds have infiltrated the shanty towns through "neighborhood improvement committees," and the notorious "Caracas mob" sweeping down from the hills is a major problem...
Begging for the Scraps. For all the squalor, few slum dwellers would return to the farm. Back home in Chile's Andean highlands Alberto Paredes, 26. earned 25? a day working on a hacienda "with only the wind and the animals." Today in Santiago he makes $1.50 a day as a construction helper. "Here I have a radio," says Paredes. A Peruvian mountain couple, German and Aurelia Ortega, are stuck in El Monton (The Pile), a Lima slum of 5,000 people beside a garbage dump. With 14 relatives, they huddle in a dirt-floored hut-its walls made...
When Charlie grows restless, the family travels, usually to Venice, Paris or London, or to the Irish coast, where they have bought a house. Charlie likes to walk the slum streets of London, where he grew up as an orphan. When they travel, the family flies in two or three planes so that no crash could claim all of them...